My Pathetic Obsession With The Hockey Boy

Amara

Cheryl pov.

Amara was at the coffee shop when I got there, two drinks on the table, one of them mine because she ordered it the exact same way she did every morning since freshman year without needing to ask.

"Sit," she said, before I pulled the chair out. "Talk. Fast. I've been up since six imagining scenarios and none of them were boring enough."

I told her everything. The equipment room, the bench by the vending machines, his father, my apartment, all of it, and watched her expression move through different kinds of shock before settling into something more careful.

"Okay," she said. "First, I'm happy for you. Genuinely. You've wanted this since we were fourteen and you cried during that hockey documentary for reasons you swore weren't about a boy."

"They were a little about a boy."

"They were entirely about a boy." She wrapped both hands around her cup.

"Second.

Cheryl. Your sister posted your journal to the entire school yesterday morning. That's not going away because Carlson showed up at your door with a new laptop."

I knew she was right. I let myself have one night of not thinking about it, and the moment she said it out loud, all of it came rushing back.

The whispers in the hallway, the recordings, Megan's voice in the courtyard saying things I still couldn't repeat to myself without my face going hot.

"I know," I said. "I have a week left with my dad, too. I haven't even started the interview."

"So let's start." Amara pulled her laptop out of her bag and opened a blank document like she was waiting for permission to be useful.

"You've got footage, you've got analysis nobody else on that coaching staff has, and now you've got access to Carlson Miller that literally no other journalist on this campus has ever had.

That's not a problem, Cheryl. That's the whole story."

"It doesn't feel like a story. It feels like my life is on fire and everyone's watching it burn."

"Both things can be true." She said, but she didn't take it back.

Amara had never once let me get away with feeling sorry for myself without also making me do something about it, which was half the reason I kept her around since we were fourteen.

"But you have a week. You've had worse timelines."

She wasn't wrong.

I pulled out my own notebook, a new one, not the one Celeste had taken, because some habits I wasn't ready to give up even after everything and went on sketching out questions for the interview, real ones this time, about his game, his training, the mental side of captaining a team under that much pressure.

Nothing about the journal.

Nothing about the night before.

I owed him that much, keeping the two versions of him separate on paper even if they weren't separate anywhere else in my head.

"There's something else," Amara said, quieter now, glancing around the coffee shop like she wanted to make sure nobody was close enough to hear.

"I've been going through the footage from the arena. From the attack."

My stomach tightened. "And?"

"Security cut out for exactly ninety seconds right when it happened. Not a full outage, just the two cameras covering that entrance.

Everything else on campus kept recording.

"She turned her laptop toward me, showing me a timestamp, a gap in the log where there shouldn't have been one.

"That's not bad luck, Cheryl. Somebody knew the blind spots."

I thought about the man's voice, low and rushed, telling the others not to disappoint the woman who hired them.

No one knows that part yet, not even Amara. Carlson too doesn't know about it. I kept it to myself because saying it out loud made it real in a way I wasn't ready for.

"Amara. They said someone hired them. A woman."

She went very still. "You didn't mention that."

"I didn't know how to say it without saying who I thought it was."

Neither of us said Celeste's name out loud. We didn't have to. It sat there on the table between us, next to the coffee going cold and the notebook full of questions I still needed to ask a boy I'd loved since I was twelve years old, and for the first time since my sister walked into my room with that cruel smile, I understood that this wasn't just about a journal anymore.

"We need proof," Amara said. "Real proof. Not a feeling."

"I know."

"Then we're building a file. Starting today. Everything, the journal, the attack, whatever she does next, because she's not going to stop at this."

Amara closed her laptop, and there was something furious in her face. Something I saw once when I boy tried to bully us. "I'm not letting her get away with whatever this is.

Neither are you."

For the first time since I woke up to my sister's voice hovering over my bed, I didn't feel like I was only running from something.

Amara walked me to class after that, still talking through logistics, how to store the file so nobody could delete it out from under us the way Celeste tried with my journal, who else on campus saw something the day of the attack, whether Coach Whitman would notice if I went about asking questions beyond game tape.

"One more thing," she said, right before we split off toward different buildings.

"Carlson. Are you going to tell him? About the woman who hired them?"

I hadn't thought that far ahead. "I don't know yet."

"You should. Before Celeste finds a way to tell him something worse first."

She was right, the way she was right about the things I didn't want to look at. I thought about him ordering my equipment without being asked, about the way he listened to me talk about my ankle like it mattered that much to him.

I thought about how easy it would be to lose all of that the second Celeste decided I was worth destroying more than she had.

"I'll tell him," I said. "Just not yet. Not until I know more."

Amara didn't look convinced, but she let it go, squeezing my arm once before she peeled off toward the library.

I stood there for a second on the quad, a notebook clutched to my chest, watching students move around me the way they had every day for three years, except today it felt different.

Today I had a week, a file that didn't exist yet, and a boy across campus who knew more about me than anyone else alive.

I felt like I was starting to fight back.