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As always, the Ottawa Centaurs’ locker room was a den of chaos. Shane was definitely mostly listening to whatever video Harris was trying to ask him to star in, but it was hard when he had to keep his eyes on the whole room at once and be ready to duck under someone’s flying glove.
“—trending right now, and I really think you’d be perfect for it. We’ve—”
The glove had definitely hit someone. There was a very rookie-shaped “hey!” that he ignored. He wasn’t the captain here, so it wasn’t his problem.
“—unique opportunity since you were a Cens fan as a kid, do you think your mom has any pictures of you here at the arena?—”
Oh, the aux cord, that’s what they were throwing gloves over. Not like there was a schedule or anything. No, they definitely needed to wrestle for music rights.
“—video of you, here, in your gear, going wherever and doing whatever pose you did as a kid, then it cuts to the photo of tiny baby Shane in his tiny baby jersey!—”
“Yo, Hollzy, did I leave my water bottle on your bench?”
No, it was on the floor under the bench. Shane reached for it blindly, trying to maintain eye contact, not wanting Harris to feel ignored.
“—set to that song, the one that’s like, I’m just a kid, and life is a nightmare, who’s it by again—”
“Simple Plan.” Shane answered absentmindedly, glancing away so he could safely throw LaPointe his bottle.
“Thanks man!”
“Yes, them! Thank you! So yeah, it’s—”
“Wait, no, hang on, not just skipping past that one,” Young cut in from behind him. “Yesterday you didn’t know who Sabrina Carpenter was, how the hell do you know Simple Plan?”
Shane froze.
“Um. Because… they’re from Montreal?”
Young didn’t buy it. He raised his voice to be heard by the whole locker room.
“Which of you assholes got Hollander to listen to music, and why’d you start there?”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
There was no reason for it to be as big of a deal as it was. Surely no one would care. Surely no one would—
“Betrayed! Betrayed by my own husband. You have been listening to music in secret, without me?”
Nevermind. His husband could make a big deal out of anything, and when it involved Shane, he definitely would.
“Wait, where did we start?” Holmberg asked.
“I thought you didn’t listen to music, Shane?” Luca asked.
“When did that change? I can give you tons of recommendations, man, all you gotta do is say the word!”
Shane cringed slightly. He did not need music recommendations, and he definitely didn’t need them from Dykstra. He glanced between his teammates and Harris, scrambling for an excuse, any excuse.
But, hang on. Did he actually need one?
Holy shit.
He didn’t, did he?
He laughed slightly. In either case, he’d been silent for too long for whatever came out of his mouth next to sound natural. He might as well just go for the truth.
“Uh, you good there, dude?” Asked Young, leaning slightly away from Shane to try to see his face better.
Shane blinked rapidly, smiling.
“Yeah, no, sorry. I just realized I can actually answer that without getting hate crimed.”
“Woah, okay, that took a turn.”
“What the hell, man?”
“Excuse me?!”
Their voices overlapped too much for Shane to tell who said what, mostly blending into one confused and distressed explosion. Shane laughed again because really, what else could he do?
“Shane, I’m afraid we’re going to need a little more explanation than that.”
Harris looked upset and stressed, like he felt guilty for starting the music conversation at all but still needed to know what was happening.
Shane settled back on his bench.
“Okay, uh, story time, I guess? But you’re not allowed to kill anyone.”
Ilya crossed his arms.
“I make no promises, мой диск. If someone deserves to be killed, it is my duty as husband.”
“Your… disk?”
Ilya grinned at him.
“Very good! Yes, диск, like компакт-диск. My CD, since you listen to music now apparently! Without your husband who loves you very much!”
Harris awwwwed while Troy rolled his eyes.
“Can we get back to why someone making you listen to Simple Plan would make us want to commit a murder?”
“Yeah, no, I’m very confused and also very concerned,” said Bood.
“That’s fair, sorry,” said Shane. “I’m just not sure where to start.”
“How about with when you started listening to music?” asked Dykstra.
“That would be my whole life, actually. The whole ‘I don’t listen to music’ thing was a lie.” An awkward beat. “Sorry.”
Everything exploded into chaos again.
“Your whole life?”
“Dude!”
“What?!”
Shane shifted awkwardly. Apparently Ilya wasn’t the only person who was going to make a big deal out of this.
Speaking of Ilya, his husband was the only one not visibly freaking out. He leaned back against the wall, arms still crossed, and stared at Shane. He seemed to be the first to make the connection between this and murder, that Shane wouldn’t have just decided to lie about something like that for his whole career for the fun of it. Shane was an honest person by default. If he told a lie, something must have happened to make him feel like he needed to.
Shane felt like a teacher standing in front of a room full of rowdy students and saying “I’ll wait.” When everyone settled down a bit, he continued.
“So in Montreal, they don’t take turns picking the locker room music. They’ve got one big playlist everyone adds all their favorite songs to, then any time they need music for anything, they just put it on shuffle. They make a new one every season so it’s always got new stuff and you’re not stuck listening to a song nobody likes except for one guy who was traded three years ago. It’s not a bad system, really. But on my first day, my captain at the time’s phone was being passed around—don’t give me that look, assholes. Yes I mean you, rookies, this was 2010, yes he was passing his phone around, I don’t even remember what app he was using. But he was passing his phone around and it got to this guy, Perkins. I don’t think most of you would recognize him. He retired, maybe that year, maybe the one after? Anyway, he got the phone, and our captain yelled, hey, Percs, none of that fag shit this year!”
The intake of air around the room was audible. Most of the room looked shocked. Too many looked completely unsurprised.
“So Percs says something like, hey, fuck you, man, that song is good and I stand by it, and someone, maybe Harper? Goes good for what, listening to while we put on our eyeliner?”
Troy looked at his feet. He’d definitely heard the same conversation, or been a part of the same conversation, a time or two in Toronto, Shane was sure of it.
“And they go back and forth for a minute, like, they’re rockstars, man, they’re wearing it in like, a cool way, and nah man, they’re emos, they’re a bunch of pussies, and so on, until Lewis gets sick of listening to it and takes the phone and says listen to whatever the fuck you want when you’re at home, dude, just don’t be playing queers in our locker room. Nobody wants that shit around.”
Synchronized winces all around, especially from the queers currently in the locker room.
“But the thing is, I’m sitting there panicking. Because this is 2010. I went to Warped Tour that summer, kind of a ‘going out with a bang’ thing with some friends before I moved to Montreal, my parents got us all tickets to celebrate my being second draft pick, and I don’t know what they’re doing these days, but back then, it was all about the eyeliner. My buddy Joe dropped his trying to put it on in my car and we never did find it. It’s probably still there. So I couldn’t be sure, but every single band I was listening to, there was probably a picture of them wearing eyeliner out there somewhere. And I thought, this is it, this is going to be the thing that outs me. The stupid locker room playlist.”
Shane could still remember the way it felt, sitting there while his brand new teammates, the people he was going to start building his career with, the guys he’d be sitting next to on the bench and on the bus and sharing hotel rooms with on the road, confirmed that he would never really be one of them. Even if he found the most gorgeous girl in the world (still something he’d been holding out hope for at the time, even though none of the girls who’d started throwing themselves at him the minute it became clear he was destined for NHL greatness had ever made him feel as alive as that damned Russian asshole who’d been picked first), even if he married her three months later because he’d knocked her up (a classic hockey player love story), there would always be that part of him buried deep, deep, deep down that knew he was a queer. He remembered the way the dread rose up in his throat as the phone was passed closer and closer until he was sure if he opened his mouth he would puke.
“So I’m going through every band I could think of because I needed something appropriately tough guy, appropriately straight, but I also needed something I actually knew. If I added shit based on what everyone else was adding, what if someone noticed I never looked excited when my songs came on? What if someone noticed I was never singing along because I didn’t know the words? I’m not that good at lying. Someone would have called me on it, and then how would I explain why I lied without outing myself?”
“Not good at lying, says the guy who kept his gay situationship a secret for how long?” Haas said, raising an eyebrow.
Shane rolled his eyes. They landed on Ilya, who winked at him. He was tempted to roll his eyes again.
“No, that’s the thing, though. Even through their little, I don’t know, goggles of heteronormativity, they still figured out I was seeing someone. They didn’t know I knew about the bets, but the leading theories were that either Boston Lily was married, or she was so ugly I was embarrassed to introduce her to everyone.”
He ignored his husband’s outraged expression and cut him off before he could complain, barrelling on.
“And I know it probably wasn’t reasonable to assume if I added Fall Out Boy or whoever that they’d instantly figure out I was gay. Like, it’s a pretty big jump from listening to Folie on the way to practice to, I don’t know, wanting to suck Patrick Stump’s dick.”
“But did you want to suck Patrick Stump’s dick?”
Multiple people looked way too invested in the answer.
“No!”
“But you had to have had a celebrity crush though, right?”
“No.”
At least three eyebrows raised.
“Shut up.”
Their silence was very loud.
“Fine. Jesus. Billie Joe Armstrong.”
A few of the guys looked considering.
“You know, he’s not my type, but I do respect it,” said Hayes, nodding sagely.
“Shut up. God. Anyway. I was scared I’d pick the wrong band and they’d just know and I’d be kicked off the team or just shunned forever, or I’d pick the right band and get caught lying and everyone would think I was weird for lying about my music taste and I’d end up shunned anyway. If emos were pussies and all the pop punk guys were wearing eyeliner and that made everyone gay, I couldn’t think of anyone I was sure would be safe. So when the phone got to me, I just froze. One of the Fitzes—not sure if it was Fitzgerald or Fitzwilliam—asked me what I was adding. He was nice about it, too. He was just trying to be welcoming, small talk with the rookie, and I completely panicked.”
(“At the disco?” Troy muttered. Harris elbowed him, never looking away from Shane or losing the sympathetic and understanding look on his face. Good man.)
“I said I didn’t listen to music. Like, at all. I figured that was the safest I could possibly play it, they couldn’t judge my music taste if it didn’t exist.”
“And did that… work?” Dykstra asked.
Shane made a face.
“Not really? I mean, sort of. But mostly no. They didn’t figure out I was gay because I was listening to gay music, but they thought I was super weird for not listening to music at all. It turned into one of those chirps that never really feels like it’s just a chirp, like we’re all going to act like it’s all in good fun, but is it, really? Especially when it made it out of the locker room. I don’t know who said what, when, but suddenly it was coming up in interviews or conversations with fans. It ended up being another thing on the list of Reasons Why Hollander’s An Unfeeling Hockey Robot. So I couldn’t just go back on it later. I was in too deep, trying to keep up the lie, and it all sort of spiraled. One minute someone on the bus is asking why I have earbuds in if I don’t listen to music, and the next I’m an antisocial weirdo listening to white noise to drown everyone out. Or jerking off to game tapes, if you believe Comeau.”
LaPointe choked a little bit on his water.
“What was that last bit?”
The memory still made Shane want to die a little bit, honestly.
“So this one time, we’re all on the bus. Someone had just put out a new album I wanted to check out. It was… shit, who was it?”
He paused, trying to think back. It was just barely at the start of playoffs, they’d made it that far but didn’t quite make round two, they already had Mitty but not Stedlund, so it must have been—
“April of ‘15, that was Future Hearts. All Time Low.”
“Oh, I know that one!” Luca exclaimed.
“2015? Weren’t you, like, a toddler at that point?” Chouinard snorted.
Luca flushed.
“I was fifteen, you dick.”
While Shane had been in the league for five years? He was starting to feel as old as his husband accused Scott Hunter of being. He shook it off and kept going; he didn’t have time for a midlife crisis, he was sure they were wanting him to wrap it up. It had been a long practice and he didn’t mind storytime, but people probably wanted to get home.
“Anyway. New All Time Low album, long bus ride. Everyone was pretty tired so I didn’t think anyone would be paying attention to me. I was wrong. Comeau comes over and sees me with my earbuds in and thinks it would be funny to yank them out. I jump, obviously, because that’s what you do when you’re minding your own business and some asshole rips your earbuds out of your head, and my phone was on my lap, so it goes flying. Comeau tries to pull it toward him with the headphone cord, I try to grab it, he tries to grab it, my phone ends up hitting the floor and the screen just shatters. So I got pissed, he got defensive, and he ends up asking what I was listening to that was such a big deal I’d rather break my phone than let him see. That’s not what happened at all, and I said that, but I guess I flushed? Because I was thrown off and embarrassed? So he kept pushing, and I said I was reviewing game footage. Obviously, I wasn’t reviewing game footage, but that was my story and I was sticking to it, so he decided if I wouldn’t admit it, it must be really embarrassing. He said, what, is it porn? Are you hiding in the back of the bus so you can jerk off? And now everyone’s laughing, and I’m denying it but that just makes it worse, so he’s like, sure, sure, you were reviewing game footage. To jerk off to. And it was the funniest thing any of them had ever heard, clearly, and it was everyone’s favorite joke for a while, but I think a few of them actually believed it. Comeau, definitely. He still brings— he still brought it up for years. All because I trapped myself in a stupid lie half a decade before, trying not to let anyone think “Hollander” and “queer” in the same sentence.”
It had been years, obviously, but the whole thing still annoyed him. Why couldn’t Comeau have just left him the hell alone?
“The album wasn’t even worth all that. I like a few songs from it, sure, but not enough to break my phone to listen to it. Whatever. I didn’t make that mistake again.”
The team sat for a moment, processing. Finally, Harris spoke.
“So have you just… not listened to music since 2010?”
Shane considered it for a moment.
“Pretty much? I listen to music when I’m home alone sometimes, or when I’m driving alone if I keep the volume low and my windows are up, but it feels too much like trying to get away with something and it makes me anxious. So. Sometimes on flights too, depending on who all is around me, as long as there’s no one from the league or anyone who looks like they recognize me or like hockey. But that’s about it.”
“And did it not occur to you that you’re surrounded by people who actually like you as a person and wouldn’t hate crime you for your music taste, no matter how gay it was?” asked Bood.
“Or that you also work with people whose music taste is, objectively, significantly gayer?” Harris asked. He raised his hand slightly. “Talking about me, by the way, if that wasn’t clear. I’m literally a part of the DJ schedule and have made you all listen to songs by gay men about being a gay man.”
Shane shook his head.
“No. It actually did not occur to me until right now. It’s just another thing I’ve spent so long hiding, it’s a habit now, and if I did want to stop, I wouldn’t even know how. It’s blown up so much, I’d have to hold a damn press conference.”
He considered it briefly.
“Or be an idiot and out myself by admitting I know who Simple Plan is and end up holding locker room story time. That works, too. Oh! Also.”
He turned back to Harris.
“Yeah, my mom has some great photos that would work. She’s got one of me in a Cens jersey standing at center ice, actually, from some family night thing when I was maybe six? It would be super easy to recreate, and definitely go viral because my hair is a disaster. I was literally pulling it from stress during the game. It was tight. I remember in the third, that—”
Dykstra cut him off.
“Okay, not to interrupt what I’m sure would have been a riveting story about a game from twenty years ago, but we do have a very important issue to address.”
He looked around the room very seriously.
“We set the music rotation order at the start of the season. We competed for spots very aggressively. Does Hollzy get added to the end of the rotation because he waived the right to compete? Do we try to guess where he would have ended up in the order? Do we start from scratch and re-compete to have an entirely new and fair lineup? Or do we shove him in whatever place puts him in charge tomorrow because we all want to see what he’ll pick?”
“Counteroffer,” said Bood. “Do we do one of those things, but also tally how many turns he’s missed since he joined us and give him that many days in a row first to make up for lost time?”
“Oh, no, not that,” said Shane. “You’d all get so sick of my music.”
His music, though! He had the opportunity to make people sick of his music! Because, at least in this room, though maybe elsewhere now that he thought about it, he had the ability to talk about music!
“More sick of it than we are of Dykstra’s after five minutes whenever it’s his turn?”
“Hey! What did I ever do to you?!”
“Besides torture my ears?”
The room dissolved into squabbling, but affectionately. Razzing on Dykstra for his music taste, offerings of other ways to fairly add Shane to the music rotation, questions about did he know this song or like that one or what did he think of this band’s new album since based on the bands he’d already mentioned there was no way he hadn’t heard it. Shane sat back, listened, and smiled. This was just another one of the ways he hadn’t realized Montreal was dragging him down until all the weight had been lifted, and just another reason he was happier in Ottawa than he’d ever been before.
Shane pulled out his phone. He had a lot of playlists. He had pre-game hype playlists, post-game (win) playlists, post-game (loss) playlists, and workout playlists, but none of them quite captured the energy of an excited Cens locker room. Oh, well. He’d just have to make a new one.