My hand trembles.
You have been here before. Standing at the edge of a possibility, staring at a door that might lead somewhere real or might lead to the same room you have been trapped in your entire life. You have filled out applications and submitted evaluations and stood on ice in front of people who had the power to change your future and chose not to.
And every single time, you went home empty.
So why is this time different?
Maybe it is not.
Maybe it will end exactly the way every other attempt has ended. With silence. With laughter behind plexiglass. With the maddening vocabulary of polite dismissal: maybe next year, the landscape is evolving, you are simply not the best fit.
But maybe.
That word again.
Maybe this is the one.
I think about my father's quiet smile and the weight of his hand on my shoulder.
I think about five coaches who told me no and then turned around and fought for me in the only way the system allowed.
I think about the seven-year-old girl in the portrait downstairs, all gap-toothed ferocity and scraped knuckles and a heart so full of love for the ice that nothing has managed to empty it. Not the rejections. Not the laughter. Not the slow, relentless erosion of hope that wears you down like water on stone until you forget what shape you used to be.
She would be disappointed in you if you did not click that button.
She would look at you with those enormous green eyes and say, what the fuck, Sage? Since when do we back down?
I exhale.
Click.
The application form populates my screen. Pages of fields and uploads and essay prompts that will take hours to complete. Name. Age. Designation. Athletic history. Competitive record. Personal statement describing your aspirations and why Valenridge University is the right fit for your goals.
I crack my knuckles. Roll my neck. Pull up a blank document for the personal statement.
And start typing.
The words pour out faster than I expected, fueled by fifteen years of early mornings and bruised shins and every single coach who told me I was extraordinary in the same breath they used to tell me I was unacceptable. Every sentence carries the weight of a thousand drills and a hundred rejections and the specific, furious resilience of an Omega who has been told her entire life that she does not belong on the ice and has responded, every single time, by lacing up her skates and proving them wrong.
It takes three hours.
Three hours of typing and revising and deleting entire paragraphs and rewriting them from scratch because the words are not good enough, are not fierce enough, do not adequately convey the scope of what I am asking for and what I am willing to sacrifice to get it.
By the time I finish, my energy drinks are truly empty, my eyes are burning, and the cursor is hovering over the SUBMIT button with the same trembling uncertainty it hovered over APPLY NOW three hours ago.
My phone buzzes on the desk. A text from Jeffrey.
Your mother is requesting your presence for dinner in twenty minutes. She mentioned the Beaumonts. I have taken the liberty of laying out your navy suit.
Also, I hid the dress she left on your bed. You are welcome.
I snort, a burst of laughter that breaks the tension just enough.
Thank you, Jeffrey. You are the only good thing about this household.
I look at the screen one more time. At the cursor blinking beside the submit button. At three hours of my life compressed into digital form, waiting to be launched into the ether toward a university that may or may not be the answer to a question I have been asking since I was seven years old.
Give them one more shot to see your skills in a place that will not find it easy to say no.
