Chapter 2 The Right Thing
THE RIGHT THING
Ibuzz up, wait for the hydraulic sigh of the door, and climb the three flights to Nia’s apartment.
Nia opens the door before I knock.
She’s already in sweats and the UW volleyball hoodie I got her junior year, hair scraped back, face bare.
She leans against the jamb like she’s holding up the entire floor, and for a second I think she might just close the door again, let me marinate in the hallway with my own bad decisions.
But she steps aside, so I go in, and immediately it’s the same as always, the muted lamps, the carefully curated plants (all alive, which I have never managed in my own space), the incense bleeding something floral through the vents.
Her apartment is a case study in “elevated neutrals,” all sand and slate, but tonight it feels clinical, like a waiting room where the only thing on offer is time to reconsider.
She follows me in, closes the door, and clicks the lock with a practiced, passive-aggressive little snap.
“Hey,” I say, but it comes out flat, like I’m already prepping my own alibi.
Nia folds her arms, nods toward the couch. I sit at the edge, bag still on my shoulder, knees bent, ready to take the charge and bail if I have to.
“Practice run long?” she says, voice neutral, eyes locked on me. Her poker face is better than mine; she could teach a masterclass in emotional defense.
“Little bit,” I say, and drop the bag at my feet, like proof. “Coach’s new thing is circuit drills. Supposed to ‘build resilience.’”
She doesn’t bite. She never does, not on the easy stuff.
There’s a silence, the kind you can only have after years of rehearsing the lines and running the play and knowing, without saying, that neither of you is convinced by the script anymore.
She sits across from me, elbows on her knees, fingers woven tight. She looks at me like she’s counting the seconds it takes for me to blink.
“You didn’t come to the game,” she says finally. Not even a question, just a fact on the table, heavy and sharp.
I look at my hands. I’m wearing a watch I don’t remember putting on. “Knee was acting up,” I say. “Didn’t want to risk it before next week.”
It's the first game I've ever missed. In ten years of competitive hockey, travel, college, pro, I have never once called in. The fact that I did it tonight, and lied about why, sits in my chest like a stone.
She lets out a breath, then laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Right. Because you’re so careful.”
I can hear the unsaid, about the concussions, about the dumbass risks I take in net, about the way I can play through pain but apparently can’t pick up the phone or send a text to my own girlfriend.
But I don’t say anything. I just watch the light flicker through the leaves of the pothos she named for a WNBA point guard.
She leans back, cracks her neck, and for a moment I remember what it felt like to be nineteen and see her do that at a party, the lazy way she’d roll her head and smile at me over someone else’s shoulder.
How it made me want to be the reason she looked up at all.
“You know, you can just tell me if you’re not feeling it,” she says. “I can handle it. I’d rather have the truth than the cold shoulder.”
“I am feeling it,” I say, because that’s what I’m supposed to say, and because I want it to be true. “I’m just—tired. I’m tired, Nia.”
She doesn’t buy it. She never does.
“That’s not tired, D,” she says, and she says my name the way only she does, all breath and zero softness. “That’s avoidance. It’s what you do when you’re about to ghost someone, but you don’t want to be the bad guy.”
I open my mouth, close it. I know the playbook here.
I want to say, No, you’re wrong, you’re overthinking it. But she isn’t. I’m the one overthinking it.
She sits there, silent, and I get this urge to break the lamp, throw it through the wall, just to see if she’d flinch.
But I don’t. I sit, knuckles white, and look for something on the wall to focus on.
There’s a framed photo of us at a Homecoming game, senior year, me in my jersey, her in purple and gold, both of us grinning like we just won the lottery. I barely recognize that guy. I doubt she does either.
My phone buzzes. I don’t reach for it, but she does, picking it up from the coffee table and holding it out to me. The screen flashes a notification: TEAM GROUPME. I take it, thumb the message open like maybe it’ll save me from having to speak.
It’s just Holt posting a meme, a photo of a guy face-down on the ice with the caption “THE STEELHAWKS’ NEWEST RECRUIT.” I almost laugh, but my mouth won’t move.
“You’re not going to tell me what’s actually wrong, are you?” Nia says. She’s not mad, not really. Just disappointed. She’s too used to disappointment to bother with anger anymore.
“There’s nothing wrong,” I say, which even I can hear is a lie. “We lost a tough one last week. Coach is riding us harder. I just… I didn’t want to suck all the air out of your place.”
Nia shakes her head, gets up, walks to the kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for herself and nothing for me.
I deserve that.
She stands, looking down at me, the distance between us suddenly the length of the entire room.
“D, I need you to actually talk to me,” she says, voice low. “Not just nod and say everything’s fine. That’s not a relationship. That’s a fucking performance.”
The word hangs in the air. Performance. She knows me better than anyone.
I nod, because that’s what I do.
She sighs, turns on the TV, flips through three shows before leaving it on a nature doc that neither of us cares about.
She sits down again, this time at the far end of the couch, her feet tucked under her, as far from me as she can get without falling off the cushions.
For a long time, we watch wolves hunting caribou in silence.
I think about saying something, something real, but every thought I have feels dangerous, like the words themselves would combust if I let them out.
Instead, I scroll through the rest of the team chat, pretend I’m invested in the meme war, and wonder how many more times we’ll do this before she finally gets sick of waiting.
She glances over, catches me staring at her, and holds my gaze for a second, eyes sharp and searching.
I know she wants me to crack, to give her the ugly, unedited truth. I want to, but I don’t even know where to start.
Eventually, she looks away.
We finish the episode in silence. When it’s over, she stands, tells me I can stay the night if I want, but she’s going to bed.
I say, “I’ll crash here,” and she nods like it doesn’t matter either way.
She disappears down the hall, closes her door soft.
I sit in the dark, alone with the wolves and my own reflection in the TV screen, and try to remember the last time I felt something I could name.
———
Sometimes, I can pinpoint the exact moment I started performing the rest of my life.
Sophomore year, winter break, first home game after the Christmas dead zone.
We’re running drills in a building so cold the water bottles freeze up, and the only fans in the stands are diehards, townies, and a pack of volleyball girls sitting together in matching sweats.
I remember because I notice her before the puck even drops, Nia Brooks, leaning over the railing, hair in braids, chin propped on her fist, smiling like she knows the punchline before the joke starts.
I don’t know her yet, but I feel the burn of her attention every time I skate toward the glass.
Game is tied, three minutes left, and some jackass from OSU fires a shot that should have gone top corner.
Instead, I catch it blind, one hand, full extension.
Best save of my college career, I can still feel the sting in my palm, the way the puck tried to rip straight through the leather, the split-second where my whole body committed before my brain caught up, and all I can think about is whether she saw it.
She did. After the game, I find her in the hallway, arms folded, eyebrows arched.
“You almost made it look easy,” she says, all challenge, zero flirt.
I say, “I do my best work under pressure,” which is corny but true.
She laughs, real and sharp, and from that point on it’s inevitable.
We start as friends, the kind you see at parties, the kind you text late at night when you’re stuck in the library and need a reason to keep going.
First time I walk her to class, she tells me about her little brother, about her parents splitting up, about growing up knowing she was always the tallest girl in the room.
She says, “People see me before they ever hear me,” and I say, “That’s not a bad thing,” and she shrugs, but I can tell it matters.
I go to her games.
Always front row, always the first to my feet when she aces a serve or blocks some fool’s spike.
She returns the favor, brings her teammates to my matches, heckles the refs in a voice that could cut concrete.
We start “studying” together, which means finding the quietest corner in the library and seeing who can go longest without making the other laugh.
Sometimes we do homework; mostly we just talk.
By spring, everyone on campus has an opinion about us.
The student magazine runs a “Campus Couples” feature with a photo of us in our jerseys, arms slung around each other, both of us pretending we don’t love the attention.
The caption calls us “the next generation of Seattle sports royalty.” I keep the clipping in a box under my bed.
Even now, years later, it feels more like evidence than nostalgia.
I think I loved her. I really do.
Or at least, I loved the way she made everything make sense.
When I was with her, I knew my role, be steady, be strong, never let anything crack the surface.
She was the only person who ever called me on my shit and made me like it.
But somewhere along the way, it all calcified.
The late-night talks turned into late-night negotiations, whose turn to do laundry, who left the kitchen a mess, who missed which game and why.
The world expected us to last, so we did. Out of habit, out of pride, out of not wanting to be the ones who failed when everyone was rooting for us.
Now, in her living room, watching the ghost-blue light of the TV play across her face, I can see the old version of us like a double exposure, the couple we were supposed to be, and the two people stuck in the ruins of that story.
I’m so deep in the memory I don’t notice her watching me. She tilts her head.
“D?” she says, soft this time, like maybe if she asks gently I’ll give her the truth.
I want to tell her everything.
About the weight I carry, about how every day I’m terrified I’m just one slip away from losing the only thing that ever made sense.
About how sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to just stop trying so fucking hard to be the best at everything, to just exist without expectation.
But all I manage is, “Sorry. Zoned out. Long day.”
She nods, but the disappointment in her eyes is so thick I almost choke on it.
“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”
And just like that, the memory snaps back to reality, and the space between us is wider than ever.
———
Nia falls asleep twenty minutes into the documentary, head slumped to my shoulder, the softest snore leaking past her lips.
I don’t move. I barely breathe.
For a while, I just watch the shadows on the wall, the way they lean and stretch across the ceiling as cars sweep past below.
I wait until her breathing levels out, then, slow, deliberate, I slide out from under her, cradle the back of her head so it doesn’t thunk against the cushions.
She’s heavier than I remember. Maybe I’m just more tired.
I carry her down the hall to her bedroom, careful not to bump the walls. She doesn’t wake.
I set her on the mattress, draw the covers up, stand there for a second like an idiot, expecting her to open her eyes, grab my wrist, say stay.
She doesn’t.
I go back to the living room, pour myself a glass of water, drink half, and dump the rest in the sink.
I wipe the rim with a towel, the way her mom always does, and put it back upside down in the rack.
The apartment is silent, except for the hum of the fridge and the endless, low-grade growl of the city outside.
I sit on the floor, back to the couch, phone in hand. I open the sports app out of habit, check the box score. Steelhawks: 2, Thunderbirds: 4.
Not even close.
I scroll the recap. There’s a photo of a substitute, some sub, face bandaged, blood matting his hair.
The caption says he took a puck to the face and stayed in the game, played through the third period like nothing happened.
I recognize him after a second, Rosen, the sub they slotted in when Janssen went down. He won't last the season.
But the look on his face, eyes glazed, teeth bloody, still in the fight, it sticks with me.
I watch the highlight on loop.
The shot, the deflection, the smack of impact.
The blood, and then the moment the kid just gets up, shakes it off, skates to the bench. Like pain is just something that happens to other people.
I close the app. I open the group chat. There’s a meme war raging, but I can’t make myself care.
I set the phone down, watch the screen go dark, and in the reflection I see myself, sitting there with my knees to my chest, shoulders hunched, a stranger in my own life.
I think about Nia, in the next room, sleeping easy because she thinks we’re still us.
I think about the guy in the highlight reel, bleeding but upright. I wonder what it would take to just stop, stop pretending, stop holding it together, stop performing.
But that’s not who I am. I get up, every time.
I stand, stretch, rub the back of my neck until it aches.
Out the window, the city is a smear of light and noise, every street alive with people who probably know exactly who they are.
I catch my reflection again, layered over the skyline like a double exposure.
Everyone says I have it all figured out.
They have no idea.