See Jane Score

“Yeah, you can’t trash-talk using words like that.”

Jane frowned and folded her arms across her chest. Vacuous was a perfectly good word. “You guys don’t like it because it doesn’t start with an F.”

Luc threw his third dart and scored a total of eighty points. Time to quit playing around and get serious. She walked to the line, raised her arm, and waited for the heckling to begin. But Luc remained silent, unnerving her more than his insults. She managed to shoot a triple twenty, but when she took aim again, Luc said, “Do you ever wear anything besides black and gray?”

“Of course,” she said without looking at him.

“That’s right.” Then, just as she was about to shoot again, he added, “Your cow pajamas are blue.”

“How do you know about her cow pajamas?” one of the guys asked.

Mr. Information failed to answer and she looked over at him, surrounded by his teammates, his hands on his hips and a smile on his lips.

“The other night I left my room to buy some M &M’s,” she told them. “I thought you guys would all be in bed, so I wore my PJs. Luc snuck up on me.”

“I didn’t sneak.”

“Sure.” She lined up her shot and threw a double ten. Then he waited until the exact moment she released her third dart to say, “She wears lesbian glasses.” She missed the board completely. That hadn’t happened in years.

“I don’t either!” Only after she denied it did she fear she may have objected a bit too vehemently.

Luc laughed. “They’re horrible little black squares like all those NOW girls wear.”

The rest of the Chinooks laughed too, and even Darby said, “Oh, yeah, lesbian, all right.”

Jane pulled the darts from the board. “They’re not. They’re perfectly heterosexual.” Geez, what was she talking about? Heterosexual eyeglasses? These guys were all making her crazy. She took a calming breath and handed the darts to Luc. She would not let these dumb jocks rattle her. “I am not gay. Although there is certainly nothing wrong with it. If I were gay, I’d be out and proud.”

“That would explain the shoes,” Rob joined in.

Jane looked down at her boots. “What’s wrong with my Docs?”

For the first time that night, the Stromster decided to speak. “Maahhn shuz,” he said.

“Man shoes?” She looked into his young face. “Since I defended your Mohawk earlier, I expected better of you, Daniel.” His gaze slid away and he took sudden interest in something across the room.

Luc moved to the line and scored forty-eight points. When it was her turn again, all the guys on the sidelines took turns heckling her. The conversation turned severely politically incorrect when they decided that the reason she wore dark colors had to be because she was depressed about being gay.

“I’m not gay,” she insisted. She was an only child and hadn’t been raised around boys, except her father, of course, but he didn’t count. Her father was a serious man who never joked at all. She had no experience with this sort of teasing.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Luc reassured her. “If I were a girl, I’d be a lesbian too.”

Jane figured she had two choices. Get upset and indignant, or relax. She was a journalist, a professional woman. She wasn’t traveling with the team to become buddies, and certainly not to be teased like they were all back in high school. But the professional approach hadn’t worked so far, and she had to admit that she liked the teasing better than being ignored. Besides, these guys probably razzed male reporters also. “Luc, you’re already a prima donna,” she said.

Luc chuckled and she finally got a laugh out of the others. For the rest of the game, she tried to give as good as she got, but these guys were much better at it than she and had had years of practice. In the end, she beat Luc by almost two hundred points, but she lost in the war of words.

Somehow, during all the teasing and trash-talking, she’d moved up a few notches in their esteem. She probably could have done without their opinions on her clothes, shoes, and hair, but at least they weren’t talking about the weather, giving her one-word answers, or ignoring her altogether. Yes, this was definitely progress.

After the game tomorrow night, they might actually speak to her. She didn’t expect for them all to become good pals, but perhaps now they wouldn’t give her such a hard time in the locker room. Perhaps they’d give her an interview and a break and keep their jockstraps up as she walked by.

Behind the wire cage of his mask, Luc watched me puck drop and spin on its side. Bressler muscled the puck out of the play-off circle, and the battle between Seattle and San Jose began.

Luc crossed himself for luck, but ten minutes into the first frame, his luck completely deserted him. Sharks right winger Teemu Selanne chipped the puck and it bounced into the net. It was an easy goal. One Luc should have stopped, and it seemed to trigger a complete blowout. Not only for Luc, but the entire team.

When the first period ended, two Chinooks players required stitches, and Luc had given up four goals. At two minutes into the second frame, Grizzell got brutally cross-checked at center ice. He went down hard and didn’t get back up. He had to be carried from the ice, and ten minutes later Luc misplaced a puck in his glove hand and the fifth Sharks goal went up on the board. Coach Nystrom gave the signal, yanked Luc from the net, and replaced him with the second-string goalie.

The skate from the pipes to the bench is the longest of any netminder’s life. Every goalie who ever played the game had an off night, but for Luc Martineau, it was more than that. He’d been through it too many times during his last season with Detroit not to feel it looming overhead now like an executioner’s ax. He’d lost focus out there, felt out of sync. Instead of seeing the play before it happened, he was one second behind it. Was this it? The first bad game in a downhill slide? A fluke or a trend? The beginning of the end?

Apprehension and a real fear he didn’t even want to admit feeling squeezed his chest and bit the back of his neck. He felt it as he sat on the bench, watching the rest of the game from the pines.

“Everyone has an off night,” Coach Nystrom told him in the locker room. “Roy got pulled last month. Don’t worry about it, Luc.”

“None of us played worth a shit tonight,” Sutter told him.

“We should have played better in front of you,” Bressler added. “When you’re in the goal, we sometimes forget to step in the crease and protect you.”

Luc didn’t let himself off quite so easy. He’d never been one to blame others and was ultimately responsible for his own play.

As the jet took off from San Francisco, he sat in the dark cabin reliving his past, and not the good stuff. The horrible hit to his knees, the surgeries and months of physical rehabilitation. His addiction to painkillers, and the horrible body aches and nausea that rolled through him if he didn’t feed it. And ultimately his inability to play the game he loved.

Failure whispered in his ear as he headed home, telling him he’d lost his edge. The glow of Jane Alcott’s laptop screen and the click-click of her keyboard assured him that everyone else would know it too. In the sports section of the paper, he would read her report of that night’s disaster.

At the airport in Seattle, Luc headed to long-term parking and caught a glimpse of Jane cramming her stuff into a Honda Prelude. She looked up as he passed, but neither of them spoke. She looked like she didn’t need his help with her suitcase, and he didn’t have anything to say to the archangel of gloom and doom.

A sprinkling of rain wet the windshield of his Land Cruiser as he made the forty-minute drive into downtown Seattle. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been so glad to be home.

Moonlight spilled through the eight-foot windows in the living room as he moved through his dark apartment. The light above the stove had been left on, illuminating the FedEx envelope on the counter. He walked into his bedroom and flipped on the light. He left the door partway open and tossed his duffel on the floor by his bed. Shrugging out of his blazer, he hung it next to his garment bag in his closet. He’d unpack tomorrow.

Right now he was tired and relieved to be home, and he wanted nothing more than to fall face first into bed.

He loosened the knot of his tie as Marie knocked on his door, pushing it open the rest of the way. She wore a pair of flannel drawstring pajama bottoms and a Britney Spears T-shirt. She looked about ten years old.

“Guess what, Luc?”

“Hey, there.” He glanced at his watch. It was past midnight; whatever she wanted, she obviously didn’t feel could wait until morning. He wondered if she’d managed to get kicked out of school since he’d spoken to her last.