Screaming into the Wind

“So what is it about hockey that you love so much?” Jo asked, her hair falling in long golden curls across her shoulders and her narrow brown eyes honing in on Kendall as he sat across from her. “The bashing? The cold? I don’t get it, but I’m trying to understand.”

The crowded lobby of their apartment complex was buzzing with activity: three girls gossiping over scripts and Starbucks at the table beside them, a guy strumming a guitar in the corner, and other Hollywood hopefuls drifted in and out of the small area.

“No,” Kendall chuckled nervously, “it isn’t any of that…It’s kind of a long story.”

Jo took a slow sip from her cup of chai tea. “I’ve got nothing but time.”

Kendall didn’t really feel comfortable telling such an intimate story there, not with all of those people around, but he assumed that he had to tell the story in order to please Jo. He had to give a piece of himself away, sacrifice his secrets to form some sort of bond with her. He wanted to make her believe that they could be together, even though they had absolutely nothing in common.

So Kendall began to tell his story, his green eyes focused on the wood grain of the table and his mind drifting back to when he was only seven years old…

<<

It was just after Thanksgiving dinner, back before Kendall had moved to Minnesota, back before he had met the three guys that would eventually change his life, and back before his father had left him. As yearly tradition demanded, Kendall was forced to go out and play football with his dad while his mother cleaned up.

It wasn’t that Kendall hated football in itself. When he was playing it with the boys from the neighborhood, it was actually fun. It was just that his dad took things way too seriously; he was a diehard sports nut that practically lived and breathed football. Since his own dreams of playing college ball had been crushed with the conception of his son at the end of his senior year of high school, he placed all of his hopes and dreams onto Kendall.

A lifetime full of broken dreams and lost aspirations was just a bit too much to throw at a seven-year-old boy, but they all came spiraling towards him in the form of a white-laced ball.

Of course, Kendall missed the catch, landing into the fresh pile of leaves that his father had just raked that morning.

For the life of him, Kendall couldn’t remember what his dad had yelled at him that day. All he could remember was the sound of the wind whistling through the trees and the dreary gray color of the sky.

That night, back in his bedroom, Kendall could hear the yelling coming from the other side of those paper-thin walls, hear the almost-too-familiar sound of his parents arguing. He wasn’t sure why they waited until he and his baby sister were in bed; it wasn’t like he couldn’t still hear them. A part of him wondered why they couldn’t just be like those happy families in the movies, but another part was glad that Katie was still too young to understand what was going on. Kendall just laid on his back in his twin-sized bed, his green eyes focused above him as he tried to distract himself by making pictures from the bumps on the ceiling.

>>

The next Thanksgiving brought change: a new city, new friends, and a new family. When the divorce was final, they had to move to a small town in Minnesota to stay with Kendall’s grandparents, but things weren’t so bad, not as bad as they’d been before, but not as good as they would eventually get. It was one of those awkward in-between stages in his life.

Kendall did notice that his mother was happier; he could see it in the way her face would glow whenever she looked at him. She had also dyed her old chocolate curls a bright red, and in a way, Kendall realized that they were all trying to change, shed their old lives away like snakeskin.

In Minnesota, they played a sport that Kendall had never even heard of before the move: hockey.

He took to ice skating relatively quickly with a little help from his new friends. They’d go down to the rink every day after school let out, and they’d play street hockey with their rollerblades whenever the rink was closed. Kendall loved the chill air of the rink, the way he just seemed to glide over the ice, and maybe subconsciously, he liked it because it wasn’t football.

>>

When he finished recounting his past, Kendall took a sip from his raspberry smoothie, refusing to look Jo in the eyes until he heard her response. He was surprised by the fact that he didn’t hear her response, he felt it in the form of her delicate hand against his.

She whispered that she wouldn’t leave him, but he was hesitant to believe her.

Now, as he sat in the lobby of The Palm Woods with Jo, he felt as if his life was shifting yet again. His life was no longer dependant on hockey or football; he was learning that he actually enjoyed singing and performing. Though he wasn’t sure how long this boy band thing would last or how long he’d be with Jo, Kendall realized that he was perfectly content on not knowing.