Darkroom: A Moo U Hockey Romance, Kate Willoughby [best books to read for young adults .TXT] 📗

Getting chewed out by Coach Keller was my come to Jesus moment. I couldn’t sit on my ass anymore and pretend things would get better if I tried harder. Maybe my ears really were fucked-up, like Indi had suggested, or maybe it was something worse like an inoperable brain tumor. Regardless, if something was medically wrong with me, I had no idea how the Dragons would react. Worst case scenario, they’d neglect to offer me a contract when I graduated.

Thinking Booth MacDonald might be able to help, I called him up. It was late, but the Barracudas had come east for a road trip, so he was in the same time zone at least.

“Young Forte! Good to hear from you. How’s that pregame routine working for you?”

“Am I on speaker?” I asked, calling back to his prank from the last time I called.

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha. No, you’re not on speaker. I’m in my hotel room.”

“The routine is working great, thanks,” I said, feeling a little guilty about the white lie. “But now I have another problem and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“This is why you should always wear a condom.”

“Mac, I didn’t get anyone pregnant.”

“I knew you were too smart for that. Now that we have that out of the way, lay it on me. What’s your problem?”

As matter-of-factly as I could, I told him about the tinnitus, the dizzy spells and the fact that I was having trouble hearing, that I’d been having trouble for months. I even told him about Indi’s shot-in-the-dark “diagnosis” of otosclerosis.

“Jesus, kid. You need to see a doctor. You guys have a team doc at Burlington? When I was at Dartmouth, there was a team doc for all the school athletes. Can you go to him and tell him what’s going on?”

I did a mental double take. In my brain, the team physician was there for game related injuries like pulled muscles or dislocated joints. Consulting him about something that didn’t originate from hockey hadn’t even occurred to me.

“That’s actually a great idea,” I said hesitantly. “But…”

“But what?”

I hesitated, reluctant to share my deepest fear, the one that threatened to throw me into panic mode.

“What if he tells me I’m going deaf, Mac? I can’t play hockey if I can’t hear. The Dragons will drop me like a hot potato and my career will be over before it even started.”

Which would make me a pariah in my family. I’d be the one who broke the family’s unbroken line of NHL players. I could well imagine my dad disowning me.

Mac said, “First of all, you’re not going deaf. You don’t know that for sure, not until you see a professional. I looked up otosclerosis while we’ve been talking and everything I’m seeing says it’s a pretty rare condition. So don’t get ahead of yourself. Secondly…hold on a sec. Just checking one more thing. There. I knew it. You ever hear of Jim Kyte?”

“No.”

“Look him up later. He was the first legally deaf NHL player. Played almost 600 games in the NHL.”

“This better not be one of your pranks,” I said. My heart was pounding.

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this,” Mac said. “According to his Wiki page, he was born with perfect hearing but lost it by the time he was three. So there you go. If you do have otosclerosis, and that’s a big if, it’s not a death knell for your hockey career. And besides, the Dragons aren’t going to just drop you. A hearing problem or any other kind of physical problem isn’t the deal breaker you think it is. It’s all about your performance.”

This wasn’t exactly reassuring. Even so, I thanked him and he said, “Let me know how it works out, Forte. I’ll be crossing my fingers for you.”

Immediately after hanging up, I checked out Jim Kyte and got chills. Kyte had been drafted in the first round, number 30 overall, just like me, which was a was a weird fucking coincidence. But that was about the only thing we had in common. Kyte had spent most of his life without hearing, so he had a long time to adapt, to develop tricks to compensate. For instance, because he couldn’t hear the players behind him, he sometimes used the Plexiglass as a mirror. He also did a lot of lipreading.

I was glad to see he’d been inducted into the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame, but he only accumulated sixty-six points in his fifteen-year career. Even for a defenseman, that was not very good. However, I also learned that he wore hearing aids in both ears and had a special helmet to accommodate them. Good to know, considering a hearing aid was apparently one of the first things they tried when it came to otosclerosis.

Unfortunately, the only way to know if I had it or not was to get checked out by a doctor, like Mac said. The idea of going to someone I’d never met before made me break out in a cold sweat. But the team physician, Dr. Neufeld, or Newfie as we all called him, was a great guy with a calm bedside manner. I’d been afraid to talk to him when I was a freshman, but now, three years later, he didn’t scare me at all. If after seeing him I needed to see an ear specialist, so be it. I’d have to grow a pair and deal with it because I had momentum now and was done with the torture of uncertainty.

Even though it was after midnight by now, I sent him an email. Right after that I texted Indi.

Hudson: Can we talk?

But I didn’t get a reply.

33

Indi

When Hudson pretended to be me at the mirror, putting on my makeup, it was like when you stub your toe hard and the message takes a few seconds to get to your brain.

It was so far out of character for him I literally couldn’t believe it was