Chapter Five

His teammate, taller, blond, the number seven on his jersey leaned against the boards next to me with the specific confidence of someone who has never been told a bad idea was bad. "You're the journalist," he said.

"That's me," I said.

"Kowalski." He stuck out his hand.

I looked at his hand. Then at him. "The rut," I said.

He looked confused. "What rut?"

"The east wall. Tuesday resurfacing."

"Oh." Recognition landed on his face, followed immediately by the look of someone who has decided the best move is to not fully engage with this line of questioning. "Yeah, that's what kind of happens."

"It really doesn't, actually," I said.

"Blades catch sometimes"

"Not like that," I said pleasantly. "Not in the same place three weeks running."

Kowalski opened his mouth, then made the wise decision to close it. He had the expression of someone reassessing who, exactly, they had decided to introduce themselves to. "I'm just going to" he gestured vaguely at the ice.

"Good talk," I said.

He left. I turned back to my notebook.

"You just did that on purpose." Declan appeared on my other side, skates off now, sneakers on, jacket zipped. He was looking at me with an expression that was newer than the ones I'd catalogued, something closer to impressed than amused.

"He introduced himself," I said. "I was cordial."

"You cornered him about a rut in the ice."

"I brought it up conversationally."

"Kowalski looked like he wanted to leave his own body."

"He did leave," I said. "Quickly and without escalating. I'd call that a successful interaction."

Declan stared at me for a second. Then he made a short, genuine sound, the involuntary kind that was either a laugh or something that had been trying to be a laugh and gotten halfway there. He turned it into a cough, but I was standing close enough that the transition was not convincing.

I looked at my notebook with great serenity.

"Do you need anything else for today?" he said. "More architectural observation?"

"I have what I need."

"Good." He shouldered his bag. "I have a forty-five minute skate maintenance window in here before the next team gets the ice. Stick work, edge checks. If you want to stay for that."

I thought about my nine AM lecture. About the ten-minute walk from the rink. About the fact that I had everything I needed and staying was operationally unnecessary.

"I'll stay for twenty minutes," I said.

He nodded like this was the answer he'd expected, which I found mildly annoying, and headed through the gate onto the ice.

I watched him skate for twenty minutes. He put on music through a small Bluetooth speaker at the penalty box, something low and unhurried, not what I'd expected from a hockey player's solo session and moved through the edge work with the methodical attention of someone doing something they genuinely liked, not something they were obligated to. No audience energy. No performance. Just a person and a blade and ice, doing a thing they were made to do.

At the eighteen-minute mark I told myself two more minutes. At twenty I told myself just until the song ended.

The song ended. I wrote one last line in my notebook.

I was capping my pen and gathering my things when he skated to the boards and said, without preamble: "You used to compete."

I looked up.

"Your posture," he said. "When you watch the ice. It's different from how the journalism students who came last year watched. They looked at the players." He tilted his head. "You look at the ice."

I held my notebook.

"I still compete," I said carefully. "Figure skating."

"Right, but" he seemed to choose his words "that's not what I mean. You watch like someone who's grieving something."

The rink was quiet around us. The overhead lights hummed. Somewhere at the far end, a Zamboni was starting up for the next resurfacing.

I had not talked about this. Not to Hendricks, not to my teammates, not to anyone here who hadn't already known before I arrived at Harlow. It was not a secret exactly anyone could G****e my name and find the competition results from two years ago, find the gap, find the return in a different category but it was mine, and I was careful with mine.

He was watching me with the same expression he'd had when he talked about future tripping. Not pushing. Just open.

"I had a fall," I said. "At a competition. Two years ago." I looked at the ice. "I was going for a quad Lutz. It's a difficult jump. I'd been landing it in practice consistently. At competition I went for it and the edge caught wrong and I fell and I.." I stopped. "I broke my wrist. In two places."

"I'm sorry," he said. Quiet and direct. Not that sucks or damn or the nervous deflection most people did when injury came up in athletic circles.

"I came back," I said. "I'm here, I compete, it's fine." I said it the way I always said it, the way it had become its own kind of smooth surface, no one can see what's underneath. "I just can't do the quad Lutz anymore. Not consistently. The wrist doesn't, my confidence doesn't." I looked at my notebook. "Which is the same thing, in figure skating."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The future tripping thing I told you about," he said.

I looked at him.

"That's what it is, right? You go for the jump and instead of just doing it, some part of you is already at the moment after"

"Where it goes wrong," I said.

"Yeah."

We looked at each other across the boards. The Zamboni was getting louder. In ten minutes this ice would belong to someone else.

"I should go," I said. "Nine AM lecture."

"Right." He stepped back from the boards. "Same time next week?"

"I'll be on time next week," I said.

"Six AM," he said.

"Six AM," I confirmed.

I was walking toward the rink exit, pulling my jacket tighter against the cold, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. A text from a number I didn't recognize.

Then I read the name at the top of the message thread, which my phone had auto populated from the athletic directory when I'd saved his contact for scheduling.

Declan Mercer.

The text said: For the record  the quad Lutz thing. That's not a wrist problem.

I stopped walking.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

I watched your competition footage last night. All of it. You have the jump. You've always had the jump.

My chest did something I wasn't prepared for.

Then the next message came through.

There's a video from three years ago, qualifier at Regionals. You fell on the Lutz in warm up and landed it clean in the program twenty minutes later. You know how to get back up.

I stood in the corridor outside the rink and read the messages twice.

Then the final one arrived and I read it once and had to put my phone in my pocket and stand very still for a second, because it said:

Also I showed my sister your skating. She said to tell you the spin combination in your 2022 free skate was, and I quote, "not okay, who is she, I need her name."

I laughed. Out loud, alone in a corridor at seven twenty-two in the morning. Brief and real and slightly embarrassing.

I was still smiling when I pulled my phone back out to respond.

That's when I saw the notification behind his messages, the one that had come in three minutes earlier while I'd been watching him skate. An email from the athletics department, addressed to the journalism class distribution list.

The subject line: PROFILE REASSIGNMENTS MANDATORY.

My stomach dropped.

I opened it.

Due to a scheduling conflict with the men's hockey program's revised media policy, all embedded journalism profiles of hockey team members are suspended effective immediately. Students previously assigned hockey subjects will receive new profile assignments by the end of day. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, standing in the cold corridor with his messages on one screen and this email on the other, and thought about twenty minutes of solo skate maintenance set to unhurried music, and a sister with purple glitter, and you know how to get back up.

I looked back toward the rink door.

I had been reassigned.

He didn't know yet.