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POV: Silver Preston

I leave Blue State with my jaw clenched and my notebook containing almost nothing useful.

We agreed on a direction. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the continuation after collapse. That part is fine. That part is actually good.

Everything else about the last hour is significantly less fine.

I cross back onto Old Campus through the wrought iron gates and let the familiar weight of the Gothic buildings settle around me. There is something about the scale of this campus that should feel overwhelming and instead just feels solid. Like the stone has absorbed enough anxiety from enough students over enough years that mine is not particularly remarkable.

I find Americus and Riley in a sunny patch of grass near the base of Harkness Tower.

Americus is sprawled across her jacket with a tube of holographic lip gloss in one hand, using it like a conductor's baton while she narrates something that involves considerable hand gestures. Riley sits cross-legged beside her with a philosophy textbook open in her lap, somehow actually reading despite the performance happening three feet away.

The afternoon light is the specific gold of early October in New England, the kind that makes everything look slightly more manageable than it actually is.

"How'd it go with hockey boy?"

Americus abandons her story the moment I come within earshot, sitting up with the focused interest of someone who has been waiting for this report.

I drop down beside them.

My knee registers the movement with its usual opinion about sudden changes in elevation.

I set my notebook on the grass.

"Fine."

Riley looks up from her textbook.

"That sounded convincing."

"Okay." I push both hands into my hair. "Painful. He is impossible to read. One moment it feels like he is running a full diagnostic on every reaction I have. The next he is delivering something that could freeze the Thames."

Americus's eyes light up with the particular delight she reserves for information she has clearly already organized into a narrative.

"Push and pull dynamic," she says. "Unresolved tension dressed up as academic collaboration. Classic setup."

"We are partners for a literature project."

"Sure you are."

"Americus."

"I said what I said."

Riley gives her a look that communicates entire paragraphs without a word, then glances back at me.

"Did you actually get any work done?"

"We have a direction. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Writers who kept working after public collapse."

Riley tilts her head slightly.

"That is a good angle."

"I know."

I lean back onto the grass and let the afternoon do what it wants with me for a moment.

Above us, Harkness Tower rises against a sky that is genuinely, unreasonably blue. The medieval stonework looks almost soft in this light, which I know is an illusion but I appreciate anyway.

Americus is saying something about Eli's jawline that I am choosing not to engage with.

Riley makes a note in the margin of her textbook.

Somewhere across Old Campus, a group of students are throwing a frisbee and arguing cheerfully about something that sounds like dining hall hours.

For a few minutes, I let myself exist inside the afternoon without thinking about anything in particular.

My shoulders drop.

My hands unclench.

It almost feels like being a normal person at a normal university on a normal Tuesday.

Then my phone buzzes against my hip.

One buzz.

The specific single buzz of a text message.

My stomach clenches before I have even looked at the screen, which tells me something about the kind of conditioning seventeen years with Leona Preston produces. My body knows the dread before my brain catches up.

I look down.

Leona Preston.

The contact name sits there in plain black text, and the preview beneath it is nine words.

How's the knee? Back on the ice yet?

No greeting.

No how is school or how are you settling in or I hope you are making friends.

Nine words, and every single one of them is about my utility as a competitive skater rather than my existence as a person.

It is so completely, precisely Leona that for a moment I almost want to laugh.

Almost.

Americus leans slightly in my direction.

"Who is that? You just went somewhere very far away."

I flip the phone face down against my thigh.

"No one. Spam."

Riley looks at me the way Riley looks at things when she is not going to push but she also is not going to pretend she did not notice.

I appreciate that about her.

I lift the phone again anyway.

Open the message.

How's the knee? Back on the ice yet?

I can hear her voice delivering it. Clipped. Professional. The tone she uses when she is asking about an athlete's recovery timeline, not when she is asking about her daughter's life.

Pain is temporary. Champions push through. Don't waste everything we've built.

Her greatest hits, playing on a loop I have been hearing since before I was old enough to understand what they were asking of me.

My thumb moves to the reply field.

Hovers there.

I could write I'm fine, focusing on school.

I could write still in physical therapy, taking it slow.

I could write something honest that would open a conversation I do not have the bandwidth for today or possibly this semester.

Instead my thumb moves upward.

Finds the contact name at the top of the thread.

I press it.

Scroll to the option I have never used before in seventeen years of receiving messages from this number.

Delete conversation.

The thread disappears.

Months of texts about training schedules and comeback timelines and the importance of not letting one bad competition define an entire career.

Gone.

The screen goes clean and white and completely empty.

I sit with that for a moment.

The frisbee game continues across Old Campus. Americus has resumed her story, the one about the costume design elective and the professor who apparently owns seventeen cats. Riley has turned a page in her textbook.

The afternoon is still the same afternoon it was sixty seconds ago.

But something in my chest has shifted.

Not fixed. Not resolved.

Just slightly more room to breathe than there was before.

I set the phone face down in the grass.

Above us, Harkness Tower stands against its unreasonable blue sky, and the autumn air coming off Long Island Sound tastes like something I have not had enough of lately.

Like the beginning of a decision I am finally starting to make for myself.