Georgia
I flinched before the crowd did.
Mandi drags me to the game Friday night with her usual relentless energy, insisting the home game against Rosethorne’s biggest rival is a campus tradition I can’t miss. She’s practically vibrating with excitement as we walk over, chattering about rivalries and past seasons and some sophomore she’s hoping to run into, and I let her voice wash over me without really listening, grateful for something to fill the silence in my head. The stands pack tighter than I’ve seen them since I arrived, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, the air thick with the smell of popcorn and cold breath. We find seats near the boards, close enough that cold radiates off the ice even from up here, close enough that everything feels different from the last time I watched Puck play, sneaking through the dark with no one else around.
Tonight the rink burns with noise and light, and Puck looks different too. Sharper. Like the crowd’s attention drags something more lethal out of him than empty practice sessions ever could. I find myself studying him the way I might study a stranger, trying to reconcile this version of him, all coiled energy and public performance, with the boy who warned me to stay away in a library lit by nothing but a single lamp.
"He’s good," Mandi says, barely watching, her attention locked on a cluster of girls three rows down. "Like, unfairly good. You’ll see."
I see it. He carves through the ice exactly like that night in the dark, clean and fast and certain, reading the play before it happens, slicing past defenders like they’re made of smoke. The crowd roars every time he touches the puck, and something in my chest tightens each time, some mixture of admiration and unease I don’t have a name for yet. I lean forward without meaning to, pulled in despite myself, and hate a little how easily he still commands my attention.
Then it happens.
A defenseman catches him along the boards, shoulder first, slamming him into the glass hard enough to send a visible shudder through the entire rink. The crack of impact rips all the way up into the stands, bodies and equipment and boards colliding in a sound that drops my stomach before my brain catches up.
I flinch hard, my body reacting before my mind finishes processing it, some old reflex built from years of watching bodies crash against ice and boards and each other, some deep certainty of what that sound should mean for the person on the receiving end. My pulse spikes, sharp and sudden, and for one disorienting moment I forget to breathe.
The crowd’s gasp trails mine by half a second, like they heard the wrongness of it only after I already had.
Puck goes down. For one frame he’s sprawled on the ice, limbs slack. Then he’s upright, skating like nothing touched him. No stumble, no wince, no hand drifting toward his shoulder the way it should if that hit landed anywhere near as hard as it sounded. I blink, half convinced I imagined the fall entirely, but the echo of the crash still rings in my ears, too loud and too real to have been nothing.
The defenseman isn’t so lucky. He glides slow toward his own bench, one arm cradled against his chest, his face tight even from this distance. By the time he reaches the boards, a trainer is already guiding him off, his shoulder clearly worse for wear in a collision he supposedly walked away from better than the guy he hit.
My hands have gone cold on the rail, knuckles pale. This is what the notebook already knows. Another line I could add in the same shaking handwriting: *the ice protects him, and something else pays the price.* I scan the stands, searching for even one face that registers the wrongness of what I just saw, some flicker of doubt to match the dread pooling low in my stomach.
Nobody. The crowd’s already cheering again, already swept into the next play, treating the hit like an ordinary hit with an ordinary outcome. Mandi claps along with everyone else, completely unbothered, not even glancing my way to check if I’m okay. I want to grab her arm, to ask if she saw what I saw, but the words die somewhere in my throat, drowned out by the certainty that she’ll only look at me like I’ve lost my mind.
I sit through the rest of the period with my hands still cold, the crack of that impact looping in my head, the certainty that it should have ended his night, maybe his week. Instead he finishes the game like it never happened, scoring twice more before the buzzer, the crowd roaring louder each time like he’s just having a lucky streak instead of doing something that shouldn’t be physically possible. Each goal lands like another piece of evidence in a case I don’t yet know how to build, and by the final buzzer I’ve stopped watching the game entirely, watching only him.
Rosethorne wins. The stands empty in loud, satisfied clumps, and I follow Mandi through the crush toward the doors, still turning the whole thing over in my head, still feeling that cold cling to my hands like it’s seeped into my bones.
That’s when I hear it.
Low, just behind me, pitched for someone standing close enough to catch it and not meant to carry any further. I recognize the voice before I even turn, that same cool, measured tone from registration.
"He’s showing off for her again," Bianca murmurs, her tone flat and assessing.
I spin fast, scanning the crowd, and find Bianca and Bella a few feet back, moving through the crush of exiting students with that same unnervingly smooth precision, like the bodies around them part without being asked. Bianca’s expression stays perfectly composed, perfectly unreadable, and something about that composure unsettles me more than if she’d looked away in guilt.
Neither of them meets my eyes, and somehow that absence feels more damning than any confession could.