Taking a Shot Read Online Free

shook my head. “Webs would kill me.”
    “This isn’t about Webs. It’s about Katie.” Kally shifted even more in his seat, so much that he was practically in the back with me and had to be breaking the law sitting that way. “Hopefully she’ll be fine in a few months or a year, and she can make a lot more good memories—but she might not be fine. She deserves to have this one, and her dad will see that eventually. He’ll come around. But he can’t give it to her—that kind of memory. You can.”
    “He’s right,” Soupy said, his eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror to meet mine. “And she needs a reason to fight. She looks like she’s giving up.”
    I knew Kally was right, at least some part of me did, and what Soupy said about her giving up made me feel physically ill. But still… “How the hell am I supposed to get Webs to let me take her to her prom?”
    Soupy turned into our parking garage. “You listen to what Zee said. You do what you know is right even though you’re scared.”
    “You never know how long you’ll have with her,” Kally said. He turned around in his seat, facing forward again. “Don’t put things off, because you might regret it someday.”
     
     
     
    AARON LUDWICZAK DIDN’T see the Colorado player cutting across the middle of the ice toward him, not even in the half-second before he got hit.
    I didn’t notice who ran him over. All I could focus on was how hard Luddy’s head hit the ice when he dropped. The impact snapped his helmet off, and it went skidding across the ice in the opposite direction of his suddenly prone body.
    “Fuck!” Scotty Thomas, our head coach, paced behind me on the bench while the trainers and medical staff headed out to check on Luddy.
    The boys and I were all on our feet, trying to get a better look. After a minute, they had Luddy up on his knees and were helping him stand. That was a good sign—Luddy getting up—even if it wasn’t completely on his own. That meant at least they weren’t going to take him off on a stretcher. They’d had to do that with our starting goalie, Nicklas Ericsson, a few months back. Nicky had only returned from his concussion a couple of games ago. Not that you could tell anything about a concussion based on whether a stretcher was needed or not. And Luddy could still have one.
    Hard to imagine that wasn’t the case when you saw the way he hit the ice. The arena crew kept replaying the impact on the Jumbotron overhead, making sure we wouldn’t be able to erase it from our memories.
    The trainers brought him past the bench on the way to the tunnel, and he nodded at us. “Give ’em hell, boys.”
    Eddie Masters, the head trainer, stopped right in front of me. His eyes were focused on Scotty behind me. “We’re taking him out of the game for concussion protocol. We’ll know more later.”
    “Yeah. Right,” Scotty said. “Fuck.” He looked up and down the bench, and the two assistant coaches came over to him. “I don’t want to screw with Zee’s line. They’ve been working together too well lately.”
    Good. That was my line. Zee, Soupy, and I had made up the second line for big stretches of the last two seasons. I was pretty sure all three of us liked it that way, too.
    “What about moving Kally up to take Luddy’s place on the top line?” Hammer suggested. They’d had Kally skating on the third line this game, but he’d been all over the place while they tried to find a good fit for him, to find someone he could have chemistry with and get him scoring again…pretty much everywhere but the top line.
    Scotty dragged a hand over his face. “He hasn’t scored a fucking goal since he got here.” He grabbed the clipboard from Hammer, scouring it with his eyes. You could almost see the way he was trying to piece together line combinations in his head.
    “What better options do we have?” Hammer said. “At least for the rest of the game, and then we’ll see what happens with Luddy. Besides, he