Chapter 23
twenty-three
SLOANE
Professor Moreno doesn’t look up from the draft.
Across the desk, the pen in her hand hovers over page three. She wrote one line on the first page and circled a paragraph on the second, and now she’s just sitting with page three open, not writing, which is somehow worse.
I’ve been sitting in this chair every Thursday since she gave me the RA position. That first week, I walked in with my hands shaking and nearly forgot to breathe between sentences. After that, I got comfortable with her and her style.
Until today, because that was a different girl, and this is a different Moreno.
“Tell me what this argument is doing,” she says now, to this girl.
The answer I give is clean, structurally sound. I hear myself saying the words, polished and neutral and unlikely to offend anyone, and saying them makes me want to crawl under her desk.
“Sloane.” She takes off her glasses, closes her eyes, and then squeezes the bridge of her nose. “I’m going to be honest with you because I think you can take it. Is that okay?”
“Yes.”
She opens her eyes, locks them on me, then taps the draft. “This is competent and well-organized.”
I wait, because I know the but is coming.
“But it’s lifeless.” She sighs. “It’s like you’ve prioritized clean sourcing and accurate synthesis of the views of others over daring to have an argument of your own.”
I keep my face the way I have all week. It’s the face I wore for the first few weeks at Halden, and the one I’ve been wearing with Rowan whenever he looks at me too long or asks too many questions.
“The girl who ran my seminar in September was quick-witted and interesting.” She tilts her head, eyes steady on me the whole time. “Do you remember that day?”
My eyes drift down to the desk. “Yes.”
“That fire I saw in you was the reason I offered you this position before I’d even seen your academic transcript.
” She picks the pen back up, taps it once against the draft.
“She connected narrative framing to something she’d actually felt: who gets to shape the story and who only gets to live inside it. ”
She’s clearly not done, so I nod, eyes still on the grain of the desk.
“I don’t recognize that girl in these words, Sloane.” She sighs and sets her pen on the desk. “It’s all correct, but none of it is yours. I want your voice, and you should, too.”
My throat tightens. Because I know exactly when the girl she wants to see started to emerge, and exactly what made her run away again.
“Okay,” I say.
“That’s not the response I’m looking for.” Moreno sighs.
“I hear you.”
“That isn’t either.”
I draw breath. There’s a coffee ring on the desk near my elbow, and I’ve been looking at it for the last forty seconds because it’s easier than looking at her. I’m on the verge of tears, and no Halden Girl mask will stop them if they start, so I just need to get out of here.
Moreno’s voice softens. “Look, Sloane, I’m not asking you to tell me what’s going on. That’s your business. But I’m asking you to come back.”
I nod, pick up my bag, and leave her office as fast as I can without looking like I’m fleeing. I rush down the corridor and into the stairwell, and only there do I realize I’ve been holding my breath since I left her office.
I sit on the third step from the top, put my bag in my lap, and then the sobs come.
My shoulders go first, then my face, then my eyes. I press my mouth into the wool of my coat sleeve because Halden Girls do not cry loudly in stairwells, even when nobody else is in the stairwell and nobody would hear.
The tears I’ve been holding all week come out.
There’s a damn good chance Mason has the photos, and if he shares them, I become the story again. If that happens, my family will once again treat me like a crisis to be contained, and Rowan will destroy himself to protect me and neutralize the threat.
And the place I came to heal from all that will become exactly what I fled.
I will not be that again, and I will not inflict that on the people I love, so all week the weight has sat on my chest and I’ve managed it by smiling right, shutting myself off from anything controversial, and letting the thing Moreno saw in me go quiet.
But the problem — the thing I didn’t plan — is that people are noticing. Rowan first. He tried gentle and patient, like I was just having a bad week. But as the days piled up, he started pulling away from me — or maybe I started pulling away from him.
Either way, the ease that had started to creep into him and into us is fraying. For a while, he’d stopped trying to be everything to everyone, solving all the world’s problems and leaving no air in his lungs for himself.
And now Moreno.
If two people can see through it, it’s not a mask. It’s just a bad performance.
My phone buzzes against my thigh.
Ivy: Are you coming tonight or am I screaming at hockey boys alone?
Then, three seconds later, it buzzes again.
Ivy: Also I haven’t seen you except to say hi or bye in like five days??? What’s going on with you???
She’s noticed, too, and now she’s doing what Ivy does, which is yelling warmly.
I don’t reply. My phone buzzes again.
Ivy: Sloane, you can’t ignore me forever. Where are you right now?
I should ignore it, but Ivy doesn’t relent on things like this.
I type back.
Sloane: Humanities building. Third floor stairwell.
The read receipt appears immediately, but I don’t wait for a reply. Instead, I put my phone down on my knee and close my eyes, letting the silence and the cold concrete wash over me until the stairwell door opens one floor below. Ten minutes later, I hear footsteps.
“Okay, so,” Ivy says. “You’re sitting in a stairwell crying, which I have a policy about.”
I wipe my face on my sleeve. “What’s the policy?”
“The policy is nobody cries in a stairwell alone when I’m in the building.”
I laugh, but it’s ugly and dies a second later.
She climbs the steps, sits beside me, and puts a coffee in my hand. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“It’s not your usual,” she says. “It was for Professor Huang, but you need it more.”
I take it anyway. “I’m fine,” I say.
“Sure.” She pulls her knees up. “Moreno?”
I nod.
“She’s tough,” Ivy says.
“She’s right.”
“Both things can be true.” Ivy takes a sip of her coffee and extends a hand. “Come on.”
“Where?” I say.
“The game is on soon, and you need a controlled environment in which to scream.”
“Wait a sec,” I say.
I pull out my compact and wince at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes are so wrecked and my nose is so red that I should go home, wash my face, and figure out what to do about the fact that everyone can tell I’m hiding something.
But if I do that Ivy will know something bigger is wrong, and then she’ll ask more questions and I’ll cry some more. So The Den it is, where at least it will be loud and there will be something to focus on that isn’t the wreck I’ve made — Mason has made — of my life.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, then put concealer under both eyes and blot my mascara. The girl looking back at me is passable. Not great, but passable, and that’s probably better than I’ve managed the rest of the week.
I pull out my phone and text Rowan.
Sloane: Good luck tonight.
Then I take Ivy’s hand, and we walk out of the building and into the cold.
The Den is insane.
The line outside the doors wraps down the hill, and inside, somebody’s painted RAVENS RISE on a bedsheet and hung it from the rafters. As we make our way to the student section, I can already feel the chants vibrating through the soles of my boots.
“You look sad and hungry,” Ivy says, dropping into the seat beside me with two pretzels, then holding one out. “I can help with one of those.”
“Thanks,” I say, taking it.
As she bites into her pretzel, she gestures at the St. Adrian’s section across the rink, where every single fan appears to be wearing the same shade of crimson. It’s far more organized than anything Halden can manage.
“Do they coordinate in a group chat, or do they just emerge from the factory like that?” she says. “It’s a major ick.”
“Debatable,” I say. “But they look good…”
She looks at me like I’ve committed a murder. “That’s an ick too.”
The house lights cut and The Den goes black, then the boards start pounding and the noise comes up from the student section in a wall. It builds and builds, and then the spotlight finds the tunnel, and I lean forward without meaning to.
Rowan comes out first, imposing as he taps the raven on the wall and glides onto the ice. But he looks heavy — not slow, exactly, but like he’s carrying something — and I know I’m part of what he’s carrying.
“Why are you making the face?” Ivy says.
“I’m not making a face.”
“You are absolutely making a face.”
“I’m cold.”
Ivy lets it go, which is a minor miracle, then turns to scream something at the St. Adrian’s boys as they emerge from the tunnel. I’m glad she looks away, because I don’t think it would take much to get me crying again, which is not the reaction I expected when I saw Rowan.
The puck drops, and the game starts, fast and slick.
The first period is tight, and I spend most of it watching Rowan. He’s a half step late on everything — reaching for pucks that used to find his stick, dumping it deep when he’d normally carry it in, making passes that land on skates instead of on tape.
Nobody around me notices — not even Ivy — because the score’s still even and he’s still upright, but I’ve watched him enough to know this isn’t his game. And I can’t help thinking it’s partly my fault, because whatever peace he’d started to find is now gone.
And then there’s Mason.
He’s not struggling.
He’s playing like it’s a showcase — holding the puck, refusing to play the team game, showboating and taking shots, and skating past open teammates as if they aren’t there. He’s playing well, though, the star on a team that’s struggling, which makes it worse.
During a stoppage, Rowan skates over to him and puts his hand out.
Mason looks at the hand, and then brushes it away.
It’s such a small gesture. He doesn’t shove him or say anything. He just lifts his glove and bats Rowan’s hand away, then skates off, and The Den makes a sound I haven’t heard a crowd make before: five thousand people breathing in at once and not breathing out.
“Oh my God,” Ivy says, very quietly, and grabs my forearm.
Rowan’s hand drops down to his side and he stands there for one second. Then he turns and goes back to the bench, and the moment is over, except it isn’t, because I can see the tension that’s still in his shoulders.
The game gets ugly fast.
With Mason playing for himself and the lines falling apart, I watch Rowan do what Rowan does. He calls changes, pulls Theo aside after a rough shift, and tries to hold the rest of them together.
But his own play suffers even more through it all. He’s slow on everything, sloppy with the puck, and rough in transition. A couple of guys behind us start muttering about what’s wrong with him.
“I’m going to kill one of these assholes,” Ivy hisses, glancing behind us.
“You are five foot three.”
“Violence has no height requirement.”
During a TV timeout, Rowan reaches forward and lines up the water bottles on the bench ledge, labels forward, three in a row. I’ve seen him do that before — with highlighters, salt shakers, tape rolls.
He does it when he’s feeling stressed or uncertain.
He’d stopped for a while.
With me, he’d stopped.
And now it’s back.
The game grinds on, still scoreless, deep into the third, until a St. Adrian’s defenseman catches Theo with a late hit. Theo goes down hard and The Den turns on the defenseman, students hurling abuse.
Rowan skates straight for the defenseman and levels him.
The defenseman folds to the ice, The Den surges up around me, and I go cold all over because the boy I know doesn’t do this. But deep down, I know it isn’t about Theo. It’s everything he’s been holding in, and this guy just got close enough to take it.
Two minutes. Roughing.
It should be more — the puck was long gone — but I wonder if the wall of Halden noise has him spooked. Regardless, Rowan skates to the box and sits against the wall, helmet still on, his mouth set in a line that isn’t going to soften.
Ivy leans into me. “Hey.”
I look at her.
“Is he okay?” she says.
“He’s fine.” I try for a smile, and I can feel how wrong it sits on my face.
“Sloane,” she says.
“He’s fine, Ivy.”
She watches the ice right as a St. Adrian’s forward puts one in the net and silences The Den. Then she turns to me, and her eyes — Rowan’s blue, a shade more electric, and with none of the restraint — have already figured something out and are deciding whether to say it.
“Is my brother being an asshole to you?”
“No.”
“Are you guys okay?”
“We’re fine.” I sound like I sounded in Moreno’s office. “Everything’s fine.”
She doesn’t push. “Should I leave it?”
I nod.
“Okay.” She squeezes my knee.
I sit there, blinking too much and trying not to cry.
The horn goes. One-nothing.
The Den empties quickly, dejected students and alumni in no mood to stick around after losing a rivalry game in such demoralizing fashion. But Ivy and I stay put, watching the players leave the ice with their heads down.
Rowan is the last one off. When he sees me, he stops, then skates over. His hair is plastered to his temples, and there’s a thin scratch across the side of his neck I don’t remember being there. He puts his glove up against the glass.
I stand, walk down to the boards, and put my hand against his on my side of the glass.
As his eyes find mine and hold, I suddenly feel terrible about locking him out. I want to tell him about the kitchen, and I want to tell him what Mason knows, and I want to tell him I stood at the sink and tried to put my mask back on but it hasn’t worked.
But I hesitate for the same reason I did at Ironwood House and every day since.
Telling him here would be pulling the pin on a grenade.
He’d go straight at Mason and burn everything down — including himself — to get him.
So I keep my hand where it is, and I don’t move, and I don’t smile. But the tears come anyway, even as Ivy’s arm slides around my shoulders and I look at him through the glass for one more second.
“C’mon,” she says, very softly. “Let’s go.”
I take my hand off the glass and turn away.