CHAPTER 1: CEILING

Forty-seven.

That's the number. I've counted three times now, which is either obsessive or thorough, and I've decided it's thorough because thorough sounds like something a professional athlete would do and obsessive sounds like something a therapist would circle in her notes with a red pen.

Dr. Bouchard does not use a red pen. She uses a green one. I asked her about it once — the color choice — and she said green is associated with growth. I said that was either beautiful or corny. She said, "Both things can be true, Mars."

Both things can be true. I think about that a lot at 3 AM.

Forty-seven ceiling tiles. My apartment in the Penalty Box has forty-seven ceiling tiles, and I know this because I am lying on my back in my bed at 3:14 AM and my brain has decided that sleep is not on the schedule tonight. What IS on the schedule: a full replay of Tuesday's game, every shot, every angle, every moment the puck crossed the blue line and my body had to decide — glove, blocker, pad, or the nightmare option where I do nothing and the red light goes on and 3,000 people make a sound that lives in my chest for days.

I stopped 32 of 34 Tuesday. Save percentage: .941. Good number. Great number, actually. Two goals allowed. Both screened — a defenseman's body between me and the shooter, so I'm reading the release point blind, guessing trajectory from angle and speed and the particular way a right-handed forward loads his stick. I guessed wrong twice. Two goals. The Rebels won 4-2.

We won.

My brain does not care about winning.

My brain cares about the two. The two is a slapshot at 3 AM and I don't have a glove.

I do the breathing. Four in. Hold for four. Six out. Dr. Bouchard's voice in my head, which is the closest thing to a lullaby I've had since I was eight years old and my mother used to hum Haitian folk songs while she folded laundry. Marie Tremblay, school librarian, five foot two, the kind of woman who could make a room full of screaming second-graders go quiet just by lowering her voice. She would hate knowing I'm awake. She would call me and hum until I fell asleep, even now, even at twenty-six, even though Gatineau is eight hours away and she has class in the morning.

I don't call her. I breathe.

Four in. Hold for four. Six out.

The trick, Dr. Bouchard taught me, is that the count is the bridge. Anxiety wants to be a flood — wants every thought to arrive at once, in a single white wall of noise — and the count breaks the flood into single drops. One. Two. Three. Four. The breathing rides the count. The count rides the breathing. They hold each other up like two drunk friends walking home, and somewhere in that mutual support, the body learns that it isn't actually drowning, it's just standing in shallow water with its eyes closed.

I learned the technique on a campus bathroom floor at nineteen. I have practiced it ten thousand times since. Some nights it works in two minutes. Some nights it takes an hour. Tonight is somewhere in the middle.

The anxiety is not an event. It's weather. Some days are clear. Some days are overcast. Some days — like today, like the last six days, like every stretch when the stakes get higher and the games get louder — the sky is a low gray ceiling and the rain doesn't fall, it just hovers, waiting, and the waiting is worse than the rain.

I've had generalized anxiety disorder since I was nineteen. Sophomore year. Three weeks of not sleeping, a campus counselor who asked the right question at the right time, a diagnosis that felt like both a door opening and a door closing. The door that opened: Your brain does a thing. It has a name. There are tools. The door that closed: You are a goalie. Your job is to stop things from getting past you. This cannot get past you.

My father said that. Jean-Luc Tremblay, rink manager, former semi-pro, a man who built his son like he built his ice — flat, smooth, nothing showing underneath. "You're a goalie. Your job is to stop things from getting past you. That includes this."

That includes this.

I take sertraline. Low dose. Consistent. I see Dr. Bouchard every Thursday via video — a therapist in Montreal who speaks French and English and who has, over four years, learned that the fastest way to get me to talk about my feelings is to ask me about hockey, because the metaphors are the same. The goal is the fear. The crease is the space I control. The screen is what I put between the world and the truth.

Nobody on the Rebels knows.

I sit up. The clock says 4:52. Close enough.

<div class="scene-break"></div>

The Riverwalk at 5 AM is mine.

This is not a metaphor. It's literally mine — nobody else is here. The Allegheny is black and silver, the surface barely moving, the river-stillness that happens before dawn when even the water is waiting for permission to start the day. The air is March-cold, that particular Pennsylvania brand of cold that isn't winter anymore but refuses to admit it. My breath comes out in clouds that dissolve before they reach shoulder height.

I run. Not fast — steady. My body knows this route the way my glove knows a puck: by repetition, by trust, by the accumulated memory of ten thousand identical mornings. Bridge to the bend. Bend to the old mill. Mill to the diner. Diner to the bridge. Two-point-three miles. Twenty-two minutes. I've done it so many times that my legs move without instruction, which frees my brain to do the other thing — the constant, humming, always-on thing — which is to think.

I think about the game. I think about the saves. I think about the two goals I let in and the thirty-two I didn't, and I know — rationally, therapeutically, factually — that .941 is excellent and the two goals were both screened shots that no goalie in the league stops clean and the team won and I was the first star and Coach Hank said "Hell of a game, Trembler" in the tunnel and I should feel good.

I do not feel good. I feel vigilant.

The Riverwalk curves past the old steel mill. The converted section glows — the brewery has lights on already, someone prepping for the day — but the abandoned section is dark and enormous and sits on the skyline like a cathedral for something that left a long time ago. Millhaven, Pennsylvania. A town that used to make steel and now makes hockey players and stubbornness.

I love this place. That's not complicated. Millhaven is the first town that ever felt like it fit — small enough that people know my name, big enough that they don't need to know everything about me. Three seasons with the Rebels. Three seasons of being the guy who makes the locker room warm. Three seasons of performing the thing that is also the truth, because the warmth IS real — I am warm, I am funny, I am the emotional center of this team and I am not faking it.

I'm just not showing all of it.

I finish the run at the bridge. My heart rate is 142, which is good. My brain is still looping the two goals, which is less good. I stretch against the bridge railing — the stone is cold through my running gloves — and I look at the river and I breathe and I count.

I count a lot. Tiles. Rafters. Seats. Stitches in my pads. It's a grounding technique, Dr. Bouchard says, and it works, and it also means I know the exact number of rivets in the Allegheny Bridge railing (214) and the exact number of parking spaces at the arena (118) and the exact number of steps from my apartment door to the ice (347). Numbers are solid. Numbers don't shift. Numbers are the thing I hold onto when the weather inside my head gets bad.

214 rivets. The river. The light changing from black to silver to the first gold of morning.

I drive home. Shower. Make coffee — French press, strong, a habit from my mother, who drinks coffee the way Quebecois women drink coffee, which is to say constantly and with religious devotion. I eat eggs. I get dressed. I put on the Mars that everyone needs.

This is not a mask. I want to be clear about that. The happy, warm, easygoing Mars is not fake. He is me. He is genuinely, actually me. But he is me at 70% — the full Mars, the 100% Mars, includes the 3 AM ceiling and the counting and the medication and the way my hands sometimes shake after games when the adrenaline drops and the anxiety rushes in to fill the space.

I show 70%. I carry 100%. The gap is invisible. That is the skill.

<div class="scene-break"></div>

Game day has rules.

Not team rules. My rules. The rules I built when I was twenty and first learned that the body and the brain are separate animals and the brain is the one that bites. The rules are not superstition. Superstition implies belief in luck. The rules are management.

Eat at the same time. 11:30 AM, two slices of toast with peanut butter, one banana, one cup of coffee that I let cool until it's lukewarm because hot coffee on a game-day stomach is asking for trouble. No eggs. Eggs are practice food. Eggs sit too heavy. The peanut butter is the protein, the banana is the potassium, the toast is the absorption layer, and if any of those three pieces is wrong — if the bread is the kind with seeds, if the bananas are too green, if I run out of peanut butter and try almond butter as a substitute — the whole equation tilts and the brain tilts with it.

Nap from 1 to 3. Or try to. Some days I sleep, some days I lie there with my eyes closed and rehearse breakdowns of the opposing team's top six forwards, and either way I get up at 3 and I drink water and I drive to the rink.

Bag goes on the bench in the same order. Catching glove on top, blocker tucked underneath, pads stacked toes-down so the sweat from the last game has had a place to dry, mask on top of the pads with the cage facing up, skates in the side pocket with the laces undone because I retie them every game and the retying is part of the ritual. The bag is a system. The system is the cage. The cage is safety.

I tape my own ankles. I do not let the trainer do it. The trainer is excellent — Mike has been with the Rebels for fifteen years, he's tied a thousand ankles, his hands are faster than mine — and I do not let him do it. The tape job is the threshold. The tape job is the moment I cross from civilian Mars to goalie Mars, and the crossing has to be done by my hands or it isn't real. Three wraps low at the heel. Five up the ankle. The figure-eight that locks the joint. The pull-tight that I feel in my own chest before I feel it in my foot. By the time the tape is done my breath is already on the count. By the time my pads are on the brain has already gone quiet.

This is the secret nobody tells you about being a goalie: the gear is not just protection. The gear is the diagnosis and the medication and the therapy. The gear is the thing that turns the shape of me — the anxious, watchful, perpetually-monitoring shape — into something the world calls position.

In pads, I am not anxious. I am ready. The same neurology, with a different label. The same scan, with a target.

It's the only place that works that way. Out here, in the world, the watching is a sickness. In the crease, the watching is the job.

<div class="scene-break"></div>

The Allegheny Ice Center smells like cold air and possibility and old rubber, and it is the only place in the world where my brain shuts up.

Not quiet. Shuts up. The difference matters. Everywhere else — my apartment, the Riverwalk, Vera's Diner, Calhoun's on a Friday night — my brain runs a constant scan, monitoring, assessing, reading the room, adjusting, calibrating. On the ice, in my crease, between my posts, the world shrinks to the size of a 6-by-4 rectangle and everything outside it disappears and I am just a body doing the thing it was built to do.

Stop the puck. Stop everything.

I'm the first one here, which is normal. My stall is in the corner — goalies get corner stalls, always, because goalie gear takes up approximately the same amount of space as a small vehicle. I start the routine: base layer, socks, jock, pants, skates. Tape on the ankles. Tape on the wrists. The routine is a ritual and the ritual is a cage and the cage is safety. If I do it the same way every time, nothing gets through.

Theo arrives at 9:03, which is late for Theo, which means Kat kept him up, which means Kat kept him up in the way that makes Theo walk into a room like the entire world is a gift he personally received.

"Morning, Trebuchet." He drops his bag, starts undressing. Theo does everything at a speed that suggests the universe is running out of time. "You look awake."

"I'm always awake."

"Yeah, but today you look awake early. Like, suspiciously early. Like, you've-already-run-and-showered-and-had-coffee early." He pulls a T-shirt over his head. "Were you up at 3 AM again?"

He asks it casually. Like it's nothing. Like 3 AM is just a time and not a confession.

Theo knows something. Not everything — not the diagnosis, not the medication, not the seven years of managing something he cannot see. But Theo knows something because Theo had his own 3 AMs — the bathroom floor, the counting, the panic attacks he hid under charm until he couldn't. We sat together once, in this locker room, during last season's worst stretch, two men on a bench not talking about the things they couldn't talk about. He came out. I didn't.

"Couldn't sleep," I say. "Thinking about the game."

"Tuesday was a .941." He points at me with a sock. "Point-nine-four-one, Mars. That's not thinking material. That's bragging material."

"I let in two."

"Both screened." He drops the sock. "You can't see through people, brother. Not even you."

I grin. The grin is real. It's always real. "I should be able to see through people. I'm six-three. I can see over most things."

"That's height, not x-ray vision. Different skill set."

Beckett comes in with Biscuit. The dog goes straight to my stall because Biscuit and I have an arrangement: I give him treats, he gives me the unconditional love that I would be embarrassed to need if he weren't so good at delivering it. Biscuit puts his head on my thigh. I scratch behind his ears. His tail thumps the floor in a steady four-count.

I count the thumps. Old habit.

"Morning, Cap." I nod at Beckett.

Beckett nods back. One nod. Beckett communicates in nods the way most people communicate in paragraphs. One nod = good morning. Two nods = I agree. A half-nod with eye contact = we need to talk. No nod = you've done something and he's deciding whether to bring it up.

One nod. We're good.

The locker room fills. Reid, reading something on his phone, lowering it when anyone looks. Asher, headphones in, already in his own world, the quietest twenty-two-year-old I've ever met. Jankowski, who is too young to be this nervous and too good to be this unsure. The guys. My guys.

Jankowski sits next to me. Not in his stall — on the floor next to mine, which is what he does when his hands won't stop shaking. He's twenty. Six months out of the OHL. He scored his first NHL goal last week and the goal seems to have made him more nervous, not less, because now he knows the league lets him play and the only question left is whether he deserves it.

He doesn't say anything. He's holding a roll of stick tape and not unspooling it.

"How's the wrist?" I ask. He took a slash on Tuesday. Nothing serious. The kind of question I ask because the question itself is the answer — I see you, you don't have to be okay, just sit here.

"Fine." His voice comes out small.

"Good. Wrap it tight today. The tape's not going to hold the way Mike did it yesterday, the roll's old." I'm making this up. The roll is fine. But I hand him a fresh roll from my stall and his hands have something to do, and the something-to-do is the cure, the way a count is the cure, the way the tape job is the cure. Routine is a body's prayer.

He starts wrapping. His hands slow down. His shoulders come down half an inch. He doesn't thank me. I don't expect him to. The locker room is a place where favors don't get named. They just get passed forward, like pucks in a drill.

I warm them up. Not on ice — in here. A joke about Theo's shirt. A question about Reid's daughter. A nod to Asher that means I see you, you don't have to talk. A chirp at Jankowski that makes him laugh and loosens his shoulders. This is the thing I do. The thing I am. The team's emotional thermostat. If Mars is warm, everyone is warm. If Mars is calm, everyone is calm.

I am warm. I am calm.

I am also running on four hours of sleep and counting things and the anxiety is a low hum behind my sternum that sounds like an arena full of people holding their breath.

But the warm is real. That's the thing. The warm is real. It's coming through the gap between my 70% and my 100%, where the leak is, where the heat escapes. The leak is what makes me good at this. The leak is what makes me tired.

Both things can be true.

<div class="scene-break"></div>

After practice, I drive past the arena.

I don't need to drive past the arena. My apartment is in the other direction. But I drive past because the mural is there, and the mural is new, and the woman painting it is also there, and she is also — not new, exactly. She's been here for weeks. But she's new to the part of my brain that slows down and pays attention instead of scanning and managing.

Wren Castillo. Art teacher at the community college. The woman who is painting Millhaven's story on the east wall of the Allegheny Ice Center. I know this because I offered to hold her paint on her first day, and we talked for two hours, and I didn't notice the time passing, and I didn't count anything, and the anxiety went quiet in a way that was different from the ice. The ice shuts it up. She just... turns the volume down.

She's on a ladder today. The second panel: the Allegheny in winter, the bridge, the ghost of the old mill. Her hair is dark auburn and there is paint in it — there is always paint in it — and she is talking to the wall. Not muttering. Talking. Full sentences, conversational volume, directed at the bricks.

"—and the shadow from the bridge should fall HERE, not there, because the light in winter comes from the south and if I put it on the north side it's just a lie and I refuse to lie to a wall—"

She's wearing an oversized sweater that hangs past her hands. Her fingers are visible only when she holds the brush. She paints in long, confident strokes — no hesitation, no second-guessing — and the contrast between the confident painting and the way she holds herself otherwise (careful, contained, like she's trying not to take up too much space) is something I notice every time.

I slow down. I watch for one minute. The paint on her hands is the exact color of dawn — warm gold, orange at the edges, fading into the pink of new light. She reaches for a different brush and her sleeve slips and her forearm is thin and pale and dotted with freckles and I think: That's not a vibe. That's beautiful.

I say, out loud, to my empty truck: "Just a vibe."

I drive home.