Benji comes in last of all, and hardly anyone notices him. His hair is still a mess, his denim shirt is half tucked in, as if he’d just pulled on his pants in a darkened room. He looks the way he did when he got out of the bed in a cabin in a campsite between Beartown and Hed not long ago, on the night that was full of Nietzsche and cold beer and warm hands.

All the other students in the room are too preoccupied with one another and themselves to see the new teacher turn toward the door and lose his breath. Benji’s not an easy young man to surprise, but he stops, his chest pounding with shock.

* * *

The teacher is wearing the same blue polo shirt as he was that night.

20

Shaving Cream in Your Shoes

It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.

* * *

When the class is over, the students rush out of the classroom as if it were on fire, as usual. Benji seems to be last by accident; he’s good at giving the impression of nonchalance. The teacher is sweating with nerves, the collar of his blue polo shirt flecked with moisture.

“I . . . I didn’t know you were still at school, Benjamin. If I’d known . . . I thought you were older. It was a . . . a mistake! I could lose my job, we shouldn’t have slept together . . . I don’t make a habit . . . you were just . . . just . . .”

Benji steps closer to him. The teacher’s hands are shaking. “Just a mistake. I was just a mistake,” Benji says, finishing his sentence for him.

The teacher nods helplessly with his eyes closed. Benji stares at his lips for a few moments. When the teacher opens his eyes again, Benji is already gone.

* * *

Bobo goes straight home after school as usual, throws his backpack into his room, gets changed, and goes out to help his dad, Hog, in the workshop. Just as he always does. But today Hog rather than Bobo is the one keeping an eye on the clock.

“That’s enough, Bobo. Get going!” Hog says when it’s time.

Bobo nods, relieved, and shrugs off his overalls. Hog notes that they’re getting to be too small for him. While Bobo fetches his hockey gear Hog hesitates for a long time before saying anything, possibly because he doesn’t want his son to see how full of anticipation he is. Fathers’ hopes can so easily suffocate their sons. But in the end he can’t help asking, “Nervous?”

It’s a stupid question, Bobo’s as nervous as a long-tailed cat between two rocking chairs. This is his first training session with the A-team, he’s eighteen years old, and hockey has a definitive way of letting children know when they’ve grown up. The son shakes his head, but his eyes are nodding. His dad grins. “Keep your head down and your mouth shut. Do your best. And wear a pair of shoes you don’t like.”

Bobo opens his mouth to make the noise he’s made ever since he was little when he doesn’t understand something: “Huh?”

“The older A-team players will fill your shoes with shaving cream while you’re in the shower. They’ll make life hell to start with, but you just have to accept that. Remember, it’s a sign that they respect you. It’s when they’re not messing with you that you need to be worried, because that means they know you’re on your way out of the team.”

Bobo nods. Hog looks as though he’s about to pat him on the shoulder but reaches for a tool from the bench behind him instead. Bobo turns to go change his shoes, but Hog clears his throat, “Thanks for your help today.”

Bobo doesn’t know what to say. He helps his dad in the workshop every day, but his dad never thanks him. But today he goes on: “I wish your life could be less complicated. That you only had to worry about school and hockey and girls and whatever your friends worry about. I know it’s been tough, having to help in the workshop, and now all this business with your mom not . . .”

He tails off. Bobo doesn’t finish the sentence. He just says, “No problem, Dad.”

“I’m so damn proud of you,” Hog says, looking down under the hood of a Ford.

Bobo goes and gets an old pair of shoes.

* * *

Amat is the smallest guy in the locker room. He’s doing his best to make himself even smaller; he can feel the way the older players are looking at him and knows they don’t want him there. Bobo’s sitting beside him, and it’s worse for him because he’s big. The older players, the ones who didn’t find other teams when the club was teetering close to bankruptcy in the summer and are damned if they’re going to lose their places to a gang of juniors now, immediately start to target him. Just little things, someone hitting him with his shoulder, someone accidentally kicking his gear across the floor. As they start to joke about noisily, Bobo desperately tries to make funny comments. It’s obvious that he’s trying too hard to gain acceptance, and for that reason it only makes things worse. Amat tries to nudge him with his elbow to get him to shut up, but Bobo is on a roll. One of the older players grunts, “So we’re getting a female coach now, too? Can’t the GM find some other way to drum up a bit of PR? Are we going to end up as some sort of political gesture?”

“There’s no way she got the job on her own merits, this is to meet a quota!” another snaps.

“Have you heard she’s a lesbian?” Bobo blurts out, a little too loudly.

The older players ignore him. But one of them says, “Definitely a rug muncher. You can tell just by looking at her.”

“Huh? What’s a rug muncher? Oh, hang on . . . I get it! Lesbian, right? I get it!” Bobo yelps.

No one reacts. The older players just go on, “Can’t a hockey team just be a hockey team? Does everything have to be political? It’s only a matter of time before they replace the bear on our shirts with a goddamn rainbow!”

As if struck by lightning Bobo exclaims, “And force us to play in, like, ballerinas’ tutus!”

He stands up and does a clumsy pirouette, stumbles into a bench, loses his balance, and falls flat on his back on top of two hockey bags. Then something happens. A couple of the older players laugh. At him rather than with him, but as long as they’re looking at him he devours their attention. He gets to his feet and does another pirouette, and one of the older guys pretends to be serious and says, “Your name’s Bobo, right?”

“Yes!” Bobo nods intently.

The other players grin expectantly, aware that the older man is teasing the boy.

“You ought to show her your cock,” he says.

“Huh?” Bobo says.

The older player points at him demonstratively. “The new coach. She’s a lesbian. Show her your cock! So she can see what she’s missing!”

“Let the anaconda out of the cage, Bobo! You’re not chicken, are you?” another player cries, and soon they’re all shouting, as if he were getting ready to attempt the long jump.

“But she . . . won’t she be . . . angry?” Bobo wonders in confusion.

“She’ll just think you’ve got a decent sense of humor!” one of the older players replies eagerly.

In hindsight it’s easy to say that Bobo’s crazy, but when you’re eighteen years old in a locker room full of grown men who are suddenly cheering you on, “no” is the hardest word in the world.

So when Elisabeth Zackell walks past in the corridor, Bobo leaps out of the locker room as naked as the day he was born. He’s expecting her to be shocked. Or at least jump. She doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.

“Yes?” she asks.

Bobo squirms. “I . . . well . . . we heard you were lesbian, so I . . .”

“BOBO WANTED TO SHOW YOU HIS COCK SO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE MISSING!!!” someone shouts from the locker room, followed by two dozen men giggling hysterically.

Zackell puts her hands on her knees and leans forward in interest toward Bobo’s crotch.

“That?” she wonders, pointing curiously.

“Huh?” Bobo says.

“Is that the cock you’re talking about? Wow. I’ve seen women with bigger clitorises than that.”

Then she turns and walks toward the ice without another word. Bobo has turned bright red all over when he steps back inside the locker room.

“It’s . . . okay, she said . . . a clitoris can’t get this big, can it? I mean . . . how big can a clitoris get? Roughly?”

The locker room is rocking with mocking laughter. At him, not with him. But Bobo is still smiling sheepishly, because sometimes any attention at all can still feel like validation.

* * *

Amat is squirming inside his gear as he looks at Bobo, already thinking that this is going to end badly.

* * *

When the practice begins, the players gather around the center circle at a very leisurely pace, demonstratively arrogant, to show Elisabeth Zackell that she’s not welcome. She doesn’t seem to pick up the hint at all, just comes out with six buckets under her arm.

“What are you good at in Beartown?”