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Jack is taller, and all legs, and long fingers that should belong on an alien. His hair is shaggy and his tie is askew and he is the picture of a geek but he is graceful and shockingly strong.
Brick is shorter and squat-built like a fire hydrant or a boxer, and he's already lost teeth to the game he loves, to sticks and ice and cage fencing in rinks from Bangor to Providence.
Brick looks strong; Jack does not. Brick elbows Jack, with his clumsy college-issue reel-to-reel, out of the way in the tunnels below Snively, and Jack elbows back. The Wildcats lost and Brick would've hit him, but in the eyes he catches there are mischief and not a little sympathy.
He doesn't know Jack's name then but Jack knows his. Jack has a notebook as thick as Brick's algebra textbook piled with the stats of every man on the team's roster, their records, their wins, their losses, even the coaches and a little bit on the trainers. He has other, slightly smaller notebooks for the other teams they play.
On a Friday afternoon in the late fall, six hours before puck drop with Boston University, Brick saunters up to the press box at Snively and leans in the door in his sweats and says 'hey', to Jack, who's poring over his notebooks and drinking burnt coffee from a plaid thermos.
"Hi," says Jack. His eyebrows are up somewhere in his shaggy hair.
They talk for two hours, Brick misses the pregame meal and is benched. He wants to hit Jack. He wants to talk to him again. Jack knows everything about hockey even though he's never played a real game (on ice, with lines, with the opposition bearing down with you and the puck in their sights clear, with refs and blown whistles and blown calls and tempers hot) in his whole life, and he knows everything about Durham and the college and the arena. He grew up nearby. He played on a river in skates too big and too small.
One Sunday afternoon in December, the pale Lazarus sun in puddles on the floor of Brick's dorm room (his roommate has gone to see his parents in White River in Vermont for the weekend) they sit and bullshit about hockey and the dining hall food and Brick's inability to pass algebra and that time that Jack broke his leg and decided talking into a microphone about sports was somehow better than actually playing sports.
"I think you'da been a goalie," Brick says. He feels vaguely triumphant that he's managed to process this thought into words. He's had a lot of thoughts lately about Jack, who is folded into a boxy little armchair that Brick's roommate liberated from the common room downstairs. Jack looks like he could unlace himself like skates and run. Like a river. Brick's had a lot of thoughts and most of them are perplexing and many of them are not good and several of them have something to do with Jack's eyebrows and his shaggy hair. Fuckin' hippie hair, the coach would say.
Jack blinks at him. "What makes you say that?"
"You think."
Jack stares, in that long-distance way he has that makes Brick feel like two goons are bearing down on him with the puck and he'd better make a decision fast.
"I mean about the game, you think, like it's a big picture, like it's a movie you got in your head, you think about stuff, where everythin' is goin' and where it's gonna be. You got your head in the game," Brick says. That's too many words. That's too close to his thoughts. "And you're crazy."
Jack laughs. That weird cackle that shows off all his teeth. He looks like a shark. A skinny, leggy, geeky shark. A fox. Not a fox.
All of his life Brick's coaches have told him not to think so damned much. Jack keeps making him think, whether with the laugh or the stare or the questions that pop his brain like a balloon and spill all the words out.
"You're the guy that straps knives on his feet and runs full-speed into meatheads every day."
"You callin' me meathead?"
"No, callin' your teammates meatheads. The BU team is pretty meatheady, too. So's Harvard. Gotta wonder how some of those guys made it into the school."
"Sure as shit wasn't by passin' algebra," Brick says, and Jack laughs again. Jack thinks he's funny. Jack is crazy. "Anyhow. You're the guy who thought he could get paid money for bouncin' a ball off his face."
"I was pretty good at bouncing a ball off my face. Better than you are at algebra."
"That ain't sayin' much, Jack."
Jack is all lines, but not even lines, not like a picture frame or the lines on the ice or the lines the coach draws up he's all lines like a blind scribble of a human being, doodled in a notebook, like the flip-books kids drew in class in their textbooks little stickman running jumping falling. Jack is all lines in a box chair. Jack makes him have too many thoughts.
His coaches told him not to think, just to move.
Brick gets up takes one step bumps into the chair and plants a messy kiss on Jack's mouth and thanks God his roommate is in Vermont which is like five hundred miles from Durham and prays Jesus he will not get struck by lightning.
He does not get struck by lightning. He breathes hard. The sun creeps across the floor tiles.
"So I'd be a goalie," Jack says, staring up at him. Eyebrows crumpled together, eyes heavy.
"Yeah."
Eyebrows go up, of a sudden. "This is so kind of Freudian."
"What?"
"You. Me. A goalie. You wanna score on me, or something." Jack has that maniacal look on his face again.
"No." Brick feels hot under the collar.
"No?"
"Well, yeah - wait - fuckin'." Too many thoughts, too few words. "Jack."
"What?"
"Shaddup."