Page 65 of Game Misconduct

Danny took a deep breath and went back into the bar.

“Yo, Garcia,” Landry said, waving him over and sliding a spare beer over to him, “where were you?”

“Phone,” Danny said, sliding back into the seat he’d vacated and wrapping his hand around the cold glass.

“Who was it, yourboyfriend?”

It was a mocking chirp, because of course it was. But Danny thought about Mike. His excited, drunken rambling.I said it out loud, Danny.Thought about the way Mike looked waking up in the morning next to him, thought about a lot of shit in that brief second.Hey, Imissyou.

“Yeah, it was,” he said, and drank.

“You’re—you’re kidding.”

Danny looked at him with that flat, dead-eyed look that made people squirm, and said nothing.

Landry stared back. He opened and closed his mouth. He was having a kind of face journey, from disbelief to horror to something Danny couldn’t entirely categorize. “You’renotkidding.”

“No.”

“Oh,” Landry said, and looked down at his drink. They sat there in silence for a couple of uncomfortable seconds. Danny took another drink while Landry just looked at his hands. This could go any number of ways and Danny wasn’t sure how itwasgoing to go. “Your—boyfriend. Okay. Right. So, uh...how’s he doing, then?”

“Drunk.”

Landry made a noise that was more of a snort than a laugh, exhaled sharply, and said, “I think he’s got the right idea. ’Nother round, old man? I could fucking use one.”

“Why not? Happy fuckin’ New Year, Lands.”

All things said, it could have gone worse.

New year, new me. New year, new me. New year—

Mike was busy in January, between drills and games and travel. He didn’t mind. It was good to be busy, and things with Danny seemed to be mostly back to normal in that he was his usual self. And even if that didn’t exactly make Mike feel great about things, at least they were talking.

The team was flying out to Los Angeles that night, so he’d packed already. And Bee was going to be playing in the All-Star game again, so Mike had started making plans to go watch it in Vegas and thinking about asking Danny to come out too, because no one had games that weekend.

He was checking out hotels when his mom called, which was unusual. They didn’t talk often because no one in the family was good at talking about feelings. It had probably been like that since they’d immigrated to California, like, five generations ago, and it had only gotten worse since as each generation of Sato kids had assimilated further and further and somehow managed to disappoint their parents in new and exciting ways. When he did speak to them it was mostly quick and to the point, coordinating visits, or like, telling them about injuries and stuff. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d called just to talk. So when the phone rang, he felt...nervous.

“Mom?”

“Hello, Michael.”

“Um—hey, Mom...uh. What’s up? How are you?”

“We’re fine, I was calling to see whether you knew where we should sit at your hockey game tomorrow.”

“You—what?” His parents hadn’t come to a game in as long as he could remember. Oh, they’d spent the money on him, no problem. But even in mites, they’d dumped him on teammate carpools, grudgingly driven him to games when they hadn’t been able to do that, and completely gave up once he moved fifteen hours away to a billet and they’d seen the way he’d had to learn to play. There was a reason he’d gone through the western Canadian major junior league and tried to get as far away from home as possible. “Why?”

“We wanted to see a game,” she said, like he was an idiot. “And you’re playing in Los Angeles, so we thought we’d come.”

Talking to his mom usually made him feel like an idiot, not through any fault of her own, but because his mom was a genius, extremely terrifying, and usually about four steps ahead of him in any given conversation. It just highlighted how dumb Mike was in general, being around his family.

“But you’ve...never reallywantedto see me play before. Uh...why now?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not the case at all.”

“But Mom, I think you came to like. Three juniors games. One Grizzlies game? You guys don’t even like sports.”

“Michael,” Sylvia Sato said patiently. “We’re not sports people, that’s true. But we didn’t avoid coming to your games because we were bored.”