Chapter Text

2 November 2010

Yuna gives real thought to finding Mark Zuckerberg and strangling him with his own hoodie strings. Does he really wear hoodies all the time or did they make that up for that movie? Is she just thinking of Jesse Eisenberg?

Probably this particular thought spiral suggests it’s time for her to step away from the PC, but the thought of taking a break – of leaving the burning fuse that could blow up her baby’s life at any moment unattended – makes her stomach churn.

“David. What do we do?”

There is a document on her computer that lists all the advice she received about parenting a professional athlete: some useful, some laughably pathetic (“You don’t need to watch all the games, just the big ones,” Sylvie Couillard, with a son in the previous year’s draft, had told her, with all the unearned sagacity of a baby-faced missionary, “otherwise you’ll get bored”). That’s towards the end of the document, prefaced by more pertinent advice from sports managers and college coaches, war stories from nightmare families ruining their son’s potential.

Oddly, no one has mentioned what to do when one of Montreal’s premiere gay clubs uploads two hundred professionally taken photos, complete with watermarks, of last weekend’s Halloween bash, and your precious, sensitive, rookie son is standing in the background of shot seventy-two.

“Where is he? Right now?”

“Columbus.” She could keep going, if she needs to. In a normal year, she could recite the next half dozen games on the schedule for Montreal. This isn’t a normal year, it’s the year her baby is making his rookie debut for Montreal. Columbus, Buffalo, Ottawa at home, Vancouver at home, Boston, Carolina at home, Philly at home, Nashville at home, Toronto at home, Philly, LA at home …

“Honey, I think we should get him home.”

“We could fly there?”

“I’m not sure he’d appreciate that.”

David’s right, he won’t. But he won’t appreciate being pulled out to Ottawa on the two-day break between games either.

Whatever her face is doing, David knows how to read it. “He hasn’t even come out to us. If he’s going to fall apart, it should be at home,” he says.

Implicit between them is the understanding that an apartment leased for five months in a new city does not a home make. In particular if the lessee is a nineteen-year-old boy who splits his time evenly between rinks, varied forms of transportation, and a mattress. The Ottawa house is still home, at least for a while.

Because she’s greedy, she steals as much of David’s ballast as she can before she has to cede it to Shane. She leans into his chest and lets the physicality of his sturdiness settle her. “Will he be okay?”

“Well, obviously,” David says, into her hair. “He has you.”

Dutch Canadians

2 Nov 2010 at 6:17PM

Yuna Hollander

Hey Shane! Your dad’s off work tomorrow, and we’re making a big pot of pho. Can we kidnap you and have you around for lunch?

David Hollander

Typically a kidnapping doesn’t involve a question mark.

So how’s this: We’ll meet you at YUL and drive you over, and back to Montreal later on.

Shane Hollander

lol okay, sounds good!

3 November 2010

In all her plans to get her boy home to Ottawa before they addressed the issue, all her scheming to ensure his comfort in a deeply uncomfortable moment, she had foolishly failed to account for Shane checking Facebook in the backseat of their car as they pass through Bois-de-Liesse. They divert to Shane’s apartment, and once the door is shut, there’s no question of getting back on the road.

Yuna paces and texts Farah. David has the honour of being allowed into Shane’s nervous breakdown; she can hear his low gentle voice through the bedroom door. She doesn’t think anyone else could coax Shane out of the silent, tear-stained hunch he has maintained since Yuna had asked him about the photos from Halloween. She can only make out a few words, here and there.

“… nothing wrong with you, buddy…”

“I just wanted to know, before…”

“…think you know now?”

Yuna presses her ear to the door in time to hear Shane laugh, wetly and without humour. “I have a pretty good idea, yeah.”

She goes back to pacing.

The part of her that can only be muted, not switched off, puts Shane in a Deep-South-appropriate ten-gallon hat and pairs it with the booty shorts he’d worn by the pool on the roof of Complexe Sky. Cologne, perhaps? Or some kind of obscenely expensive men’s leather boots – was it Prada that did that sort of thing? Pity that they were already boxed into Reebok.

“Let home be a safe harbor. At home he’s not a pro, just your kid.” Fuck, she was going to have to buy Sylvie a bottle of wine, wasn’t she. Yuna takes a moment to be grateful Montreal had the second draft pick. If Shane had been sent somewhere in the American South – well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

David is handling the emotional side of things for now. Shane is in no state to take on the practicalities. Yuna had messaged Shane’s middle school classmate asking them to un-tag the photo, of course, but they were only the first and for all they know it’s already been reposted on one of the hyper-local news sites or a gay gossip blog with aspirations of book deals.

Yuna bites her lip.

On Shane’s coffee table, the second hand on his brand new Rolex is ticking.

Because it’s a Halloween party, one’s eyes are naturally drawn to the tableau of costumes and flesh on display, plus Shane’s face is partially obscured (Yuna is not going to ask any questions about the young gentleman doing the obscuring until the current crisis is past, but after that – well). It won’t hold up to anyone who knows him, but it might allow a plausible public denial – no. No, she can’t let Shane put himself back in the closet, not if there’s another path open to him. Unless that’s what he wants? Should she support him in that, or would that be homophobic?

Shit. The hockey moms are useless here. She needs to talk to the GSA moms. Probably she still has their phone numbers somewhere. Yuna is nothing if not an incorrigible networker. She never loses a number.

“Mom, can you get off your fucking phone?” Shane snaps, as she tries to compose a message to Geneviève that sounds both urgent and unpanicked. She hadn’t heard the door open, but when she looks up, he’s there, David behind him. He still looks wrecked, but the initial panic has been replaced by anger, if she’s any judge.

There’s nothing wrong with anger. And Yuna prefers this sort of outburst to the ones that have him turning his rage against himself. When he was seven he’d let it out by banging his head against the corner of the bathroom sink.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting. She feels the same fresh burn that she felt facing the nurse in urgent care twelve years ago: I’m trying my best, okay?

“Sorry, honey,” she says. She has to tell him that Farah is coming over tomorrow; she has to tell him that she’ll kill anyone who so much as sneers at him; she has to tell him that legally, the league can’t do a fucking thing to him, even though they both know the law is a paper tiger at best.

But she can do that later. For now she opens her arms and embraces her son.

4 November 2010

Yuna thinks that if Farah were a man, she’d be scratching her beard in this moment of rapid calculation. “Well, there are worse ways it could have happened.”

“Yippee,” Shane says flatly.

She has to remind herself that his prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed to stop herself from kicking him, and that he’s – conventionally, if not biologically – considered an adult to stop herself from scolding him. That’s probably a faux pas at any age, considering she and Farah are guests in his apartment.

“There are lots of ways to downplay it, if that’s what you want,” Farah offers. “But … it’s also … look, times are changing.”

“I was just thinking that,” Yuna says. “I mean, Calvin Klein had a whole rainbow campaign over the summer. And Jaguar just dumped a brand ambassador over a homophobic tweet. Actually, that might be a good place to start—”

“Before we get into all that,” Farah says, “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Shane?”

“What,” Shane mumbles. He’s chewing on his hoodie strings again. Yuna resists the urge to yank them out of his mouth.

“Plenty of people experiment at your age. I don’t want to assume it says anything about you.” Farah steeples her fingers. “But I can’t make good decisions without good information.”

Shane groans and folds forward, resting his forehead on the desk.

Farah gives Yuna a sympathetic look. It’s well-intentioned, but thoroughly unhelpful.

What Yuna would like, most of all, is for the population of the planet, all seven billion and counting, to agree that a picture of her baby boy at a gay bar, dressed up like a beefy aerobics instructor from 1983, is not newsworthy or notable in the slightest.

Failing that, she’d settle for the chance to take a tour of Shane’s skull, and determine whether he really doesn’t know what he wants, or whether he’s unsure what The Right Thing To Do is. They don’t teach this in parenting books (and they really should): if your teenager never rebels, they’ll never learn that your parents will love you even if you don’t choose The Right Thing.

Right before Yuna is going to guide Shane upstairs, to his old bedroom, and attempt the store-brand version of the magic David’s able to perform whenever Shane retreats into himself, he mumbles into his sleeve: “idonwnagstrngle.”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t want to, like, guest star on Glee.”

“I think we can accommodate that,” Farah says, very wryly. Then, gently, she adds, “Would it be easier if your mom stepped away for a minute?”

Shane takes a deep breath – the yoga is really paying dividends for his lung capacity – and unfolds himself. “No, it’s fine. Um.”

Yuna folds her hands together so she can’t drum her fingernails on the dining room table while she waits.

“A guy – came onto me.” Shane has his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his shoulders around his ears. “Over the summer. And I – didn’t hate it. But. He – I mean – I wanted – I wasn’t sure—“

Yuna looks away, blinking hard.

“I just wanted to know,” Shane says miserably. “People always says Montreal is the gayest city in Canada, and I wanted – before people started to recognize me.”

“That’s very reasonable,” Farah says, while Yuna is still biting down her first three unhelpful impulses.

Shane says nothing else.

Yuna sniffs once and clears her throat. “And how was it, honey?”

“Mom.”

“Well, you’ve had a girlfriend. And now you’ve had —” she stops, noting that Shane is making the same involuntary motions he does when he’s about to retch, and pivots: “— a little … experience with men. Did it clear anything up? For you?”

“I — that, um … well. It’s like …”

Fuck, she wishes David was here. Yuna places her hand on top of Shane’s, stilling where he’s worrying a hangnail. “Sweetie, it doesn’t need to be embarrassing. I promise you: both Farah and I have had bad sex before.”

“Oh, yes,” Farah nods enthusiastically. “Awful.”

And, whatever other psychic damage she’s just inflicted, at least it acts as a circuit breaker. “Jesus Christ. Mom. I think I might be gay, okay? Please stop talking about sex now. Please.”

“Thank you for telling us, Shane,” Farah says warmly. “I know that wasn’t easy, but it’s important to know so we can strategize. Now, there’s a few options.”

Yuna jots down notes as Farah speaks. Broadly, their options are: deny it (not recommended, likely to backfire); say nothing (high risk, high reward); wait until it comes up, then confirm (suboptimal)l; or try to get out ahead of it.

“If you were any other rookie under other circumstances, I would recommend saying nothing, especially since no one has really picked it up yet,” Farah says. “Unfortunately, the league has decided to make your rivalry with Rozanov the centrepiece of the upcoming All Stars game. They’re already trying to line you up to shoot some promotions, and they haven’t even announced the rest of the roster yet. Under those circumstances, I don’t think we can rely on these staying low profile.”

Shane sighs, both hands clasping the back of his neck.

Yuna waits until she’s sure Shane has nothing to say, then adds, “It’s your decision, sweetie, but – well. I know you don’t want to talk about it. Would it be better to talk about it on your own terms, or wait until they ambush you in a media scrum?”

It’s only after the words are out that she realizes she’s framing her preferred option as the best one in a way that might not be fair. After all, Shane can prepare for an ambush. He’s handled all sorts of bullshit questions about his race even when they’ve been asked at wildly inappropriate times. Some aspiring podcaster had even shoved a microphone into his face in the Bell Centre parking lot, asking if Shane’s heritage gave him a genetic advantage over white players. (That aspiring podcast is having a very hard time getting players to appear as guests lately, because no agent worth their salt is is inclined to let that behaviour go unchecked, especially not when Farah has had a word with them.)

Shane closes his eyes. “Okay. We get out ahead of it. How do we do that, exactly?”

“Unfortunately, my first idea was to guest star on Glee,” Farah notes wryly, making a show of crossing out a line on her notepad. It makes Shane snort, and Yuna feels colossally grateful. Every hour, every phone call, every ‘first date’ coffee shop introduction, every frat-boy-gone-to-seed she’d suffered through, the Excel spreadsheet with weighted rankings and a heat map, they had all led to settling on Farah as the best agent for Shane, and, though she hadn’t expected it be to quite so apparent quite so soon, there’s clearly no one better for him in a crisis.

“But, honestly, it’s up to you, Shane. I would suggest we – quietly – reach out to some brands that will line up with the … image you have of yourself.”

Farah’s doing the right thing, of course. Letting Shane decide what that image should be. But Yuna feels like she won’t ever be able to breathe again, if her Shane has to walk into a locker room knowing that ‘pansy’ has a ring of truth.

“We should lean into the – his masculinity,” Yuna declares. She’ll be the bad guy. She’ll do it for him.

“If I may,” Farah says slowly, when Shane just keeps on staring at the table, “your CCM shoot with Rozanov—“

“What about it?” Shane snaps.

“It played very well,” Farah says evenly. “Putting you next to him makes audiences perceive you as more Canadian.”

Under the table, Yuna opens the contacts on her phone. Near the top, her eye lands on Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord).

“More white, you mean,” Shane says.

“Yes.” Farah spreads her hands. “European masculinity, even Slavic masculinity, is very different from North American conceptions. If we get you two some more joint campaigns – sponsorships, or even just magazine features – a little bit of strategic direction will make you look comparatively mainstream, even if the audience is aware of your sexuality.”

“He’ll make me look less like a faggot,” Shane says bluntly. “Because audiences think he’s fruity.”

“Shane,” Yuna says, “I understand this is frustrating, but it’s a pragmatic solution. You seemed to get along with him well enough at CCM—“

Shane groans and digs his knuckles into his eyes. “Yeah, he was – fine. Good, even.”

Yuna remembers Shane’s words – a guy hit on me over summer – and wonders if the groan is because the guy was on the CCM shoot. One of the photographers or a makeup artist. Or is she stereotyping?

Shit. What if Rozanov was homophobic? Europe is usually ahead of North America about these things, but Russia isn’t exactly typical.

“He didn’t seem homophobic when you met him, did he? I remember one of the PAs was wearing pride pins – he seemed normal talking to them, right?”

Shane laughs. “No, not homophobic.” He drags his hands down his face. “Yeah. Okay. Pair me up with Rozanov. Why not. I’m going to take a walk.”

He shoves away from the table. Yuna watches him go, chewing her lip. It’s not uncommon for Shane to step away and return when he’s feeling settled, but under the circumstances, she’s not sure he’ll be able to settle down.

Yuna waits until the front door slams before asking: “It’s the right approach, isn’t it?”

“It’s the only approach, as far as I’m concerned,” Farah agrees. “Not Rozanov, necessarily, but the whole … hyper-masculine thing. Thanks for broaching it.”

“He can’t fire his mother,” but even as she says it, she thinks of all the other ways she could lose him. “If there’s things that you can’t say, I’ll say them.”

Farah leans back in her chair, looking down the hallway as if to ensure that Shane had really gone. “Yuna. Getting out ahead of it, playing him up as a manly guy, it’s the best approach. But I can’t promise what’s going to happen. We can position him to the world. We can do our best to get him all the support that’s out there. But we can’t control the locker room.”

The roar that’s been in Yuna’s ears, the one she forces herself to turn down whenever Shane’s in her presence, roils up, insisting on itself. There’d been an article on CBC this morning, about the criminal investigation into the firebombing of that gay couple’s house on P.E.I. Should she be looking into private security? How would she broach that with Shane?

Across the table, Farah reaches for Yuna’s wrist. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to frighten you. But there’s no precedent here. Not in the NHL. Not the NBA, or NFL, either. You and I, we need to be clear about this. For Shane.”

It’s not like a bodyguard would be allowed into the locker room anyway. It’s not like Shane would accept that. In a flash, she remembers how adorable he’d been when he began first grade, and stamped his foot to underscore his stance that he was “too big” to be walked into school now. It would’ve been around that time that the evening news had updates on the Matthew Shepard murder.

The roar crescendos, and Yuna has to race to the bathroom to vomit it up.

5 November 2010

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co…

5 Nov 2010 at 9:03AM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Alicia! This is Yuna Hollander, we met at the CCM shoot last year. Do you have a minute?

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord)

Hi Yuna, great to hear from you! What can I do for you?

Yuna Hollander

Do you happen to have the contact details for Ilya Rozanov’s talent rep? Something came across my desk that might suit him, but I don’t have a phone number.

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord)

I don’t, sorry - I liaised with Ilya directly for day-of! Priya from legal should have it though :) I can send you her number?

Yuna Hollander

Yes please! You’re an angel.

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

5 Nov 2010 at 9:09AM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Priya, this is Yuna Hollander. We emailed last year about Shane Hollander’s CCM sponsorship. I’m trying to get in touch with Ilya Rozanov’s representative – Alicia said you might have their details?

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

Good morning Mrs H!!! Lovely to hear from you 😊 I have a number for Anatoly Sapozhnikov, but I’m not sure it will help 😢 he had a coronary last year and went home to St Petes 💔 but maybe he knows who reps Ilya now? I’ll send you his digits!

Yuna Hollander

Thank you, Priya, I appreciate it!

Anatoly Sapozhnikov

5 Nov 2010 at 9:24AM

Yuna Hollander

Hello Mr Sapozhnikov, Priya Bhatla from CCM was kind enough to pass on your phone number to me. I am trying to get in touch with Ilya Rozanov’s current representative. Would you be able to share that information? Kind regards, Yuna

Anatoly Sapozhnikov

⚠️ This message was not delivered and cannot be retried.

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

5 Nov 2010 at 10:18AM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Priya, sorry to bother you again. Would you happen to have an email address for Anatoly?

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

No luck on the phone, eh? 📵 Sure thing, I’ll dig it up!

[email protected]

Yuna Hollander

You’re a wonderful human being. Thank you again!

Yuna says, “For fuck’s sake!”

David and Shane, thankfully, have retreated to the kitchen and do not witness her outburst.

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co…

5 Nov 2010 at 2:23PM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Alicia! No dice with Priya and I think this might be time sensitive… obviously I would never ask for an athlete’s direct contact, but would you be willing to pass my number to Ilya and let him know I’m trying to get in touch with his rep?

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord)

Oh, sorry to hear that Yuna!

I can certainly pass your details along :) Is this the best phone number for you?

Yuna Hollander

Sure is! Thank you – and let me know who I need to bully to get you a raise!

Ilya Rozanov (C) (Raiders)

5 Nov 2010 at 2:45PM

Ilya Rozanov (C) (Raiders)

Mrs Hollander, this is Ilya Rozanov. We met in the elevator in Toronto. You wanted to speak to me?

Yuna Hollander

Thank you for messaging! I’ve been trying to find out how to get in contact with your agent to discuss some branding possibilities. Would you mind passing along their email address? Thanks, Yuna Hollander

Ilya Rozanov (C) (Raiders)

I mean, if you have proposal to discuss, they will bring it to me.

We can cut out extra person.

What would you like to be telling them?