CHAPTER 1: GOLD

The tile is cold.

That’s the thing I always notice first — not the hammering in my chest, not the way my lungs have apparently forgotten how to be lungs, not the fact that my hands are shaking so hard they’re basically vibrating at a frequency that could shatter crystal. The tile. My bathroom floor. 4:07 AM. The grout is cracked in the corner by the toilet and there’s a water stain on the ceiling that looks like a duck, and I know this because I have spent a statistically significant number of mornings on this floor, staring at this ceiling, counting the seconds until my body remembers that dying is not actually what’s happening.

Four in.

I breathe. Or I try to breathe. My chest is doing the thing — the compression thing, like someone parked a Zamboni on my sternum and walked away.

Four hold.

The duck stares at me. The duck does not judge. The duck is a water stain. The duck has no opinions about Theodore Volkov lying on a bathroom floor at 4 AM in January in his boxers with his heart trying to exit through his ribs.

Six out.

The breath comes out ragged and wrong and not at all like a breath should come out, but it comes out, and that’s the deal I’ve made with my body: you don’t have to be good at this. You just have to do it.

I count. I count the way my mother taught me to count pirouettes — raz, dva, tri, chetyre — because Russian numbers are the oldest thing in my brain and when everything else is on fire, the oldest things survive.

Raz. The shaking starts to slow.

Dva. The Zamboni on my chest lifts one wheel.

Tri. My vision stops doing the tunnel thing, the edges filling back in like someone adjusting the aperture on a camera.

Chetyre. My hands. I hold them up. They’re still shaking. Less than before, but still — the tremor, the barely visible vibration that nobody notices unless they’re looking, and nobody is looking because nobody knows.

That’s the deal I’ve made with everyone else: you don’t know about this. You never know about this. The golden boy does not lie on bathroom floors. The golden boy does not count in Russian while his heart tries to kill him. The golden boy is charming and fast and bulletproof, and if you looked at him on the ice last night — two goals, one assist, the kind of game that makes scouts lean forward in their seats — you would never, not in a million years, guess that the golden boy is currently staring at a water stain duck and wondering if this is the one that doesn’t stop.

It stops.

They always stop. That’s the other deal: the panic attacks are brutal and convincing and they feel exactly like death, but they are not death. They are just my brain rehearsing death for no reason, like an understudy who keeps running the show even though the lead actor is fine.

The lead actor is fine.

I sit up. My back is against the bathtub. My phone is on the bath mat — I must have knocked it off the counter on the way down, which I don’t remember doing, but time gets weird during the attacks. Loses its shape. Five minutes can feel like an hour. An hour can feel like a Tuesday.

I pick up the phone. My hands are still trembling enough that unlocking it takes three tries. The screen is bright and my eyes hate it.

One notification. My agent. Barry Goldstein, who has represented hockey players for thirty years and who calls me “kid” even though I am twenty-four and six feet tall.

Call me when you’re up. Good news from Detroit.

Detroit.

My chest does the compression thing again — not a panic attack, something smaller, something closer to the feeling you get when you’re standing at the top of a very tall building and part of you wants to jump and part of you wants to run and all of you wants to know what happens next.

I put the phone on the counter. I brush my teeth. I look at myself in the mirror: dark hair pushed up from the floor, green eyes with the post-panic redness that makes me look like I’ve been crying (I haven’t), the scar above my lip from a stick in juniors that I like to say makes me look dangerous. It doesn’t. It makes me look like a guy who got hit in the face with a stick, which is exactly what happened, and the guy who hit me apologized and then asked for my number at a bar three weeks later, which is a story I tell at parties because it’s funny and it redirects the conversation away from anything real.

Redirection. Performance. Charm as camouflage.

My mother taught me that, too. Not on purpose. By demonstration.

I don’t look at the photo on my dresser. It’s there — Irina Petrova, twenty-two years old, mid-spin in a practice rink in St. Petersburg, arms like wings, the blades of her figure skates catching the light. It’s face-down. I turned it face-down three weeks ago, after the last time she called and I didn’t answer, and I haven’t turned it back up because looking at it is like looking at a receipt for a debt I can never repay.

My mother gave up everything for me. Her country. Her career. Her body, which was built for triple axels and is now built for waiting rooms and watching hockey games on television with her jaw tight. She came to America on a training visa and never went back. She married my father — Kevin Volkov, an accountant from suburban Detroit who is kind and quiet and has never once in his life made a decision that made Irina Petrova feel like the sacrifice was worth it.

That’s my job. Making the sacrifice worth it.

I pull on sweats and a t-shirt that’s probably too tight but I know exactly what I’m doing with the t-shirt because the t-shirt is part of the armor. I grab my keys. I drive to the rink with the heat on full blast because January in Millhaven, Pennsylvania is a personal insult to anyone who owns skin.

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I’m late.

Not tragically late. Not I overslept because I was out until 3 AM being young and irresponsible late. Just late enough that everyone in the locker room notices, and the noticing is the thing, because Theo Volkov is never late. Theo Volkov is the guy who arrives ten minutes early with a grin and a story about whatever ridiculous thing happened to him on the drive over. The grin is on. I put it on in the parking lot, like pulling on a helmet.

“Theo!” Mars, from his stall, goalie pads half on, mustache already looking judgmental. Marcus “Mars” Tremblay. Best friend. Starting goaltender. A man who once caught a puck with his face in warm-ups and said, “The universe is testing my vibe.” Mars operates on a frequency that I’m not sure is available to most humans. “You’re late.”

“Beauty takes time.” I drop my bag, pull out my skates. The routine. The choreography. Everything has choreography — getting dressed, taping my stick, walking into a room. My mother drilled that into me before I could read. Every movement has intention, Theodya. If you’re going to do something, make it look like you meant it.

“You look like you slept in a dumpster,” Reid says from the corner. Reid Gallagher. Enforcer. Six-four, two-thirty-five, hands like catcher’s mitts. Reads poetry on the bus. Fights grown men for a living. He is the most terrifying gentle person I have ever met, and I am mildly afraid of him at all times, which I think he enjoys.

“I look incredible and you know it.”

“You have toothpaste on your neck.”

I wipe my neck. There is, in fact, toothpaste on my neck. This is what happens when you brush your teeth while shaking. Details escape.

“It’s a fashion statement.”

“It’s Crest.”

Across the locker room, Beckett Cole is already taped and laced. Jersey on. Stick in hand. He looks like he was born ready and has been impatiently waiting for the rest of us to catch up, which is probably accurate. Beckett is our captain, and he is a deeply serious man who does deeply serious things like arrive first and leave last and occasionally smile, which is an event so rare the team has an unofficial tracker for it. Mars once claimed he saw Beckett laugh and the rest of us treated it like a Bigfoot sighting.

Beckett looks at me. Not a long look. Not a casual one either. It’s the look of a man who got a text from me three weeks ago — Just got a call from my agent. Something about Detroit. Don’t tell anyone yet. — and has been sitting on it with the patient, steady discipline of a guy who is very, very good at carrying weight.

I give him the smallest nod. Later.

He nods back. Whenever you’re ready.

That’s the thing about Beckett. He doesn’t push. He just — holds space. Like a wall you can lean against that will never move. I texted him instead of Mars, which surprised both of us, but Mars would have wanted to talk about it, and I couldn’t talk about it, not then, not when my hands were shaking in a bar and I had to hide them in my pockets.

Beckett just said: Whenever you’re ready.

I love that man and I will deny it under oath.

Practice is good. Practice is always good because the ice is the one place where the performance and the reality overlap — where the golden boy and the real Theo are the same person. On the ice, I am fast. I am the fastest guy on this team and probably the fastest guy in this division and the fact that I know this is not arrogance. It’s architecture. Speed is what I was built for. My mother built me for it, with the skating drills she ran me through at four years old, her hands on my shoulders, her voice in my ear: Faster, Theodya. You have to be faster than everyone. If you’re the fastest, they can’t catch you.

She meant the other skaters. I think I mean something else.

I take a pass from Asher Park — our winger, a man of approximately eleven words per day, all of them devastating — and fire a wrist shot that beats Mars glove side. Mars swears in French. I point at him. He points back. This is our language.

Beckett is running the defensive drills with the intensity that used to scare me and now just impresses me. He’s different this season. Lighter. Not light — Beckett Cole will never be light — but lighter, like someone took a few bricks off his shoulders. Harper Reeves did that. His PT. His girlfriend. The woman who somehow convinced the most closed-off man in minor league hockey to open a door, and then walked through it, and then refused to leave.

They are annoyingly happy. I mean that in the best possible way. Watching them together is like watching someone solve a math problem you didn’t know had an answer — surprising and slightly infuriating and also deeply, secretly comforting because it means the math isn’t rigged.

After practice, I’m in my stall, unlacing, when my phone buzzes.

Barry.

“Kid,” he says, because Barry Goldstein opens every conversation with kid the way normal people open with hello. “Detroit.”

My hands stop moving on my laces.

“The Red Wings want you for a three-game look. AHL affiliate said you’ve been tearing it up down there. They want to see you at the next level. Three games, starting in about two weeks. Against Columbus, Ottawa, and Chicago.”

The locker room is loud. Mars is arguing with Reid about whether soup counts as a food or a drink. Asher is staring at his phone with the intensity of a man decoding nuclear launch codes (he is probably looking at a picture of his cat). Jankowski — the rookie from Michigan, a kid so young he still has baby fat on his face — is retaping his stick for the third time because he can’t get the pattern right and he’s too proud to ask.

Nobody is looking at me.

“Kid? You there?”

“I’m here.” My voice is normal. My voice is always normal. “That’s — yeah. That’s great, Barry.”

“Great? It’s the Show, kid. This is what we’ve been working toward.”

The Show. The NHL. The place where my mother’s sacrifice turns into a return on investment. The place where everything I’ve given up and everything she’s given up and every morning on a bathroom floor becomes worth it because the golden boy made it, he made it, and the debt is paid and the sacrifice is justified and Irina Petrova did not give up St. Petersburg and triple axels and the person she was supposed to be for nothing.

“I know,” I say. “I know what it is.”

“Two weeks. I’ll send the details. Get some rest, get some points, keep doing what you’re doing. This is your shot, Theo.”

He hangs up.

My hands shake.

Both of them, at the same time, the tremor running from my fingers to my wrists to my forearms like a current. I shove them in my pockets. I lean back in my stall and close my eyes and breathe — raz, dva, tri, chetyre — and when I open them, Mars is looking at me.

“You good?” he says.

“I’m golden,” I say. And I smile. The full one. The one that has gotten me out of conversations and into beds and through two years of lying to everyone I know about the fact that my brain is trying to kill me on a semi-regular basis.

Mars looks at me for one more second. Then he nods and goes back to arguing about soup.

I go home. I feed myself something that might be pasta. I sit on my couch and I look at my phone and I think about Detroit.

Then I walk to my dresser.

My mother’s photo. Face-down. I pick it up. Twenty-two-year-old Irina, mid-spin, arms like wings.

I look at her for a long time.

I turn it face-down again.

Not yet, Mama. Not yet.