Lonnie spelledCHAMPIONSwith two Hs the first time, and we kept it that way for three seasons out of pure spite and affection.
My throat does something complicated.
No getting emotional…there’s a time and place.
Because I already did the crying.
I did it last night, face-down in a hotel pillow that smelled of bleach and stranger, after a farewell party that had no business being as devastating as it was.
The whole team showed up. Pete made a speech and ruined it halfway through by sobbing. Lonnie gave me a hockey stick they'd all signed, and somebody—I still don't know who—had writtenbring us back something shiny, O'Sheadown the shaft in marker, and I had to leave the room.
I wrung that pillow out like a dishrag.
This morning, I am made of granite, dry shampoo, and the dregs of a frosted strawberry protein shake I drank in the shuttle while a businessman watched me like I was eating a live pigeon.
This morning I am fine.
I sling my duffel higher on my shoulder, tuck the signed stick under my arm like a lance, and walk through the gates of North Star Elite College.
It takes the campus roughly nine seconds to start staring.
Now, I want to be fair. I am not a stranger to being looked at. In Knottingley, I was constantly looked at. A pink-haired Omega in goalie pads is not what the good people of West Yorkshire expect to see standing in a crease, and they made their feelings known with the subtlety of a foghorn. Old men at the boards. Mothers in the stands.
That's not natural, that one. Should be home, that one. Who let her, that one?
Loud. Always loud.
I learned to skate through noise like it was weather.
This place is different.
This place is silent.
It's a quieter cruelty—a hundred small heads turning, a hundred conversations dropping half a degree, eyes tracking meacross the frozen quad and then sliding away the instant I look back. Nobody says a word. Nobody has to. The disapproval here doesn't shout.
It hums, low and constant, like a fridge you stop hearing until it switches off.
I lift my chin and let them hum.
"Bonding services?"
An Omega in a North Star staff fleece has materialized at my elbow, arms full of glossy trifolds. Her scent is anxious chamomile, and her smile is the professionally exhausted smile of someone who has given this exact pitch four hundred times before lunch.
"The Heat Clinic offers confidential consultations," she recites, pressing a pamphlet into my free hand whether I want it or not. "Suppressant calibration, scent-neutral housing referrals, emergency suite bookings—" Her eyes do a quick, automatic sweep of me, the duffel, the stick. "The figure skating facility is the third building down, past the recovery center. You'll see the signage."
"I'm not here for figure skating."
"There's also a transitional support group on Thursdays," she continues, already retreating, already pitching the next person, "very welcoming, very?—"
And then she's gone, swallowed by the navy-and-white tide.
I look down at what she's handed me.
OMEGA WELLNESS AT NORTH STAR: A GUIDE TO THRIVING.
Inside: a Heat Clinic with its own glossy two-page spread. Suppressant titration schedules. A diagram of a "scent-neutral emergency suite," which is a fancy way of sayinga room with very good ventilation and a lock.
My stomach pulls tight.
