Mason skates past me on the way to the handshake line. “Good game, Cap.”
“You too,” I say, and his face gives me nothing back.
After the handshake line, I find Sloane in the stands. She’s standing, clapping with both hands over her head. Ivy is next to her, and my parents are two rows behind them. When Sloane spots me, a wide grin crosses her face.
I try the smile I’ve worn for twenty years — for parents, coaches, teammates, and cameras — the one that says we won and I’m fine and isn’t this great. It sits wrong and stops short, like the muscles have forgotten how to operate it.
Her smile dims at the corners, and a crease forms between her brows.
I turn away and skate to the locker room. It’s already loud, music loud and Luca louder, his arms around two freshmen and celebrating like we just won a championship. In reality, webarely held on against a team we should have beaten by three or four.
I sit at my stall with my pads half off and sweat running down the back of my neck, making a few comments to the guys but mostly letting them celebrate. It occurs to me then that maybe this is how Gavin felt, day after day, game after game, wearing the C.
Tension, never relenting.
I come out of the dressing room twenty minutes later, and my father is in the corridor with Greg Mercer, the scout. Mercer shakes my hand and tells me he liked the penalty kill, which is the kind of thing you say when you can’t point to anything else.
And that’s really the highlight.
We talk for ten minutes, and he’s pleasant and professional, asking how the team’s looking and what I’m studying. They’re not the questions someone from the league asks when he’s interested. They’re the questions he asks when he’s doing a favor for someone.
When Mercer leaves, my father sighs. “That performance needs work, Ro.”
“I know,” I say. “I’ll sort it.”
“Good,” he says. “You’ve got more in you.”
He puts his hand on my elbow, squeezes once, and turns to go.
My mother touches my arm on her way past. “You were wonderful,” she says.
She means it without having watched closely enough to know whether it’s true. But I kiss her cheek and thank her, because saying or doing anything deeper would send her spiraling, and managing that is one of the things that’s always on my list.
Then Sloane arrives, her eyes level on mine, not buying it. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
It’s the same answer as before the game.
The same lie.
seventeen
SLOANE
Professor Moreno keepsme after class.
Not in a bad way. She just stands at the front of the seminar room while the others file out, then says something that reorganizes my week. Today it has nothing to do with class; it’s about the research we’re doing together.
“I want a proposal on my desk by the twentieth,” she says. “Media narratives and institutional reputation. You’ve been doing the reading for it, and now it’s time to put some ideas and arguments on a page.”
I think I’m ready.
The article she gave me after that first seminar — the one about narrative framing in public shaming cases — I’ve read countless times now, and each time I find another layer that makes me want to argue with it, which Moreno says is the whole point.
And that was just the start. I’ve been her research assistant for weeks now, pulling sources, annotating drafts, sitting in her office on Thursday afternoons with coffee that goes cold because I’m too engrossed and I forget to drink it.
It’s one of the things at Halden that feels like mine, along with Rowan and the pool.
