Page 26 of On His Mind

I don’t say thank you. I never know how.

Practice ends about how I figured.

Cole heads over to talk with the coaches. An assistant stops Theo to show him something on a tablet, and three upperclassmen hang back to wait for him, because leaving together is a thing they get to do. The room empties toward the tunnel in twos and threes and takes all that easy noise out with it.

The freshmen stay and pick up pucks. Nobody says so. You’re new, so you sweep the corners while the guys who earned their way out hit the showers, and Blue’s already at it before I’ve even looked around for the bucket. I don’t mind it. Mary always said I’d find a chore in an empty room, and she wasn’t wrong. Josh raked the pucks himself every night, after a two-hour skate, when he didn’t have to. It just feels like being where the work is.

I fill one bucket. Then another. The lights over the seats cut out section by section until it’s only the ice lit, white, and humming.

“You staying?” Blue’s leaning on his stick at the hash marks with a bucket beside him.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll shoot.”

I skate back to the net and drop into my stance. Blue starts feeding pucks at me from the top of the circle. He shoots. I track it, set, seal. Rebound. He gathers it, resets, and goes again. The only sounds in the building are the puck off his blade, the puck off my pads, my edges biting when I push across, and he puts it where I have to dig for it, over and over, and neither of us says a word.

This is what Josh did. Every night. One man, one bucket, no talking, the same flat shots until I stopped flinching. Now it’s Blue. We just skate, and the pucks pile up in the corner.

Blue racks his stick after a while. “Done.”

I stand up straight.

“You coming?”

“In ten.”

He nods and goes.

I sweep the last of the pucks, and when the bucket’s full and there’s nothing left to do with my hands, I take one slow lap around the rink. My edges leave two clean lines in the ice. I stop on the goal line and look around at my new home rink.

Don’t fuck it up.

Chapter 6

Penelope

I’mfiveminutesfromthe end of my yoga video when my phone starts ringing. The instructor freezes mid-breath, one arm still reaching for the ceiling, and my mother’s contact photo takes over. The phone rings over the paused pose. I let it go once. Then I answer, because not answering is a fight I don’t have time for before eight a.m.

“Good morning, Mom.”

“Penelope. Good morning.” No pause. My mother doesn’t do small talk. “Did you sign the contract?”

“Yes.” The word is out with no hesitation. “It’s signed. I was going to drop it off between classes.”

The manila folder is on my desk in the next room, exactly where it’s been for three days. The signature line is exactlyas empty as it was when Oliver slid it across the table over chocolate mousse I didn’t order.

“Good,” she says. “The Whitmores will be pleased.”

“Is that all?”

“Do you know what project they’re putting you on?”

“They didn’t say. What projects do you know of?”

“Chicago, of course.”

Right. I roll my shoulders back and look out the window. “I have my first day of classes today. Thanks for checking in.”