“Hey,” Ivy says. “No offense, but fuck off.”
Margot’s mouth opens, but she doesn’t know what to say.
Priya tries a laugh, but it’s nervous and wrong.
“You ghosted her, Margot,” Ivy says. “And I saw your comment on HaldenGoss, Priya…”
Priya’s laugh turns into a protest. “I?—”
Ivy scoffs. “And now you’re back because the hockey team made her safe again.”
They leave. Margot mutters that Ivy isa lot, which is the word people use for women who refuse to make their honesty comfortable, and the whole time I sit there fighting the urge I desperately want to banish.
The Halden Girl rising.
It’s a reflex, coded into the version of me that spent the last year learning that social friction is a personal failure and someone else’s discomfort is an instruction to become smaller, smoother, easier.
Go after them. Smooth it over. They might talk.
I know this voice. She’s dictated which version of myself showed up and which one stayed locked away. She’s the one who smiled and calibrated her grief into something palatable, and who made sure she never looked too angry or too broken or too anything.
She was useful, once.
She kept me alive when alive was the only thing I could be.
But I want more than that now.
Moreno looked at the uncalibrated version and called it credible. Rowan held the messiest, most unedited version of me I’ve ever let anyone see, and he didn’t flinch or contain it or route it through someone more appropriate.
He said he loved it.
And Ivy is eating bar nuts as calmly as you like, after telling two of the most popular girls in our year to fuck off. I used to think that was just Ivy, the way her hair is dark and her laugh is too loud and her loyalty has teeth.
But it isn’t a personality trait.
It’s a decision she makes every single day, to spend herself only on people who have earned the expense, while the rest of the world calls her a lot and she loses exactly zero sleep overit. It’s a discipline I shared, once, and desperately want to find again.
Because I’ve already got those people.
So that girl — that voice — is past her expiration date.
“You good?” Ivy asks, studying me.
“Getting there.”
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said in a year.”
I laugh. “It wasn’t ‘I can’t bear watching hockey tonight’?”
Ivy glances at the TV above the bar, which is tuned to the game. I wasn’t watching it, but now my eyes follow Ivy’s, and I can’t help but watch. Rowan flickers past on the screen, and everything in me pulls tight at how wrong it looks.
He’s technically present, but the thing that makes him Rowan — the instinct, the anticipation, the way he reads the ice like a living map — is gone. What’s left is someone trying to act out a version of himself that doesn’t exist anymore.
I know that feeling.
On screen, he dumps the puck into the corner and skates away from it: a give-up play, a freshman play, the kind of decision that keeps you from making a mistake but also keeps you from making anything happen.
“Some questions tonight about the captain’s focus,” the play-by-play voice says over a replay, as the jukebox cuts out again. “Hale’s been a different player lately.”
