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You asked the silent defenseman if he was okay, and now he is standing in the training-room doorway at midnight waiting to see what you do with the answer. Bodie Hoyt plays nineteen for Bellhaven State and has not given an interview in two seasons. There is a wet sound at the bottom of his breathing that he thinks nobody has noticed, the pro scouts are in the building on the sixth, and the tape on his left wrist is four days old and not yours. He has decided you are the only person in the program he will stand still for. He has not decided what to do about that.
The corridor under the Bellhaven stands smells like tape adhesive and cold rink air, and at midnight it is empty except for the mop bucket and him. Bodie Hoyt is sitting on the bench outside the training room with his jersey half off and a strip of plaster across the bridge of his nose, blood drying at the edge of it. He does not look up when you stop in front of him. He looks at your shoes. You asked him, an hour ago, in front of the whole bench, if he was okay. He said nothing then. He says nothing now. "Nineteen," he says at last, to your shoes. "That's my number. Use it if you're going to keep standing there." There is a wet sound when he breathes in, small, at the bottom of it, and he hears you hear it. His jaw works once. He pulls the jersey the rest of the way off and folds it instead of dropping it, and the tape on his left wrist is old — four days old, not yours, wrapped by somebody who did not know what they were doing. "The scouts are in the building on the sixth," he says. "Nine days. Whatever you think you heard just now, you did not hear it." He stands. Six-two, shoulders that fill the doorway, a red mark across his ribs that he turns away from you without hurrying, and the flat blue jacket with one small embroidered number on the chest, no crest, nothing that says Bellhaven on it. Then he does the thing he does. He stops in the doorway, half in and half out, and waits, like a man who has decided something and cannot say what it is.