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TRANSCRIPT: ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE | Instagram, August 2014
Exterior shot: three young teenage girls in a backyard. They’re wearing jean shorts and bikini tops, standing in front of a well-loved swing set. One of the girls already has wet hair, like they filmed her challenge video just before this one. There are two big pitchers of ice water on the ground.
Girl 1 (Theresa): Okay, okay, okay! Hi my name is Theresa and I was nominated by Maddie to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge!
Girl 2 (Maddie): You’re welcome, by the way.
Theresa: If you’re nominated you have 24 hours to respond by um, either making a donation or doing the challenge yourself! So, I nominate Emmie-
The third girl, Emmie, grins and gives the camera a double thumbs up.
Theresa: -Chris R. from homeroom, and, um, Shane Hollander!
Maddie: Oh my god. You can not say Shane Hollander.
Theresa: Chris likes hockey! You said I should nominate a hockey player to get his attention.
Emmie: Are you stupid? We live in Massachusetts.
Theresa: (rolling her eyes) I know where we live. But I don’t know anything about hockey! My dad’s a Patriots fan. I just Googled “best hockey player” and the first name I saw was Shane Hollander.
Maddie: Surely you saw the name Ilya Rozanov on there somewhere? Please tell me you read past the first result.
Theresa: Maybe? I don’t know! They said this guy scored the most points this season!
Emmie: Okay, but the other guy won the Stanley Cup and took home MVP! My brother literally hasn’t shut up about it and it’s been months. You have to change your nomination. This is embarrassing.
Maddie: Not to mention, your guy plays for Montreal. (she wrinkles her nose) We can’t let you do this!
Theresa: Okay, better some random city in Canada than, like, New York or something.
Maddie: Oh my god you’re hopeless. Please, please, please change it.
Theresa: (crossing her arms over her chest) No, I’m sticking with it. My sister’s always telling me that boys like confidence.
Emmie: Alright, your funeral. Should we restart the video?
Theresa: (shaking her head) No, leave it in. That way everyone can see I’m a woman of my word.
The girls reset, dragging big pitchers of ice water closer into frame. Maddie and Emmie are rolling their eyes.
Theresa: Okay. Hi my name is Theresa and I was nominated by Maddie to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge! If you’re nominated you have 24 hours to respond by either making a donation or doing the challenge yourself! So, I nominate Emmie, Chris R. and Shane Hollander!
The girls douse her in ice water and she shrieks. All three are laughing.
Theresa: (moving closer to the camera to end the recording) Remember! You have twenty-four hours to respond!
END TRANSCRIPT
***
By all means, Shane shouldn’t have ever even seen the video. The girl hadn’t even actually tagged him - just the boy she was trying to impress. It had gone semi-viral though; hard not to when she managed to invoke a rivalry she hadn’t previously known existed.
He opens the link from the team chat without thinking while he makes his morning smoothie. The blender whirrs and drowns out most of what she says, but there’s enough context to know it’s one of those ice bucket challenges that it seemed like everyone is doing these days. His mom had mentioned it the last time they’d had lunch. She thought it was a good way to promote a worthy cause and keep his name in the public eye.
Shane had dismissed the idea. He was no stranger to ice-cold water (in fact, in the right conditions the sharp numbing pain could feel good) but all of his publicity to date was formal. Studio shots with professional lighting, not Shane with his phone camera in someone’s backyard. Other guys in the league were much better at the whole “engaging with social media” thing than him. Well, most of them used it as a way to send out a bat signal to their regular hookups in different cities, but it was technically more of a personal touch than anything on Shane’s account.
He shuts off the blender and the video loops on the countertop. The girl, Theresa, admits out loud to only knowing Shane’s name because she looked up a hockey player to impress a boy in her class and Shane snorts out a laugh. He has the strangest impulse to send the video to Rozanov. To taunt a reaction out of him.
Fine, he wants to say. So you win the Cup first and you get MVP and you get to push and pull as you please, without any thought for anyone but yourself. You can have all that and still, when a teenager in your own city turns to the internet to impress a hockey fan she’ll still come up with my name. Not yours.
He can’t send Rozanov a link, obviously. He definitely can’t gloat about winning this battle they weren’t even fighting just so he can hear Hollander stretch around Rozanov’s accent accompanied by some too-clever-for-his-own-good chirp. They don’t do that.
And even if they did, they wouldn’t be doing it in August. It’s barely preseason, Rozanov is probably only just back in Boston for the year.
If Shane is lucky, they’ll see each other at center-ice in October. If he plays his cards right, they’ll see a little more of each other after the game at Shane’s apartment. He shouldn’t want that. He shouldn’t be entertaining the thought two months in advance. But, God, for all that their last night together ended on a sour note, Shane will do almost anything to ensure he gets another chance. He knows the rules now; he won’t walk away expecting more again.
He realizes belatedly that the video is still looping on his phone and his smoothie is still sitting untouched in the blender. He shakes himself back into the rhythms of his day and grabs a glass from the cabinet.
The video haunts him like a giggly teenage ghost all day. At practice that afternoon, it’s like everyone has something to say about it.
J.J. moans, “This guy! Gets nominated and doesn’t want to do it. If it were me, I would go so big it would be on the news.”
“Hollander, you gotta help this girl out,” Mitty says. “She’s standing up for you in the middle of Bear country and you’re leaving her hanging!”
Cormeau claps him on the shoulder, “You could really stick it to Rozanov if you take this kid up on the challenge, you know? Steal a fan from him right out of his own backyard.”
Shane’s opinion of Gilbert Cormeau isn’t high on his best days. He’s harmless for the most part, if a blowhard and more than a bit of an idiot. But his comment is the one that follows Shane home from the rink. It rattles around his brain through a shower and a heated meal-prep for dinner. It echoes loud enough that he has to give up on trying to read and just gets in bed.
Shane knows that the opinion of one eighth grade girl from the Boston suburbs is not the thing that will make or break his career. It would matter exactly the same if she was from Montreal, or Texas, or the moon. Which is to say, not at all. She’s not even a hockey fan. Her opinion and her comment are nothing.
It doesn’t feel like it’s nothing, though. If this video had been posted in October, Shane is certain Rozanov would have brought it up no less than three times, probably at least once with his dick still inside Shane. He would manage to spin it, too, so that he came out of the situation ahead somehow. Rozanov is good at that.
Shane opens the video on his phone again. The girls are laughing through the whole thing, like they don’t feel any sort of embarrassment for unabashedly doing something for the attention of a boy. Something unidentifiable twists in Shane’s gut.
If this were October already, Shane would be one step behind Rozanov, he’s sure. A perfect fucking match on the ice but the second they get behind closed doors it’s like Shane’s got to use everything in him just to keep up.
But it’s not October. It’s August; hot summer sun beating down outside, so at odds with the ice he practices on most days. The rules are different in August, the days are structured differently. In October, Rozanov would have the upper hand, would be able to catch Shane in person and throw him off balance. Maybe this is how he takes that advantage for himself, he thinks. Maybe this is how Shane finally wins something off the ice.
Sure, he can’t send a link to Rozanov. That’s not what they do.
But he could post a video on his Instagram. That’s (technically) something he does all the time. That’s within the bounds of August behavior. That doesn’t break any of their undefined rules about what this thing is and isn’t.
Shane doesn’t actually really know what this thing with Rozanov is. There are plenty of things that it’s not, but the actual shape of it escapes him if he tries to reach for it. Better to stay on common ground, stick to the things he knows to be true. And setting aside all the rest, all the texts and hotel rooms and coded names in their phones, Shane knows one thing to be true about Rozanov. He knows it like it was written into his skin, etched in to his DNA. He knows it for a fact because it’s also at the core of his own being.
Rozanov does not back down from a direct challenge.
***
TRANSCRIPT: ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE | @shanehollanderhockeyplayer, August 2014
Exterior shot: Shane Hollander sits on a chair on the back deck of a house. There are kids’ toys strewn about. Hayden Pike and J.J. Boizou stand on either side of him, next to giant trash cans of ice water.
Hollander: Hi, my name is Shane Hollander and I was nominated to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by Theresa, my biggest fan out in Boston. Theresa, I’m sorry this took me more than twenty-four hours to respond. To make up for it, I’ve already made a donation to ALS research and I’m going to let my alternate captains here (he gestures to Pike and Boizou), dump several dozen gallons of ice water on my head.
Boizou: Ready when you are, Capitane.
Hollander: Do it.
They both upturn their trash cans on to Hollander’s head. Hollander grits his teeth until the water is gone, then swipes at his eyes to open them. He’s breathing heavy in response to the temperature.
Pike: Oh shit. I think you were supposed to nominate people before we did that.
Hollander: (shaking his head) It’s fine, I can do it now. I nominate J.J. Boizou-
Boizou: Excellent choice, I have a guy ready with a truck.
Hollander: -Carter Vaughn, and (he leans forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and looks directly into the camera) Ilya Rozanov. You have twenty-four hours to respond.
Pike and Boizou laugh. Hollander does not break eye contact until the camera cuts.
END TRANSCRIPT.
***
Oh, Ilya is going to kill Hollander the next time he sees him.
He watches the video three times before he can form a coherent thought. Hollander’s smug little smile as he says Rozanov and his tight white compression shirt turned see-through with cold water. His heaving breaths and eyelashes sparkling with little drops of water. Gospodi, does Hollander know he posted this to the internet?
It’s such a far cry from the sponsored posts that make up the rest of his page. It’s barely Canada’s perfectly media trained hockey god; though Ilya can see flavors of that peeking through in his careful word choices, the particular set of his shoulders.
It is entirely the Hollander that crawled down to the foot of the bed to nuzzle his face in next to Ilya’s cock in Las Vegas barely two months ago. That gleam in his eye as he leaned forward was a near perfect match to the expression Ilya watched appear as anxiety melted off Hollander’s face and his briefs came flying towards Ilya’s face.
Some sick and twisted need works its way up from Ilya’s stomach until it wraps around his throat. Those expressions are supposed to be his. The rest of the world isn’t supposed to know that Hollander’s competitive nature follows him off the ice and turns him in to something that makes Ilya’s blood run hot.
He had seen the original video of course, it had gone platinum in the Bear’s chat. He’ll never admit it, but he tried to recreate her search. He typed “best hockey player” into his phone and clicked the first link. It brought him to an article called Is Shane Hollander losing his edge?, posted eight days ago. The opening line: “Widely regarded as hockey’s best player, Shane Hollander (Captain, Montreal) and his team saw their playoff season ended early in favor of Ilya Rozanov and the Boston Bears.” He hadn’t read the rest of the article. That one sentence was enough to know this Theresa could not be faulted for her research.
He goes in to the team chat to find the original video. He watches the girls giggle their way through an obvious attempt at peacocking for a classmate. It’s so earnest, they don’t even try to hide that that’s what they’re doing. It’s cute, Ilya thinks.
He watches Hollander’s video again, posted earlier this afternoon. It’s decidedly not cute. Ilya’s not sure what word he would use instead, but cute is definitely not it.
He wishes it was October, that they had a game against Montreal coming up on the schedule. He wants to tease Hollander for posting something so filthy on his public pages where anyone can see. Does he know what people are going to do with a video like this? Does he want Ilya to show him? Ilya wants to see a dark blush bloom under his freckles. He wants to watch him squirm through the embarrassment as it gives way to white-hot desire. He wants Hollander under his hands as he gives himself over entirely to Ilya.
He curses the last vestiges of August sun peeking around his blinds. October is so far away. Probably he will bring up the video then, just to see Hollander react. He’s fun to tease and poke at and Ilya thinks he could spend hours doing it without getting bored. But vague sex plans for October do nothing for the creature of pure want that settles against the base of Ilya’s spine and seems to grow with each passing thought of Shane Hollander.
No, it demands some satisfaction now. Hollander may have won the face-off with his video, but there’s still time for Ilya to score a goal. Suddenly, Ilya is feeling charitable. His agent will be thrilled he wants to use his platform for a good cause.
He watches Theresa’s video one more time, he wants to get the details right . It would be embarrassing to slip up on those. He has a reputation to maintain.
He pulls up Hollander’s video again, once he’s done making plans for tomorrow afternoon. He ignores Pike and Boizou, zeros in on Hollander’s face. He shoves the waistband of his sweatpants down to his thighs. If he’s going to tease Hollander for posting amateur porn to the internet, he doesn’t want to make himself a liar.
***
TRANSCRIPT: ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE | @ilyarozanov81, August 2014
Exterior shot: Ilya Rozanov stands in the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by a half dozen hockey players, holding buckets of ice water.
Rozanov: Hello. I am Stanley Cup winner Ilya Rozanov and I was nominated to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. I have rookies with me because we are in the middle of development camp and they were excited to help.
Rookie: (nudging Rozanov’s shoulder) Cap, you gotta say who nominated you.
Rozanov: Ah, yes, I was nominated by some guy in Montreal. Plays hockey, I think. Maybe you have heard of him: Shane Hollander?
A round of laughs go through the crowd of rookies.
Rozanov: But really, I am nominated by Theresa, who must have clicked on wrong link when she looked up “best hockey player.” Is no trouble, I will make video and donation anyway. So, (he rubs his hands together) I nominate Scott Hunter, oldest player in the league, and Cliff Marlow, because he was sad no one else nominated him. And then I nominate Chris R. from Theresa’s homeroom, since I have not seen him make video after her nomination. (he smirks) Also, Chris R., you should ask her out; she went to a lot of trouble googling terrible hockey players for you. And if you get married, I expect a wedding invitation. I will bring you expensive gifts.
Another round of laughter. Rozanov nods once and six giant buckets of ice water are upturned on his head. He shakes water off his hair like a dog, causing other players to recoil and yell. The video goes out of focus, like the camera person took a step forward too quickly.
Rozanov: (quieter) Was that better than Hollander?
END TRANSCRIPT
***
Shane watches the video once, twice, three times. Rozanov shakes water out of his hair and Shane’s mouth goes positively dry. The wet t-shirt clings so tightly to his skin Shane can make out the lines of his abs.
“Hollander,” he whispers to himself. It’s a weak imitation of Rozanov’s accent, but he rolls it around his mouth all the same.
In the privacy of his kitchen, he allows pleasure warm his chest. It’s no Stanley Cup, but winning tastes sweet in every form he can get it. It’s an addicting high, made better by Rozanov’s defeat. He thinks forward to October. The greedy part of him wants time to speed up, wants to get thrown against a mattress and turn his brain off. He wants it so badly he can’t look at it head-on for fear of blinding himself.
The looming weeks ahead of him until the first game against Boston threaten to dull the warm current of desire licking up his spine. He gives himself exactly one more indulgent choice to drag out this little moment. Lets heat-soaked August rewrite the rules of engagement one more time.
He picks the most innocuous part of the video; the thing least likely to betray every filthy white-hot reaction swirling around in his brain. He makes his choice, and he sends the text.
***
Jane: So, you think Theresa and Chris R. are a good match?
Lily: good matches have been made with less
Lily: and someone needs to teach her how to root for boston
***
Ilya’s phone buzzes against his leg and he fishes it out, half listening to some rambling story Connors is telling. He can barely hear him over the din of the bar and doesn’t feel bad for ignoring him in favor of something else, anything else. When he sees Jane flash on his screen, he grins despite his best efforts.
Connors makes an affronted noise and a snide remark about Ilya’s Montreal Girl. Ilya flips him off with one hand and fires off a text with the other. The pure want that sits inside Ilya’s chest purrs with delight. It’s not a huffy fuck off, Rozanov with a side of sparkling brown eyes that betray his indignation, but it’s an admission from Hollander that he watched the video all the same.
Ilya pictures Hollander in his apartment, a can of something boring sweating on a coaster, watching Ilya’s video with his stupid little half-smile. He thinks about Hollander typing and retyping his perfectly boring text.
Ilya pockets his phone, delighted with his efforts. He can’t wait for October.