Chapter 2: Night Rendezvous with the Jock

FEYA

The St. Jude Rink at 8:00 PM looked and smelt like hell. The room was a nightmare of tangled laces, spare jerseys, and the sharp, metallic tang of skate sharpeners.

I had already reorganized the pucks by weight and color; black, orange for practice, and the blue weighted ones. It took me twelve minutes and made me feel 4.2% better.

And Jaxson Rivers was late. When he finally showed up, I said, "You’re seven minutes and fourteen seconds late,"

"I was on the ice. Some of us actually do work instead of just counting decimals."

I chose not to grace that with an answer.

He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, his Physics mid-term review and slapped it onto the equipment trunk I was using as a desk. "Just tell me what the symbols mean so I can pass this thing and get back to my life."

I looked at the paper that was covered in coffee stains and what looked like a half-hearted doodle of a hockey stick. "This is an absolute mess."

Jaxson stepped closer, invading my personal bubble. "Listen, Einstein. I’m here because I have to be. You’re here because you’re a delinquent. Let's keep the commentary to a minimum and the answers to a maximum."

"I am not a vending machine for answers, You have to know what force is…”

"I know what force is," he snapped. He reached for the pen in my hand, but as he did, his fingers missed by nearly two inches.

I paused. He blinked rapidly, a sharp furrow appearing between his brows.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine," he growled, finally snagging the pen on the second try. He rubbed his temple with the ball of his hand, hard. "The lights in here are just... cheap. They flick. It's annoying."

"They don't flicker," I informed him. "The ballast is operating at a standard sixty-hertz frequency. It’s perfectly stable."

He didn’t seem like he heard me, leaning over the paper, his shoulders hunched. "Just... explain the equation. Slowly."

I watched him for a moment. He was squinting so hard his eyes were almost shut.

"Fine," I said, deciding to ignore it. I began to tutor him using hockey terminology that would be easier for him to grasp and surprisingly, he did and remained quiet except while asking for clarification.

Forty minutes passed and he was frustrated, his movements jerky and impatient, while his eyes looked hazy.

"I can't do this," he finally hissed, shoving the paper away. "The letters are moving. It’s like they’re trying to crawl off the page."

"Letters are inanimate, Mr. Rivers."

"It's a figure of speech, you robot!" He stood up suddenly, and the chair screeched against the floor. I covered my ears, the sound vibrating through my skull like a drill.

I hissed and clapped my hands over my ears, my shoulders tight and hunched. There was blissful silence for a few seconds and then…

"You're really... weird, you know?" he asked, his voice quieter.

I said nothing. He sighed and reached for his gear bag, his hand trembling slightly. I watched him, my brain calculating the probability of him passing this test.

It was currently at 12%.

"Tonight was a failure," I said, standing and packing my bag. "Your cognitive retention is zero. We need a different environment.”

"It's the only place Wallace said we could go," Jaxson said tiredly, heading for the door. "See you tomorrow. Try not to hack any satellites in the meantime."

Then just like that, he was gone and I made the short trek to my dorm room.

"How was it?" Maya asked as I entered and began carefully undressing.

"He is arrogant, basically illiterate, and he calls me weird a lot," I said, staring straight ahead. "Also, I think something’s really wrong with him."

"Aside from his terrible personality?" Maya joked.

I sighed. “If I had more time, there would be a higher chance of him passing this test. But only a week?”

I stared out of the window as Maya weaved through the campus roads, heading to our shared dormitory. “I need to do some things differently. But what?”

Maya threw a sympathetic glance at me as she pulled up in the parking lot of our dorm. “Whatever it is, you’ll figure it out, you brainiac. And you know I’ll help in any way if you need me to.”

I knew that.

But I also knew I only had 6 days left.