Patins et pilules

Chapitre 10

**Un nouveau narrateur s'amène avec le premier chapitre en anglais de l'histoire. J'avais besoin d'un narrateur qui était présent avec Jérémie quand Maeva n'y était pas et je n'ai pu me résigner à faire penser un anglophone en français. Les chapitres suivants sont parfois en français, parfois en anglais mais il y a tout de même plus de chapitres en français.**

Liam

29 octobre

As I am in the shower, I notice a shampoo brand that I never saw, it's called « Loveurcurls ». I guess it belongs to Maeva, since Virginie's hair is as straight as hair can be. I owe a lot to this Maeva girl.

First, she helped bringing my friend back.

At the beginning of this year, things started to go bad for Jay. At first, his girlfriend told him that she wanted to move to another city to open a physical therapy clinic as soon as she would get her diploma. He didn't like the idea since it meant that they wouldn't see each other much during the season but he had always felt guilty about her giving up her dreams for him, so he let her do what she wanted. A few weeks later, though, after he came back from a road trip, she told him that she was leaving him for someone else and that's when it became really bad. He was shocked, and he became completely lost on and off the ice. At the practices and in the games, he had moments when he totally froze, like if he was on another planet. I was trying to talk to him all the time to keep him in the game but, from day to day, he was missing more and more on the plays and making more and more mistakes, which is so unusual for him. When he was not playing, he didn't feel like doing anything else than laying in his bed. I tried to go out with him, to make him meet new people, to change his mind but he almost never accepted and the few times he came, we had to leave early because he wasn't feeling well when surrounded with people. We all became really worried, and the team management met him and offered him to join the NHL player assistance program or at least to meet some people that he could talk to, but he always refused. Coach Champagne tried to keep him away from playing for a few games because, honestly, he wasn't really helping us and the media and the fans were hitting heavily on his case but, it was worse because he said that hockey was the only thing that he was still interested in and that they were taking that away from him. Before the last road trip of the season, it was decided that he would share his room with Colin instead of me. They said that it was because I was the best one to share the room with Niklas, who had just joined us a few weeks before because I was grown-up and responsible but young enough (or cool enough I would add) that he wasn't as impressed by me as he was with the older guys on the team like Colin or James. But deep down, I knew that it was above all because they thought that Colin would be a better "babysitter" for Jay because he doesn't like to party or hang with the other guys as much as I do. And, well, it's true that I like doing stuff like playing cards with the guys and that I often don't see the time passing by...

I'll probably remember that night in Vancouver for the rest of my life. We had been able to have Jay joining us at the restaurant for Jack's birthday and that was a little victory. But shortly after, he had one of these moments when he froze and started not to feel well. And, somehow, he talked us into letting him go back to his room by himself.

It's only in the middle of the night, when Colin's screams from the room besides mine woke me up, that I realized what a mistake it was. These memories will be stuck in my head forever, Jay unresponsive on his bed in his vomit, the alcohol bottles on the floor, the scent in the room, the paramedics coming in, everyone on our floor in the hallway, trying to help. I've known Colin for several years and he has been my captain for 5 years now, through good and bad times, and it is the only time that I saw him totally losing his shit. He couldn't stop screaming and crying, saying that it was all his fault. He wanted to go to the hospital with him but coach Champagne, who has known Jay for years and who personally knows his parents decided to go. I don't think any of us slept that night and we were totally apathic at the practice that day. The news we got from the hospital when the coach came back were not good at all, they had put Jay on an artificial coma in the intensive care unit and they were thinking about adding him on a list to receive a liver transplant, otherwise he might die. Needless to say, we lost that game in Vancouver, as well as every game on that trip, even if the news were better toward the end, when Jay was well enough to be sent back to Montreal and finally didn't need a transplant. Thankfully, we were already qualified for the playoffs, but we lost a row and had to play against the Bruins, the best team in our division. Colin and I were the players designated to talk to the media after these games, trying to explain the reasons why we were suddenly so bad while not being able to tell the media what was really happening and how we felt in the locker room. It was so hard, especially since we were both emotionally involved in the situation but sending someone else out there would have been suspicious. It's only when we got back to Montreal, after Colin and I were allowed to visit Jay at the hospital, after he thanked us for saving his life and after he recorded a little video for the guys that we started to play like we usually do and won the 2 last games of the regular season. Around that time, we decided to call Jay every day and, a couple weeks after he was discharged from the hospital, he was even able to secretly visit us in the locker room before game 6 against the Lightning. We won that game and got our ticket for the semi-finals. Unfortunately, the Capitals were too good for us, and our run ended in 5 games against them but, under these circumstances, I think we can be proud of our accomplishment. Even if I wasn't really pleased back then. After the playoffs, I went back to Red Deer, but I stayed in touch with Jay. On the phone, he seemed to do a lot better from week to week. There were a few times that I called him while he was at the pharmacy. To be fair, I think that it was because he was going there at a specific moment during the day when he knew that there wouldn't be many clients and that was the time that was convenient for me to call him, just after I woke up in Alberta. One day, I made a comment about the pharmacist probably being cute to make him go there as often and he said: