I stayed down for a long time.
Just the water running cold over everything. Just the sound of my own breathing — shallow, careful, testing what hurt and how much. My ribs answered that question immediately. My back answered it too. The side of my face where the shelf caught me was still going, hot and insistent, blood pinking the water on the tile beneath me.
I got my hands flat and managed to push myself up. Sat there. I wanted to completely fall apart right there on that floor.
But crying felt like giving them something.
So I sat under the cold water until I could stand.
Then I stood.
Got dressed.
Looked in the mirror.
Decided what I could explain and what I couldn't.
I went to Coach.
Sat across from his desk and said what happened clearly andspecifically because I wasn't going to let myself be dismissed for being vague. I told him everything. All of it. He listened. He nodded. He said he'd address it, but that I never told him anything before so there was no history of anything to report.
What he addressed was calling me back in the following week to gently suggest that maybe I was having some trouble adjusting socially and had I considered speaking to someone in student services or maybe a counselor or maybe finding a different sport.
I walked out of his office and sat in a stairwell for twenty minutes. Just sat there. One morning I came in and there was something written on my locker. Black marker. Big. Not trying to be subtle. I stood there and looked at it for a moment. Then I went to the bathroom and got paper towels and came back and cleaned it off myself. Slowly. While guys filtered in around me. Some of them saw it before I got to it. Some of them saw me cleaning it. Marcus did.
Nobody said anything.
Not to me. Not to each other. Not to anyone.
I scrubbed until it was gone. Got dressed. Went to practice.
Scored twice.
Marcus never said anything. Never did anything. Just looked down and avoided me. That's the part I couldn't move past. That's the part I still can't move past when I let myself think about it. I could suffocate with how angry that part makes me. He was in that locker room every single day. He heard Tommy. He heard Porter. He saw everything. He knew about the shower too.
The person who moved his furniture and set up a projector and saidI love youandI think we can make this work.
Watching all of it happen and choosing silence.
Every single day.
Choosing silence.
Not me.
Not once did he choose me.
I confronted him later.
Parking lot. Just us.
"You know what they've been doing and you said nothing. You lied. And didnothing."
He looked at his keys. He couldn’t even look at me. "Rhys—"
"You told me you loved me." I said it flat. Not to hurt him. Just because it needed to exist somewhere outside of my own head. Because I'd spent too many nights wondering if I'd imagined the whole thing. If maybe they were right about me. If maybe I had made him uncomfortable. If maybe this was somehow, some way, my fault. "You said it and you meant it and then you let this happen."
He closed his eyes. "I know," he said, defeated.
