ICE AND ALIBI

Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Family

Eli's POV

I locked the bathroom stall and pulled the bag off my shoulder before I even heard the principal's door close behind me.

My hands were already moving. Zipper, lining, the little hidden pocket nobody ever checked because nobody ever looked twice at a hockey bag. The bottle was small, no label, just thirty oxycodone pills my cousin always called the "thirty-pack."

I didn't think about it. Thinking about it would've slowed me down.

I twisted the cap and dumped them straight into the toilet, all thirty, watching them spin and sink and disappear into the water. Then I flushed twice, just to be sure none of them floated back up to say hello to a principal who was about to search my bag for weapons and find something so much worse instead.

My heart was still hammering when I zipped the bag shut and walked out like nothing had happened.

That's the part nobody at this school would ever understand. Not the fight. The *after.*

---

The principal's office smelled like old coffee and floor cleaner. He talked a long time — *zero tolerance, first offense, we'll be reaching out to your guardian* — and I nodded in all the right places and said sorry in all the right places, and the whole time I was just grateful my bag was sitting empty and clean beside my chair.

By the time they walked me back to class, fifth period was already halfway done.

The whispering started before I even sat down. I heard it the way you hear wind through a crack in a window — quiet, but everywhere. *That's him. He broke Brody's nose. Did you see the blood?* I kept my eyes forward and slid into my seat in the back.

A girl dropped into the chair beside me a minute later, dark curls pulled up high, a smile that already knew it worked on people.

"I'm Sharae," she said. "You're the guy who broke Brody's nose."

"I'm the guy who got walked to the office for it. Same thing, I guess."

"He deserved it." She tilted her head. "You don't look like someone who gets in fights."

"Looks are funny that way."

She laughed — and that's when there was a knock at the door, sharp, three times.

The teacher opened it a crack, said something I couldn't hear, then turned back into the room with a look on her face I didn't like at all.

"Eli? You're wanted in the hallway."

The whole class went quiet in that specific way classrooms do when somebody's about to get in trouble twice in one day. I stood up slow, left my bag under the desk, and walked out into the hall like my stomach wasn't already sinking.

He was waiting by the lockers. Tattoos climbing both arms, up his neck, across one whole side of his jaw, so thick you couldn't tell where the ink stopped and his face began.

The hall wasn't empty. Four kids by the water fountain. Two more coming out of the bathroom, freezing mid-step the second they saw him. One kid with a hall pass, halfway through asking the monitor a question that died in his throat.

Seven sets of eyes, and not one of them looking away.

"Where is it," he said. Quiet. No greeting.

"Where's what."

"Don't." He stepped closer, voice dropping lower still. "The thirty-pack. Where's the bag."

I held his stare. "Gone."

"Gone like sold? Gone like you handed it off to somebody?" His jaw worked, like he was already doing math he didn't like the answer to.

"Gone like flushed. Down a toilet. Before they could search my bag for a weapon and find that instead."

For a second he didn't say anything at all. The hallway felt very long and very quiet, every one of those seven kids holding still like moving might make this worse.

"You flushed thirty thousand dollars," he said, finally, like he needed to hear it out loud to believe it. "You panicked over a school search and you flushed it."

"I didn't panic." My voice stayed even, even though nothing in my chest felt even at all. "I made a choice. A fast one. The right one."

"The right one." He laughed, short and ugly. "You embarrass this family in a cafeteria, and then you cost it thirty grand cleaning up after yourself. You think your father's going to call either of those the right one?"

"Nobody touched you," I said. "I handled both of them."

That's when he hit me. Open palm, fast, hard enough my head snapped sideways and my ears rang and somewhere down the hall one of the kids by the fountain actually gasped out loud.

I tasted blood where my teeth caught my cheek.

"You don't get to decide what 'handled' means," he said, low, just for me now, the others too far to catch the words even if they could see everything else. "That's not your job. It's never been your job."

"Outside," he added, louder this time, jerking his chin toward the exit doors at the end of the hall. "We're finishing this where I don't have an audience counting how many times I have to say it twice."

I looked past him for half a second and saw all seven of them frozen mid-motion — phones half-raised, nobody quite brave enough to actually lift them all the way, the hall monitor reaching slowly for the radio on her belt.

Down past the doors, faint but getting louder, footsteps. More than one set. Radios crackling. Somebody already moving toward us before he'd even said the word *outside.*

He heard it too. His jaw tightened, just barely, the only sign he'd noticed at all.

"Move," he said.

I walked past him first, because that was the rule. Always walk first. Never let them see your back.

We made it three steps before security rounded the corner, fast, already talking into their radios, already reaching for him. He didn't fight it — just raised his hands, calm, like he'd practiced that too.

But he turned his head toward me one last time while they pulled him back, voice low enough that only I could catch it under all the noise.

"And stay away from the detective's daughter," he said. "We don't need her father looking twice at us. Not now."

Then they had him fully turned, walking him the other way, and the hallway swallowed the rest of whatever he might've said next.

I stood there with my cheek swelling hot under one eye, ears still ringing, seven witnesses scattering in seven different directions like none of them had seen anything at all.

*The detective's daughter.*

I thought about brown eyes across a lunch table. *Like the detective?* she'd said, like it was nothing.

It wasn't nothing. My family already knew exactly who her father was.

And now, somehow, so did I.