He kind of has.
I can’t wait to get to the locker room so I can text Gisele.
Bixie This
Gisele
There’s a special kind of chaos that happens when your hands know exactly what they’re doing but your mind is somewhere else entirely. You can organize every drawer, follow every step, make every cut with absolute confidence—and still end up holding the wrong tool, wondering how something so precise went sideways sofast. Funny thing is, that kind of mistake rarely travels alone. It tends to show up in pairs, in different cities, at the exact same moment, proving a point no one asked for. And if you think you can outwork it, out-plan it, or out-discipline it into behaving? Well. I admire the optimism.
Playlist: “Stupid” by Tate McRae
The hotel room in Minneapolis is perfectly fine.
Clean, neutral, the kind of aggressively inoffensive décor that exists specifically to offend no one, which means it also delights no one. I’ve been awake since five-fifteen because my body apparently didn’t get the memo that I’m supposed to be resting before a full day showcase.
I have two hours until it starts, a continental breakfast waiting downstairs, and absolutely no reason to be lying here staring at the ceiling.
I pick up my phone.
This is a mistake. I know it’s a mistake before I do it, the way you know touching a bruise is going to hurt but you do it anyway because some part of you needs to confirm the damage is real.
I open social media.
The Slammers’ official account has posted something. I see the logo in my feed and my thumb pauses without deciding to, the way it apparently does now when anything Slammers-related crosses my screen.
I tap it.
It’s a video. Game footage, last night, the camera angle from just above the penalty box. The caption says: ILLEGAL EQUIPMENT: A LOVE STORY (sound on) with approximately forty-three fire emojis, which tells me exactly who wrote it.
Shep. Obviously Shep.
I turn the sound on.
The clip is eleven seconds long. I watch it once without understanding what I’m seeing. Then I watch it again.
Bennett is on the ice.
He’s holding something that is not a hockey stick. It takes me a full three seconds to identify what it is because my brain keeps rejecting the information. It’s a goalie stick. He’s holding a goalie stick. He’s standing at a faceoff dot in the middle of a professional hockey game holding a goalie stick like this is a completely normal thing to be doing, and the referee is skating toward him with an expression I recognize because I’ve worn it—the expression of a person encountering a problem they have no framework for.
I watch it a third time.
My stomach drops somewhere around my knees.
This is not the goalie stick. This is Main Street. This is a man standing in the middle of traffic staring at nothing, this is Bennett Foster coming apart at the seams again in public, this is everything I was afraid would happen when I wasn’t there to—
I call him.
Voicemail. Immediately, no ringing, the flat click of a phone that’s off or out of range.
I text him.Are you okay?Send. Stare at the screen. Nothing.
I call again. Voicemail again.
I text Boone.Is Bennett okay? I saw the video.Send. Nothing. They’re on a bus, probably, somewhere between last night’s arena and the next city, and nobody has their phone on, and I’m sitting in a Minneapolis hotel room at five-thirty inthe morning watching an eleven second clip on repeat trying to figure out if the man I—
If Bennett is okay.
I watch it a fourth time.
