Page 53 of Fractured Ice

The hallway is quiet after everyone clears out. My room is thirty feet to the left. I know that. I'm standing in front of the elevator anyway.

The button is right there.

Part of me wants to press it. Go up to four, knock on her door, explain it like a person, and tell her that Jamie was freshman year and it was one night. And I haven't thought about her since because the only person I've been thinking about for years is the one who just walked out of my team's hangout with her walls back up. Tell her that the rotation of women in my bed that people joke about exists because she's the standard and nothing else has come close.

The other part of me knows exactly how that goes. She's not going to open the door. And if she does, she's going to look at me the way she was looking at the card table, perfectly even, perfectly closed, and everything I say is going to sound like exactly what she thinks it is, which is a guy with a history trying to talk his way out of having a history.

I turn and walk to my room.

Here's the thing about Sienna Park. She's had my number since sixth grade, and I know exactly what she thinks of me because I'm the one who kept giving her reasons to think it. Every time I said the wrong thing at the wrong moment, every girl she ever saw leave a party with me, every stupid fumble in every interaction we've ever had. Her read on me isn't wrong. It's accurate, but it’s not the full picture.

Tonight, for a few hours, I thought maybe she was starting to question it. Starting to wonder if what she knew about me was incomplete. And then Jamie walked across a hotel room and confirmed the worst of everything she's ever believed about me.

I sit on the edge of the bed and look at my phone. Three delivered, read, but no response. I'm thinking about her laughing so hard she grabbed my arm, and the way she looked through the card game, and how easy it was when we were talking about Finch and his mug.

That was real. Whatever that was tonight was real. I know it was real, and it lasted right up until the second it didn't.

The worst part isn't that she left. The worst part is that she's not wrong to leave. She has the evidence, and the evidence says exactly what she thinks it says, and I can't argue with it because I'm the one who spent years producing it.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling, trying to figure out what you do when the only version of yourself someone can see is the one you aren’t any longer.

I don't have a good answer.

It follows me into sleep.

13

Sienna

Bennett rotates meetings with smaller groups of students in his office on Fridays, and he uses the time with the energy of someone who genuinely enjoys what he does, which I've always found both admirable and slightly exhausting. Today he's got my mid-semester progress report spread across the desk between us, photos and printed interview excerpts and game coverage notes, and he's going through everything, methodically, without tipping his hand until he's ready to.

I sit across from him and wait until the other students finish their discussions, and then there’s only him, me, and my work.

"Photography's excellent," he says, turning a page. "The practice shots especially. You've got an eye for the moment before the moment, which most students don't develop until their third year." He sets down a printed photo of Ethan mid-drill, caught from below, the lines of the ice and the motion of the play behind him. "The game coverage is thorough. Your statistical context is better than half the grad students I've supervised."

"Thank you."

"The interview excerpts are where you shine." He finds a printed section and reads something quietly to himself. "The exchange about the ice feeling right. You let him get there instead of redirecting him. That's a mature instinct."

I wait for the but.

He sets the papers down and looks at me over the top of his glasses.

"You've done an exceptional job documenting Ethan Walker the hockey player," Professor Bennett says. "The way he thinks about the game, how he moves, how his team functions around him. That's all here and it's good." He taps the stack. "What I'm not finding, not yet, is Ethan Walker the person."

The words land in a way I'm not going to show on my face. "I'd argue they're not separable."

"I'd push back on that." He leans forward slightly. "What drives him when he’s off the ice? What does he want in the future that isn't a championship? What's the specific thing he's afraid of? You've given me the public-facing athlete. I want the interior." He closes the folder. "You've got access most journalists would give their left arm for. Use it."

I nod, professionally, in the way that means I've heard and processed and will take this feedback seriously, thank him, gather my stuff, and then leave his office and walk down the corridor and out the glass doors into the gray March afternoon and stand there on the steps feeling like I’ve been given accurate feedback and hate it.

The interior.

The problem is that every time I think I've got a read on Ethan Walker's interior, something contradicts it. He's the guy who runs through women at a rate that should be disqualifying and also the guy who drove an hour after practice to see his little sister's opening night. He's the guy who says things like you didn't seem to mind being bent over and also the guy who slept on top of the covers and waited to make sure I was okay. He volunteers with youth hockey on Sundays. He's been to fourteen away games and apparently left a girl in every one of them.

The more I learn, the less I understand, and that is both journalistically inconvenient and personally something I'd rather not examine too closely.

"Sienna!"