The walls might as well have been made of paper.
I lay in the dark of my new room, staring at shadows shifting across the ceiling, every sound from the other side of the drywall pulling me tighter. The faint creak of Caleb’s mattress as he turned. The slow rustle of sheets. A deep, frustrated exhale that sounded like it carried the weight of the entire season.
Sleep refused to come. My mind kept replaying the old battles—the night I was seventeen and the opposing captain spent three periods whispering the same poison Kane Harlow was now spreading online. I answered with a hat trick and a tunnel fight after the final buzzer. My father had watched from the stands with terrified pride in his eyes, later telling me I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone but myself. He was wrong. I always
