Chapter 17 Kaiden #2
Cat is in the third row with Thomas, Penny, and my parents.
She’s wearing my lacrosse jersey over a long-sleeve—the away green with MONAGHAN across the back, and the sight of my name on her body in a stadium full of people does the thing it always does.
The detonation. The quiet, structural rearrangement of everything inside me.
No waving. No blown kiss. Not today. Today is business. I meet her eyes across the field, hold for one second, and nod. She nods back. That’s enough. The whole conversation in a look: “I’m here. I see you. Win.”
The locker room. Coach keeps it short. “Scouts in the press box. Undefeated season on the line. Go out there and prove why you’re the best team in this league. Questions? No? Good. Get out there.”
I stand. The boys form around me. The captain’s moment.
“Holy Oak plays dirty. We know this. They’re going to hit late, hit hard, and try to get in your head.
Don’t let them. We respond with the scoreboard, not our fists.
Every goal is an answer. Every assist is a statement.
We are not them. We don’t play their game.
We play ours, and ours is better. Let’s go. ”
The field. The crowd. The lights. The PA system announcing lineups.
The particular electricity of a homecoming game—the energy cranked higher than any regular season match because homecoming means something at a school like Edgewood.
It means alumni in the stands. It means donors evaluating.
It means the school’s identity is on display, and Edgewood’s identity is winning.
Face-off. I win it—clean, fast, the ball in my stick before Holy Oak’s captain can react.
Up the field. Iz on my right. Xander cutting through the middle.
The play develops like a conversation we’ve been having for four years—no calls needed, just movement, each of us reading the others through the particular telepathy of athletes who’ve shared a field since they were twelve.
I feed Iz at the crease. Iz draws two defenders, finds Xander cutting backdoor. X catches, shoots—top corner, no chance. Goal. Under a minute in.
The stands erupt. I don’t look. Stay in the play. Reset.
Holy Oak responds the way we expected—physically.
Their midfielders start running through checks like they’re trying to dislodge organs.
A late hit on Danny that doesn’t get called.
A slash to Iz’s wrists that the ref somehow misses.
The kind of escalation that’s designed to provoke retaliation, because retaliation means penalties, and penalties mean man-advantages, and that’s Holy Oak’s playbook: make you angry, then capitalize on the anger.
We don’t bite. We score.
Second goal: my solo. Carry from midfield, beat one defender with a face dodge, beat the second with a split, step into a right-hand rip that catches the far pipe and drops in. The scout from Georgetown is writing something on his clipboard.
Third goal: Iz. A fast break off a Ryan save—the outlet pass perfect, Iz in full stride, nobody between him and the cage. He finishes overhand, casual, the way he scores when he wants the other team to know it’s not even hard.
Fourth: Danny. His first of the season. A ground ball in the defensive zone that he carries the length of the field—nobody expects the defenseman to attack, which is exactly why it works.
He finishes with a bounce shot that threads the goalie’s five-hole, and the bench erupts because Danny Rorke scoring is a statistical event, like a solar eclipse. Even Danny looks surprised.
Halftime. 5–0. Holy Oak’s coach is screaming at his players. Their captain is pacing the sideline. The frustration has the particular flavor of a team that came here expecting a fight and is getting dismantled instead.
Second half. The violence escalates. A two-handed slash that opens a cut on Xander’s forearm. A body check on Iz that puts him on the turf for the third time. An off-ball hit on one of our midfielders that’s so late it’s almost post-play.
I stay disciplined. The scoreboard. Not the fists. Every time the rage tries to surface—every time the basement wiring says “hurt the person hurting your people”—I put it in the stick. In the shot. In the pace.
Two more goals. Both mine. Both angry—the shots hitting the net with a violence that’s just barely within the bounds of the sport. The scout from Georgetown stops writing and just watches.
Xander adds another. Ryan makes a save in the final minutes that defies physics—a point-blank shot that he catches with his bare hand because the ball deflected off his stick and his body simply reacted. The crowd screams.
Final buzzer. 8–1. Undefeated season intact. Homecoming won.
The celebration on the field is brief—hard, physical, the piling-on of boys who have just proven something under pressure. Then we separate. Helmets off. The crowd flooding the field.
I find Cat before she finds me. She’s coming down the bleacher steps, Thomas behind her, my parents behind him, and Penny somewhere in the chaos.
She sees me. Starts to run. I meet her at the bottom of the stands and she launches—legs around my waist, arms around my neck, her body colliding with mine with the particular force of a girl who has been watching the boy she’s falling for dominate a lacrosse field for two hours and needs to put her hands on him immediately.
I kiss her. In front of the scouts. In front of the parents.
In front of the alumni donors and the coaches and every student at Edgewood Prep.
My hand in her hair, tilting her head, my mouth claiming hers with a possessiveness that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the fact that I just played the best game of my life and the only trophy I care about is the one wrapped around my body saying my name.
“You were incredible,” she says against my mouth.
“I was motivated.”
“By what?”
“The image of taking that jersey off you later.”
She laughs. I set her down. Turn to my parents—Mom’s hug first, then Pop’s handshake that turns into a hug. Thomas claps my back. Penny high-fives me with a force that nearly dislocates my shoulder.
“Scout from Georgetown was taking notes,” my father says. Low. Just for me. “A lot of notes.”
I nod. File it. Bigger things ahead tonight.
“I need to shower and change. The dance starts in two hours.” I look at Cat. “You’re getting ready with Penny?”
“We have everything in the girls’ locker room. Dresses, shoes, the whole operation. Penny’s been planning it for a week. Then we’ll head back to my house for pictures.”
“I’ll pick you up at seven.”
She kisses me once more—soft, quick, the kind that promises the harder kind later—and walks off with Penny, who immediately links arms with her and starts talking at a speed that suggests the last two hours of silence during the game were physically painful for her.
I head to the locker room and it is chaos. Music blasting. Boys celebrating. The particular energy of a team that just won homecoming and is about to put on dress clothes for the first time since somebody’s bar mitzvah.
I’m at my locker, pulling off pads, when I hear Cat’s name.
Two guys. Bench by the showers. Mike Hanley and Joe Callahan’s kid brother, Matt. Not starters—bench players, the kind who contribute just enough to make the roster and not enough to matter.
“I’m just saying,” Mike says, voice low enough that he thinks it’s private, “she went from Pennington to Monaghan in like three weeks. That’s fast. Like, real fast. Makes you wonder what’s under the whole ice-princess thing.”
“We’ve all seen what’s under it,” Matt says. Both of them laugh. The particular laugh of boys who have seen the leaked photographs and think the violation is a joke.
Something in me goes cold. Not hot—cold. The particular temperature that precedes calculated violence. I close my locker. Walk to the bench. Stand over them.
Mike looks up. His face does the thing faces do when they register that the person they were talking about is standing directly above them and heard everything.
“Say her name again.” My voice is flat. Conversational. The voice I use when the rage has gone past heat into something frozen and precise. “Say one more word about her body. About the pictures. About what’s under anything. I’m interested to hear what you think happens next.”
Mike stands. He’s shorter than me. Most people are. “Cap, it was just—”
“Choose your next word very carefully, Mike. Because every person in this room heard what you said, and I’m deciding right now whether you finish this season on the roster or finish it in the emergency room.”
The locker room has gone quiet. Thirty players. Every eye on us.
Iz appears at my right shoulder. Danny at my left. Xander leaning against the lockers behind Mike and Matt, arms crossed, blocking the exit. Ryan sitting on the bench three feet away, phone in his hand, the gesture of a person who records things as a reflex and is currently recording this.
Mike’s confidence drains visibly. He sits back down.
“Catherine O’Farrell,” I say, “is off-limits. Her name, her body, her history, her relationships—all of it. You don’t discuss her.
You don’t joke about her. You don’t look at the pictures that someone else violated her privacy to take.
And if I find out that anyone in this room is sharing, saving, or reposting those images, I will personally make sure you never play a sport at this school again.
And that’s the legal version of what I’ll do. ”
The room holds its breath.
“We clear?”
Thirty nods. Some slow. Some fast. All certain.
I turn away. Iz claps me on the shoulder. “That was restrained.”
“Cat would want me to be restrained.”
“Since when do you do what people want?”
“Since the person wanting it is her.”