“Quite the event,” his mother says under her breath. It isn’t a compliment, he knows. She thinks it’s overblown. She’s never been quiet about how ridiculous she finds the salaries of professional athletes, the devotion of sports fans. She’d always seemed faintly mystified by his interest in hockey, and the mystification only grew as he grew older and more serious about it.

She didn’t stop him, though she never went to his games, his nanny taking him when he was young, then teammates’ parents. She could have, especially when it meant at sixteen he was moving 500 kilometres away to play in the QMJHL, but she didn’t. David thinks she was a little relieved to have the apartment to herself. “You’ll be going first?”

“Or second,” David says, mouth dry. “First or second.”

The Panthers management team takes the stage, and David’s hands go white-knuckled on the arm rests. He wishes, fleetingly, that his mother would reach out, take his hand, but he knows she won’t, and it’s fine. It’s something he’s accustomed to. Only focus on the things in your control. He set records. He won Gold. His combine results were stellar, and he did well in the interviews. They’ll make the right decision.

David waits for them to say his name.

They don’t. They don’t say it.

*

David watches, numb, as Lourdes hugs his family, taking his time before walking down to the stage, like everyone’s there to see him, like there aren’t twenty-nine more people to be drafted in this round alone. He dons the Panthers jersey, the Panthers hat, and seeing him wearing the jersey David should be wearing, the numb feeling recedes, replaced by a surge of nausea.

David has the sudden fear that the Islanders will pass him over too, that everyone will, that he’ll go undrafted, will have to return to Québec City in disgrace. He knows it’s irrational, but he’s still almost surprised when the Islanders GM says his name. He stands, accepting a perfunctory kiss on the cheek from his mother, a slap on the back from his father that lands as hard as a blow, and makes his way to the stage almost on auto-pilot, only remembering Dave’s advice when he’s halfway there.

He smiles. He doesn’t want to. It doesn’t feel right on his face. But Dave said to smile, so he smiles. He thinks if it was the Panthers who took him — he thinks he wouldn’t have needed to force it if it was the Panthers who took him, but it doesn’t matter, because they didn’t, so he does.

David does an interview with Sportsnet as soon as he leaves the stage, now wearing an Islanders jersey, another with NBCSN shortly after. He has no recollection of what he said to either network, but he’s been trained well enough to know he probably said the right things: that it was an honour, that he was excited, that he can’t wait to play for the Islanders. He thinks he smiled the entire time.