Chapter 28 #2
The little signals that say I’m safe, you’re safe, we’re in this together.
“Sloane! Oh my God, we haven’t seen you in forever.” The forever does a lot of heavy lifting, because what Margot means is, we saw you plenty, we just pretended we didn’t.
“Are you coming to the Pi Sigma thing Saturday?” Priya jumps in. “Margot, didn’t you say that—”
“Hey,” Ivy says. “No offense, but fuck off.”
Margot’s mouth opens, but she doesn’t know what to say.
Priya tries a laugh, but it’s nervous and wrong.
“You ghosted her, Margot,” Ivy says. “And I saw your comment on HaldenGoss, Priya…”
Priya’s laugh turns into a protest. “I—”
Ivy scoffs. “And now you’re back because the hockey team made her safe again.”
They leave. Margot mutters that Ivy is a lot, which is the word people use for women who refuse to make their honesty comfortable, and the whole time I sit there fighting the urge I desperately want to banish.
The Halden Girl rising.
It’s a reflex, coded into the version of me that spent the last year learning that social friction is a personal failure and someone else’s discomfort is an instruction to become smaller, smoother, easier.
Go after them. Smooth it over. They might talk.
I know this voice. She’s dictated which version of myself showed up and which one stayed locked away. She’s the one who smiled and calibrated her grief into something palatable, and who made sure she never looked too angry or too broken or too anything.
She was useful, once.
She kept me alive when alive was the only thing I could be.
But I want more than that now.
Moreno looked at the uncalibrated version and called it credible. Rowan held the messiest, most unedited version of me I’ve ever let anyone see, and he didn’t flinch or contain it or route it through someone more appropriate.
He said he loved it.
And Ivy is eating bar nuts as calmly as you like, after telling two of the most popular girls in our year to fuck off. I used to think that was just Ivy, the way her hair is dark and her laugh is too loud and her loyalty has teeth.
But it isn’t a personality trait.
It’s a decision she makes every single day, to spend herself only on people who have earned the expense, while the rest of the world calls her a lot and she loses exactly zero sleep over it. It’s a discipline I shared, once, and desperately want to find again.
Because I’ve already got those people.
So that girl — that voice — is past her expiration date.
“You good?” Ivy asks, studying me.
“Getting there.”
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said in a year.”
I laugh. “It wasn’t ‘I can’t bear watching hockey tonight’?”
Ivy glances at the TV above the bar, which is tuned to the game. I wasn’t watching it, but now my eyes follow Ivy’s, and I can’t help but watch. Rowan flickers past on the screen, and everything in me pulls tight at how wrong it looks.
He’s technically present, but the thing that makes him Rowan — the instinct, the anticipation, the way he reads the ice like a living map — is gone. What’s left is someone trying to act out a version of himself that doesn’t exist anymore.
I know that feeling.
On screen, he dumps the puck into the corner and skates away from it: a give-up play, a freshman play, the kind of decision that keeps you from making a mistake but also keeps you from making anything happen.
“Some questions tonight about the captain’s focus,” the play-by-play voice says over a replay, as the jukebox cuts out again. “Hale’s been a different player lately.”
“Look, Mark, I’ll say what everyone is thinking.
” The color commentator leans into it, building toward something he’s been told to build toward.
“It’s been a noisy few weeks around the young captain — and you hate to see it land right when scouts are deciding who’s got the makeup for the next level. ”
“Off-ice distractions become part of the evaluation, fair or not,” the play-by-play says, cautious now. “And there’s certainly noise around the program.”
I put my drink down.
I know that move. They never say your name; they don’t have to. But it’s the same translation I heard inside my own family’s living room, spoken by a lawyer my parents hired, a man who used words like credibility and character and what kind of girl while I sat on the couch in my school uniform.
That was the first time I understood that my pain was being translated into a language designed to make other people comfortable with doing nothing about it.
Different room, different pipeline, same product: take a person, reduce them to a risk assessment, and let the machinery grind until there’s nothing left to defend.
It’s what Moreno has been talking about, what I wrote about and what I lived.
And I think I know who’s behind it. Mason told me enough about his father that I can do the math. The calls are being made, conversations are being had, and the people who hold Rowan’s future in their hands are writing him off as too hard.
It’s the same architecture that was used on me.
I keep watching as Rowan takes a hit along the boards and gets up slowly, one hand on the glass, and the camera catches his face for one unguarded second before the helmet shadow covers it. He looks lost and tired and broken.
What he did was wrong, making it about everyone except the person it was supposed to be about — that was real, and it mattered, and I’m not going to say otherwise just because watching him suffer makes the knowing harder to hold.
He took my agency because he was afraid for me, but fear doesn’t equal permission.
But I told him to stop deciding what people could handle, and then I decided what he could handle — how much of what happened in the kitchen he deserved, and what would happen if I gave it to him.
I handed down a verdict and called it a boundary.
I don’t need to fix this. I don’t even know if it can be fixed. But I need to be there, not to manage it or solve it or perform the version of support that makes me feel like a good person, but to be in the room for the ugly time he’s going through.
And whatever happens after that… we’ll see.
“I have to go,” I tell Ivy, putting money on the table.
She looks at me, weighing it — where, why, whether she should talk me out of it — before she settles into the expression she wears when she’s decided to trust someone’s decision despite having opinions about it.
“If he makes you cry again, I’m keying his car,” she says.
“He doesn’t have a car.”
“Then I’ll rent one for him and key that.” She grins. “Go.”
I grab my jacket and go toward whatever is left to say.