Page 190 of Slashed Bonds

Five years later. One game. And they’re in a car with a can of gas because they still think they own me.

Laughable. That’s what it is, when I can get far enough from it to look. The pure comedy of men who have everything deciding that one Omega on one roster is a threat worth a felony. I’d laugh if I had the energy. I don’t. So I lie here and let it sit on me like a cat.

Meanwhile the world went insane.

Two weeks of trending. Not a day off. You can’t open an app without finding us, the intro and the masks and the spin, and the forehead kiss that Maddie posted from three angles before we were off the ice. The good and the horrendous, both at volume. Half the internet adores the way we look, the ink and the metal and the red grins. The other half is disgusted by it, and they’re both loud, and they’ve both decided we’re a referendum on something.

We’ve tainted hockey. We’ve brought hockey back to what it was. Pick one, people. You can’t have both.

The back-and-forth is the funniest thing I’ve read in years. I’ve been doom-scrolling it from under the comforter at three in the morning with the brightness down, and there are grown men in the comments having what amount to breakdowns about Killian’s hair.

Coach and Roz are not laughing.

They’re too busy. Twenty-five inquiries in two weeks. Programs, leagues, a broadcast outfit from a country I had to look up, all of them abruptly fascinated by a team they didn’t know existed a month ago. And sponsors. Not one or two. A list. Roz read it out at the debrief with her reading glasses on and her voice getting flatter with every name, the way a woman reads when she doesn’t trust the numbers in front of her.

A cheque. Today. Some kind of cheque, for some kind of amount, and I’ve been too miserable to go downstairs and find out what.

Then there’s the fan club.

My fan club. Mine. Somebody made it, and then a lot of somebodies joined it, and now there’s a corner of the internet where people I’ve never met post stills of my hip check and argue about my lipstick shade. It’s intriguing. That’s the most I’ll give it. The attention sits wrong on my skin, like a sweater in the wrong size, because these are the same people. The same public. The ones who looked at a frame-up five years ago and decided it was a confession, who called me a druggie on every platform that existed, who forsook me in about the time it takes to type it.

Some of them are still at it. Doping. Remember the doping. She was dirty then and she’s dirty now. Making it their mission to drag the old story back up into the light.

And they’re losing.

That’s the strange part. I’ve been watching it happen from bed. The fan club, and people who aren’t in it, people with no reason to care, have made it their business to defend the only Omega with the balls to be on the Blackridge Vipers. They’re pulling the old reports. They’re finding the gaps. They’re posting side-by-sides of Alphas who’ve done lines on camera and been drunk on the bench and make eight figures a year regardless, and asking why one eighteen-year-old Omega’s panel got her exiled when a man’s gets him a reality show.

They’re proving my innocence. Strangers. On their phones. For free. Where were you.

I don’t know what to do with it. I let it happen.

And the notes have stopped.

Not one since the fire. No burner, no 2:13, no paper under a rock. Two weeks of silence from Halbrook, which should feel like a reprieve and feels like the quiet before a hit, the half second when you’ve seen the shoulder drop and the glass hasn’t taken you yet.

I’m numb to it. That’s the truth. Whatever part of me used to do fear about those four men has been burned out along with everything else, and what’s left is a flat gray patience that I think might be the Switch’s and might be mine. I can’t tell anymore. The line’s moved.

Right now I’m focused on not dying.

Because that’s the actual project. Not the pack, not the sponsors, not the cheque. The meds.

Dr. Lessard. That’s the Omega doctor the team assigned me, the one from two towns over who ran tests on me while I slept the day before Ashford and came back with a face like a closed door. She’s a ruthless bitch. I mean that as the compliment she’d take it as. Sixty, maybe, with gray hair cut short as a man’s and a Beta’s total immunity to anybody’s scent or mood or charm, and she sat me down the morning after the fire with my file open and said four things.

This combination is killing you faster than it’s saving you. Whoever prescribed it was treating a chart, not a woman. You’ll taper off everything over ten days. It will be unpleasant.

Unpleasant.

Thrilling. Truly.

Ten days became three days of functioning badly and then this. The crash. The last of it leaving my blood and taking everything else with it, the energy and the appetite and the thermostat, so that I’m freezing under a down comforter in a heated room and I’ve eaten four crackers since Sunday. My hands shake. My head’s a bell somebody keeps hitting. And the thing under my ribs where the hunger used to live is a cold stone that doesn’t want anything.

Then, when it’s out, the new ones start. Slowly. Something for the appetite. Something for the energy. Something to bring my hormones back toward whatever the chart calls a balanced Omega, and I don’t know what that is, I’ve never been one. Lessard said it’ll take six weeks before I feel it and six months before it’s steady.

So. Survive. That’s the whole plan. Survive the week and start the next thing.

“BITCH.”

The comforter lifts.