Chapter Text
Nine days after Team Canada lost the International Prospect Cup, Shane’s mom bought him a workbook and told him to start practicing his signature. Shane’s mumble of agreement must have been pretty unconvincing, because his mom continued, “You can’t just shove this in your bag and pretend to forget about it. You need to treat your signature like homework.”
“I barely have time for homework either,” Shane said, slumping into the passenger seat. School had started up again on Monday, overwhelming and agonizing and personally designed by the OCDSB to rob Shane of his ice time.
“Do we need to talk with your teachers again? They agreed to give you extensions on assignments—”
“Mom.”
“—are they not giving you extensions? I can email Principal Nguyen, remind her of your circumstances—”
“Mom, it’s fine. Seriously.”
“It’s clearly not fine, Shane, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up!”
“Can we just go to the rink? I need to focus on skating right now. Not homework, and not signatures that nobody’s going to want anyway.”
His mom leaned across the car’s centre console and laid a hand on Shane’s shoulder. It was the same side that Ilya Rozanov had cross-checked during the finals, leaving behind a bruise that Shane neglected to ice. The mark was almost completely faded by now, invisible to the eye unless you were actively looking for it.
“You’re currently the leading scorer in the OHL,” she reminded him. “People want your signature now, and they’ll really want it when you win the Prospect Cup next year.”
Shane sighed. “I can only win if I practice.”
“You will,” she said. “But while I’m driving you to practice, you’ll practice your penmanship. All buckled up?”
“Yeah,” he said, the discussion good as over now that the car was in motion. Shane studied the book in his lap, which had an elastic strap on its bound spine that his mom had conveniently clipped a felt tip pen onto. Shane fiddled with the pen for only a moment, not wanting to be caught and lectured like he had with his peeled water bottle labels and chewed hoodie strings. When he flipped the book open, he found that pages inside alternated between lined and blank, substantial in a way that made Shane think the ink wouldn’t bleed through them. He liked how smooth the paper felt when he ran his fingers over it—unmarked and pristine, with the promise of some yet-unachieved organization.
Practice, it was. Shane could manage that.
In mid-February, a massive blizzard hit southern Ontario, resulting in the shutdown of thousands of schools, businesses, and roads. With the Queensway closed and practices canceled, Shane’s mom took the opportunity to drill Shane on his “soft skills”—all the things she deemed as necessary to him having a successful career as an athlete, minus his actual performance as an athlete. Yuna Hollander’s expectations were specific and seemingly all-encompassing, including but not limited to:
- Answering interviews in a measured and concise manner
- Answering emails in a professional and timely manner
- Giving firm handshakes to men in expensive suits
- Engaging with teammates (and select opponents) outside of practices and games
- Smiling in a way that looked acceptable on high-definition cameras
- Safely and respectfully navigating fan interactions
The handshakes he’d practiced with his dad, the emails with his mom, the smiles with the bathroom mirror, and the engagements with one particular opponent, who’d smirked at Shane from the handshake line and taunted in a low voice, “See you at the draft.”
Other things like interview prep would have to wait until they hired an actual PR specialist, which his parents had put on the backburner for now even though Shane had repeatedly given them permission to dip into his college fund to cover it. His dad reminded Shane that he had a year and some change until he turned 18, when he would be eligible for the MLH draft. A lot could happen in a year. His dad meant it in his usual cautious manner, but the sentiment made Shane’s stomach churn. He tried to imagine playing at the collegiate level instead. The hockey would be good, it always was, but everything else about university—the half-empty 8 AMs, the drunken house parties, the library and coffee shop study sessions—was a great expanse of gray nothing. He’d live his life the same muddling way he did now, pretending the things that mattered to other people mattered the same amount to him.
It was Thursday night, day two of the storm, when Shane’s mom asked after the book she had gotten Shane.
“I think it’s in my room,” Shane said, heaping his dinner plate high with whole wheat pasta. His dad had started cooking it at Shane’s request. If either of his parents minded the switch, they hadn’t said so.
His mom frowned. “You think?”
“It’s definitely in my room,” Shane amended. “What? I didn’t want to keep carting it around in my bag when it was messing with my organization. It would’ve gotten squished in there anyway.”
“Sure,” his dad said carefully.
“It’s just—” His mom was still frowning. Jesus, you’d have thought Shane had admitted to taking the car out for a drunken joyride, or gotten a girl pregnant, or some other juvenile catastrophe with the look she was looking at him. “—Have you practiced at all since you put the book away? If you don’t like the paper, or you want something more convenient to write on, I can buy something else.”
“The book is fine! My signature is fine!”
His dad reached across the table to rub at his mom’s hand, and the two of them shot each other a nervous glance, the one they’d always used that meant “Shane’s feeling sensitive and we need to back off,” as if Shane was still ten years old and crying after every game he lost.
“I’m sure it is,” his dad started—
Shane pushed away his plate, stood up from the table, and walked to his bedroom. He let his footsteps fall heavy on the stairs so he didn’t have to hear his parents angrily whispering at each other.
The discussion got louder as Shane returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, fragments like “too hard on him” and “worried about next year” drifting through the doorway to Shane’s reddening ears. Shane dropped the notebook on the table in front of his parents, then shoved a forkful of pasta in his mouth. Tentatively, his mom opened the book, tilting it so Shane’s dad could see the first page too. Neither of his parents said so, but it was obvious from how his mom’s mouth had flattened and his dad’s had curved that Shane’s signature was decidedly not fine.
Shane’s dad was the first to break the silence: “I know you’re pretty set on the athlete career path, but maybe you should consider being a doctor.”
“David!”
“Well, it’s not like the school cares about traditional penmanship either! Why do they even bother to teach the kids cursive if they’re not gonna have them practice it afterwards?”
“It helps with brain development and fine motor skills,” his mom said. “Not that Shane needed help on that front.”
Shane’s dad smiled, looking across the table where Shane was still pretending to be focused on his food. “No, he did not. Forget cursive. The schools should be teaching a second language instead.”
“Shane’s school did. What they really need is typing classes, and personal finance—”
“Says the private banker!”
“Oh, Mr. Treasury Board doesn’t agree?”
Shane tuned his parents’ bickering out, staring at his sloppy, childlike signatures until his vision blurred and his eyes grew wet. He wanted to blame it on the difficulty of using a pen in a moving car, but like his mom said, fine motor skills were never Shane’s problem. On the ice, he could move at 35 km/h and shoot a puck with the kind of accuracy that made even the most jaded scouts lean forward in their seats. Poor visibility during the long, dark winter months wasn’t a good excuse either, when Shane was haphazardly tilting his capital “H” to the right and adding a loop at the end because he’d forgotten what the letter was supposed to look like in cursive. He Googled the alphabet and everything, only to get distracted going down some internet rabbithole.
His dad cleared his throat. “Shane, I’m stopping by Mr. Martin’s tomorrow morning after the worst of the storm passes. Maybe you’d like to come with me?”
Mr. Martin lived two houses down from the Hollanders. He’d been old when Shane was little and he was ancient now, but he’d gone to a few of Shane’s Timbits games back when his mobility was still good. Shane mostly remembered him as a nice, long-winded man who never complained when stray balls landed in his backyard. A few times, he’d let Shane rummage through his childhood action figures, which he stored in a binder in his cluttered garage in a dark purple plastic bin alongside some old comics and his daughter’s high school yearbook. She’d moved to Vancouver long before Shane was born and visited rarely, which Shane’s mom had always emphasized to Shane as a reason to be extra polite to Mr. Martin. Shane always was.
“I was younger than you when I started collecting,” Mr. Martin said, leaning back with a smile as he flipped the garage light switch on. “Though I stopped a little after Emily was born.”
“Life gets busy,” Shane’s dad agreed, following Mr. Martin into the garage. Shane trailed behind them, his hands jammed into the front pocket of his hoodie. “I couldn’t keep up with the MLH when Shane was a baby either. If he hadn’t picked up the sport, I don’t know if I would’ve started watching again.”
“Mom would’ve,” Shane said. He shrugged when Mr. Martin glanced back at him. “She’s even more obsessed with hockey than me.”
“Maybe I’ll start following it again,” Mr. Martin mused. “The season after the next—I have a feeling there’s gonna be some very talented rookies.”
Shane’s dad nudged him.
“Oh, um, thank you,” Shane said absently. He wondered who else would be in that draft class. A number of college prospects, no doubt. Maybe one of the guys from Shane’s Juniors team, depending on how well they did next year and how serious they were about hockey—not very, compared to Shane. And there was Rozanov, obviously, if he didn’t stay closer to home and sign with the KHL or another European League.
The thought of the next year’s Prospect Cup already had Shane’s adrenaline spiking. It was hard not to resent Rozanov for winning the tournament, even though that’s what all of them were there to do. He’d deked Shane in the third period of the championship game for his second (and winning) goal, a blunder so obvious even the commentators had grit their teeth during the live broadcast. Shane tried to envision him and Rozanov playing in the same league season after season, a whole career pitted against that unbothered attitude and effortless athleticism. Five or ten or fifteen years from now, would Rozanov still be coming in first? Shane swallowed, clenching his fists until the replay faded from his mind.
Mr. Martin rattled a tin of Danish cookies around, startling Shane from the morose train of thought. “Old seashells,” he explained. “Emily picked a bunch of them up off the beach in Victoria when she was little and I never had the heart to toss them, even though she says doesn’t want them anymore. Guess that’s why my garage is such a mess, huh? Makes it a lot harder to find things when you need to. Like these darn cards, which I could have sworn were somewhere around—a-ha!”
Having surveyed the room at a pace that made Shane’s whole body twitch, Mr. Martin had decided the box that contained his collection was at the very bottom of a precarious-looking pile. He unsuccessfully attempted to slide it out from the stack.
“Shane, do you mind moving the bins on top?” Shane’s dad asked. Shane did so without complaint, wrinkling his nose only when he saw clumps of dust stuck to his sleeves. At last, Mr. Martin cracked open the bottom bin, passing binders off to Shane and his dad with a big smile.
Shane’s dad whistled as he flipped through the pages. “Gretzky’s rookie year. Even I know this card.”
Shane leaned over to take a peek, and found he recognized it too, with its sky blue background and Gretzy’s angled posture. Mr. Martin and Shane’s dad were speculating how valuable it might be, which Shane didn’t really get. It was Wayne Gretzky, sure, but the actual card was just a piece of colorful cardboard. Gretzky hadn’t signed it or anything.
They’d moved onto fawning over a Bobby Orr card when Shane uncovered the half-empty binder with the autographed cards.
“You can take that home with you if you’d like,” Mr. Martin said, nodding to Shane. “Might be easier to study in person than coming over here every time you want to take a look at the signatures.”
“Thank you,” Shane’s dad said.
“It’s a very nice collection,” Shane added, for lack of anything else to say. “Do you have any favorites?”
Mr. Martin pointed out a few, and Shane politely agreed. Evidently, he hadn’t done a very good job of it, because Mr. Martin added, “It’s a bit hard to explain the appeal to people who don’t collect.”
“The surprises in each pack must be fun,” Shane’s dad volunteered.
“They are. When you get a great hit, it makes you forget all the earlier disappointments—and all the money you spent! And there’s something special about that childhood connection. When I was a kid, I’d get a box for Christmas and a box for my birthday. Packs were cheaper, so my brother and I were able to convince our parents to buy them more often. I remember ripping a pack in the hospital after getting my arm in a cast. My grandma bought it for me to cheer me up, and then she had to buy a pack for my brother too because he was so jealous!”
Mr. Martin flipped to a specific page in the binder he was holding. All nine sleeves were filled with Johnny Bower cards. He laid a wrinkled hand on the cards, his touch delicate, almost reverent, against the transparent plastic barrier.
“I used to think the cards were magic. The colors were so bright and the pictures were so clear that I thought the players were going to peel right off the page and barrel towards me. I would run my fingers over my favorite cards until the paper dirtied and the corners curled. I still have some of those season stats on the backsides memorized. At the time, they felt as important to know as birthdays or phone numbers.”
He closed the binder, placing it back in the bin. Mr. Martin studied the overcrowded garage, shaking his head like the space had personally disappointed him.
“I kept the cards all these years because my brother’s collections were mixed with mine, and I didn’t want to throw them out after he was gone. But I loved how they made me feel too. Like I could be close with something so big and important. They’re the only keepsakes I have for the games I can’t rewatch, for players that have retired or passed away, and for the seasons long gone.”
On Saturday morning, Shane’s mom poured herself a cup of coffee and examined the penmanship of the Greats. She had firm opinions about players from her own lifelong love of the sport, which dovetailed into the specific ways they signed their names.
Shane’s dad had played through college, but it was his mom who had a real passion for the sport. They’d both been nothing but encouraging to Shane’s athletic ambitions, which is why it was so much stranger that the Hollander household had missed this hobby entirely.
“Mom, why didn’t we ever buy trading cards?”
His mom’s mouth thinned. “It never occurred to me to get them for you, I guess. You were so set on doing the real thing, I thought cards would have bored you.”
“Did you ever collect them?”
“No, not really.”
“Why not?”
His mom crossed her arms. “I just don’t care for them.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t say this to Mr. Martin, or any other collector, but to me, cards seem like a form of gambling, which I really don’t like in relation to sports. And a lot of people who collect them are just attempting to turn a profit through resales, which isn’t much better.”
“Then why did you want me to look at Mr. Martin’s?”
“Because it’s something a lot of other fans care about—and that matters, whether or not you or I feel the same.”
Shane groaned. “I’m gonna have to keep on working on this signature, aren’t I?”
His mom laughed. “You’ll get it. Oh! And I’ve got the perfect motivator. Wait just a moment.”
She walked back upstairs, probably to her bedroom. Shane busied himself with loading some mugs into the dishwasher, then returned to the family room, where he’d left the binder open on the coffee table. His mom had returned by then, perched on the couch with something hidden behind her back.
“Maybe I was too harsh about trading cards earlier,” she said, eyes drifting to the ceiling corner like she was too embarrassed to look at Shane. “When your dad and I were dating in college, he used to get me a pack with a flower bouquet, and we’d open them together. I gave them all away when we moved to Ottawa, but it was a fun way to pass the time. When I saw these were being released, I knew I had to buy a few packs.”
She passed a foil pack over to Shane with little ceremony. He stared down at his lap, the metallic sheen of the words “Team Canada Juniors” reflecting the ceiling light back into his eyes.
Shane remembered signing papers with his mom for the photo releases last year. She’d made him read every inch of the legalese, so he understood what he was agreeing to with promotional materials and merchandising. There was no direct payment attached, beyond the meager stipend he received from the OHL. His mom ensured that his Juniors money went into a checking account under Shane’s name despite Shane’s assurances that he trusted his parents with it. He was eager to pay them back, after all they’d spent to get him where he was. Literally, in some cases. The gas mileage for regular practices and tournaments was no joke.
“Okay, wow, we really should have bought you a pack when you were younger,” his mom teased. “Come one, rip it open!”
Shane tentatively tore the packaging under his mother’s watchful eye. He examined the cards one by one, recognizing the faces and names of his teammates for the past few months. He laughed when he got to Taylor’s card, who had a vaguely constipated expression on his face that he only wore when he’d let a puck through, and was determined to prevent the next from getting in. It was the kind of thing you never would have spotted from the stands beneath all of the goalie’s gear, but here it was in all its glossy glory, like you were right there and playing beside him.
The last card in the batch was Shane himself. He didn’t know if the photo had been taken during practice or the tournament proper, but he was focused on something beyond the frame. The card identified him as Shane Hollander #24 — Centre and, damningly, Captain.
He had been so honored when his teammates had selected him, he’d organized a get-together at a nearby pizza place after their penultimate practice and covered the entire bill (with some help from his parents). All 24 guys’ numbers were saved to his phone contacts, and he’d even had active chats with Garret and Miles, the two collegiate wingers on his line; AJ, a defenseman who did origami to decompress before games; and the aforementioned Taylor, their starting goalie and one of Shane’s alternate captains. Garret and Miles both sent amiable texts last month saying they were looking forward to seeing Shane on MLH ice in a years’ time once he was eligible for the draft. AJ had sent a photo of a paper crane about five hours after the final game. Shane had been too ashamed to respond.
Shane flipped the card over, where it described his age, weight, height, and hometown. There was a nice note about his performance in the OHL and his playing record at the IPC. “Silver Medalist” was bullet pointed as a fucking achievement.
“I know you’re embarrassed about how the team did at Worlds. But I checked online—your card is the most valued one in the pack right now because everyone knows this isn’t the last they’re going to see of Shane Hollander.”
“Well, yeah,” Shane said. “I'll probably be on Team Canada for the IPC next year. What do you even want me to do with the card? It feels weird to keep a picture of myself.”
His mom smiled. “I’ll keep it if you don’t. I’ve got three other Shanes tucked away in my nightstand, and your dad is using a fourth as a bookmark.”
“Mom, that’s even weirder!
“What? Dad and I are your biggest fans.”
Shane rolled his eyes. “You’re my only fans.”
“So far,” his mom replied. She reached into her pocket, placing a blue Sharpie on the table in front of Shane. “Now will you please sign a card for your biggest fan?”
Shane was quiet for a moment, but his mom didn’t push him.
“Can I have a piece of paper?” he asked. “I want to practice a little bit first.”
