Second Chance on the Ice

1. Cyaire

Cyaire

(Three Years Ago)

“Your father and I didn’t spend this much money raising you for mediocrity, Cyaire.”

My mother’s voice pours through my AirPods while I walk through the marble lobby of The Langham, tie hanging loose around my neck, headache pressing hard and insistent behind my eyes like some alien creature trying to escape through my skull.

I pause near the entrance, squeezing my eyes shut as if that might drown her out, but my momma is relentless, not loud, exactly, just utterly impossible to ignore.

“Cyaire? Do you hear me, boy?” She sharpens the question, and the pitch of it sends a spike of pain through my temple that makes me wince visibly enough for a passing couple to glance at me sideways.

“Yes ma’am,” I reply, drawing a slow breath through my nose as I force myself to take in my surroundings rather than the inside of my own skull.

The hotel is exactly what people expect when they think New York luxury.

Gold lighting catches across polished marble floors in wide amber pools, and expensive perfume trails through the air every time someone moves past me.

Somewhere near the elevators, a pianist is playing softly enough to dissolve into the ambient texture of clinking glasses and low, careful conversation.

The kind of music that exists purely to remind you that you are somewhere elevated.

Everything about this place feels fancy. Stunning and perfect in every conceivable direction I look.

I am so fucking tired of perfect.

“Well. Do you?” My mother continues, her tone making clear she is very much still waiting on a satisfactory answer to the question she asked before I stopped listening.

“I’m aware, Momma. I’m blessed to have the things you and Dad have afforded me.” I shift the strap of my overnight bag higher onto my shoulder, already knowing those words won’t be enough.

“I don’t think you are,” she replies immediately, not appeased in the slightest. “Your interview at Mount Sinai was an opportunity most people would spend their entire lives praying for. The fact that you sound exhausted right now, instead of grateful, is genuinely concerning to me.”

I press the button for the elevator. Then I stand there and stare at the closed doors as my reflection assembles itself slowly across the shining gold surface.

The doors don’t open and I don’t move.

The version of me looking back is immaculate by the professional standards instilled in me.

Navy blue suit tailored to my mother’s exact specifications, shiny brogues, crisp white button-down, silver cufflinks shaped like stethoscopes.

A gift from my brother, Julian, last Christmas, delivered with a knowing smile and absolutely zero irony.

My tie is the only thing off. Hanging loose around my collar.

I started undoing it somewhere between the cab and the lobby and then simply lost the motivation to finish.

Julian. I would rather be talking to him right now.

He would tell me to fall in line. Give her what she wants, if I want her to stop her nagging.

Keep my head down, go to my room, review my notes for tomorrow.

Julian has always been better at folding himself up neatly when the situation demands it. . .but I’m not him. I don’t want to be.

Something ugly and suffocating twists deep in my chest at the thought of going upstairs, changing into pajamas, and sitting cross-legged on an expensive hotel bed reviewing interview notes for programs I have absolutely no intention of attending..

Exhausted doesn’t begin to cover what I’m feeling right now.

I’ve spent the last four days pretending my future still belongs to me.

Four days walking through pristine medical school campuses with their gleaming buildings and their hushed, reverent corridors, while admissions boards smile at me like the shape of my life has already been decided and I’m simply waiting to be handed the paperwork.

Four days of listening to people tell me how impressive I am, how bright my future is, how incredibly lucky I am to even be sitting in these rooms at my age.

Lucky. That word keeps coming at me like something I’m supposed to catch and hold close to my chest.

“Tomorrow’s interview is even more significant than today’s,” my mother continues, shifting gears without pause. “Columbia’s acceptance rate alone should convey to you exactly how fortunate you are to even be considered for a seat in that room.”

“I know the acceptance rate.” I say it quietly, already turning away from the elevator, walking without any particular destination through the lobby because standing still is making everything worse.

“You should know it. Considering how hard your father and I have worked to put you in a position where schools of that caliber would even look at you in the first place.”

There it is.

That damn line. The one she always returns to eventually, like a compass finding north, like she needs me to feel the full geometry of what I owe them before she’ll feel complete.

As if I wasn’t the one who spent four years grinding through undergrad.

As if she was sitting beside me at two in the morning trying to untangle organic chemistry.

As if she survived back-to-back exams on three hours of broken sleep, sat through MCAT prep courses, suffered through Biochemistry labs, dragged herself through every miserable and demoralizing stretch it took to make myself competitive enough to even stand at the threshold of schools like this.

My parents gave me opportunity. I know that. I have never pretended otherwise.

I also did the work. Every brutal, unglamorous second of it. Alone, in rooms they never entered, for years.

None of that appears to register once my mother begins talking about sacrifice.

Every achievement I have ever managed somehow folds back into them.

The money they spent, the schools they chose, the future they already constructed for me before I was old enough to understand that I might want something different. Something that was actually mine.

“I said I know,” I snap, sharper than I intend, the words escaping before I can weigh the consequences of them.

I brace for her to raise her voice, to pull out something from scripture about honor and respect, to make me feel smaller than I already do. It doesn’t come.

A brief silence crackles through the line. Then she exhales, softly, and the sound of it somehow hits me harder than anger would have.

“You sound irritated,” she says calmly. A little too calmly.

Because I’m twenty-four years old and my entire life feels like a performance I never once auditioned for, and I am standing in the lobby of a hotel that costs more per night than some people earn in a month, wearing cufflinks shaped like the career I don’t want, talking to the woman who loves me most in the world in a language that has never quite fit.

“Long day,” I say instead, carefully. “There’s a lot riding on all of this. It’s a lot of decisions to be making at once.”

“You were the one who chose to schedule all of your interviews within the same week,” she tsks disapprovingly. Like I had a choice.

No, you chose this. I want to say it plainly.

The schedule was hers. The hotels were hers.

The itinerary was printed and emailed to me like a boarding pass for someone else’s destination.

She already absorbed one outburst though, and I know better than to spend what little goodwill I have left, so I bite the inside of my cheek until the copper taste of it grounds me back into my body.

The worst part, the part that keeps me from saying any of the things that actually live inside me, is that my mother genuinely believes she is helping. Mave Reed loves her sons with a ferocity that I’ve never once questioned. That love has never been the issue.

The problem is that her love arrives wrapped so tightly around expectation that eventually you can’t breathe beneath the weight of it. You can’t move without brushing up against the shape of the future she already decided was best for you before you had any say in the matter.

I watched it happen to Julian for years.

His careful answers and his carefully rehearsed smiles.

The way he slowly learned how to fold parts of himself away quietly every time our parents started talking about image and legacy and what the family name was supposed to represent.

Julian spent the majority of his life trying to become the version of himself they wanted him to be rather than the one that actually made sense to him.

I love my brother more than anyone in this world. I don’t want that for myself. I hope that one day he finds his way out from underneath it too. Tonight, in this lobby, I am choosing something different. Even if I don’t know yet exactly what it is.

“You have another interview tomorrow morning at ten,” my mother says, her voice smoothing back into the efficient register she uses when she has a plan. “Your reservation has already been extended with the hotel. A car will collect you from the lobby at eight thirty.”

I stop walking.

Ahead of me, at the far end of the lobby, is the entrance to the hotel bar.

Low amber light falls across dark wood floors through the glass.

Soft jazz piano drifts through the open doorway alongside the quiet murmur of early evening conversations, unhurried and warm.

The bottles of liquor behind the bar glow gold in the backlit shelving, and the people perched on stools and sitting in leather chairs look like they belong in a magazine spread.

More piano music is playing through the room, because of course in establishments like this, there’s no other instruments available to serenade its customers.

Something that sounds like it could belong to Julian floats out of those speakers and the irony of it pulls the first genuine, unguarded smile out of me that I’ve managed all day.

For the first time since I landed in New York, something inside my chest loosens slightly. Just enough to breathe.

“You’re listening, aren’t you?” My mother’s voice cuts back through the moment cleanly.

“Yes, ma’am.” The words come out on their own.

“You can’t afford to lose focus right now, Cyaire. One impulsive decision, just one, can alter the trajectory of the rest of your life in ways you are not prepared to navigate.”

A laugh rises in my throat and I press my lips together to contain it before it escapes.

If only she knew.

Because the truth is, I’ve already made a life changing decision. It’s been sitting there for days, maybe longer, waiting for me to stop pretending I haven’t already made up my mind.

I’m done with medicine. Done pretending I want this.

Done forcing myself through the paces of a future that feels emptier and more airless every single time someone congratulates me for how far I’ve come toward it.

Done making every decision according to a blueprint that was drawn up before I was old enough to understand what I actually wanted, or who I actually was.

The second I get back to California, I’m applying to Berkeley’s acting program.

Film, theatre, auditions, all of it. Everything that has lived in the back of my mind like a door I kept walking past but never opened.

I don’t care if I have to start at the bottom.

I don’t care if my parents look at me like I’m dismantling something precious and irreplaceable.

Ruining my future, by their definition of it, sounds like considerably less suffering than spending the rest of my life trapped inside a version of myself I never chose.

Maybe they’ll never fully forgive me for it.

Maybe they’ll look at me the way they’ve always looked at Julian on the days he failed to be exactly what they needed him to be.

Even though my brother has given them nearly everything, bent over backwards to please them, and it’s never been enough.

That specific look, patient and disappointed at once, is one I know by heart.

Maybe choosing something for myself means losing them in some significant way.

I think I can carry that. I think I have to.

“Cyaire?”

I surface back into the conversation and realize my mother has been speaking this entire time. I’ve completely checked out, my gaze fixed on the amber warmth spilling through the glass of the bar door.

“I should probably get some sleep,” I say, the words landing flat and automatic.

“Review your notes before you go to bed,” she insists, as if I haven’t just communicated that the conversation is ending.

“Mmmhmm.”

“Do not ‘mmmhmm’ me, boy.” The frustration in her voice is real. “I am being serious with you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I say, that particular combination of words has always worked as a release valve between us, reliable as anything.

She sighs again. Softer this time. “I only want what is best for you.”

There it is. The guilt trip. A punch right in the sternum.

Not a shout, not an accusation, just that quiet statement that carries all of it underneath without needing to name any of it.

The years, the money, the sleepless nights she spent worrying.

Every sacrifice compressed into eight words delivered gently enough to make you feel them twice.

“I know,” I say back, and I mean it. That’s the part that’s always made this so complicated.

“Call me after Columbia tomorrow.” She says it with the particular satisfaction of someone who considers a matter finished.

“I will.” The line disconnects.

I stand there for a moment longer, looking once more at myself through the glass. The perfect, immaculate, carefully assembled image of a young man walking confidently toward a prestigious future. Future medical student.

A complete fucking lie.

“Fuck it,” I murmur, quietly enough that no one near me catches it.

Then I push the door open and walk into the bar, the warmth of it meeting me at the threshold.

I cross to the stool I’d been watching through the glass, drop my bag at my feet and sit with a heaviness that has nothing to do with physical tiredness.

Exhaling slowly, something unknots across my shoulder and relief seeps into my bones.

“What can I get you?” The bartender materializes in front of me, setting a coaster printed with The Langham’s gold crest down on the polished wood with a quiet, practiced snap.

“Jack and Coke.”