Georgia
The call comes in Sunday evening, her name lighting up my phone right as I finish dinner. I almost let it go to voicemail, but ignoring her only makes the next call worse, so I answer, propping my phone against a stack of books on my desk. Her face fills the screen, already assessing me before she says a single word of greeting. I can see the exact moment her eyes flick down and back up, cataloging.
"You’re slouching," Mollie clips, the greeting itself an inspection.
"I’m sitting on my bed."
"Posture is posture. It doesn’t take a break just because you’re off the ice." She adjusts something on her end, her own background sharp and organized behind her - not a single thing out of place, the way it’s always been - and settles in with the particular energy she gets when she’s decided a conversation is actually a meeting. I brace myself without meaning to, my shoulders creeping toward my ears. "How’s training going?"
"Fine. Good, actually." I think about the ice here, smoother and more forgiving than anything I’ve skated on before, the triple lutz combination I finally landed, the quiet joy of skating for myself instead of for a scoreboard. None of that translates into anything Mollie would recognize as an answer worth having.
"Fine isn’t a metric, Georgia. What’s your jump consistency looking like? Are you still working the combination we discussed before you left?" she presses, each word measured and clipped.
"I’ve been working a lot of things."
"That’s not an answer either," she snaps, her mouth thinning into the shape she gets when she suspects I’m being evasive, which, to be fair, I am. "I talked to your old coach last week. She mentioned you haven’t sent any updated training logs since you got there."
Of course she did. Of course they’re still talking, still comparing notes on me like I’m a project handed off between departments. "I’ve been busy adjusting to a new school, Mom."
"That’s not an excuse for losing momentum." She leans closer to her camera, and my jaw tightens on its own, a reflex trained into me long before I understood what it meant. "This is exactly the kind of thing I was worried about when you left. New environment, new distractions, and suddenly there’s no urgency. Are you eating properly? You look thinner in a way I don’t like."
"I’m eating fine."
"Are you sleeping enough? You have circles under your eyes," she pushes, clinical and unrelenting, the way a doctor might list symptoms rather than a mother asking after her daughter.
"I’m sleeping fine, Mom." I press my palm flat against my forehead, the old, tight coil of frustration winding through my chest, familiar and exhausting all at once, like a muscle I’ve strained too many times to count.
"I’m not trying to criticize you," she says, her voice softening in that particular way that means she’s about to do exactly that. "I just need to understand where your head is right now, because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’ve lost your sense of urgency. This is your career we’re talking about. Scouts don’t wait around for teenagers to find themselves."
"Maybe I’m allowed to find myself a little," I fire back, my voice cracking on the last word, hating that it does.
"Not at the expense of everything we’ve built," she counters, her voice sharpening into something precise and clipped, the same voice she’s used my entire life to reshape every conversation into a correction. "You have talent, Georgia. Real talent. But talent without discipline is nothing. I need you to take this seriously."
I don’t have a response that doesn’t come out shaking, so I don’t try to give one. We talk for another few minutes, if it can even be called talking, mostly her cataloging a list of things I should be doing differently: my diet, my sleep schedule, the exact number of hours I should be logging on the ice each week. By the time I finally end the call, some excuse about homework barely holding together in my voice, my hands are trembling against the screen.
I sit there staring at the dark glass, my own reflection faint and hollow-eyed. My throat feels tight and small, my pulse fast under my skin. Eleven years old again, waiting to find out what I did wrong this time.
I need to move. The anger coils tighter with every second I stay still, and skating is the only outlet that has ever actually worked, the only place words don’t get to follow me.
I grab my skates.
The Fang is empty this late, the overhead lights humming low over ice that gleams smooth and untouched in the dim light, silent in a way that feels almost merciful after Mollie’s voice. I lace up fast, barely bothering with my usual careful ritual, and step onto the ice already pushing hard into my strokes, as if speed alone could outrun the conversation still looping in my head.
I don’t run through any program. I don’t think about technique or scoring or anything Mollie would recognize as productive. I just move, hard and fast and furious, carving sharp turns into the ice, throwing myself into jumps with more aggression than precision, working the anger out through my body the way I’ve always had to, because nobody ever taught me another way to do it. Every landing jolts up through my knees, proof that I’m here and she isn’t.
I skate until my legs burn, until the tight coil in my chest finally loosens, until the cold air and the exertion burn away enough of the fury that I can breathe properly again. By the time I slow down, breathing hard, sweat cooling against my skin, I’ve scraped the worst of her voice out of my head and left it somewhere on the ice behind me.
I don’t notice him until I’ve stopped and started skating a slow lap toward the boards to unlace my skates.
Puck stands in the shadowed entrance to the rink, still and quiet, watching, his expression unreadable even from this distance.
Something cold slides down my spine that has nothing to do with the ice. This is the third time now - the bent railing outside my dorm that first week, the way I’d catch him lingering at the edge of practice when he thought I wasn’t looking, and now this. I used to tell myself it was coincidence, the ordinary friction of two people sharing a small campus. It doesn’t feel ordinary anymore. It feels like a pattern I’ve been refusing to name, one that’s been accumulating in the margins of my notice long before tonight gave it a shape.
I catch only a glimpse, there for a fraction of a second, my heart lurching, and by the time I turn to look properly, he’s gone. No sound of a door, no trace of movement, nothing except the faint scent lingering in the cold air where he stood: pine, and something sharper underneath it, something like static right before a storm - and the strange, unsettled feeling that he’d been there far longer than I realized.