He points toward their opponents’ bench. Amat nods hesitantly. David doesn’t break eye contact.
“Do you want to be something, Amat? Do you really want to show this whole town that you can be something? Now’s your chance to show them.”
At the next defensive face-off Benji lines up on one side of Kevin, Amat on the other. Maggan Lyt is now standing with both hands against the glass of the team bench, shrieking that NO ONE pulls her son from a semifinal and goes unpunished. Lars looks at David.
“If we lose this game she’s going to castrate you.”
David leans nonchalantly against the boards.
“Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town.”
*
Out on the ice, Benji does as he’s been instructed—he gets the puck and fires it out of the zone, and it glides toward the opposing team’s end. Amat does as he’s been instructed: he takes off. He gets hacked by one of the backs as he’s only just starting to skate away, and by the time he pulls free there’s no point chasing the puck. He goes after it anyway. A gasp runs through the spectators who understand hockey. A deep sigh passes through the ones who don’t. The opponent’s goalie calmly skates out and plays the puck to his defense, who move it up the ice, where their forwards fire a shot at Beartown’s goal. When the referee blows for another face-off back in Beartown’s end, Amat is standing alone in the opposing team’s zone two hundred feet away. The other sponsors are muttering, “Does that one need a compass, or what?” But Tails can see what David sees. What Sune saw.
“Quick as a wolverine with mustard up its ass! They won’t catch him!” he smiles.
David leans over the boards and catches Amat by the shoulder when he’s on his way back.
“Again!”
Amat nods. Kevin wins the face-off, but Benji doesn’t even manage to get the puck out of the zone, but Amat sets off at full speed toward the opponents’ goal anyway, and doesn’t stop until he reaches the boards at the far end. He can hear booing and mocking laughter from the stands: “Are you lost? The puck isn’t anywhere near you!” but he just looks at David. The Beartown goalie smothers the puck, another face-off. David makes a brief circular gesture in the air. “Again.”
The third time Amat races across the ice it doesn’t matter where the puck is, because there’s one person in the rink who sees his pace and realizes what’s going on. The coach of the opposing team snatches a sheaf of papers from his assistant and roars: “Who the hell is that? Who the hell is number eighty-one?”
Amat looks up at the stands. Maya is on the steps just below the cafeteria; she sees him. He’s been longing for that since the first day in primary school, and now she sees him. He loses his concentration so much that he doesn’t hear Bobo yelling his name until he’s right next to the bench.
“AMAT!”
Bobo is hanging over the boards, and grabs him by the collar:
“Fake inside, skate outside!”
For half a second they look each other right in the eye and Bobo doesn’t need to say anything to prove how much he would have liked to be on the ice himself. Amat nods in acknowledgment, and they tap each other’s helmets. Maya is still standing on the stairs. At the next face-off Kevin and Benji circle the zone, stop in front of Amat, and lean toward him.
“Have you got any strength left in those little chicken-legs, then?” Kevin grins.
“Give me the puck and you’ll see,” Amat replies with bloodshot eyes.
Kevin wouldn’t have lost that face-off even if his hands had been tied behind his back and he had a pistol held to his head. Benji shovels the puck along the boards and chases after it. Tomorrow his thighs won’t even let him get out of bed but he feels nothing now, and knocks down two opponents with one hit. Amat feints inside but chips the puck off the boards instead, then blasts past the defenseman on the outside, so quickly that one of the two players covering Kevin has to let go of number nine and chase number eighty-one instead. That’s all Beartown needs. A stick hits Amat’s lower arm so hard that he thinks his wrist is broken, but he manages to pull the puck from the boards and skate around the net. He has one breath in which to look up, wait until the blade of Kevin’s stick hits the ice, then release the puck at the same instant he’s knocked to the ice. Kevin gets the puck two inches off the ice, and that’s twice as much as he needs.
*
When the red light goes on behind the net, adults tumble over each other in the stands. The sponsors send each others’ cups of coffee flying across the rows of seats as they try to do high fives. Two fifteen-year-old girls bounce around a cafeteria in delight, and up at the back of the stand an old A-team coach who never laughs does so today. Fatima and Kira hug each other until they’re lying on the floor and aren’t really sure if they’re celebrating or crying.
Outside the rink, alone in the snow, Ramona stands and feels the sound wave hit her. “I love you,” she whispers to Holger. Then she turns and walks home on her own with a smile in her chest. It is a moment shared between people and hockey, between a town whose inhabitants want to believe and a world that has spent years telling them to give up. There isn’t a single atheist in the whole building.
*
Kevin turns and heads straight for the bench, swatting away every teammate who tries to hug him, climbs over the boards, and throws himself in David’s arms.
“For you!” the boy whispers, and David holds him like he was his own son.
Twenty yards away Amat crawls to his feet from the ice. He might as well be in a different rink altogether seeing as no one is looking at him anyway. A moment after his pass, the defenseman’s stick and elbow hit him in the neck with all his weight behind them, Amat’s head hit the ice as if he’d been knocked into an empty swimming pool, and he didn’t even see the goal. By the time he gets to his knees every Beartown player is following Kevin toward the bench, everyone in the stands is watching number nine. Even Maya.
Number eighty-one—the number he chose because his mother was born that year—stands alone by the boards and looks at the scoreboard. It is simultaneously the best and worst moment he has experienced in this rink. He adjusts his helmet and skates toward the bench in a few lonely strides, but someone swings around behind him and taps him twice on the helmet.
“She’ll notice you when we win the final,” Benji smiles.
He’s already skated off and is standing by the center line before Amat has time to reply. Lyt is on his way over the boards but David stops him and calls to Amat to stay on the ice. As Kevin skates out to take the face-off at center ice, they nod briefly to each other, number nine and number eighty-one. Amat is one of them now. It doesn’t matter how many people up in the stands actually realize that.