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three hundred pounds. We never messed with him.
    He held up a small whiteboard. He’d written out instructions for me. Coach Jon did that because he didn’t trust that I would always be able to read his lips and understand every word.
    Some people who have been deaf for a long time before getting cochlear implants learn sign language and lip-reading. I knew many of them called themselves “deafies” and were proud of how well they coped with their hearing loss.
    Others, like me, received implants when we lost our hearing as children. We learned to understand sounds through the implants. We weren’t forced to read lips or use sign language. Still, I was good at it. Good but not great.
    But all of us with hearing loss become very good at understanding the world by watching it. Deaf drivers are usually much better than hearing drivers because they concentrate on what appears in front of the car, not what’s on the stereo. I know it made me a better hockey player—everyone said it seemed like I saw everything that happened around me. Off the ice, I’d always concentrated on people’s faces as they spoke, and I could read lips.
    Coach Jon didn’t speak to me. He just held up the whiteboard with instructions:
RADAR, MAKE SURE YOU DON’T GIVE AWAY THE PUCK
!
    I nodded. I knew what he meant. For the whole game, my passes from the left side to Nate at center had been off target.
    As the other guys on the line shift went onto the ice, Coach Jon wiped the wordsoff the board. He quickly wrote something else down.
    GO GET THEM!
    He smiled and patted my back. I stepped onto the ice to join my teammates.
    We lined up in the Rebels’ zone, with the linesman dropping the puck in the circle to the left of the Rebels’ goalie. As left winger, instead of staying on the boards, I took a position above the circle, directly behind Nate, who stepped in to take the draw.
    The linesman snapped his hand down as he dropped the puck. Nate fought for it but lost the draw. The Rebels’ center kicked the puck toward the boards. From behind him, the Rebels’ right defenseman raced to the puck.
    So did I.
    I got there first. I chipped the puck ahead along the boards, past the defenseman, and I chased the puck into the corner.
    I knew where Nate would go. That’s why they called me Radar. Because I saw the entire ice and knew how all the plays would unfold.
    Yes, Nate was in a traffic jam in front of the net, but he knew what I knew: where the open ice was. Back at the top of the face-off circle, where I had just been. It would be open there. He’d have time to shoot.
    I glanced up the boards and saw the defenseman racing for me. The safe pass was to bounce it off the boards knee high, back to our defenseman at the point. But time was ticking. A goal this late in the game would almost guarantee us a win.
    I floated a pass to the top of the face-off circle.
    Except Nate wasn’t there!
    Instead the Rebels’ center stepped in and took my pass. He had some momentum and used it to peel away up the ice, toward our defenseman on the point.
    The Rebels’ center saw that our defenseman had come in a little too far, expecting my pass. With his speed, the center knew our defenseman was trapped. The center banged the puck off the boards past the defenseman and burst over the blue line.
    The center poured on the speed, breaking loose. All alone on the goalie.
    He moved right and then left; then he flicked the puck up and over our goalie’s shoulder into our net.
    Just like that, we were down 4–3. Worse, we’d given up a shorthanded goal.
    Correction. I’d given up a shorthanded goal because of a bad pass.
    I hung my head and skated back toward the players’ box. I didn’t want to be able to read any lips as I took myself off the ice.

chapter eight
    About twenty-four hours after causing the Hitmen to lose the opening game of the season, I was standing on a street corner