Content warning, highlight the hidden text between the lines:
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Mild sports violence
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"Here's your card, Mrs. Balwinder. We'll see you in July. Happy New Year," said Alicia, reaching across the desk to hand an appointment card to somebody's great-grandmother. The office assistant wondered if the 8th was too late to still say Happy New Year. Yes, probably.
She turned in her office chair and resumed her conversation with Maxine. "Do you think I'd like snorkeling?"
"Miss Alicia, you would not believe all the coral down in the water. Big, colorful, all sorts of fish and life in there," Maxine exclaimed, her plump cheeks upturned merrily as she recalled her annual snowbird getaway. Even her eyes seemed to smile. "They give you these frozen peas, and when you hold them out, the fish just swim right up to you and eat it! They even had this parachute swing on the boat, and they'd fly you up there and you could jump off into the water. I never did, but people there your age got a kick out of it. I'm telling you, you need to get out to Cancun one of these days." It was the reason she still worked at the age of 72: to go on vacation.
The door to the dental treatment area swung open, and two pairs of footsteps made their way down the hall. Alicia reached for a blank appointment card and a pen. "I'll get this one, too."
Maxine nodded as her attention drifted back to her computer screen. On the other side of the reception desk stood a pale, balding man with a really solid effort at a combover. Beneath his black and navy winter coat, Alicia spotted a red, black, and silver-gray shirt bearing three familiar letters: QoW. Their eyes met. How did she know him? She looked at the name on the patient sheet: Jim Stein.
"Jim?" she said, eyes half-squinting.
The patient looked at her nameplate, and then looked again. "Alicia Winthrop?" He shot back simultaneously.
Alicia's face froze as she scrambled to find her conversational bearings. She couldn't think of a good response, but she wanted to beat the surprise cameo to the punch. "Ohhhhhhhh… this is complicated."
"I knew you looked familiar!" the seat thief shouted, pointing a finger at her.
A thousand half-formed explanations jockeyed to spill out first, but none made it across the finish line. Alicia held up a finger to her lips and tried to keep it professional, "Um. Looks like, uh, $15 is your copay. That's good." She waited in interminable silence as Jim took longer to write a check than anyone ever born. The office assistant smiled enthusiastically, eyes full of suppressed panic as she received it across the desk. "Thank you. Do you need to schedule a follow-up appointment?"
"Yes."
"Great! Miss Maxine, I'm going on break," Alicia declared, still staring directly across the counter, before silently mouthing to her one-time wrestling tutor, "follow me." She stood up from her threadbare rolling office chair, burst through the office door, and met Jim in the reception area. Alicia performed a cruel pantomime of walking casually as she resumed the conversation in a half-whisper, "Hi. Let's talk outside."
Alicia pulled the front door open, inviting the cold to rush in and snap at her unprotected body. In her nervous haste, the moonlighting wrestler had forgotten her coat. It didn't matter. She led Jim in anxious silence across the crumbling asphalt parking lot towards the less cared-for side of the office.
They reached the sanctuary of the dumpster beside an unused back exit when Alicia turned around to face the fan and laid it out plainly, "Okay, so the woman at the desk knows. Nobody else does. I want to keep it that way."
"I promise I won't tell anybody," Jim assured her with a nod and a shrug before circling back to what he apparently felt was the more important part of the conversation. "You saw your first show last year and now you wrestle?"
The answer didn't come as easily as she expected, but she was honest. "Probably not for long. They gave me a contract for five matches, and then they're either going to sign or cut me." A plume of steam escaped Alicia’s lips as she broke eye contact in favor of a muddy, discarded Itchin’ for Riches scratch-off ticket that didn’t quite make it into the dumpster. "I don't think I'll make it. All I do is lose. Nobody cheers for me."
Rather than sympathy, he offered a diagnosis. "Well, you don't exactly try to pop the crowd. If you want people to be happy to see you, you need to give them a reason." Alicia was momentarily taken aback by the frankness and clinicality of the answer. Jim continued, "There are plenty of women on the roster who lose more than they win. Your first opponent, Connie Rocket? She was around for like three months before she got her first victory."
Misdiagnosis. "Connie Rocket is a famous track star."
Jim sniff-chuckled. "Collegiate track star. Former collegiate track star. In Japan. Name another famous track star." Silence. There was that one, what's-his-name. The freelance wrestling tutor continued, "You think anyone in Illinois knew who Connie Matsuno was before QoW? She stuck around because she made people care. People cheer for her because she's The Rocket, not because she won a bunch of track meets." Maybe he could keep his accreditation as a wrestling doctor after all. "You wanna stick around? I don't think it's going to be on the quality of your matches."
The bluntness hit her like blunt things do. "Hey!"
"You want someone to be honest with you or someone to kiss your ass?" asked the man whose combover lost more credibility anytime the wind picked up. "And don't take this the wrong way, but who are you?"
People kept asking that, and she appreciated it less each time. "You're being pretty mean," said Alicia, shivering in the winter air.
Jim's pale features scrunched in confusion for a moment as he seemed to play back the sentence in his head. "Not like that. Don't get offended. Look at your opponents. Anyone can look at them and instantly know what they're about. Nobody knows what an Alicia Winthrop is. You're nobody until you prove you're somebody." He paused for a moment and played that sentence back too. "Pretend I said that in a nice way."
Alicia didn't even know when she would wrestle again after her match with Hellion tomorrow night. "I don't think anyone backstage will even notice me if I do."
Jim's intensity jumped a notch. He was either too cold or too frustrated to let this drag out much longer. "Literally throw your weight around! Make someone demand a match with you. Lots of in-ring stuff happens to settle backstage stuff. Don't you read the dirt sheets?"
"That's a little personal."
Jim rolled his eyes. "The wrestling press. Newsletters and stuff. You're not just competing in a sport. There's politics. There's a pecking order. There's a game."
"How do you know all this stuff?"
He opened his coat with one hand and pointed to his shirt. "I'm a fan."
A sustained wind cold enough to knock the wind from Alicia's lungs cut the conversation short. "Thanks for the advice," she said with a half-smile. "Nobody told me any of this. I really appreciate it." With a polite little wave, Alicia turned and headed towards the office entrance.
Jim took a few steps before calling out to her, "Oh! I wanted to ask: is the dentist's name really-"
Alicia cut him off, "It is, but we're supposed to tell patients it's pronounced 'puh-PAY.'"
* * * * *
No Hard Times. Not tonight. Alicia didn't need a workout; she needed to clear her head. Nearly a month of hard freeze had turned the lake into a perfect meditation spot.
The sun had set about half an hour before the powder blue sedan coughed and juddered to a stop in the parking spot closest to the lake. Perhaps the park might not technically have been open after sundown, but the former hockey player questioned why the city would have spent so much money on a lighting system and left the gate open if they really didn't want anyone there.
Pop the trunk. Skates around the neck, equipment bag on her shoulder, portable goal in one arm. A short walk to the ice and change of footwear later, and Alicia was home. She pushed off and picked up speed, dragging the goal into position at the far end before circling the lake and reacclimating to her old legs. After the first trip around the ice, she reversed with a sharp mohawk turn, transitioning to a backwards skate and carved a wide, graceful arc around a quarter of the lake's circumference before another crisp transition back. Several minutes passed as she remembered and wallowed in the feeling of confidence. The ex-Division II athlete didn't need to warm up; she just enjoyed it.
Alicia swung back around to where she dumped her equipment bag and took out her stick and puck carrier. With a flick of muscle memory, she scattered the puck mound, snatched one with the blade of her stick, and trucked down the ice as if on a breakaway, barreling towards the net.
"Top-right corner," she muttered to herself.
As she skated into range, she transferred her weight onto the stick, squared up to the net on the fly with a deke and popped a wrist shot that just painted the inside of the right pipe and crossbar. That was her shot.
It was someone else's first.
Under the bright lights of Woodcutter Park, Alicia skated back to the pile and dug out another puck. She spun around, and exited the player's box in the third period of the Hart County 12-and-under rec league finals. If it were a movie, she'd have called it contrived: a three-goal comeback bringing the game even at six apiece with less than 20 seconds left in regulation. Coach called out the play, but he was wasting his breath. Nicole called it first: get her the puck and clear the skies. Everyone else just needed to show up for the pizza party.
As usual, Nicole hit the ice first with Alicia close behind. Their team–what were we called?–had possession. A girl named Clara or Kara caught a glimpse of the ace and reflexively made the suicide pass into traffic to the one player who could receive it–and she didn't. Nicole slipped by the left winger only to get cleared out by an oncoming defender, who slammed into Nicole just as her stick made contact with the puck, sending both girls sliding across the ice and out of play. Nobody else was close. Alicia smashed through the player her teammate had deftly avoided and handled the puck for the first time the whole tournament.
With tremendous effort, the six-foot-tall 12-year-old managed to keep her forward momentum and maintain control of the puck at the same time. Alicia searched for an open teammate, but everyone had a shadow. She scanned her surroundings again. One-on-one coverage up and down the ice--but they double-teamed Nicole. Wait. I'm the open teammate.
Adrenaline flooded her veins as Alicia looked in front of her and saw nothing between her and the net but ice, air, and a goalie. The realization hit the towering seventh grader about half a second before everyone else, and here came the other team to smother the play and send the game into overtime. The goalie had been a sieve throughout the third period. Maybe by sheer chance one more could squeak through. One shot. Make it count.
"Double-vision!"
Oh thank you thank you thank you, thought Alicia, breathing a sigh of relief as her rescuer raced up behind her.
As usual, Nicole arrived just when she needed to be there. They'd never run the play before in a game. 6 seconds left to go in the championship game seemed as good a time as any to try. With a sneaky drop pass between the legs to the ace with braces behind her, Alicia swung her stick at empty air, faking a slapshot. She banked hard at the last possible second just as a puck whizzed by her right shoulder and lit the lamp. 3.6 seconds left on the clock. It was academic. No sudden death tonight. She skated behind the pack and watched Nicole leave the ice surrounded by her teammates, sticks high in the air, arms around the MVP, heading for the locker room and Katie's Pizza and the expensive premier league where the kids with talent played. More than the trophy in her hand, Alicia wanted that. She was pulled back to Woodcutter Park by the beam of a police flashlight.
"Hey! Park closes an hour before sundown!" came a voice from a rolled-down police car window.
Practice over, I guess, thought the former hockey player. So ended the short, brilliant flight of the Shooting Stars.
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