That strap used to be mine.
Now she keeps it welded to her body. A boundary disguised as nylon and zippers.
Once, in April, she wore a deep green jacket I’d never seen. The color made her hair look darker. She was laughing at something Aubrey said, head tipped back, the familiar pull at the corners of her mouth flashing and gone.
Not for me.
I stood there like an idiot, grasping a cup I’d forgotten I was holding, watching her disappear into the engineering building. The coffee went cold. I threw it away without drinking it.
Other times I’d spot her ahead of me as she disappeared into a building I no longer followed her into.
She never looked at me.
That was worse than her anger. Anger meant I still existed to her, even as a wound. This was different. This was erasure. Clean, surgical, complete.
Theo made sure we never had to share space. He rearranged the project calendar, moved meetings, absorbed logistics without comment. When it came time to file, I insisted all three names go on the patent—mine, his, hers. The work mattered. She mattered. That was nonnegotiable.
We tested the sensor on the ice—me alone, at odd hours. It worked the way it was supposed to. The data was clean enough to build on.
We never tested it with katas. That became out of scope after the fallout. Not because it wasn’t valuable, but because it required her.
I’m taking the project forward now. Different lab.Different advisor. It carries her fingerprints. I don’t try to scrub them out. They’re proof she was here. Proof we made something good together before I broke her.
Coach let me finish the season after the investigation—after the meetings that stripped everything down to facts and consequences.
Reed was kicked off the team. The disciplinary board called it “attempted sexual assault and endangerment.” Breaking his nose earned me my own conduct violation for assault. But I’d do it again. Some lines you don’t let people cross, even when you’ve already crossed too many yourself.
The investigation cleared me of Reed’s actions but not my own. “Exercised poor judgment in agreeing to manipulate a fellow student for social gain.” Legal language for: you made a girl a game, and it doesn’t matter that you now care for her or that you stopped Reed. You still did the damage.
Isabelle Merteuil was gone by April. There was no announcement or spectacle. Just absence. Proof that power only lasts as long as people agree to hold it up.
The locker room shifted in ways no one wanted to name. Some guys looked at me like I’d broken an unspoken code. Others looked at me like they’d finally seen the game clearly and didn’t like the reflection.
The ice is the ice. That part hasn’t changed.
I love the cut of my blades, the clean geometry of motion, the way the world narrows to speed and breath and timing. But the attention—the roar, the expectation, the constant pull—doesn’t feed me anymore. It presses in instead. Heavy. Claustrophobic.
For the first time, I crave the quiet more than the noise.
I thought hockey was who I was. Turned out it was just what I was good at. There’s a difference. One youcan build a life on. The other just gets you through four years and leaves you hollow when the buzzer stops.
MIT starts in August. I’ll probably still skate—pickup games, maybe a men’s league. But it won’t be my identity anymore. It’ll just be something I love. That feels like freedom.
Mason and Riley didn’t ask questions they didn’t need answers to. We skated. We finished the season. We ate takeout late at night and talked about nothing that mattered. It was care, carefully administered.
The parties kept happening: end-of-season blowouts, graduation pre-games, invitations passed along like currency. I stopped going. At first, people noticed. Then they stopped asking.
The girls—some avoided me outright. Maybe the stories caught up faster than I did. Others tried anyway, smiles too wide, hands lingering too long, proximity overwriting consequence. I learned how to step back without being cruel. How to disengage without spectacle.
Growth looks boring from the outside.
When they call my name, I walk. The stage feels smaller than I imagined it would when I was nineteen and convinced this place would make me into someone inevitable. I take the diploma, shake a hand, smile for the camera. The noise drops out entirely.
Just my breath.
The weight of the folder.
The knowledge that whatever comes next won’t be carried by momentum alone.
