I turned away from them, but one of them—the more talkative one—grabbed me by the arm, and said, in a voice that was just slightly above a whisper, “Take a few bottles of potassium pills. Grind them up with a whole bunch of eggshells, and a bottle of mint extract. Then add it to a hot bath. It’s an old family cure. I guarantee it’ll help the kind of headache you’ve got.”

Then they skated off together in perfect unison. I remember thinking at the time there was something strange about how they skated. It was like they weren’t really moving at all. Instead the rest of the world was moving beneath the two of them, while they stood still.

I’m generally not a bath kind of guy, but I decided to take their suggestion. We always had a supply of mineral supplements at the house, so the potassium was easy. I had to buy the rest. At the market, the checker looked at me funny when I came to the register with four dozen eggs and a bottle of mint extract.

I wasn’t sure why I believed a random skater dude when it came to how to relieve a headache—especially a headache as nontraditional as mine. I guess I was so desperate I was willing to try anything. So when I got home, I cracked the eggs into a container, figuring someone could use them for something, then pulverized the shells and the potassium in a food processor.

The potassium dissolved in the hot bathwater, but the eggshells stayed like a fine sand on the bottom of the tub. The mint—which made the entire bathroom reek—tinged the water the slightest bit green, and smelled much stronger than I thought it would. After ten minutes in the bath, I had to admit my head felt a little less tightly packed. Still, there was something bouncing around my brain like an old-fashioned pinball, ricocheting off of my overtaxed gray matter, until finally it dropped.

“We know the names of all the players on the Tsunamis.”

Have you ever gotten a sudden chill while you’re in a hot bath? It’s not a pleasant thing. I leapt up so quickly I think half the bath splashed out; I lost my balance and fell to the floor with a heavy thud. I yelled and cursed, not just because of the fall, but because it had taken me so long to realize. The Tsunamis didn’t exist in this world! Here, we were still the Blue Demons, just like they were when my father played. Who the hell are these skaters?

As I left the bathroom, towel-wrapped, but still dripping wet, my mother intercepted me.

“What was that I heard? Did you fall?”

“I’m fine.”

She looked into the bathroom, took a whiff, and said, “What’s going on in here? It smells like you killed a Christmas elf.”