All Chapters of Puck Around And Fall: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

45 Chapters

The writing on the wall

Thursday arrived the way good things do when you've been dreading them — faster than expected and without the courtesy of a warning.I'd spent Wednesday night doing three things simultaneously: rereading my Elowen chapters, talking myself out of rereading my Elowen chapters, and composing a mental list of every reason attending Ms. Okafor's writing elective was a terrible idea. The list was long and mostly irrational. It included things like what if everyone else is better and what if she actually reads it out loud and the deeply personal what if I cry in front of strangers over a fictional dragon librarian.I went anyway. Mostly because Ms. Okafor had said not a questionwith the energy of someone who had never once been argued out of anything.The creative writing elective met in the small room off the main English hallway — not a proper classroom, more like a space that had been a storage room in a previous life and still had the slightly apologetic atmosphere of something repurpos

Last Updated : 2026-07-07

What Knox knows

The rink at five-thirty in the afternoon had a different personality than the rink at eight in the morning.Morning practice was all business — whistles and drills and my dad's voice bouncing off the rafters like it owned them. But this was the tail end of the day, the ice freshly resurfaced, the overhead lights doing that warm amber thing they did in the last hour before the evening session. A few guys still lingered on the benches pulling off gear. The Zamboni sat parked at the far end like a very large, very slow guard dog.Knox was waiting at the boards when I pushed through the side door, still in his practice gear from the waist down but with the jersey swapped for a hoodie, hair damp and sticking up at the front in a way that suggested he'd pulled the helmet off and done absolutely nothing about it afterward. He had two cups from the vending machine in the hall — hot chocolate, the powdery kind that tasted like ambition and disappointment — and held one out when he saw me."You

Last Updated : 2026-07-10

Claire Merritt's Minnesota.

She talked for forty-seven minutes.I know because I watched the call timer in the corner of my screen the entire time, the way you watched a clock during something important — not because you wanted it to end, but because you needed proof it was real. That this conversation was actually happening. That my mother, who deflected questions about her past with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing it for decades, was finally, actually, talking.I stayed in the car the whole time. The heat was long gone. My breath made small clouds against the windshield and I let them, didn't wipe them away, just sat in the cold and listened.She grew up forty minutes outside Evergreen, in a town even smaller, the kind with one stoplight and a grain elevator and a high school where everyone knew your business before you did. Her parents were teachers. She was quiet, bookish, the girl who read through every summer and applied to colleges out of state the second she was old enough to understand

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

The other Side of the glass

I had been to exactly one hockey game in my life before Evergreen.It was a Ducks game in Anaheim when I was nine, and what I remembered about it was primarily the nachos, the way the cold hit you the second you walked into the arena, and a very large man in the row behind us who screamed so hard during a penalty call that he knocked his beer into our row and apologized so genuinely that Dad invited him to sit with us. I remembered nothing about the hockey itself. I had spent most of the third period reading a book I'd hidden in my jacket.The point is: I came to tonight with a limited frame of reference and zero expectations.That was, it turned out, the right way to come.The Evergreen Eagles' home rink held about twelve hundred people when it was full, which it was tonight because it was always full on home game nights — this was what Finn had told me on the walk from the parking lot, breath fogging, hands shoved in his hoodie pocket. The whole town showed up. It was the thing they

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

The Danger of Easy

The text came in on a Wednesday morning, sandwiched between my alarm and the sound of Dad burning toast downstairs.Finn: Hey. Completely unrelated to anything — how are you at literary analysis?Me: Define how are you at.Finn: Like. Do you understand it. As a concept.Me: Finn.Finn: I have a paper due Friday and Okafor is going to see right through me if I try to fake my way through the symbolism in Gatsby and I would rather eat a puck than ask Knox because he'll just tell me to ask you anyway so I'm cutting out the middleman.I stared at the screen for a moment. Then I got up, got dressed, and texted back: Frosty Mug. Four o'clock. Bring the book and whatever notes you have.Finn: You're a lifesaver, California.Me: You owe me a hot chocolate.Finn: Done. Extra marshmallows.Me: Obviously.The Frosty Mug on a Wednesday afternoon was a different creature from the Frosty Mug on a weekend. Quieter, softer around the edges. A few regulars at the counter nursing coffee and doing crossw

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

Vending Machine Crackers

I found out Knox wasn't at practice the same way I found out most things in Evergreen — through the group chat, which operated with the speed and accuracy of a small-town nervous system and the editorial restraint of absolutely none.The message was from Torres: Captain's out today. Family stuff. Coach has us running suicides for the foreseeable future. Pray for us.Below it, a chain of crying emojis and one from a junior defenseman that just said this is a war crime which felt slightly dramatic but not entirely wrong given my dad's relationship with conditioning drills.I read it sitting in the library annex during my free period, Elowen open on my laptop and going exactly nowhere, and I sat with the two words — family stuff — and what they meant in the specific context of Knox Callahan, whose family stuff had one primary address.I texted him before I fully decided to.Me: Hey. You okay?The reply took twelve minutes, which was long for Knox.Knox: Dad's been admitted. Observation.

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

The Talk

Dad had a tell.It wasn't obvious. You had to have lived with him for seventeen years, through three different cities and two different coaching staffs and the great Incident of 2019 where he tried to give me a driving lesson and we didn't speak about it for a week. But if you had that context — if you knew the specific way he reorganized the refrigerator when he was thinking hard about something, alphabetizing the condiments like the universe would realign if the hot sauce came before the ketchup — then you could see it coming from about four rooms away.The condiments were alphabetized when I came down Saturday morning.I poured my coffee and sat down and waited.He came in from the garage in his Eagles hoodie, saw me sitting at the island, and did the thing where he decided to make eggs he didn't need in order to have something to do with his hands. I watched him crack two into the pan with the focused attention of a man performing a very normal activity that was definitely not a s

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

Elowen Goes Through The Door

I almost didn't bring it.The chapter had been sitting in my notebook since Tuesday — handwritten, which I almost never did anymore, but something about the night after the hospital had made typing feel too clean, too final. I'd needed the drag of a pen. The way handwriting slowed you down and made you commit to each word before the next one arrived.Elowen went through the door on page three.I had written it in one sitting, two in the morning, the house quiet and the Minnesota dark doing its particular thing outside my window. It had come out the way the best writing sometimes did — not constructed but discovered, like the chapter had already existed somewhere and I was just the person holding the pen when it surfaced. I had read it back once, changed four words, and closed the notebook.I hadn't looked at it again until Thursday morning when I was packing my bag for the elective.I put it in. Took it out. Put it back in. Arrived at Ms. Okafor's repurposed-storage-room with it wedge

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

Beware of Nice

Riley Voss smiled at me on a Monday morning and I almost walked into a locker.Not because the smile was warm — it wasn't, exactly, it was the kind of smile that had been assembled from the correct components but in the slightly wrong order, like a sentence that was grammatically fine but semantically suspicious. It was because Riley Voss had spent the better part of my first three weeks at Evergreen High treating me like a weather event she was waiting to pass, and now she was standing by the water fountain in the east corridor at eight fourteen in the morning with her cheer squad flanking her like a very well-dressed security detail, and she was smiling at me like we were old friends who had simply been too busy to connect."Avery," she said. Warm. Easy. "Cute sweater."I looked down at my sweater. It was the green one. Fine sweater. Nothing notable."Thanks," I said, because I had apparently left my survival instincts in AP Lit."We're doing a spirit week planning committee meeting

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

Robert Callahan, Menace

Knox warned me about his dad on the drive over.Not in a concerning way. In the specific, slightly pained way that people warned you about family members they loved unreservedly and were also mildly embarrassed by on a situational basis. He said it while merging onto the main road, one hand on the wheel, eyes forward, with the energy of someone delivering a legal disclaimer before a theme park ride."He's going to ask you questions," Knox said."Okay.""A lot of questions. Personal ones. He has no concept of the warm-up period.""I can handle questions.""He's also going to make at least one joke that lands somewhere between dad humor and actual comedy and you're going to laugh and then he's going to think he's hilarious for the rest of the visit, which will make the jokes worse.""Knox.""I'm just managing expectations.""You've mentioned the questions twice now. How many questions are we talking?"He glanced at me sideways. "When Finn came to visit sophomore year after the ankle thi

Last Updated : 2026-07-15

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