He doesn’t want to do anything but sleep, but once the lights are out and the room’s quiet, he’s wide awake, sore, and pissed off, everything in him still clenched tight. He finds his bag in the dark, swallows a couple of Advil dry, rotates his shoulder slowly enough to shake some of the stiffness but not enough to make anything worse. His jaw’s held tight, and once he notices he’s clenching it he struggles to relax it, which is a losing proposition.

The worst thing, the worst part of the whole night, the bloodbath, the dirty hit, the dark mood that’s hovering over the entire team, the worst fucking thing is that, after all that, Lourdes still made David look like the asshole.

After all that, David’s the one lying in the dark, thinking about it, while Lourdes is probably out celebrating with his team, getting fistbumps for his two points, picking up pretty girls not because he’s a hockey player, but because he’s got a stupid, dopey smile David bets works for him just as well as everything else does. The worst part is that David’s lying here, dwelling on it, and Lourdes has as good as admitted he doesn’t think of David at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

David doesn’t forget about Lourdes’ promise to see him in February, the opportunity to exact some sort of righting of the scales, but what he and Lourdes both did forget was that All-Star Weekend falls in January.

David, second in the rookie points race, gets invited for the rookie game and would never even consider turning it down. Lourdes, still first in the race, inevitably gets invited as well.

It’s in Pittsburgh, and the Penguins have two decent enough rookies this year that they let them captain the teams. They turn the tradition of picking their teammates into a joking competition that the local reporters and those not successful enough to cover the real All-Stars are making a cute little narrative out of, from what David can gather. The arm wrestle for first pick definitely works toward that, getting a titter from the journalists and most of the rookies. David feels uncomfortably like he’s getting picked in gym class, except he was always picked first, and this time he’s pretty sure he won’t be.

He isn’t. Samuelsson, who beat Petersen in the arm-wrestling match, chooses Lourdes. That’s no surprise to anyone, least of all David, though Lourdes plasters on a mock-humble shocked expression that raises David’s hackles. He contents himself with being second, at least, hopefully beating Lourdes in the game, even if it’s a contest that fundamentally means nothing.

Except when it’s Petersen’s turn, instead of going with David, he picks Markson. Markson, from David’s cursory research once the picks came out, is middle of the pack maybe, and not even from David’s draft year, having spent his post-draft season still in the minors. From the lengthy shoulder slapping hug that follows, David gathers Petersen went with friendship over strategy, and even if the game’s pointless, even if it means nothing, that’s still stupid.