~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Priya walked me to the bus stop even though her dorm was in the opposite direction, still lecturing me the entire way about weight distribution and something called “edge control” that I was fairly sure she’d learned from a YouTube video an hour before deciding she was qualified to teach me.
“Text me when you get home,” she said, hugging her jacket tighter against the wind.
“And don’t overthink the whole Marchetti thing.
You’ve got two days.
You’ll be fine.”
“I fell four times tonight,” I said, turning to look at her with my fingers gesturing four times.
“You fell four times and got back up four times.
That’s basically the whole sport, from what I can tell.” She grinned, already backing away toward her building.
“Go home.
Eat something.
Sleep.
You look like you’re about to collapse where you’re standing.”
I probably was.
My legs had that particular hollowed-out ache that came from using muscles I didn’t know I had, and my hands still smelled faintly like the rink.
Cold metal and rubber and something I couldn’t quite name.
I watched her jog off before the bus pulled up, and I climbed on with my backpack still weirdly heavy despite the fact that I hadn’t opened a single book all evening.
The ride home was short, fifteen minutes through streets that had gone quiet with early evening, streetlights flickering on one by one like the town was slowly exhaling.
I pressed my forehead against the cool window glass and let my mind drift back to the rink without meaning to.
Not the falling, not the humiliating scramble for the boards every four seconds, but the moment before all of that.
The hallway.
Calloway’s voice dropping when she talked about her father.
The flicker in her face she hadn’t meant to let show.
I didn’t understand why I kept circling back to it.
It wasn’t my business.
It wasn’t supposed to matter to me at all, not beyond the fact that I needed her to pass chemistry so I could make rent.
And yet.
By the time I got off the bus and walked the two blocks to my apartment, the cold had worked its way fully into my bones, and I was grateful, stupidly grateful, for the porch light my mother always left on even though I’d told her a hundred times it wasn’t necessary.
She was in the kitchen when I let myself in.
She was standing at the counter in her work clothes, her sleeves were pushed up, and she was chopping something that smelled like garlic and the beginning of a good night.
She glanced up the second the door clicked shut behind me, and I watched her expression shift to that particular maternal radar she’d always had, the one that could read a room, or a daughter, in about half a second flat.
“Hey, you,” she said, setting the knife down.
“You’re late.
Everything okay?”
“Yeah.
Just — practice ran long.
With Priya.”
“Practice for what?” she asked, furrowing her eyebrows.
I hadn’t meant to say practice.
It slipped out before I’d thought it through, and now I could feel her watching me more carefully, the way she did whenever she suspected there was more to a sentence than the sentence itself.
“Nothing.
It’s not important,” I said, already turning to walk out.
“You look tired.
And a little—” she tilted her head, studying me in that unhurried way she had, like she had all the time in the world even after a ten-hour shift, “—somewhere else.
Rough day?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said.
“Emery.”
“I said I’m fine.”
It came out sharper than I meant it to, and I saw the small flinch cross her face before she covered it, and immediately I felt worse than I had all evening, worse than falling into the boards four separate times in front of Priya, worse than agreeing to humiliate myself on ice for a girl who probably didn’t remember my name five minutes after I’d said it.
“Sorry,” I added, quieter.
“It’s just been a long day.
I’m going to shower and go to bed.”
She didn’t push, which somehow made it harder.
She just nodded, the kind of nod that said
*okay, but I’m here if you change your mind*
And she went back to the cutting board, knife tapping steady against wood.
“There’s food if you want some.
I made extra,” she said, pointing to a plate covered on a small table.
“Thanks.
Maybe later,” I said, looking at her, feeling guilty.
I stayed in the doorway a second longer than I meant to, watching her work.
The way she moved around that kitchen like she’d memorized every inch of it, which she had.
After twelve years in this apartment, twelve years of the two of us figuring out how to make ends meet without ever quite saying that phrase out loud to each other.
She hummed something under her breath, off-key, the way she always did when she was tired and trying not to show it.
I thought about telling her.
About the tutoring job, the deal, the ridiculous shot I had to make by Friday.
She would have listened.
She always listened, even after a double shift, even standing at a cutting board with garlic on her hands.
But I didn’t have the words for it yet.
Not the parts I understood, like rent and stipends and eligibility letters, and definitely not the part I didn’t understand at all.
The part that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with a look on a stranger’s face I couldn’t stop thinking about.
So I just said goodnight, and made it down the short hallway to my room before the guilt fully caught up with me.
She worked long shifts, came home and still made dinner, still noticed when something was wrong with me even after being on her feet all day, and I’d repaid all of that by snapping at her over nothing.
Over a puck.
Over a girl with a captain’s letter stitched onto her jersey who I’d known for exactly one conversation.
I closed my door quietly and didn’t turn on the overhead light, just the small lamp by my reading chair.
The one I’d had since high school, its fabric worn soft in the spots where I always curled my legs up under me.
I dropped into it without taking off my shoes, without doing any of the things I was supposed to do.
Like my homework, a shower, texting Priya back like I’d promised, and just sat there for a long moment, staring at nothing, letting the day catch up with me all at once.
The chair had been my mother’s before it was mine.
It had been dragged from apartment to apartment through three moves and two evictions we didn’t talk about anymore, patched up once by hand because we couldn’t afford to buy a new one.
I’d read half my textbooks in this chair.
Cried through a handful of bad breakups in it.
Back in high school, before college made the idea of dating feel like one more thing I didn’t have time for.
It had never once, in all those years, been the place I sat thinking about someone else’s face.
Eleven days until rent.
Two days until I had to somehow make good on a promise I had no business making.
One conversation that had rearranged something in my chest that I didn’t have a name for yet, and didn’t particularly want one for.
I thought about the way Calloway had said
*do you even know who I am*
Like it was a wall she’d built brick by brick over years of people wanting things from her.
Her attention, an autograph, a story to tell their friends about the girl on the recruiting poster.
And then the way that wall had cracked, just barely, just for a second, over her father and a handbook and a grade she was too proud to admit she needed help with.
I understood pride.
I understood it better than almost anyone.
Probably, the particular exhaustion of needing something and hating that you needed it.
Of doing the math on rent and groceries in your head during lectures because if you didn’t do it now you’d forget and the number would surprise you later, worse.
Maybe that was why I couldn’t stop turning it over.
Not because she was beautiful, although she was infuriatingly, unfairly so, in a way that had nothing to do with why I was doing any of this.
But because for one second, standing in that office, she hadn’t looked untouchable at all.
She’d looked like someone holding something together with both hands and hoping nobody noticed the seams.
But I noticed.
I didn’t know what to do with that yet.
Eventually the cold in my legs from the rink turned into a different kind of stiffness, the kind that meant if I didn’t move soon I wouldn’t move at all, and I hauled myself up out of the chair and into the shower, letting the water run hotter than was probably good for me.
I stood under it until my skin turned pink and the tightness in my shoulders finally started to loosen.
I thought about her hands wrapped around a hockey stick like it was an extension of her own arm.
I thought about the way she’d smiled, not warm, not kind, but something close to delighted, right before she told me to get in net.
I thought, uselessly, about what it might take to make that same smile happen for a reason that wasn’t watching me fail.
I didn’t examine that thought too closely.
I didn’t have the energy left tonight to examine anything too closely.
By the time I got out, wrapped a towel around my hair, and pulled on an old T-shirt that had long since stopped being anything other than sleepwear, the apartment had gone quiet.
My mother’s bedroom door shut, the hum of the dishwasher was the only sound left in the house.
I peeked into the kitchen on my way past.
She’d left a plate covered on the counter, a sticky note on top in her handwriting:
*eat something, love you, don’t stay up too late.*
I didn’t eat.
I meant to.
I told myself I’d have it in the morning, cold, standing at the counter before my first class, the way I usually did with leftovers she made for me on nights she suspected something was wrong and didn’t ask twice.
I slumped into bed instead, sheets cool against skin still faintly damp, and lay there staring at the ceiling for longer than I should have, my body exhausted in a way that should have made sleep instant and instead just left me lying there, replaying the day on a loop I couldn’t seem to turn off.
The way she’d said *not my problem* like a door closing, except it hadn’t felt like a closed door at all.
It had felt like a dare.
Like she wanted to see if I’d actually show up.
I would.
Obviously I would.
Rent was rent, and pride was pride, and I had exactly two days left to turn myself into someone who could put a puck in a net without falling over first.
But somewhere underneath all of that, in the part of my brain too tired to keep lying to itself, I already knew the truth Priya had tried to hand me on the bleachers and I’d refused to take.
This wasn’t only about the money anymore.
It hadn’t been, probably, from the second Calloway Marchetti looked at me like I was a puzzle she hadn’t decided was worth solving yet.
I turned onto my side, pulled the blanket up over my shoulder, and let my eyes finally fall shut, the last thing on my mind not chemistry equations or eviction notices or Priya’s laughter echoing off empty rink walls, but a single flicker of something unguarded crossing a stranger’s face in a coach’s office, gone before I could be sure I’d really seen it at all.
Sleep came slow, and when it finally did, it came with ice under my skates and blue-white light and a captain’s jersey I couldn’t quite stop watching, even in my dreams.