Chapter 1 The Letter #4
My laptop is on the desk, buried under a stack of hockey analytics printouts and three empty energy drink cans that I should probably recycle before Jeffrey sees them and gives me the disappointed look that is worse than any lecture.
I sit down.
Pull up a browser.
Type Valenridge University into the search bar.
The website loads quickly. Clean design. Navy and gold color scheme matching the letterhead. A hero image of a sprawling campus with modern facilities set against a backdrop of mountains and evergreen forest.
The application portal is right on the front page. A button labeled APPLY NOW in gold letters, pulsing gently, like the website itself is holding its breath.
I hover my cursor over it.
My hand trembles.
You have been here before. Standing at the edge of a possibility, staring at a door that might lead somewhere real or might lead to the same room you have been trapped in your entire life.
You have filled out applications and submitted evaluations and stood on ice in front of people who had the power to change your future and chose not to.
And every single time, you went home empty.
So why is this time different?
Maybe it is not.
Maybe it will end exactly the way every other attempt has ended. With silence. With laughter behind plexiglass. With the maddening vocabulary of polite dismissal: maybe next year, the landscape is evolving, you are simply not the best fit.
But maybe.
That word again.
Maybe this is the one.
I think about my father's quiet smile and the weight of his hand on my shoulder.
I think about five coaches who told me no and then turned around and fought for me in the only way the system allowed.
I think about the seven-year-old girl in the portrait downstairs, all gap-toothed ferocity and scraped knuckles and a heart so full of love for the ice that nothing has managed to empty it.
Not the rejections. Not the laughter. Not the slow, relentless erosion of hope that wears you down like water on stone until you forget what shape you used to be.
She would be disappointed in you if you did not click that button.
She would look at you with those enormous green eyes and say, what the fuck, Sage? Since when do we back down?
I exhale.
Click.
The application form populates my screen. Pages of fields and uploads and essay prompts that will take hours to complete. Name. Age. Designation. Athletic history. Competitive record. Personal statement describing your aspirations and why Valenridge University is the right fit for your goals.
I crack my knuckles. Roll my neck. Pull up a blank document for the personal statement.
And start typing.
The words pour out faster than I expected, fueled by fifteen years of early mornings and bruised shins and every single coach who told me I was extraordinary in the same breath they used to tell me I was unacceptable.
Every sentence carries the weight of a thousand drills and a hundred rejections and the specific, furious resilience of an Omega who has been told her entire life that she does not belong on the ice and has responded, every single time, by lacing up her skates and proving them wrong.
It takes three hours.
Three hours of typing and revising and deleting entire paragraphs and rewriting them from scratch because the words are not good enough, are not fierce enough, do not adequately convey the scope of what I am asking for and what I am willing to sacrifice to get it.
By the time I finish, my energy drinks are truly empty, my eyes are burning, and the cursor is hovering over the SUBMIT button with the same trembling uncertainty it hovered over APPLY NOW three hours ago.
My phone buzzes on the desk. A text from Jeffrey.
Your mother is requesting your presence for dinner in twenty minutes. She mentioned the Beaumonts. I have taken the liberty of laying out your navy suit.
Also, I hid the dress she left on your bed. You are welcome.
I snort, a burst of laughter that breaks the tension just enough.
Thank you, Jeffrey. You are the only good thing about this household.
I look at the screen one more time. At the cursor blinking beside the submit button. At three hours of my life compressed into digital form, waiting to be launched into the ether toward a university that may or may not be the answer to a question I have been asking since I was seven years old.
Give them one more shot to see your skills in a place that will not find it easy to say no.
I press submit.
Watch the loading wheel spin.
Watch the confirmation page populate with a message thanking me for my application and promising a response within forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours.
Two days to find out if the rest of my life begins or if this is just another ending dressed in better stationery.
I close the laptop. Stand up. Strip off my compression gear and pull on the navy suit that Jeffrey, patron saint of my sanity, has laid across my armchair.
The fabric is cool against my shower-flushed skin, structured and sharp in a way that makes me feel armored rather than dressed.
I check my reflection in the mirror on the back of my door.
Dark navy hair, still damp, pushed back from my face.
Green eyes that look tired but awake. Jaw set.
Shoulders squared. The kind of posture that makes my mother purse her lips and mutter about femininity and the kind that makes my father nod with quiet pride because he knows it is the same posture I adopt before stepping onto the ice.
Ready for battle.
Even if the battle is a three-course dinner with people whose greatest contribution to society is their wine collection.
I head for the door, tugging my cuffs straight.
And somewhere between the mirror and the hallway, between the closing of my laptop and the click of my dress shoes on the marble stairs, a thought crystallizes in my mind with the hard, bright clarity of ice forming on a still pond.
This could be the season I need.
The place. The team. The chance.
Four weeks at an institution that claims to see what every other program has refused to acknowledge.
Surrounded by Alphas and Omegas who might understand what it means to fight for space in a world that was not built for you.
Competing on ice that is not pre-salted with bias and tradition and the comfortable assumption that some bodies belong here and others do not.
Or it could be the final confirmation that the dream was always impossible.
That my mother was right. That the coaches were right. That the scouts and the teams and the entire fucking infrastructure of professional hockey was right to look at me and see a liability instead of an athlete.
Either way, I will have my answer.
Either way, the uncertainty ends.
And either way, I will walk off that ice knowing I gave it everything. Every drill. Every shift. Every ounce of the stubborn, furious, unbreakable will that has kept me skating since I was seven years old and too small for her own jersey and too fierce for anyone to stop.
This could be the season she needs to prove she either belongs... or is done with this for good.