~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Friday arrived exactly the way I’d been dreading.
Too fast, and somehow, impossibly, not fast enough.
I spent the whole day distracted, chemistry equations blurring into hockey diagrams Priya had texted me the night before.
Little arrows showing which way to angle a stick I still wasn’t entirely convinced I knew how to hold correctly.
By the time my last lecture let out, my hands had gone cold with nerves rather than weather, and I walked to the athletic center like I was heading toward a final exam I hadn’t studied for.
Priya was already waiting by the rink doors, bouncing slightly on her heels, way too pleased with herself for someone who wasn’t the one about to publicly humiliate herself on ice.
“You look like you’re about to throw up,” she said cheerfully.
“I might.”
“Don’t.
It’ll be memorable enough without vomit,” she said, already laughing.
“You’re not helping,” I said, frowning at her.
“I’m never helping.
I’m just here for the show.” She looped her arm through mine and steered me toward the doors before I could think too hard about turning around and walking straight back out.
“Come on.
Best-case scenario, you score and this whole thing becomes a great story.
Worst-case scenario, you don’t, and this still becomes a great story.
Either way, I win.”
“Comforting,” I groaned.
The rink was louder than I expected.
Not a full crowd, nothing like game night, but enough of the team had stuck around after their own practice wrapped that a small cluster of players sat scattered along the boards.
Sticks propped beside them, clearly having heard through some invisible grapevine that something worth watching was about to happen.
A few of them glanced over as I laced up on the bench, whispering behind gloved hands in a way that did nothing for the nausea currently taking up permanent residence in my stomach.
I fumbled with the laces twice, fingers clumsier than usual, and I caught one of the girls near the boards nudging her friend, both of them not quite bothering to hide their amusement.
I told myself it didn’t matter.
I told myself a lot of things in that moment that I didn’t fully believe that this was just a shot.
That Calloway’s opinion of me carried no more weight than Coach Marsh’s or the syllabus for organic chem, that whatever happened in the next ten minutes wouldn’t actually change anything about my life beyond a line item on a stipend form.
None of it made my hands stop shaking.
And then Calloway skated out from the far end, and every other thought in my head went quiet.
She moved across the ice like it wasn’t even a surface, like gravity had made a personal exception for her the same way I’d joked about days ago.
Her stick tapping lazily against the ice as she came to a stop in front of the net, settling into position with the kind of ease that made my two nights of practice feel almost insulting by comparison.
She’d swapped her regular gear for a goalie’s pads, oversized and intimidating, but her face above all that armor was doing something worse than intimidating.
She looked entertained.
“You actually showed up,” she called across the ice, voice carrying easily in the emptiness of the rink.
“I had money on you chickening out.”
“Who’d you bet against?” I asked, skating toward her.
“Myself.
I lose either way, apparently.” A small, sharp smile tugged at her lips.
“Whenever you’re ready.
Try not to embarrass yourself too badly.
I do have a reputation to protect, even in a scrimmage against someone who’s never played.”
I pushed off the boards and made my way onto the ice, wobbling exactly as much as I’d feared I would, painfully aware of every set of eyes tracking my progress across the rink like I was a science experiment nobody expected to go well.
Priya had stationed herself at the boards with her phone already up, recording, because apparently that was the kind of friend she was.
“You’ve got this,” she yelled, not quietly.
“Or you don’t.
Either way, I’m posting it!”
“Thank you for that.”
I got myself into some approximation of position, puck settled awkwardly against the blade of my borrowed stick, breathing hard already despite not having moved more than ten feet.
Calloway crouched low in net, all business now, whatever amusement had been on her face a second ago tucked away behind pure focus, and something about the shift unsettled me more than the taunting had.
She wasn’t playing anymore.
Not really.
“Anytime,” she said.
My first attempt didn’t even qualify as an attempt.
I overcorrected on my stride, ankles buckling the exact way Priya had spent an hour trying to train out of me, and I went down hard onto one knee.
The puck skittering somewhere off to the side, useless.
Laughter rippled along the boards, not cruel exactly, more the reflexive kind that came from watching someone fall in a way that looked like it hurt more than it did.
Calloway didn’t laugh.
She just watched me get back up, something unreadable behind her eyes, and reset without a word.
The second attempt made it slightly farther.
I actually got the shot off, weak and wide, sailing well past the left post into the boards with an embarrassing clatter.
The third, I overthought so badly I basically just tapped the puck forward and watched it slide, unthreateningly, directly into her waiting glove.
She caught it without even having to move, tossed it back toward me with something that might have been pity.
“You’re thinking too much,” she called out.
“It’s not chemistry.
You don’t need to show your work.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said immediately.
“It’s not, actually.
I’ve been doing this since I was five.
Nobody’s easy at anything the first time.”
Something in her voice had shifted, almost imperceptibly, less mocking than it had been a minute ago.
“Stop trying to be perfect.
Just hit it.”
I didn’t know why that particular piece of advice, delivered by someone who two days ago had told me my failure wasn’t her problem, was the thing that finally settled something in my chest.
But it was.
I set up for a fourth attempt, and this time I didn’t think about my footing or my grip or the fact that half the hockey team was watching.
I thought about eleven days, now nine, ticking down toward a number I couldn’t make disappear through sheer willpower.
I thought about my mother’s sticky note still sitting folded in my bag.
I thought, for one unguarded second, about the flicker I’d seen in Calloway’s face in that office, and how much I wanted to see it again, on purpose this time, not by accident.
I hit the puck.
It wasn’t elegant.
It wasn’t fast.
It skittered low and a little to the right, nothing like the clean, sharp shots I’d watched her teammates take in warmups.
But Calloway, maybe distracted, maybe just not expecting anything from someone who’d fallen on her first three tries, dropped a fraction of a second late.
The puck slid past her glove and into the net.
For one full second, nobody made a sound.
Then Priya’s scream of triumph echoed off the rafters loud enough to startle actual birds somewhere outside the building, and the small cluster of teammates along the boards broke into surprised applause.
Half of them laughing, a couple of them already pulling out their own phones like this was going to be circulating by dinner.
I stood frozen in the middle of the ice, stick still raised slightly from the follow-through, staring at the net like I didn’t quite believe what had just happened.
Calloway straightened out of her crouch slowly, pulling her mask up, and for a moment her expression was completely unguarded.
She looked surprised, or something almost like respect.
But it was gone as fast as it appeared, replaced by the careful blankness she seemed to keep on hand for exactly these situations.
“Lucky shot,” she said.
“A goal’s a goal.”
“Barely.” But she was skating toward me now, slow, deliberate, stick resting over her shoulder, and there was something in the way she was looking at me that made the cold air in my lungs feel suddenly insufficient.
“Fine.
You made your point.
Congratulations, you get to tutor me.”
“Was there ever really any doubt?” I asked.
“Enormous doubt.” The corner of her mouth curved, not quite a smile, something more complicated than that.
“But apparently you don’t quit.
I can respect that, even if the form was terrible.”
“I’ll take it,” I said quietly.
She stopped a few feet away, close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to keep looking at her, the same way I had in Coach Marsh’s office two days ago.
Except this time there was no office, no coach, no handbook between us.
Just ice and cold air and the sound of Priya still recording somewhere behind me, narrating in an increasingly ridiculous sports-commentary voice that neither of us was paying any attention to.
“Monday,” Calloway said.
“Library, seven o’clock.
Don’t be late.
And Hale—”
It was the first time she’d used my actual name, and something about hearing it in her voice landed strangely in my chest, more than it should have for two syllables.
“—bring better shoes.
Yours are a disaster.”
She skated off before I could respond, leaving me standing in the middle of the ice with a stick I barely knew how to hold and a goal I still couldn’t quite believe I’d scored.
Priya was already barreling toward me across the rink with her phone still recording and absolutely no intention of letting this moment end quietly.
“You did it,” she shrieked, nearly knocking me over in a hug that I was in no position, balance-wise, to survive gracefully.
“You actually did it!”
“I got lucky.”
“You got lucky, and she noticed you.” Priya pulled back, grinning in a way that made me immediately suspicious.
“Did you see her face?
That was not the face of someone who thinks this is just about chemistry.”
“It is just about chemistry.”
“Sure it is.” She looped her arm through mine again, steering me carefully off the ice before my legs gave out completely, still buzzing with adrenaline and something warmer underneath it that I wasn’t ready to name yet.
“Monday, huh?
Library, seven o’clock.
Very romantic.”
“It’s tutoring, Priya.”
“Uh-huh.” She grinned wider, clearly not buying a single word of it, and didn’t drop the subject the entire walk to the locker room, narrating an increasingly elaborate theory about eye contact and follow-through that I refused to dignify with a response.
I sat on the bench afterward, unlacing borrowed skates with hands that still hadn’t fully stopped shaking, and let myself replay it one more time.
The puck sliding low, the half-second where Calloway hadn’t moved fast enough, the way her face had gone unguarded before she caught herself.
I didn’t know what Monday would look like.
I didn’t know if the girl who’d show up at the library at seven o’clock would be the same one who’d taunted me across the ice, or the one who’d told me to stop trying to be perfect, or something else entirely that I hadn’t seen yet.
But for the first time since that hallway outside Coach Marsh’s office, the number in my head.
Eleven days, now nine, didn’t feel like the only thing that mattered anymore.
I texted my mother on the bus ride home.
*good day.
tell you about it later.*
Then I put my phone away before I could second-guess sending it, and watched the streetlights blur past the window.
One goal.
One name — Hale — said in a voice I couldn’t quite stop hearing.
Both of them settled somewhere in my chest I still didn’t have a word for.