Chapter 1: The Quiz
The email had come in January with the subject line ALL-STAR CONTENT PLAN (EXCITING!!) and Shane had read it four times on the team bus, each time hoping the attachment would say something different.
It never did. Page three, in a font somebody in marketing had chosen to look playful: RIVALS TO TEAMMATES: HOLLANDER + ROZANOV. Mic'd-up practice skate. Locker stall neighbours. "How Well Do You Know Your Teammate?" quiz, filmed Friday, posted Saturday morning for maximum reach.
"Maximum reach," Shane said now, under his breath, standing in a hotel ballroom in Las Vegas that was decorated to look like the inside of a slot machine.
"You say something, Shane?" Priya Nandakumar didn't look up from either of her phones.
"No. Sorry. Just reading the questions."
"Don't read the questions. The whole point is you don't know the questions." She plucked the card out of his hand with the efficiency of a woman who had done this to a lot of millionaires. "Spontaneity. Chemistry. The fans love you two. Well. The fans love to hate you two. Same metrics."
There were two tall stools in front of a backdrop of neon dice. There was a camera on a slider, a second on a tripod, a boom mic, a ring light and three people from the league's social team holding iced coffees and looking at Shane the way people looked at a dog that might bite. He tried to arrange his face into something friendly. One of the coffee people flinched.
He had played in five All-Star Games. He had done the breakaway challenge in a cape once because the Metros' social coordinator had cried. He knew how to do this. You smiled, you said something about how much fun the guys were, you tossed a puck into the front row, you went to bed at ten.
What he did not know how to do was sit on a stool beside Ilya Rozanov and answer questions about him on camera, because the honest answers were the kind of thing that ended careers.
"He's late," said one of the coffee people.
"He's always late," Shane said, and then wished he hadn't, because Priya's head came up like a hunting bird's.
"Oh, that's good. Say that on camera."
The doors at the back of the ballroom opened and Ilya walked in like he had paid for the building.
He was wearing the Atlantic Division jersey, black with gold trim, over a pair of jeans that had definitely not been in the content plan, and he had his sunglasses pushed up into his hair, which the Vegas air had already made worse. He stopped halfway across the carpet, looked at the dice backdrop, looked at Shane, and put a hand over his heart.
"Hollander," he said. "They make us match."
"It's the team jersey," Shane said. "Everyone matches. That's what a team is."
"Is very romantic, I think." Ilya came up the little riser and took the other stool without being asked, folding himself onto it so his knee ended up an inch from Shane's. He smelled like the hotel's lobby and, under that, like the cologne Shane had once told him was too much and which he had worn every single time since. "You look nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
"You are holding your water like a grenade."
Shane put the water on the floor.
Priya clapped once. "Okay! Love this energy. Ilya, Shane, the format is simple. I ask a question, you both write your answer on your board, you flip on three. Most matching answers wins bragging rights. Loser has to wear the other guy's team hat to the skills competition tomorrow."
Ilya made a small, thrilled noise.
"No," Shane said.
"It's already approved," Priya said, and handed him a dry-erase board and a marker that squeaked.
The red light on the camera came on. Shane felt his media smile assemble itself, piece by piece, like a machine he'd built in his garage.
"First question," Priya said, in a bright new voice for the camera. "Ilya. What's Shane's pre-game meal?"
That one was fine. That one was public. Every hockey podcast in North America had made fun of Shane's pre-game meal. He wrote CHICKEN, RICE, BROCCOLI and flipped it.
Ilya's board said SADNESS.
The coffee people laughed. Priya laughed. Shane did not laugh, but he felt the corner of his mouth go and had to bite the inside of his cheek, and Ilya saw it, because Ilya always saw it.
"Is not wrong," Ilya told the camera. "Plain chicken. No salt. Like eating a hospital."
"It's a performance diet."
"It is a crime."
"Okay, Shane, your turn." Priya flipped a card. "What's Ilya's go-to coffee order?"
Shane's marker stopped on the board.
He knew. Of course he knew. Double espresso, then a second double espresso about forty minutes later, which Ilya called "the sequel," and on game days a disgusting hotel-lobby hot chocolate with extra whipped cream that he would deny drinking under oath. Shane had watched him order it in seven countries. He had once driven to a twenty-four-hour gas station outside Raleigh at one in the morning because Ilya had been in a mood and the hotel's machine was broken, and he had come back with two cups and Ilya had looked at him like he had pulled a star out of the sky.
He wrote BLACK COFFEE, which was what a man who barely knew Ilya Rozanov would guess.
Ilya's board said ESPRESSO X2. Under that, smaller, in a scrawl the camera could probably still read: + SECRET HOT CHOCOLATE.
"Wrong!" Priya sang.
"Very wrong," Ilya agreed, and turned on his stool to look at Shane with enormous, wounded eyes. "Black coffee. Like I am a trucker."
"I don't know what you drink," Shane said. "Why would I know what you drink?"
"Because you have stared at me across a faceoff circle for seven years. I thought you were paying attention." He leaned in and lowered his voice, as if sharing a secret with the whole internet. "I know everything about him. He sleeps with three pillows. He folds his socks."
The coffee people loved that. Shane felt his ears go hot. "That's... everybody folds their socks."
"Nobody folds their socks, Hollander."
"How do you know how many pillows I sleep with?"
It came out sharper than he meant it to, and for one horrible second the room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the cameras. Ilya didn't even blink.
"Everyone knows. Is in your Players' Tribune article. 'My Routine for Success.'" He made air quotes. "Very boring article. I read it twice to fall asleep."
Shane had not written anything about pillows in that article. He was almost sure. He was going to have to go home and read it and find out, and he was going to spend the whole flight wondering, which was exactly what Ilya wanted.
They went on. Favourite movie: Shane wrote something Ilya had once mentioned in an interview, which turned out to be a lie Ilya had told the interviewer, because Ilya's board said MAMMA MIA TWO and he refused to elaborate. Biggest fear: Ilya wrote GEESE for Shane, which was true and which Shane had told exactly one person, at four in the morning, in a hotel in Calgary. Shane wrote NOTHING for Ilya, because what else would you write, and Ilya's own board said BEING BORING, and he held it up with total sincerity.
Somewhere in the middle Shane realised what he had to do, and that it was going to be the hardest thing he'd ever done on camera. He had to get every single one wrong.
It should have been easy. It was not. His hand kept starting the real answers. Ilya's middle name, which Shane could have spelled in Cyrillic. The scar through Ilya's eyebrow: CAR DOOR, AGE NINE, MOSCOW, NOT A FIGHT, NO MATTER WHAT HE TELLS REPORTERS. Ilya's favourite thing about Montreal, which was the bagels and, once, in a whisper, Shane. Each time, Shane put the marker down and wrote something stupid instead. HOCKEY. RED. DOGS?
Ilya, meanwhile, was getting everything right. Not the private things. Never the private things. He was too careful for that, and too smart, and he had been keeping this secret as long as Shane had. But he went right up to the edge of every answer and leaned over it, grinning, and let the cameras think it was a bit.
"Last question!" Priya held up the card like a winning lottery ticket. "Both of you. What's the one thing nobody knows about your teammate?"
Shane stared at the board. The marker squeaked when he uncapped it. He could feel Ilya beside him not writing, waiting, his knee now very much touching Shane's knee where the camera couldn't see.
He wrote: HE'S NICER THAN HE LOOKS.
He didn't know why. It was true and it was safe and it was the most honest thing he'd written all afternoon. He flipped it before he could change his mind.
Ilya's board said: HE CHEATS AT CARDS.
"I do not," Shane said.
"Every time."
"I have never cheated at cards in my life."
"Then you are very lucky. Lucky in cards." Ilya looked at Shane's board for a long moment, and the grin went somewhere else for a second, somewhere quieter, before he put it back on. "Nicer than I look," he said to the camera. "He is wrong. I am terrible. Write it down."
"And that's a wrap!" Priya was already scrolling through footage on one phone and typing on the other. "Ilya wins, eight to one, oh my God, Shane, you didn't get anything. That's going to do numbers. Shane, you're wearing the Boston hat tomorrow."
"I heard."
"We'll get you on the red carpet in it. It'll be iconic."
The red light went off. The coffee people started breaking down the ring light. Shane stood up too fast and nearly knocked his stool over, and Ilya caught it with one hand without looking.
"Good game, Hollander," he said, loud enough for everyone. Then he stood and clapped Shane on the shoulder, the way you'd clap a rival you were being forced to like, and his hand slid an inch lower than it needed to and stayed there for a beat. Something slipped into the pocket of Shane's quarter-zip. Something flat and plastic.
Ilya was already walking away, sunglasses down, waving to the coffee people like a minor prince.
Shane didn't take it out until he was alone in the elevator. A hotel keycard, in one of those little paper sleeves. On the sleeve, in the same scrawl as SECRET HOT CHOCOLATE, someone had written a room number and, under it: You got them all wrong. I am very offended. Come explain.