Chapter 75 75

Chapter 75 75
Roman’s POV

I remained on the cold concrete floor of the utility alcove, staring at the scuff marks on my skates, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I flinched and looked up to see Miles standing over me. His face was streaked with sweat and dirt from the ice, and his jersey was torn at the collar. He looked just as exhausted as I felt, but his eyes were soft.

“Hey,” Miles said, his voice quiet in the small space. “The rest of the team and Coach are waiting for you in the locker room. We need to do the post-game debrief.”

The very last thing I needed was to face my teammates after a defeat like that. I wanted to stay in this dark corner until the arena lights turned off, but I pushed myself up from the floor anyway. I wiped my wet palms on my thighs, picked up my helmet and my skates, and followed Miles back down the echoing concrete corridor.

When we entered the locker room, nobody was moving. The guys were slumped on the wooden benches, some with their heads in their hands, others staring blankly at the floorboards. Coach Bailey was standing in the center of the room, her arms crossed tightly over her clipboard. She waited until Miles and I sat down on the bench nearest the door before she spoke.

“Look at me, all of you,” She started, her voice low but carrying into every corner of the room. “That was a hard pill to swallow. We let ten goals slide past our blue line today. Ten! That is not the standard of UIC hockey. We had the offensive drive, but our coverage in the neutral zone was almost non-existent. That's why we spent the rest of the game playing catch-up.”

The moment she said that, all the frustration in the room instantly boiled over into finger-pointing.

“Well, we wouldn’t have been struggling to catch up if our defense actually held the line,” Jesse muttered, ripping the tape off his wrists and tossing it into the trash bin. “Dex, you let their center skate right past you on that third goal. You weren’t even looking at the puck.”

“Don’t pin that on me, Jesse!” Dex snapped, sitting up straight and glaring across the room. “I was covering the pass because Hartley was out of position on the left wing. If he actually backchecked instead of hovering near the red line, our side of the ice wouldn’t have been wide open!”

“Why are you blaming me? I was waiting for the transition because Roman was driving the puck deep!” Hartley shouted, throwing his wet towel onto the floor. “We scored seven goals today, our offense did its job! Maybe if Paulie actually stopped a single goal instead of letting everything enter our net, we wouldn’t be sitting here with a loss!”

“Leave Paulie out of this!” Carson shouted. “He was screened on four of those shots because the defense was standing like a bunch of traffic cones!”

I stayed silent, keeping my eyes fixed on the floor and listening to them tear each other apart. I had scored four goals while my knee was throbbing with a dull, white-hot ache, and I was drained. But then Jesse turned his head toward my corner of the room, his face twisted in frustration.

“You know what? I think it's Roman. Roman was forcing the puck too much in the third period,” Jesse said, pointing a finger at me. “He was trying to be the hero out there instead of passing to the wings. If our captain actually did his job, we could have at least ended with a tie.”

A wave of hot, uncontrollable anger rushed through my veins, wiping away every bit of my exhaustion. I stood up from the bench, my skates clattering loudly against the rubber floor mats as I stepped right into Jesse’s face.

“Are you out of your mind, Jesse?” I roared. “I scored four goals today, that's way more than everyone else combined. I even set up Miles to score another two goals. If I hadn’t been playing the way I was, we would not have scored even a single goal. So, don't even talk to me about doing my job, when you can’t handle a simple pass without fumbling it.”

“Roman, that’s enough.” Miles said, reaching out a hand, but I swatted him away, my eyes locked on Jesse.

“Do you want to talk about who caused this defeat?” I continued, my voice rising as I looked around the room. “Fine, let's talk about it. Go and look in the mirror, that's who caused the defeat. If you spent half as much time on your skating drills as you do pointing fingers, you might actually be worth something on the ice. Don't use my name to cover up your—”

“Alright, that's enough!” Coach Bailey’s voice was even louder a whistle blast. She slammed her clipboard down onto the equipment table with a deafening crack. “Sit down, Foster. Now.”

I remained for a few more seconds, glaring at Jesse, before I slowly sank back onto the wooden bench.

Coach Bailey looked around the room, her expression fierce. “Look at yourselves. Just look at yourselves! The moment you start to squabble amongst yourselves, you might as well be handing the State Championship cup to every other school in Illinois. You are a team. When you win, you win together. When you lose, you take the hit together. I will not tolerate this amongst my players.”

She took a slow breath, before continuing.

“Next week, we start on a clean slate,” she added. “Our away game against Northwestern is next, and that is the team we were playing when Roman took his knee injury earlier this season. They are going to be loud and physical, I'm sure they are expecting us to show up broken after what happened today. But I want every single one of you on the ice at six AM Monday morning. We are going to fix our neutral zone coverage, and we are going to take back our pride next Saturday.”

She looked at each of us one last time, her face softening just a fraction. “Today was painful, but it’s just one game. We're currently at the top of the leaderboard and we still have a long season ahead of us. Go home, get some rest and ice your joints. Dismissed!”

The team shuffled around in heavy silence, everyone slowly undressing as Coach left the room. I walked over to my corner of the room, the anger in my veins turning into a cold exhaustion. The metal latch on my locker was jammed, and I slammed my palm against the door twice until it finally clicked open with a loud rattle. I stuffed my helmet and skates inside.

Miles leaned against the locker next to mine, his voice low so that the others wouldn’t hear. “Are you okay, man? You really went off on Jesse.”

I nodded mutely, keeping my back turned as I pulled on my gray hoodie head. I didn’t want to explain the knot in the pit of my stomach, or the fact that my mother’s words from breakfast on Thursday were still looping in my brain alongside the game tape.

“I’m fine,” I told him, tying my sneakers quickly. I reached into my pocket, grabbed my car keys and tossed them over to him. “Go wait for me beside the car. I’ll drive you home.”

Miles caught the keys, looking at them with a confused expression. “Why aren’t you coming now? The locker room is empty.”

“I just want to check one or two things with the training staff about my knee wrap,” I said, not meeting his eye. “Just go and warm the engine. I’ll be out in ten minutes.”

Miles studied my face for a long second, probably seeing through my lie, but he didn’t say anything else. He wrapped a quick arm around my shoulders in a side hug before turning and walking out, the keys jingling in his hand.

When the last equipment manager turned off the main lights, leaving only the dim yellow safety bulbs, I stood up and walked out into the corridor. I moved slowly through the athletic building until I reached the Hall of Fame.

It was a long, wide corridor lined with glass display cases, trophies and photographs of UIC’s greatest sports moments. At the very center of the hockey section, Aaron’s Number 88 jersey hung in a glass case, and his picture was mounted above it.

I stopped and stared.

Aaron was looking right at the camera, his arm draped around the championship trophy from three years ago. That smile, the one he wore everywhere he went, the one that showed off his crooked teeth, made him look so invincible. His blonde hair was messy and stuck out from beneath his championship cap, and those gray eyes that girls all over campus had been obsessed with were bright with life. He had this effortless grace about him, a way of making everything look easy, whether he was scoring a goal or just talking to a freshman in the quad.

I looked so much like him, down to the dimples in the cheeks. That was my curse. Looking at the hung picture felt like staring into a twisted mirror at a reflection of myself. Every time a booster looked at my face or a fan shouted my name from the stands, they weren’t seeing Roman. They were seeing the ghost of number 88, expecting the same magic. It was even worse, because I wore the same number 88 as he did. The only real difference was that Aaron had gray eyes and mine were blue.

I leaned my forehead against the cool glass. His face had been everywhere since the funeral — on the university website, in the arena lobby, in the local papers, on flyers everywhere. As much as I loved him, Aaron had done me a big disfavor by dying so young. He had left behind a legacy that was much too heavy for me to carry. I didn't want this pressure, I just wanted to play hockey.

“He was something else, wasn’t he?”

I straightened up quickly. Coach Bailey was walking up the corridor in her winter coat, keys in hand. She stopped beside me, her eyes moving up to Aaron’s picture.

“I still remember the away game against DePaul University during his junior year,” she continued. “We were down by three goals in the third period, just like today. Aaron told the other boys that if they didn’t win, he was going to make them walk back to Chicago in their skates. Then he went out there and scored two goals in three minutes. He had this way of making everyone believe that the impossible was normal.”

The comparison pressed down on my shoulders like a physical weight. A reminder that I had just failed where Aaron would have definitely succeeded.

“Yeah,” I muttered dully. “He was great.”

Coach Bailey’s sharp eyes moved from my tense shoulders down to my clenched fists. The smile faded from her face, replaced by an understanding look.

“You know, Roman,” she began, “sometimes I look at that jersey and wonder if it’s doing more harm than good hanging out here in the open. I’ve been thinking of moving it to the main trophy room in the administration building. Give the current roster some room to breathe.”

I looked at the white fabric behind the glass, at the bold black number eighty eight. Even though Aaron's legacy was suffocating me, the thought of erasing him from this corridor felt wrong. It felt like we were giving up on his memory.

“No,” I refused. “Leave it here, Coach. It belongs to the rink.”

Coach Bailey studied my expression for a long moment before nodding. Her hand landed heavily on my shoulder.

“Alright, Roman. We leave it,” she said softly, then turned to walk down the hallway toward the exit. “Get some rest tonight. I’ll see you on Monday morning.”

I stood alone in the dark corridor for a few seconds longer, staring at my brother’s crooked teeth in the photograph, before I turned my back on the glass case and walked out into the cold night toward my car.