The Hockey Star And His Roommate; She Has A Secret

AUREL

Con Law is the one class I can't afford to fail, which is exactly why I haven't understood a word in forty minutes.

Professor Adler is up front saying something about commerce and clauses and a case from seventeen-eighty-something, while I'm staring at the same paragraph in my textbook I've been staring at since the bell, the words sliding off my brain like water off a windshield.

Wrenley would absolutely know what it means. She's someone that could explain it in two sentences and make me feel stupid for not getting it, which is somehow the only way it ever sticks.

But she isn't here. She's probably across campus pretending she didn't just verbally dismantle my girlfriend in front of twenty four people yesterday.

And speaking of my girlfriend.

Elise is in the seat beside me with her head on my chest, the way she likes to sit when there's an audience, her hand resting over my heart, sometimes circling it like she's claiming territory which she is.

Half the lecture hall watched a clip of yesterday on someone's phone before class started. I saw it going around, the angle from the mats, Wrenley's voice, and Elise knows they saw it, so now she's draped on me like a flag somebody's trying to plant back in the ground.

I let her. That's the part I can't explain to anyone.

I sit here with her head on my chest, her perfume in my throat and I let her, because the alternative is what happened the last time I tried to pull away, and I'm not… I can't do that again.

I can still hear her mom's voice on the phone at two in the morning. ‘Please, Aurel. Just don't upset her right now. You don't know what she's capable of when she's upset.’

The thing is, I know exactly what she's capable of because I've cleaned it up. I've sat in the ER waiting room at three in the morning with my hands shaking, telling myself it was my fault for saying the wrong thing.

So yesterday, when her hands were shaking in that gym and her face went that exact color of white I've learned to be afraid of, I froze.

I looked at Elise, who I was scared would do something to herself in the parking lot if I humiliated her in front of the whole school, and I chose the fire I knew over the girl I…

I don't finish that thought simply because I'm not allowed to finish that thought.

The look on Wrenly's face when I dragged Elise out of the gym is something I would never forget in a hurry.

Whatever she thought of me before yesterday, it's worse now, and the worst part is she's right to think it. From where she stood, I was just a coward who wouldn't defend her.

She doesn't know about the ER or the phone calls or the way you have to walk on egg shells around a person like Elise. She just knows I had one job and didn't do it.

I'd rather she think I'm a coward than know the truth. The truth is more embarrassing.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. There's only one person that would message me at a time like this. In fact, I've been expecting his call ever since the results were released.

Dad: Saw your midterm grades on the parent portal. We need to talk this weekend. You know what happens if you lose your eligibility. I didn't pay for four years of hockey so you could throw it away on a degree you're failing.

I read it twice. The thing in my chest that's been tight since I woke up pulls tighter.

I know what happens. He's used that threat so many times, I can practically recite it word for word.

The money stops, the tuition, the house, the whole life everyone thinks I have– gone, the second I stop being useful to him as a story he tells at dinner parties. My son the athlete. My son the future lawyer. He doesn't care which one I am as long as I'm a headline.

"Who's that?" Elise murmurs against my chest, not lifting her head.

"Nobody," I say but then she tries to look into my phone. "It's my dad."

"Oh, tell him I say hi." She smiles up at me, sweet, like yesterday didn't happen, like there isn't a clip of her shaking and shouting going around the whole school.

This is the other thing about Elise. She can rewrite a room in her own head by morning. In her version, she's the wronged girlfriend and Wrenley's the villain and I'm the prize, and she believes it so completely that sometimes I almost do too.

I put my phone away without answering my father.

Finn catches me in the hallway after, falling into step beside me like he's been waiting, which he probably has.

"So that was a fun thing that's all over campus," he says.

"Not you too man," I groan.

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just walking innocently. Next to my best friend, who let his girlfriend call his crush a homeless charity case in front of the entire athletics department and said nothing." He takes a bite of the protein bar he's always eating. "Real innocent walk."

"You don't know the situation, Finn."

"I know the situation better than anyone alive." He says it quietly, not joking anymore, and that's worse. Finn's known me since freshman year.

He's the one who drove me to the ER. Finn knows every reason I have for being careful with Elise, and he's looking at me right now like none of them are good enough anymore.

"I know exactly why you froze. And I'm telling you, as the one person who actually gets it, that reason is going to cost you something you can't get back if you keep using it as an excuse."

"It's not an excuse. It's real." I sigh. “You of all people know that.”

"Both things can be true." He stops walking which makes me stop too. "She's not your responsibility, man. She was never your responsibility. And that girl yesterday– the one who didn't need you to save her, who saved herself and walked out without looking back?" He shrugs, like it's obvious, like it's the simplest thing in the world. "You couldn't take your eyes off her the whole time. I watched you. So did Elise and everybody else."

I don't say anything, because there's nothing to say that isn't either a lie or a confession, and I'm not ready for either.

"Just think about it," Finn says, gentler now. "Before you lose more than your GPA."

He walks off toward the rink, leaving me standing in the hallway. Not long after, the bell rings but I don't move.

For the first time in two years, I let myself think the thought all the way to the end. I don't want this anymore and it scares me more than Elise ever has