Free All the Way by Jordin Tootoo

guy who cared about his players, I wouldn’t even have been drafted. For some reason, he saw the good side of me.
    WHILE I WAS PLAYING in Brandon, Terence would come down and stay with me after his season ended, and then we would go home to Rankin Inlet for a couple of weeks. And that was a whole other scene, back there putting up with the parents’ drinking and listening to their sob stories about not having enough money. I don’t think my parents ever understood how much partying I did, and I sure didn’t tell them. The lessI told them, the better my life was, because they had their own shit to worry about. I’m their son, not their parent.
    There were daily phone calls between me and Terence when he was in The Pas and I was in Brandon. “Did you call Mom? Dad?” “No, you call.” Neither of us wanted to have to listen to their bullshit. We moved away from town to get away from that shit. But it was constantly with us, because we were always worrying about what was going on. Is Corinne okay? She had her own family by then and the next thing you knew, her kids were growing up around my parents; it was an unhealthy environment.
    Not a lot of people know that I even have a sister. Corinne’s one tough cookie. She had to be to put up with so much mental abuse and physical abuse. Her being as strong as she is today is unbelievable. When I was a young kid, it seemed like she was always in the doghouse with our parents. It was hard for me, as a younger brother, to see my sister be in shit all the time for no reason. When my parents were partying and drinking, they’d bring everything on Corinne. She did her fair share of drinking in her early teens as well, but ever since she had her first kid when she was twenty-one, I don’t remember her drinking. Now she’s got a happy, healthy family, a husband, and four kids. She’s sober and her husband is sober.
    When my brother and I left home, there was a void there for my parents. Then Corinne started having kids and that filled the void. When she started having kids, my parents kind of took over and started looking after them. Seeing my nephews and nieces having to deal with my parents’ old-school mentality …that’s not how it’s supposed to be anymore. But when I say stuff like that to Corinne, she laughs and says, “Imagine living here every day and seeing the shit that goes on—you wouldn’t know what to do.”
    The truth is, Corinne is my best friend. I can call her any night of the week. She’s the only one who has known me through thick and thin. We talk every other day, and I’m not afraid to talk to her about anything. We’ve always been close. She kind of took me under her wing when I was a little kid. We talk to each other when things aren’t going well. She says, “You’re my little brother. I can give you shit just like Mom does.” She’s someone I look up to a lot.
    For her, having to deal with everyday life living in the north and with our family situation is tough. Sometimes she’ll bitch about how it sucks up there and complain that this is all we’ve got. But she’s not going anywhere. Terence and I got out, but Corinne always says that she’s a lifer. She would never leave Rankin Inlet.
    MONEY WAS ALWAYS a big issue for my parents, and it still is. Sure, it’s expensive to live in the north. My parents both worked—my dad is retired now, but my mom still works as a school janitor. But it wasn’t about buying gas or groceries. It was about the booze, and about the fact that they always expected things to be given to them because they figured they had made us.
    I was making only a couple hundred bucks a week playing junior. Terence was making more than that in The Pas. But with both of us, half of that had to go home—and, fuck, we knew what it was being spent on. Mom would call and say, “We can’t make our