Blue State

POV: Eli Hayes 

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She is going to be late.

I knew it the moment I sat down and checked the time and did the math on how far Branford is from Blue State on a bad knee.

I ordered my coffee anyway and picked the corner table by the window because it gives a clear sightline to the door, which is habit more than anything else. Eleven years of hockey teaches you to know where the exits are.

I have been at Yale for less than two weeks and I already have a system.

Early practice. Classes. Film review. Conditioning. Sleep. Repeat.

There is no room in that system for complications.

Silver Preston is a complication.

I knew who she was the moment I saw her on the plane out of San Jose, sitting in 14A with her knee brace and her Yale hoodie and her very deliberate effort to look at nothing except the window. Silver Preston. Junior national medalist. The girl who fell at Nationals in January and took half the figure skating internet down with her on the way.

I follow skating the way most hockey players do not bother to, because edges are edges and understanding how figure skaters read ice made me a better skater when it mattered.

I know exactly who she is.

I have known since the jet bridge at Bradley when she looked at me like I was an inconvenience and walked away.

I have said nothing.

It is not my information to use.

The door chimes.

She comes in from the cold with her notebook pressed against her chest like a shield, scanning the room with the careful, controlled sweep of someone who has been trained to look calm when they are not.

Her eyes find me.

She hesitates for exactly half a second.

Then she sets her jaw and walks toward me through the maze of mismatched chairs and study groups, and I watch her navigate it with the particular precision of someone who calculates every step before they take it.

She sits down across from me.

"You're early."

"You're late."

I hear how it lands. Flat and unwelcoming. Good.

The last thing I need is for Silver Preston to think this partnership is something I am enthusiastic about. She made it very clear in class, in the dining hall, in every interaction we have had, that she wants as much distance from me as possible.

I can work with distance.

Distance is something I understand.

"I had to limp halfway across New Haven," she says. "Some of us have mobility challenges."

I look at her knee brace.

The post-surgical kind, the heavy structured brace you only wear after significant reconstruction. I have seen enough injuries in locker rooms to know what that brace means in terms of what she went through.

I look back up at her face.

"Then you should've left earlier."

It comes out harder than I intended.

She goes still for just a moment, and I see the flash of something real beneath the composed expression she is wearing like armor.

Then it closes off again, smooth and practiced.

"Nice. Really showing off that Minnesota charm."

"Just being honest."

She opens her notebook with more force than the task requires and uncaps her pen like she is preparing for something significantly more serious than a coffee shop study session.

I stretch my legs out under the table.

The table is small. Blue State is not designed for two people who do not particularly want to be near each other.

"Fine," she says. "Let's figure out this project so we can both get through Chen's class without completely failing."

I wrap both hands around my coffee cup.

She is organized. Already has bullet points started, already thinking about themes and angles before we have said ten words to each other about the actual assignment. I clocked that in class too, the way she was taking notes before Professor Chen had finished the sentence.

She is not here to coast.

That is the part that is making this difficult.

It would be easier if she were careless. If she were the kind of person who coasted on a famous name and a history of magazine covers and expected the grade to follow.

She is not that.

She is sitting across from me at a scratched wooden table in a coffee shop on Chapel Street, fifteen minutes late with her jaw set and her pen moving, and she is going to work for this the same way she apparently worked for everything else.

Which means I am going to have to work alongside her.

"You don't strike me as someone who fails at anything."

I say it before I fully decide to.

Her pen stops.

She goes very still in the particular way of someone who has just heard something that landed somewhere it was not supposed to reach.

"You don't know me."

"Don't I?"

The words come out before I can stop them.

Something shifts in her expression. Fast and controlled, but I catch it. A flicker of something that looks like fear before the composure locks back into place.

She looks down at her notebook.

Starts writing bullet points about American literature themes.

I watch her work for a moment.

Identity. Reinvention. The collapse of the American Dream.

The irony of it does not escape me either.

I pick up my coffee and say nothing.

After several minutes she glances up and catches me watching.

"What?"

The word comes out sharp. Defensive in a way she probably did not intend.

"Nothing."

"You're staring."

"Am I?"

She looks like she wants to say something considerably less polite than what she actually says, which is nothing. She just redirects her attention to the notebook and keeps writing.

She is going to be difficult to work with.

Guarded and precise and completely unwilling to let anything show.

I know that type.

I have been that type.

"We should focus on authors who dealt with identity crisis and public scrutiny," she says finally, her voice shifting into something more neutral, more professional. "Fitzgerald after his breakdown. Hemingway's relationship with his war injuries."

I look at her properly for the first time since she sat down.

"That's actually not terrible."

"Thanks for the ringing endorsement."

There is the smallest trace of dry humor underneath the words. Barely there. Gone almost immediately.

"I'm serious. Most people pick something predictable."

"I don't do predictable." She looks up. "We'll get an A. I don't lose."

Something in my chest shifts at that.

I do not know if she means it as the statement of someone who is confident or the statement of someone who is terrified of what losing means for her.

Probably both.

"Guess we'll see," I say.

She holds my gaze for exactly three seconds.

Then she looks back down at her notebook.

And I drink my coffee and say nothing and think about the very specific difficulty of working closely with someone who is trying as hard as she is to be invisible.