Off the Ice

The Perfect Couple

By the end of my first week, I had learned two things about New York Montessori High School. The first was that the food in the cafeteria was somehow better than most restaurants back home. The second was that everyone, without exception, knew who Freya Carter was.

I hadn't met her yet, not properly, but I didn't need to. Her name floated through every hallway conversation like background music, half admiring, half nervous, the way people talk about someone they respect and slightly fear in equal measure. George filled in the gaps for me over lunch on Thursday, the two of us tucked into a corner table near the windows while he worked through what had to be his third plate of fries.

"She's basically royalty here," he said. "Her dad's some big deal, owns half of downtown or something. She dates Carlton, obviously, which you probably already knew, and she's got this whole thing where people either love her or are terrified of her. Sometimes both."

"That's not ominous at all."

"I'm just saying. Watch yourself around her."

I filed that away and didn't think much more about it until later that afternoon, when I saw her in person for the first time outside the library. She was exactly what I'd pictured, tall and effortlessly put together in a way that made my own outfit feel like it belonged in a completely different school. She had a small group clustered around her, laughing at something she'd just said, and even from a distance I could see the way people angled themselves toward her without seeming to notice they were doing it.

I would have kept walking without incident if Sarah Kessler hadn't been coming from the opposite direction at the exact same moment.

I recognized Sarah from my chemistry class, quiet, always in the same faded green hoodie, the kind of person who seemed to prefer being invisible over being noticed. She didn't so much as glance toward Freya's group as she passed, just kept her head down and kept walking toward the library doors.

Freya's voice cut across the hallway before Sarah had even made it three steps past her.

"Oh my god, is that the same hoodie from Tuesday? I feel like I've seen it every single day this week."

A couple of people near her laughed, that quick, uncertain laugh people give when they're not totally sure whether it's actually funny or whether they're just supposed to laugh because someone popular said it. Sarah's shoulders went stiff, just slightly, though she didn't turn around, didn't slow her pace, just pushed through the library doors like she hadn't heard a word of it.

I stood there a second longer than I meant to, something twisting uncomfortably in my chest.

"You good?" George asked, catching up beside me. He'd clearly seen the whole thing too, his jaw tight the way it got whenever he watched someone be unkind for no real reason.

"That was kind of awful."

"Yeah. That's Freya for you. She's not always like that, from what I hear, just when she feels like it." He shrugged, though it wasn't really a careless shrug, more like the kind people do when something bothers them but they've decided it's not their fight to pick. "Sarah's used to it, unfortunately."

That last part somehow made it worse. The idea that someone could get used to being made fun of, that it happened often enough to become routine instead of shocking, sat with me the rest of the walk to my next class.

I thought about Carlton then too, unavoidably, the way I always seemed to eventually circle back to him no matter what I was actually trying to think about. He was dating her. Whatever version of Freya existed behind closed doors, softer maybe, kinder maybe, he was the one who got to see it, if it existed at all. Meanwhile the rest of us apparently just got this, the version who made fun of a girl's hoodie loudly enough that a whole hallway could hear it.

It didn't match the picture I'd built of him either, honestly, though I supposed it fit a little better after the hallway collision than it would have a week earlier. Popular guy, cutting remark, girlfriend who apparently specialized in the exact same thing. Maybe they made sense together in a way I hadn't wanted to consider before.

I didn't see Freya again until the following Tuesday, this time at Mario's, the diner near the rink where half the hockey team seemed to eat after practice. George had dragged me there under the promise of the best milkshake in a fifty mile radius, and to be fair, he wasn't wrong. We were three sips in when the door chimed and Carlton walked in with Freya trailing slightly behind him, her expression already doing that thing where it looked like she was mentally cataloguing everything wrong with the room.

"This place always smells like old grease," I heard her say, sliding into a booth a few tables down like she was doing the vinyl seat a personal favor.

"It's fine," Carlton said, not looking up from the menu. "Half the team's here. It's just food."

I tried not to stare, mostly out of self preservation, but it was hard not to notice how different the two of them looked sitting across from each other compared to how they looked in the hallway photos plastered all over people's social media. There, they always looked easy, practiced, like two people who fit together without effort. Here, there was something stiffer about it, something that didn't quite match the performance.

George noticed me watching and kicked my foot lightly under the table. "Don't," he said quietly. "It's none of our business."

He was right, obviously, and I made myself look away and focus back on my milkshake, though I couldn't quite shake the strange, uncomfortable feeling of having glimpsed something I wasn't supposed to see. A gap between what everyone assumed about the two of them and whatever was actually happening in that booth.

I didn't know Freya, not really, beyond the hallway comment and secondhand warnings from George and whatever I'd absorbed from the general talk of the school. But something about watching her scroll through her phone while Carlton sat across from her, neither of them saying much of anything, stuck with me longer than it probably should have.

They were supposed to be the perfect couple. Everyone said so, constantly, like it was just an established fact of the school's ecosystem, the same way everyone accepted that the cafeteria's Friday pizza was the best day of the week or that the north stairwell was always freezing no matter the season.

But sitting there with my milkshake going warm in front of me, I wasn't sure I believed it anymore. Not entirely. And for reasons I didn't fully want to examine yet, that thought stayed with me long after George and I left the diner, following me all the way back to my dorm room like something I'd need to hold onto for later.