Free The Understatement of the Year by Sarina Bowen

easily answered. Straight people always assume that you’re either in the closet or all the way out. But that’s not really how it worked. You could be out for some people and hiding it from others. “My family knew, and my closest friends. But not the hockey team.”
    Bella chewed on the end of her pen. “Sports really is the final frontier, isn’t it? Now there’s same-sex marriage in seventeen states. But the NHL is a hundred percent straight.”
    “ Sure it is.”
    “Right?” she laughed.
    The bus rolled on, and we sat in silence for a minute. “Don’t put me with Graham,” I said quietly.
    She made an annoyed sound in her throat. “He’s not a jerk, okay? The world is papered over with jerks, but Graham is not one of them.”
    That might even be true. But it didn’t matter. If Bella put us in a hotel room, I could almost picture him leaping from the balcony. And it would be my fault, in a way. Because I still took the occasional opportunity to torture him with a knowing smile or a stare.
    “How about this?” I asked, hitting on the solution. “Just run it by him first.” That way I wouldn’t offend Bella by harping on it. He could tell her himself. “If he doesn’t like the idea, tell Hartley I’ll babysit Frenchie for him.” I’d never heard either of our French-speaking teammates slander me. And “faggot” was the same word in English and in French.
    “Fine.”
    I looked out the window then, watching the world go by. And I tried to think of hockey. Nothing but hockey.
     
    — Graham
    By some miracle, I finally played a decent game that night in Boston.
    It was the bright lights and the sound of the crowd that woke me the hell up. Though I’d been stinking at practice, the chance to mow down a real live opponent shook the cobwebs off of me. I felt lighter on my feet than I had in weeks. Whenever the other guys had the puck, I was energy in motion. Mine , I’d chant to myself, poke-checking the puck out of their grasp. And if the guy didn’t give it up, I forced the issue. My pads got a workout. By the time the game was over, I’d tossed every one of their offensive players onto the boards.
    It helped that the other team had looked shaky. There’s nothing like an early goal to light up the squad. Hartley sank one when the clock still read 15:55 in the first period.
    And it wasn’t just me who was fired up. Our foot speed was good. Passes went where they were intended to go. Our confidence lasted all three periods, for a 4-0 score on the game.
    Finally . It was nice to remember that I could play this game.
    Pitbull and Ke$sha were already singing their guts out by the time I made it into the locker room. Stripping off my sweaty pads, the exhaustion began to hit me. But it was the good kind. I stacked my gear as best as I could into a dodgy metal locker. The host school didn’t have the fancy digs that our stadium had. (Either that, or they’d saved it for themselves.)
    Behind me, Bella suddenly slammed the heel of her boot onto something skittering across the floor.
    “Gross,” Big-D said. “Tell me that wasn’t a roach.”
    “Save the white meat,” I joked. There was no use getting too ornery about the surroundings. It would only make us sound like the elitist snobs that everyone expected from the Ivy League.
    “This is the way I picture showers in prison,” somebody else said, heading around the corner into the cave-like facility.
    “And, just like in prison,” Big-D put in, “you can expect to be eye-fucked by those of us who like boys.”
    There it was. The daily queer smear from Big-D. And what did I do about it? Look away. Neutral face. Repeat. My whole life was a cowardly exercise in raising my deflector shields.
    “I’m sure you meant me ,” Bella quipped, because deflection was not her style. “I like boys. A lot. And let me just throw it out there that I won’t be eye-fucking you while you shower.”
    “You don’t have to, darlin’. You’ve had the real