What can I say? When he’s right, he’s right: I thought he was serious when he said that about groceries.
I’m pretty sure my stepmom leaving grew out of me playing hockey so much, and now my dad never has money ’cause he got divorced and ’cause I play hockey. So I say it out loud.
“So is it the money that you’re crying about?”
He looks at me, confused. “What do you mean?”
“I heard you crying a couple of times at night. And I just mean she never would have left if I didn’t play hockey.”
He doesn’t deny it. Instead he says, “You know what? Jenny was all about going to school, and that’s okay. You were her second, or maybe more like her fourth, priority. But you’re my first priority. That’s just the way it is. I would never cry about money. Never. I don’t know what I’m crying about, to be honest.”
I can see Dad’s getting riled up. He wants me to chase my hockey dreams in the worst way. He spent his childhood playing hockey even more than I do, and it’s all he wants me to do—so that I’ll be able to compete with kids from cold climates who skate constantly. When he was four, his parents made a rink in their backyard for him to skate in for hours every day during the winter. They wanted us to move to their town in Iowa so they could remake the rink for me, but California has become a hotbed for youth hockey, and Iowa, not so much. There are some California midget and bantam guys who are some of the best youth hockey players in the country. Bantam and midget are the next two older levels after mine. We don’t have as many great hockey players as in cold states like Michigan and Minnesota, but teams from my club have gone to the national championships three times. That’s one of my dreams. I got lots of dreams.
I actually know there’s another reason Dad doesn’t want to move to Iowa. It’s a pretty safe state, but there were those two Iowa boys who got kidnapped during their paper routes and were never found. It was a long time ago, but I heard Dad talking about it once when his parents were visiting. I could tell something about those two cases just stuck under Dad’s skin. That’s why he got me Sinbad, so I could go out into the world and grow up, but I could stay safe, too. Dad and his friends always say that the hardest part about being a cop is when something happens to a kid. Basically, you become a cop thinking you’re gonna save the world, and then you find out you can’t save everyone. Some days you can’t even save anyone at all . . . some weeks . . . some months.
When you’re a cop’s kid, you kind of realize things about people that are maybe darker than what most kids realize. My dad sees a lot of bad stuff at work. I mean, he’s seen a seventy-five-year-old woman with her chest sliced open, he’s seen a two-year-old who’d drowned, and he’s seen five dogs dead in someone’s garage. I hear all this stuff listening to him talk with his cop friends when they play poker. I accept what I know—it’s just part of my life. Maybe, in a way, that’s why I’m so close to Sinbad. I love my dad more than anyone in the world, but sometimes I can feel something kind of emanating out of him. It’s a darkness or a sadness or something, and as much as I love him, I just can’t be around him sometimes. But then, when I’m with other kids who don’t see what I see, that can be hard too. So I just want to be with Sinbad. He’s so happy, and he makes me happy.
And see, just like Sinbad gets me away from the darkness, my hockey gets Dad away from his darkness. He even said so one day when he’d had three beers. I see how proud he is of me, and I know the only way to make everything right is to work as hard as I can. It’s a lot of responsibility for me, but I don’t mind ’cause like I said, hockey is in my soul.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
IN HOCKEY I’M what’s called a peewee. That’s eleven- and twelve-year-olds. I’ll be twelve next month, so this is my last year in peewee. I’m trying to make the jump from peewee AA to AAA next season. Tryouts are coming up in less than two weeks. The AAAs are kids who skate fast, pass good, hit the puck hard, and want the puck more than life itself. That’s me, I know it. I know it, but I got to prove it to Coach Dusan in the tryouts. Just thinking about this makes my stomach turn. Dad keeps saying, “Don’t worry about being worried, worry about getting the puck. Don’t think about anything but the puck.”
When we get to the rink forty minutes later, Shu, in cargo shorts, is just unlocking the front door. He’s sixty, but his calf muscles are still as big as grapefruits. He was on the Chinese national team when he was young.
Shu doesn’t say hi. He says, “Last time you lazy, this time work hard.”
“I had a stomachache last time.”
“I don’t care, skate hard or I pinch you.” Then he reaches over and pinches my neck, I mean, really pinches HARD.
“Ow! I haven’t even done anything yet! How can you pinch me?”
“I forget to pinch you last time,” he says, walking away.
Dad heads to the ice, and I head to the dungeonlike locker rooms. Even at this hour, the dungeons are overly warm. I strip and put on my socks, leggings with cup, shirt with built-in neck guard, elbow pads, shin guards, shoulder pads, hockey pants, pants shell, mouth guard, and jersey. Then I focus on my skates. They have to be tied just right, or I’m no good. I pull the laces taut on the bottom eyelets, and then on the top, I wrap the laces twice around my ankles and pull tight but not too tight, then knot them. I stand up and concentrate on my skates. All good.
I’m already sweating as I take off my skate guards and grab my helmet, stick, and water bottle. In the hall I pass Rocko rolling in his hockey bag. “Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says.
That qualifies as a long conversation when it comes to Rocko and me. We used to be good friends—he was in my class in third grade, but he moved to Glendale that summer. Later, by coincidence, we started hockey together, ending up on the same team for two years. Then when I made AAs, and he didn’t, he stopped talking to me, even when I said hi. And his mom and dad stopped talking to my stepmom and dad. Some of the kids and parents are like that. Not a lot of them, but some. Maybe we would have drifted apart anyway. He just seems way younger. Like, his dad still ties his skates, even though that’s against the rules for peewees. Also, Mr. Rockman likes to complain to the coaches, which doesn’t even seem to embarrass Rocko. He complains if he doesn’t like the way practice goes, if he doesn’t think Rocko played enough in a game, etc. Everybody at the rink knows who the crazy parents are. Some are crazy in a kinda funny way, and some are crazy mad like Mr. Rockman. You gotta have an incredibly talented kid for a coach to take on a parent like that, though some coaches are more tolerant than others of screaming parents. Still, I’m basically cool with Rocko, just don’t see the need to try to escalate back into friendship.
Now my dad, even though he knows a lot about hockey, never complains to the coaches. Once in a while, if he has a suggestion, he says he politely shoots the coach an e-mail, but he won’t confront a coach like Mr. Rockman does. Dad’s main focus is not on the coaches but on me. Dad says you have to work hard to dig every ounce of your talent out of yourself. “You can’t be sure how much talent you have until you hit a wall,” he told me once. Now and again I think I’ve hit a wall, and sometimes that gets me so upset I cry, but I push through it and get better.
I stomp down the hall with a bunch of other skaters. Until I step on the ice, I feel like I’m kind of a regular kid. Then I step on the ice, and the world changes. All my working out, all my skating lessons, all my hockey practices, all the time I spend hitting the puck in my driveway—it all comes together and makes me feel like a gladiator or something as I sprint once around the rink with my stick, stopping to slap a puck into the net. I had my skates sharpened yesterday, and they feel great!
A few midget AAAs are among the group here to skate with Shu. Midgets are fifteen to eighteen years old. I’ve talked to the guys here before. They’re seventeen, and they’re awesome. They’re here ’cause they’re reaching for the brass ring. The brass ring is either college or major junior or the pros. Anything, as long as
you can keep playing at a high level. Except for Rocko, that’s the only type of player who shows up at five in the morning to skate with a sixty-year-old Chinese man who pinches them hard on the neck when he gets mad. I’ve heard “Don’t be lazy, I pinch you” about, I don’t know, fifty times. And I’ve been pinched maybe twenty times, including today.
“Don’t be lazy!” I shout for no reason, and skate at top speed halfway around the rink and come to a quick stop, spraying ice into the air.
Fifteen guys and one girl show up. Except for the girl—Ji-Hye—Rocko and I are the only ones who haven’t made AAA yet. Ji-Hye plays college hockey, and she’s super mean. Me and Rocko usually just try to avoid being in line near her so she doesn’t beat up on us.
Shu appears and says, “I time you.” He swings his stopwatch around in the air, and we all get in line. I get in front of Ji-Hye, but she pushes me out of the way and says, “Move over, or I’ll sit on you.” She’s serious. She pushes and trips boys who are smaller than her, and then she sits on them. I let her go in front of me, since it’s pretty embarrassing when she sits on you. You can’t get up. You’re only set free when Shu decides to make her get off. She lives in Koreatown near Jae-won, my best friend from last season’s team. When I’m over at his house sometimes and she’s home from school, we troll her just to get on her nerves, like we go to her parents’ place and ring the doorbell. I don’t remember if she sat on me first, or if Jae-won and I trolled her first. The funny thing is, at the same time, we all respect each other.
One by one, Shu times us. The fastest guy around the rink clocks in at 14.45. That’s blazing for a seventeen-year-old in full gear. Ji-Hye’s lap is 16 flat. Mine is 16.21. I’m fast for a peewee. But I know I still need to learn to get into the hockey zone, like how it happens sometimes when I feel like I can see half the ice at the same time, my peripheral vision as good as my forward vision. Like how it happens when I know what a player is going to do before he does it. “That’s a hockey player,” my dad likes to say.
Shu pinches no one, so we all clocked pretty well for us. Next we zigzag through the cones while touching one of our hands on the ice. Then Shu runs a full-ice scrimmage. I manage some good moves and even dangle a midget before getting off a slap shot. During a break, Shu says approvingly, “You make AAA. You AAA.” Really?? I stand there for a moment, letting his words wash over me, inside me. That’s the first time he’s ever complimented me! I look over to my dad; he’s talking to the other parents. I’m pretty much 100 percent certain all they talk about is hockey. Maybe they throw in a few sentences about golf or politics or whatever, but basically they talk about hockey. Then it’s like whoosh, as soon as I take my mind off the ice, I think about our house. In my mind the fire’s huge, and the houses and firefighters are tiny. I see the flames lick at the sky, but I shake the image out of my head and turn to Shu, aware that I’m frowning. Focus. There are a million things that can distract you every time you’re on the ice. Sometimes big things.
So: focus.
After three and a half hours of alternating drills and scrimmages, one of the workers revs up the Zamboni to level the ice. We change and go outside to do muscle work.
Muscle work starts with frog jumps up and down the big garden. The parents are watching, even though it’s hot outside. My quads are burning. Rocko collapses, but I keep going. A couple of other kids collapse. I keep going. Ji-Hye hasn’t stopped either—she’s stronger than some of the boys. Finally it’s just me, her, and the midgets. Two more jumps, then with a groan I collapse to the ground and breathe hard. I groan again. Can’t move my legs. I don’t even watch what’s going on, just wait for it to end. After a minute, Shu taps me with a foot, and I just look at him as he skates away. Next is push-ups. I do my thirty-three. Then everybody’s counting as the midgets keep going and going and going. The world record for nonstop push-ups was set by a Japanese guy who did more than ten thousand. But Shu tells them to stop at two hundred. So that’s about six times more than me—means I need to work harder. Me and Ji-Hye get pinched at the same time. “Lazy, you both lazy.” Ouch—it feels like he’s just torn off a piece of my flesh. In fact, it makes me almost dizzy for a second.
A few more exercises, and thirty minutes later Shu sets us free. When Dad and I walk back through the rink, the figure skaters are on. Ivan’s out there working on spins with a girl. I’ve seen her around, and her skating is as amazing as frick. You concentrate on eight edges when you figure-skate—front left outside, front left inside, etc.—and she works her edges perfectly. She’s like a frickin’ brain surgeon at ten years old.
I stop and drop my gear, then hop up and down on a bench up to thirty. Then I pick up my gear and continue. Dad doesn’t say anything.
I take a moment to transfer my mind from the rink to the rest of the world. The rest of the world where you get in cars and drive around to places that aren’t rinks and communicate with people and eat something besides buffalo wings and soggy salad from the rink café. It’s hot here in Burbank, and I think about how hot and dry it’ll be by our house today.
“Dad, can we drive by the house to see if it’s okay?”
“Read my mind,” he replies as we walk across the parking lot. “Taco Bell first?”
“Sure,” I reply. As far as I’m concerned, someone should declare Taco Bell a national treasure. You know what I’m saying?
CHAPTER 5
* * *
WE’RE ABOUT AN hour from home. I eat my tacos over the bag, trying hard not to spill. Weekends, I get to eat junk food one day, and this is the day. But thinking about our house, I don’t really enjoy my tacos as much as usual. The lettuce feels like paper in my mouth, and the meat tastes more like clumps of seasoning than actual beef. I eat everything anyway, ’cause I’m food-driven like Sinbad. Half an hour later I can see smoke in the distance. As we get closer, the sky’s dark like yesterday. It’s unbelievable, actually. I check my phone: the fire’s at twenty-two thousand acres, but I can’t find anything about houses burning down. I try to search my instincts, to see if our home is within those twenty-two thousand acres. But I come up blank.
The 14 is open, so we get there fast. Our street is silent, empty. There’s smoke and flames way in the distance but nothing nearby. All the houses look intact, but there’re signs of a fire: a car that looks burned out, a blackened tree, the charred front of a neighbor’s house. I spot our little house! I feel like it’s so beautiful, it’s practically shining. I smile at Dad, and he smiles back. A man in some kind of uniform-like shirt walks up to the window and knocks. Dad lowers the glass, and the man says, “You live on this street? We were just about to lift the evacuation orders. The fire’s heading in the opposite direction now.”
“Thank you. Appreciate you taking care of our street,” my dad says.
“Sure thing. I heard it wasn’t so bad on this one. Next street over, there were some problems. Have a nice day.”
“Thank you!” I call out, and he raises a couple of fingers in the air in reply.
We go to check out our house. The backyard is blackened, and the outside wall is charred. The avocado tree looks dead, the leaves in a circle on the ground. I push at some crunchy leaves with my foot. No more guacamole for us—we can’t afford avocados from the store. “All that guac was fun while it lasted,” I say.
Dad just laughs. “We got someplace to stay tonight!” We high-five. We still have a house! I go check my room, and everything is completely, completely normal. Yes!
We head back to Long Beach to get our stuff. I zone out—you get expert at that when you play travel hockey, ’cause of all the driving you have to do. When we get to Aunt Mo’s place, Sinbad is sitting on the sidewalk as my aunt seems to be trying to entice him back into the house with food. I get out of the car, and he trots over to me.
“He ran out when I opened the door,” she says. “I’m sorry! He was upset that you weren’t here. He started whining.”
“How long has he been out here?” I ask, rubbi
ng his head. He sits extra straight in front of me, like he’s some kind of perfectly behaved dog.
“You’re going to be mad at me,” she says.
“No, I’m not.”
“Two hours. Every time I tried to get close to him, he stepped away.”
“No prob,” I say, ’cause I can see she feels bad. Of course, inside I have to admit I’m kind of upset with her. I know a kid from school whose dog got out the front door, and she never saw the dog again. But Dad flicks a finger on my back, like a warning, so I smile and say, “Thanks for taking care of him.”
“The evacuation orders are lifted,” Dad tells her. “We went by the house, and it’s fine. The avocado tree looks dead, though.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” my aunt says. Then she brightens. “But come in and watch a movie before you go home.”
So we go and watch the original Star Wars. It’s her second-favorite movie, so she knows all the words. Honestly, none of the Star Wars movies would make my top hundred, but I’m always happy to watch whatever Aunt Mo wants, ’cause she’s such a cool person. I’m already over the Sinbad-getting-out thing. Dad says she put her whole life aside when my mom died and he needed someone to babysit me after he quit hockey and got a job with LAPD and Jenny was going to school. Aunt Mo worked weekends and nights so she would be free during the weekdays. Then she did it again for a few months after Jenny left. So Dad and I pretty much watch whatever she wants, even the super-girlie stuff that makes me want to pull out my hair, like all that Twilight crap. But her favorite movie is the original Terminator, which I’m not allowed to watch yet. Looking forward to it, though. We went to a team dinner once after a game, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was there at the restaurant. He let the whole team take a picture with him, even though he was in the middle of dinner, and then he signed my shirt and wrote To Aunt Mo. From the Terminator. When I gave it to her, she said, “Good times!”