Chapter 35
thirty-five
MIKE
I haven’t moved from this couch in seven hours.
Or maybe eight. Time stretches and compresses simultaneously now, each minute an hour, each hour a blink. The ESPN highlights play on mute—some team celebrating a shutout victory, players piling on their goalie in that familiar crush of joy I’ll never feel again.
The apartment reeks. Three days of takeout containers map my descent across the coffee table—pizza from yesterday that’s evolved into its own ecosystem, Chinese from whenever. The receipt’s probably time-stamped with the exact hour I stopped giving a shit.
Seventeen missed calls from my agent light up my phone screen. Twenty-three unread texts. I stopped checking it somewhere around call twelve, when his messages evolved from “checking in about the Calgary scout” to “Mike, what the fuck is going on?”
My laptop hibernates in the corner, but I’ve memorized what’s waiting: three overdue essays, a discussion post for my sports psychology class, and an inbox hemorrhaging professorial concern. “This isn’t like you, Mike.” “Just checking if everything’s alright.”
Dr. Morges even called the hockey office asking if I was injured.
The couch has molded to my body now, a Mike-shaped sarcophagus. I’m still wearing Thursday’s Pine Barren Hockey t-shirt. Or Wednesday’s. Hard to track when you don’t sleep, just drift between waking catatonia and horizontal staring contests with the ceiling.
The pounding starts—someone trying to break down the door with their forehead. Others have come, given up, and gone. But this is Andy’s signature knock. Like everyone else, I want her to go away, to let me pickle in peace. But then the pounding stops and a key scrapes in the lock.
“Mike?”
Her voice cuts through the darkness. I forgot she has a spare key.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
I shift my head—the first voluntary movement in hours—and watch my sister process the disaster. The apartment looks bad. I know because her face cycles through shock, recognition, then something that makes my dead heart twitch—pure fear.
“Oh fuck.” The words escape as a whisper. “Not again.”
She attacks the apartment with focused fury. Bottles clink accusations as she stuffs them into garbage bags. Her movements are sharp, violent, but her hands tremble when she thinks I’m not looking. I let her rage like a tornado around me, my ass on the couch the eye of the storm.
“Maine called me.” She won’t make eye contact, too busy excavating a plate from beneath geological layers of napkins. “Said you’ve missed two practices.”
Two? Sounds right. Or wrong. Time isn’t something I track anymore.
“He said it’s like before.” She starts on washing the dishes. “During your funk last year.”
That word, shrinking last year’s catastrophe down to manageable size, makes my blood boil. But correcting her would require energy I’m hoarding for breathing, and suddenly my senior year meltdown seems small when compared to what Sophie is going through, and what she’s asked me to do.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You’re not.” Andy slams the plate down, and starts on the next. “You’re decomposing in the dark at 2:00 p.m., in a shirt how many days old?”
“Could be Thursday’s. I’ve lost track.”
“And your apartment’s a crime scene, and Maine says when you do show up you’re skating like a zombie.”
The thought arrives clean: I don’t give a shit anymore. About hockey, about school, about maintaining this performance. All I want is Sophie, and now I’ve got her. The rest is just me processing what I’ve lost, and what I’ve got to do next.
“I’m giving up the NHL.”
Andy freezes. “What?”
“Sophie needs me to stay. So I’m staying,” I say. “I’m just processing.”
“Processing?” She wheels on me, tears building—the furious kind. “This isn’t processing. This is you sliding. This is your depression eating you alive.”
“It’s my choice. I love her. She needs me here?—”
“To what? To give up everything you’ve bled for? Everything you ARE?” Andy’s face contorts with grief. “You’re volunteering for your own destruction.”
I shrug. It’s all I can muster.
“Fucking hell, Mike.” The tears stream now, but her voice stays fierce. “Do you know what it was like? Watching you last year? You stopped talking. Stopped existing. For three months, you were gone. What remained was this hollow thing that looked like my brother, but… fuck, Mike.”
I remember. The weight of existence crushing me into the mattress. Food tasting like ash. The careful distance I maintained from everyone because their concern felt unbearable, and the loss of hockey was like a feeding tube being disconnected from a catatonic patient.
“You FOUGHT.” Her voice rises. “You fought so fucking hard. Therapy twice a week. All the new things. You rebuilt yourself, and I was so goddamn proud.”
Something hot pricks behind my eyes.
“And now…” She scoffs. “One conversation with her and you’re back here, like none of it mattered, like YOU don’t matter.”
“It’s not?—”
“Then explain it. Make it make sense.” She drops beside me on the couch. “Because what I see is my brother choosing to drown.”
“Love means sacrifice.”
“No. Love means growth.” Her hand finds mine, squeezes hard. “Love means becoming more, not less.”
Another shrug.
She shifts closer. “Last time, hockey saved you. The possibility of playing again pulled you through. But if you give that up… what’s left?”
Nothing. We both know it. Without that North Star, I’m just this—a ghost haunting his own apartment. I’ll get over it, because I have to—Sophie needs me to—but until then, fuck yeah I’m down in the dumps, and I’m not going to apologize for taking the time I need.
“Her mom was in the hospital and Sophie said she needs me,” I say. “And if I leave—if I’m in Calgary when it happens again—then…”
“You’re not her support animal! That’s not your fucking job!” Andy’s voice breaks. “If being with her means erasing yourself, that’s not love, Mike. That’s slow suicide with company, that’s detonating your own fucking life because she’s too scared to live her own.”
We sit in gathering darkness. The TV continues its silent mockery.
“You have a game in two days,” Andy says eventually.
“I know.”
“Will you play?”
The question weighs more than my equipment bag. “I don’t know.”
“Mike—”
“I’ll go. I’ll shower. Eat something. Show up.”
“I’m staying tonight,” she says in that tone that reminds me she’s related to me. “I’m crashing on the couch you bought thinking you’d be signing a pro contract.”
The irony stings, targeted and specific.
“And tomorrow, after Cornell, we’re talking. Really talking. Maybe calling your therapi?—”
“I’m not going back to therapy.”
“Then we’ll find something. But Mike…” She sighs. “This path leads nowhere good. You can’t white-knuckle through giving up your soul.”
“Drama runs in the family,” I attempt.
“Depression runs in the family,” she corrects. “There’s a difference.”
After she disappears to find sheets, I sit in my slightly cleaner apartment feeling exposed. Suddenly, my phone buzzes with Sophie’s name. Her contact photo—us laughing at something I can’t remember—feels like evidence from another life.
Can’t wait to see you!
I stare at the heart emoji until it blurs. My thumbs hover over the keyboard before I force myself to type:
Me too.
Six letters. The smallest lie I’ve ever told.
Andy reappears with bedding and catches me staring at the phone. “Sophie?”
I nod.
“And you’re pretending life’s wonderful?”
Another nod.
“Mike… if she loves you—really loves you—she needs to know.”
“She’ll blame herself.”
“Good,” Andy says quietly. “Maybe she should. Did she hesitate?”
I feel a spark of anger… emotion… for the first time in days. “What?”
“Or did she just decide her needs were worth your dreams?”
I don’t answer. Can’t answer. I’ve been dodging that question for three days.
“You matter too,” Andy says finally. “Your dreams matter. And anyone who loves you would never ask you to choose between them and oxygen.”
She kisses my forehead and starts making up the couch. I should help, or do something else besides marinate in truths I don’t want to taste, but that would take a lot of energy.
So instead, I close my eyes and imagine the game in a few days. Lacing up skates that feel like shackles. Arena lights spotlighting everything I’m giving up. Playing a game that used to be my religion and is now just torture.
The couch dips as Andy settles in, and I force myself to stand. To shower. To pretend I’m still human. But as hot water sluices over me, washing away three days of self-pity, Andy’s question echoes off the tile:
What’s going to save you this time?
Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.
I’m going to fade into this hollow version of myself until there’s nothing left but what Sophie needs. A boyfriend-shaped projection who shows up and slowly forgets he ever wanted anything else.
Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s love.
Maybe that’s just the lie I’ll keep telling myself.