All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

POV: Ray For the first time in four years, I paid for a seat. The ticket was eight dollars. I held it in my fist outside Thompson Arena and read it twice, as if someone might ask me to prove I belonged. A cold October wind snapped at my jacket. Behind me a line of students stamped their feet and blew into their hands. The smell of popcorn and wet concrete drifted out through the open doors, and under it came the low roar I knew better than my own heartbeat. I had no jersey. No bag. No number. Liam had texted me that morning. Come see what you are missing. Then a second message, three seconds later. You are not missing it. I just want company. I went in. The arena hit me the way it always had, with noise first. Horns, drums, a thousand voices rising at once. The lights were hard and white. The ice shone like a sheet of polished glass. I climbed the steps to row nine, found an empty seat near the aisle, and sat down with my elbows on my knees. Then I looked at the ice and f

POV: RayThe guest speaker walked into our seminar room with a paper cup of tea and no notes, and I knew within a minute that he was not going to be easy to forget.It was a wet Tuesday afternoon in late November. Rain streaked the tall windows of the graduate building, and the radiator under them gave a slow, tired knock. The room smelled of chalk dust, damp coats, and the burnt edge of the coffee someone had left on the back table. Twelve of us sat around a long scarred table. Professor Wen perched at the far end with her pen already tapping."This is Dr. Aldous Whitlock," she said. "Listen carefully. He does not do slides."He did not. He was a tall, stooped man in his sixties, with a gray beard trimmed close and a cardigan with one patched elbow. He set his tea on the table and looked at each of us in turn, taking his time, as if each face were a page he meant to read."For fifteen years," he said, "I have worked on one question. How does an institution change?"His voice was dry

POV: RileyThe first snow of December fell on a Sunday, and for once I did not check the windows.I woke to a soft white hush. The glass was frosted at the corners. Outside, the quad lay under a clean blanket, and the lamps along the paths wore small round caps of snow. A bell rang the hour somewhere far off, low and slow, and the sound seemed to settle into the drifts instead of echoing.I lay still and listened to nothing.No buzz from my phone. No quiet fear humming under the floorboards. I had trained my body for a year to listen for a watcher, and now my body was slowly learning it could stop.I pulled on my boots and went out.The rink at six in the morning was a different country. The doors sighed open on a breath of cold that smelled of wet steel and fresh water. The lights came up slowly, blue and then white, and the ice lay waiting under them, newly flooded and shining like poured glass.I laced up on the bench by the boards. The leather creaked. My fingers knew every loop.

POV: MarvelOn my first morning, forty men heard the coach say my name, and not one of them cared."Martinez," he said, loud enough to bounce off the cinder block walls. "Third line. Left wing. Do not make me regret reading your file." A few players laughed. It was not cruel. It was only the sound of a room that had never heard of me and did not plan to ask. I stood there with my gear bag cutting into my shoulder, and I felt the old version of me, the captain's rival, the boy people watched, slide off like a coat I had borrowed.The city sat four hours from campus by bus. My apartment was above a tire shop, one room with a mattress on the floor and a window facing a parking lot. At night the smell of rubber crept through the vents. The rink was old. Half the seats were orange, one bulb was dead in the scoreboard, and the ice had a soft gray look under the lights, like it was tired of everyone.I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life. Up at five. Skating drills until my legs

POV: RileyThe form had one box left blank, and my pen hovered over it for a full minute.Major. A single word, and a whole life folded inside it.It was a bright Tuesday in April. The registrar's office smelled of toner and warm carpet, and a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, stirring the corners of the papers on the counter. Through the window the quad had gone green. Students lay on the grass with their shoes off. Somewhere a guitar was being played badly and with great joy. A year ago I would have chosen the safe word, the one my father had circled in red on every plan he ever drew for me.I wrote it in small, clear letters.Communications. Concentration, documentary photography.My hand did not shake. I read it twice, the way I read things that mattered, and slid the form across the counter. The clerk stamped it. The sound was a soft, final thud, like a door closing on one room and opening on another.I stood there a moment longer than I needed to.I planned the rest of it in t