Chapter Text
“It’s harder than I thought it would be.”
Yuna Hollander’s voice is quiet, almost impossible to hear across a closed door and down a hall. But it’s late enough that she expects her children to be asleep, and she’s not minding her volume as much as she might otherwise.
“Having both of them playing competitively?” David asks.
“Yes.” A long pause. Sabrina strains her ears, but then the rushing of her blood seems to drown out her parents’ voices. “I haven’t seen you all weekend.”
“Fifty-one hours,” Sabrina’s dad replies without pause.
“But they love it so much. And Shane is… he’s just flying, isn’t he? He shines on every team he’s on, every coach thinks he has the drive and the talent to make it. But these next three years will be so critical, we can’t slow down now. And Sabrina has taken to it like a fish to water. What if she’s just as good?”
Her mother’s voice is tight, stressed. There’s a long pause before David replies, and Sabrina imagines that he’s rubbing her mother’s back, trying to pet the tension out of her body. He’s the only one who can bring Yuna Hollander down when she gets wound tight. “It’s not forever. We embrace the moments we have together as much as we can. We can handle three, maybe four years until Shane is old enough to do it on his own. We owe it to them to give them the best possible chance of success, don’t we?”
“Yes, of course,” Yuna says, but the words are threaded through with a heavy waver. “God, this would be so much easier if it was only one of them. Not balancing two hockey schedules, all the hotel rooms. The laundry,” she says with a wet laugh. “Fuck. Do you want to take Shane or Sabrina next weekend?”
“There’ll be scouts next weekend, you should take Shane. You can advocate for him better than I can. You’ll get him in front of all the right people, and they’ll be grateful for it.”
“You’ve barely seen him the past two weeks.”
“I’ll work through lunches this week, come home early on Wednesday when he’s got a free evening. Do something with him then.”
“Fuck,” Yuna says again and a heavy sigh, and then their voices fall silent.
Sabrina lays in bed, blankets tucked to her chin, and stares at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. Shane stuck them up for her when she was six and he was eight after she had begged for them for her birthday, meticulously arranging them to match the tilt of the Big Dipper as they see it at the cottage in July.
Sabrina might only be 12, but she isn’t stupid. She knows that Shane is better than everyone else that he’s ever played against, that he lives and breathes hockey, that while so many kids say they’re going to play in the NHL one day, Shane actually will. He’s going to get drafted when he’s 17, and win a thousand awards and score a million goals, and make loads of money and be very famous. This is all just facts.
She also knows that nobody gives a shit about women’s hockey. The games hardly ever get aired on TV, and it’s never covered by sports broadcasting, and it gets maybe a couple of lines in the newspaper where the NHL games get entire articles. She might be a great player herself, but there’s no endgame for her, not like there is for Shane. No money, no fame. Maybe an Olympic run or two if she’s lucky, but that’s it. No long-term employment, nothing to base an entire future on.
She lays in bed for ages, staring at the stars above her head that are losing their glow, and thinks. Her alarm clock is showing 12:24am by the time she finally rolls over and closes her eyes.
***
It’s not so bad, spending time with her dad in the car, driving two hours away for the weekend to play a tournament in Kingston. They do the entire first hour of conversation in French so she can practice, and they find fast food along the way, the type of food that Mom and Shane don’t like to eat. He sings along with every Hip song that comes on the radio, and they duet (poorly) to Fleetwood Mac, Sabrina floating her arms around herself like she’s Stevie Nicks. They share a hotel room, and she doesn’t have to squeeze herself past her mother working through her salutations on the yoga mat that she drags along with them on every road trip. She falls asleep with her dad snoring lightly from the other bed, a louder version than what she normally hears from down the hall at home. It’s her first season in competitive hockey, the kind that requires her to travel further and more often to play, and they’re slowly finding a rhythm to existing with each other for an entire weekend. They’re used to travelling with Mom and Shane, but it’s different when it’s just the two of them. Quieter, lonelier.
She swims in the hotel pool with the other U-13 players in the evenings, while her dad mingles with the other parents along the pool deck. He looks more tired around the eyes, dark shadows starting to gather in the creases. He has a book, but it doesn’t seem to keep his attention. She dips her head so only her eyes and nose are poking out of the water, and watches how he chats with a small smile with the woman beside him, but how the smile drops away the moment she turns to speak to someone else.
He’s struggling.
***
Her team wins three of their four games, and Sabrina scored five goals total. She’s pretty pleased with the results, but is so exhausted that she sleeps in the car for most of the trip home. She wakes up with Shane leaning through the passenger door, jostling her shoulder.
“Hey,” he says when she blinks her eyes open blearily into the setting sun. “Come on, Mom’s making dinner.”
He carries her hockey bag inside for her, shepherding her along through the door like she can’t find her own way. The house smells like chicken and garlic and home, and Sabrina barrels headlong into her mother’s side as soon as she’s toed off her shoes in the front hall, eyes closed. Yuna envelopes her close, rocking her gently side to side where they stand in front of the stove, while Sabrina inhales the smell of her, refamiliarizes herself with the way she fits into the notch under her mother’s arm.
Her dad leans in a moment later, and she hears them kiss over her head, and in an instant, she’s made up her mind.
***
She doesn’t want to tell them that she overheard their conversation, that she’s been watching them closely looking for signs of trouble. They’d feel awful, is the thing, that they’d put this burden on their daughter when they’d only been trying to do what was best for her. They would tell her that they can make it work, that she can compete at the highest levels of hockey too, that every sacrifice is worth it.
But they aren’t looking out for themselves, not looking after their family the way they should be. So Sabrina will handle it herself.
She starts to complain about having to haul her gear around, whines about her alarm going off at 5:30am so she can be at the rink for 6:30 before school. Honestly, it’s not even that hard to pull off. She sees the way that her parents start to get frustrated with how she’s acting, the way that Shane stares at her like he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want to devote her every waking moment to hockey. She gets lectured about the sort of behaviour that is expected from her, across all parts of her life. It’s so frustrating to sit and listen to something she knows perfectly well.
She still plays well, scores well, puts in the effort when she’s on the ice. She pushes herself through every practice drill. She loves the way it feels to sink the puck into the net, skirting it past the goalie too fast for them to catch it. But she makes it well-known at home that she’s not enjoying the trappings of competitive hockey.
By the time they approach the end of the season, Sabrina has laid enough groundwork that no one is surprised when she tells them that she doesn’t want to play again next year.
“Are you sure, honey?” her mother asks, but there’s something that looks like relief in the shape of her eyebrows.
“I’m sure,” Sabrina says. “I think I want to try rugby instead, can I do that?” There’s a rec team in Ottawa, and their season spans part of the summer and into fall, minimizing overlap with Shane’s hockey season. She can play for her future high school team, if she wants. She thinks she’ll like the running, the exertion, the tackling that she hopes feels close enough to checking.
Sabrina Hollander is 13 years old when she puts her brother’s dream in front of her own and promises herself that she’ll never tell a soul about what she’s done.
***
She misses hockey, there’s no doubt about that. Without being part of a team, it’s nearly impossible to get actual ice time, especially not where she can skate as fast as she wants, or practice her stick handling. She finds herself out on the driveway a few times a week, shooting goals on the net they’ve had since Shane was seven, giving herself challenges and working until she meets them.
It’s almost immediate, the way things change at home. There’s still demand for Shane to travel, but now they can all go together if they want, and even though they aren’t at home, it isn’t so bad since they’re together. There’s less fast food, which is maybe the only downside to it all. Sabrina starts to bring her own yoga mat along just to work through the pent-up energy that demands an outlet. Most nights, the hotels are jam-packed with visiting players, and they only get one room for all four of them, and her parents share one of the double beds while Sabrina fights with Shane for possession of the covers on the second, when there’s not enough floor space to add a cot as well.
There are usually a few other younger sisters who tag along too, and she becomes friends with them, thrown together at a rink with little else to do. Most of them complain about the smell of their brother’s gear, if not the smell of their brothers themselves, and Sabrina silently thanks whatever tidy monster lives in Shane’s head that makes him shower religiously after playing and keeps him from leaving his clothes in a stinking pile on the floor. There are often questions about which girl belongs to which player, with girls pointing out their brothers as they sail across the rink. Except for Sabrina. Shane is the only Asian player on the ice, and Sabrina is the only Asian kid in the bleachers.
***
It’s a good thing that Shane is as hockey-obsessed as he is, because it doesn’t take much to convince him to play with her in the driveway when he’s not at practice or games. He shows her the drills that he’s learned at practice, translating them to be played on concrete instead of ice. They take the bus down to the canal in the winter, skates slung over their shoulders, and race each other down the ice, dodging other skaters and pushing at each other.
It’s fun, but it’s not the same as playing games with a team, not like scoring a goal right before the buzzer goes.
Sabrina thinks that her dad wonders about it, why she was so adamant about quitting hockey but still plays with Shane. So she reminds him, as casually as she can, that hockey is something they’ve always done together, the way that she knows how to speak best to her brother. The thing they both learned best from David Hollander, left wing for McGill. She reminds her parents about how awful it was to be separated all the time. She doesn’t want them to feel guilty for ending her hockey career before it could really begin.
**
Shane turns 16, and Sabrina turns 14. He starts driver’s ed, and she starts high school.
Sir John A. MacDonald Secondary School does, in fact, have a girl’s rugby team, and Sabrina makes the team in Grade 9, outrunning most of the seniors and refusing to flinch when someone runs headlong into her, keeping the ball tucked tight under her arm. The most travel she has to do is around the school district to play other schools, and that all happens on weekday evenings. Her parents come to see her play, and Shane comes too, when he’s not at his own practice. He stands at the sidelines with a little furrow between his eyebrows, like he’s still trying to puzzle out why she’s outdoors on a field with shorts and cleats on instead of in an arena with pads and skates.
Shane is still his neurotic self, but all the hockey and the onslaught of puberty have changed him from the gangly brother she knows into a stranger with defined muscles. It’s a fucking hassle on the days he does show up to her games, because her teammates keep checking him out and twittering at each other, giggling behind their hands. It makes Shane go red in the face, but he never flirts with them, even when they’re rolling the waistbands of their shorts to make them even shorter with the hopes that their thighs will catch his eye. He’s possibly the most hopeless boy she’s ever met.
Nearly all his hockey friends have girlfriends, now. She hears them at practices and tournaments, bragging to each other about the girls they’ve kissed, chests puffed out as they talk about getting blowjobs like they’ve conquered the world. It’s gross, honestly. Shane never joins in, never brags about his own conquests, but he doesn’t tell them to knock it off, either. Some of the sisters still tag along, although they’re getting older now, but being present for Shane’s games also makes her a target for his teammates and opponents to flirt with her.
It’s not like Sabrina hasn’t noticed boys, it’s just that she’s overheard the absolutely disgusting things these ones have said to each other.
“Come on,” says a guy wearing a ratty Guardians t-shirt, bleached hair curling out from under his hat. He looks exactly like fifty percent of the other guys here. “There’s a little room just off that hallway that no one ever uses.” She thinks he’s trying to give her a sexy look, but it’s so over-the-top that it’s just weird and creepy. “I’ll make you feel good.”
She hesitates for just long enough that he thinks he’s got her, and leans in a little closer, boxing her in against the wall. He’s just inches away from kissing her when she scrambles away, ducking under his arm and taking off for the relative safety of the bleachers where her parents sit.
One of the other girls tells her the next day at breakfast, her voice low and angry, that the dickhead has been telling everyone that Shane Hollander’s baby sister let him finger her in the custodian’s closet.
Sabrina stops going to the tournaments.
***
Shane goes to the International Prospect Cup in Regina, and their parents fly out with him. Sabrina had been deemed old enough and responsible enough at 15 to stay home along for the week, to get herself to school and do her homework. Their next-door neighbours are a retired couple that have known Sabrina and Shane since they were babies, and they invite her over every night for dinner, and are probably keeping her parents apprised on how she’s doing.
It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s lonely in a new way.
The championship isn’t televised, but her mom calls every day and tells her how Shane and the Canadian team have done. He does so well, scores a ton of goals, but Canada still falls to Russia in the end.
Her family comes home, not jubilant but still happy enough with the results. Shane’s silver award gets wedged onto his trophy shelf, practically hanging over the edge for lack of space. Yuna talks about all the connections she made on Shane’s behalf, how many scouts passed her their information, how much cleaner Shane’s stickwork was than everyone else’s.
Sabrina thinks that Shane is taking the loss harder than he should, but he keeps pretending that nothing is wrong when she calls him on it.
“You still did amazing,” she tells him. She’s brought a basket of laundry from the basement, half of it hers and half of it Shane’s. “Mom is like, off the charts so happy with how you did.”
Shane scoops out his clothes and starts methodically refolding them to put them away. “It would have been better if I hadn’t lost.”
“Second isn’t losing.”
“It kind of is.”
“Did you meet that Russian guy, the one everyone keeps talking about? Romanov?”
“Rozanov. Yeah, for a minute.”
“…And?”
Shane places another t-shirt into his drawer and smooths out the wrinkles before shutting it away. “I told Mom that he was kind of a dick.”
Sabrina laughs. “That’s not really a surprise. Sometimes I think that it’s a good thing you’re so good at hockey, because you’re probably too nice to be in hockey.”
“The other guys aren’t that bad,” he says, and Sabrina can’t help but remember that douchebag who lied about fingering her just to save face at her expense. “I don’t know, he was fine. Nothing that special about him.”