Chapter 6

Roselle's POV

“Ma’am, you need to come with me.”

The security guard’s hand hovered near my elbow without quite touching it, which I appreciated in some distant, disconnected part of my brain even as the rest of me was still trying to catch up to what had just happened. My knee throbbed where I’d gone down on the ice. My bag had slid somewhere across the rink floor during the fall, and someone I didn’t know was holding it out to me now like it was evidence in a trial I hadn’t agreed to be part of.

“I didn’t mean to, the door was open, I was trying to find the financial aid office, they relocated here for the day and I—”

“You’ll want to explain that to the front office.” The guard’s voice wasn’t unkind, exactly, just tired, the voice of a man who had clearly dealt with far stranger campus emergencies than one panicked freshman crashing a hockey drill. “Come on.”

I didn’t look back at him. I couldn’t. I’d caught one glimpse of his face right before the guard reached me, jaw tight, shoulder held at an angle that made my stomach drop even lower than it already had, and the way he’d said who the hell are you had landed somewhere just under my ribs and stayed there, sharp and humiliating, the exact opposite of an accident being met with grace.

The walk out of the arena felt like it took either four seconds or four years, I genuinely couldn’t tell you which. Every face along the glass had a phone raised. I kept my eyes forward, chin up, the way my mother had taught me without ever actually teaching me, just by living it in front of me for nineteen years, and made it out through the same door I’d come flying through less than ten minutes earlier, except now it felt like walking out of a different building entirely.

My phone was dead. I didn’t get it back to life until I made it to my dorm room, plugged it into the wall while still sitting on the floor because my legs had apparently decided sitting on furniture was asking too much of them right now, and watched the screen light up with more notifications than I had ever seen at once.

Chloe found me like that twenty minutes later, sitting on the floor by the outlet, staring at my phone like it had personally betrayed me.

“Okay, that face is not a good sign.” She dropped her bag by the door and crouched down next to me. “What happened?”

I turned the phone around so she could see it.

The campus gossip page, the one every single freshman had apparently already been told to follow within the first six hours of orientation, had posted a video. Fourteen seconds long. Me, flying through a door I had no business flying through, colliding directly into the legs of Jace Whitfield in the middle of a scouted showcase drill, both of us going down, him slamming into the boards, the whole thing captured from three different angles because apparently half the rink had been filming already.

The caption read: does anyone know who this girl is because she just cost JW the biggest scout visit of the season.

Six thousand views. It had been up for twenty two minutes.

“Oh no,” Chloe said, quiet, and then, because she was apparently the kind of person who read comment sections even when she absolutely should not, “oh no, okay, we’re not reading these.”

“Read them.”

“Roselle.”

“Chloe, read them.”

She sighed and scrolled, and even though she tried to summarize instead of read them out loud verbatim, I caught enough. Some idiot freshman. Watch where you’re going. Imagine ruining that for him, scouts don’t come around twice. Someone had already found a screenshot of my student directory photo from somewhere, God knows how, and posted it next to a comment that just said this is her, right, be honest.

My stomach turned over slow and complete, like something physically rolling inside me.

“It’s fourteen seconds of a video,” Chloe said, gentler now, setting the phone face down on the carpet between us like that might stop it from existing. “Nobody actually knows what happened. It’ll blow over by tomorrow, this kind of thing always does.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted it badly enough that for about ninety seconds I actually managed it, sitting there with my back against the wall, the two of us not saying anything, just letting the ordinary sounds of move in day continue somewhere down the hall, someone’s music too loud, someone else laughing at something in the stairwell, life continuing on exactly as normal for everyone who wasn’t me.

Then my phone rang.

Not a text. An actual call, the kind almost nobody made anymore, and the number on the screen had a campus prefix I didn’t recognize attached to a name that made my whole chest go tight before I’d even answered.

Office of the Dean of Students.

“This is Roselle,” I said, my voice coming out smaller than I wanted it to.

“Good evening, Ms. Adair, this is calling from the Dean of Students office regarding this afternoon’s incident at the athletics complex.” The voice on the other end was clipped, professional, entirely unbothered by the fact that she was calling to detonate whatever was left of my evening. “We understand there was a significant disruption during a scheduled recruitment event involving yourself and a member of the hockey program.”

“It was an accident, I was trying to reach the financial aid office, they’d relocated there for the day and the door was—”

“We’ll need you to come in and explain the full circumstances in person. Dean Whitmore has asked to see you tomorrow morning, nine o’clock sharp, her office, third floor of the administration building.” A pause, brief, clinical. ”This is not optional, Ms. Adair.”

I said okay. I don’t remember deciding to say it, it just came out of me, small and automatic, and the woman on the phone said something about bringing any relevant documentation and thanked me for my time, like this was a scheduling matter and not the exact thing that could unravel everything I’d come here to protect.

I set the phone down on the carpet next to the first one, and for a second neither Chloe nor I said anything at all.

“Nine a.m.,” I said finally. “Dean Whitmore.”

Chloe winced. “That’s not the nice dean.”

“There’s a nice dean?”

“There’s a nicer dean. She’s not it.”

I looked down at my hands, still faintly trembling, though whether that was hunger or fear or the particular cocktail the two of them made together when they’d been running unchecked all day, I honestly couldn’t say anymore. Six thousand people had already decided who I was based on fourteen seconds of footage. Somewhere across campus, a boy with a scholarship of his own and a much bigger platform than mine was probably telling an entirely different version of today to whoever would listen, and I hadn’t even caught his name properly before he’d looked at me like I was something he needed to get rid of.

“It’ll be fine,” Chloe said, though her voice had lost some of its earlier conviction. “You’ll explain what happened, they’ll see it was an accident, and this whole thing will be a stupid story you tell at parties in like a year.”

I wanted to believe that too.

I didn’t sleep much that night, and somewhere around two in the morning, scrolling through a phone I should have put down hours earlier, the video had climbed past eleven thousand views, and someone had finally found out my name.