Chapter 5
Observation Deck
Austen
“Focus.” Maya tapped her pen against my notebook, right next to a line of derivatives. “You dropped a negative sign here. You’re hemorrhaging value.”
“I wrote what the caffeine told me to write.” I flipped the page, unwilling to erase the mess. My brain felt like it was floating in formaldehyde; the chalkboard smell of Ridgeway wasn’t helping.
Outside the seminar room, Friday afternoon energy vibrated through the hall—zippers zipping, voices pitched high. Game day static. Every scrap of conversation drifting through the door ended with “Caribou” or “Frost Demons.”
Maya’s phone buzzed on the table, vibrating against a stack of anatomy flashcards. A push alert lit up the screen: CARTER TO START IN NET TONIGHT.
She angled it toward me, eyebrows raised. “Well. It’s official. Your roommate just went viral.”
“It’s a starting lineup, Maya. Not a pandemic.”
“Tell that to the campus,” she said, gesturing toward the noisy hallway with her highlighter. “Symptoms include face paint and screaming. You ready for the exposure?”
“I’m ready to finish this problem set,” I lied, recapping my pen with a precise click. “The rest is just noise.”
“You’re going.” Not a question. A decree.
“I don’t care about hockey. Not my scene.”
“You also never share a dorm with the starting goalie.”
“Correlation is not causation.”
She grinned. “Cop-out. Game starts at seven-thirty. That gives you”—she checked her watch—”three hours to finish math and decide which side of the rink you like.”
“North side,” I said automatically, then cursed internal muscle memory. My foster placement in eighth grade took me to three local games; the foster dad always sat north end because tickets were cheaper. Data point lodged deep.
Maya heard the slip and let it hang without comment. Instead, she packed her laptop. “Dinner?”
I nodded, stacking the corrected quizzes. “Food that isn’t vending-machine biscotti would be an upgrade.”
We pushed through Ridgeway’s double doors. Cold Harbor’s sky had the flat, dishwater gray that turned every outdoor sound brittle. Students hurried past dressed in school merchandise. North Point sat across the quad, windows lit like a convection oven.
Halfway there, a trio of freshmen jogged by chanting, “Let’s go Demons!” One wore face paint.
Maya smiled. “Entire campus is vibrating.”
“Just campus?” I flexed my left hand; the fingers tingled, leftover adrenaline from grading under a time crunch. “My window at seven will be rattling in sympathy.”
“You’ll be inside the arena, so it won’t matter.”
“I—” I started, then shut up because my rebuttal sounded flimsy even to me.
North Point’s heat flushed my glasses. We joined the queue, trays clattering ahead. The display boards had swapped the usual slideshow for hype videos: saves from last season, slow-mo glove snags, students losing their minds in the stands.
I stepped forward, tray vibrating in my hands.
Maya selected chickpea curry. “You okay?”
“Noticed they updated the garnish on the salad bar.”
“Such drama.”
I shoveled rice onto my plate, then added two slices of pizza because carbs felt correct. We found a table near the back, mostly deserted except for a philosophy grad student—I knew peripherally—asleep over handouts.
Maya unwrapped her spoon. “So. Why the resistance? Why don’t you want to go to the game?”
“Crowds.” I poked at the slice. “Noise. Potentially freezing my butt off.”
“You look nervous,” Maya said.
“I’m not the one facing pucks at ninety miles an hour.”
“Ahh, that’s sweet. You’re worried about your roommate. It’s kind of cute.”
“I’m not worried about my roommate. I’m worried about what would happen to me if something happens to him.”
Maya paused, her fork hovering over her salad. “Clarify.”
“Blast radius,” I said. “He is a high-pressure system. If he crashes and burns out there, the debris field hits our dorm room. I finally have the environment stabilized. I don’t need a sullen, defeated athlete destroying the equilibrium. It introduces chaos into my living space.”
“So, you’re worried about collateral damage?” she asked, amused. “You think if he misses a puck, your side of the room explodes?”
“I think emotions are contagious variables,” I countered. “And I have a weak immunity to drama.”
“Yet, you are being a drama queen. Get over yourself. You’re going to go watch some hockey, clap politely, support your roommate, and go home.”
“And if he implodes? The entire town will talk about it for a week.”
“And if he stands on his head, the town will talk about that.” She leveled the spoon at me. “Either way, Luke survives. You, walking in or out of the arena, doesn’t change his save percentage.”
“I know.” The pizza sauce tasted like ketchup. “But I still feel exposed.”
“Because you’re invested.” She waited a beat. “You know that isn’t a crime, right?”
I exhaled through my nose. “I bought the man coffee. I didn’t adopt a puppy.”
“Sometimes coffee is the puppy.”
I snorted. “Is that Plato or Kant?”
“Maya Chen.” She speared a chickpea. “Philosopher of unspoken feelings.”
My phone buzzed. A text from Luke: Team departs for rink at 5:45. If AC unit achieves liftoff, call the tower.
I typed back: Holding steady at 70°. Runway clear. Good luck.
He answered immediately: Bring earplugs if you come. Student section rowdy.
No assumption, no pressure. Data. My thumb hesitated above the keyboard before replying: Noted.
Maya tilted her head, reading the exchange reflected in my glasses. “You’re halfway through the door.”
“Quarter.” I pocketed the phone. “Maybe an eighth.”
She grinned. “Better than zero. Finish eating.”
We demolished the food in companionable silence broken only by North Point’s distant dishwasher roar. I checked my watch—5:12.
I looked at my empty plate. Well, almost empty, the rice I’d put on there still sat in pile. Why I thought rice went with pizza was beyond me. Maya was right. Sitting in my room worrying about the blast radius wasn’t going to prevent the explosion. It just meant I wouldn’t see the fuse get lit.
“I have recitation homework to prep,” I said, stacking my napkins with unnecessary precision. “It’ll take me forty-five minutes to clear the queue.”
Maya tilted her head, sensing the shift. “And after that?”
I sighed, defeated by my own curiosity. “After that… I suppose I should collect some empirical data. The sample size is currently zero.”
Maya grinned. “I knew you’d cave.”
“I am not caving. I am conducting field research.” I stood up, grabbing my tray. “Meet me at the dorm?”
“6:15,” she said, pointing a fry at me like a baton. “Sharp. If I miss the anthem, I’m charging you for emotional damages.”
“6:15,” I confirmed. “Don’t be late.”
She touched my sleeve—a short, approving squeeze—and let go.
Back in Ridgeway, the corridor lights flickered under motion sensors.
I claimed the small copier room because it had a door that closed and, crucially, no loud AC.
The hum of the machine replaced the buzz in my head while I printed blank quiz templates.
Seventy copies spat out, warm stacks soothing the chill in my fingers.
Staple, align, repeat.
On the forty-fifth packet, my mind drifted: Luke’s bag slung over his shoulder, shoulder taped beneath jersey, helmet perched high during warm-ups. I saw the crease through his eyes—the sliced ice, the painted lines, the impossible angles.
I shook myself. Packet forty-six.
At packet sixty, the copier jammed. I popped the cartridge door, tugged free a crumpled sheet, and remembered Luke untangling his headphone cord with the same frown of practical focus.
Five twenty-two. Copier reset. Quizzes finished. I marked my checklist for class finished, which made me think about the tidy checklist taped to the fridge back in the dorm: Quiet Hours, Guest Notice, AC 68°. Simple rules we’d signed together. I imagined a new bullet—Arena attendance variable.
Ridiculous.
I sat. The bench felt cold despite the crowd heat.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
I looked up. Maya stood in the aisle, clutching two soft pretzels wrapped in foil. She grinned, dropped into the empty seat beside me, and offered a pretzel.
“I’m still glad you came,” she said. “And I bet your new BFF hottie goalie will be glad you showed up to.”
“He won’t even notice I’m here. Besides, I am observing,” I corrected, taking the pretzel. “Distinct difference. They’re like fish swimming around in a bowl, and I’m on the outside watching them.”
“Ah yes, a boy aquarium. Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.”
Down below, the players flooded onto the ice for warm-up. The noise level spiked to a roar. Luke skated last: controlled V-push to the crease, one, two, distinct tap of the left post with his glove, tap of the right post with his stick.
I knew the pattern from chipped AC nights.
Maya chewed a piece of salt. “He always does that. Tap, tap. Sports superstition is wild.”
“It’s not superstition,” I said, leaning forward. “It’s proprioception.”
Maya blinked. “Bless you?”
“Proprioception,” I repeated, pointing at the ice. “The body’s ability to sense its location in space without visual input. Luke can’t see the net behind him. He’s touching the iron to calibrate his internal map.”
Luke dropped into a butterfly, popped up, and tapped the posts again.
“He’s establishing his coordinate system,” I explained, watching Luke’s movements track with the imaginary lines in my head. “Defining zero on the X and Y axes so he never has to look back to know where the center is. It’s not magic. It’s geometry.”
“Dear God, you can turn anything into math.”
“It’s the universal constant. Besides, even Dr. Thorne would lose her mind over this. It’s a perfect closed loop. High efficiency. Zero waste.”
“Your scary professor?” Maya asked, taking a bite of her pretzel.
“She’s not scary,” I said, tracking Luke as he stretched. “But, she will ruin my GPA if I don’t come up with a senior thesis topic soon.”
Maya looked from me to Luke, then back to me, a slow smile spreading across her face.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she laughed. “You’re turning hockey into homework.”
“I’m turning it into something solvable.”
Down on the ice, Luke squared to the first shooter. Pads clicked; puck ricocheted. Routine.
Crowd noise washed over us, but the vectors behaved. Like he’d said, constants kept you honest. He was the constant right now, bright blue paint framing a problem set he solved in real time.
My pulse ticked a half-beat faster. I leaned forward, elbows on knees. I could see the mathematical proof developing in front of me.