Off the Ice

The Scholarship

Hey, I'm Jennaya Williams, but my friends call me Jenna.

I am seventeen years old, and tonight I was waiting for the one email that could change the entire direction of my life. I had applied for a scholarship to New York Montessori High School months ago, and the results were dropping at eleven o'clock. I had been counting down the hours since breakfast, which was probably the reason I'd eaten almost nothing all day. My stomach had been in knots since the sun came up.

I tried everything to distract myself. I danced around my room with my earbuds in until the song ended and I realized I hadn't heard a single word of it. I picked up a book I had already finished twice and read the same paragraph four times without absorbing it. Nothing worked. My mind kept circling back to that one page, the one list, the one name I needed to see.

By ten thirty I gave up pretending I could function normally and just sat cross legged on my bed, laptop open, refreshing a page that hadn't changed in an hour.

My mom knocked once and let herself in before I could answer, which was pretty much her signature move. She sat on the edge of my bed and put her hand over mine on the keyboard.

"You're going to wear a hole through that screen," she said.

"I can't help it."

"Whatever it says, we're proud of you. You know that, right?"

I nodded because I did know it, even if my stomach didn't seem to have gotten the message yet. She squeezed my hand and left me to my countdown, and I spent the last twenty minutes staring at the clock like it owed me something.

At eleven on the dot, my laptop chimed. I actually flinched.

I sat there for a full ten seconds without moving, just staring at the little notification bubble in the corner of my screen like it might disappear if I looked away. Then I called for my parents, because there was no way I was opening this alone, and I heard my dad's footsteps coming down the hall faster than I'd heard him move in years.

I put my hand over my eyes and clicked it open, then peeked through my fingers like a coward.

Congratulations Jennaya Williams, you have been offered admission to New York Montessori High School on scholarship.

I don't remember screaming exactly, but my mom told me later that I did, loud enough that our neighbor texted the next morning asking if everything was okay. My dad picked me up off the bed like I weighed nothing, which I definitely did not, and my mom was already crying and laughing at the same time, which was pretty much her factory setting for anything emotional.

"We're so proud of you," my dad said into my hair, and his voice cracked in a way that made my own eyes sting.

I lay awake a long time after they went back to bed, staring at my ceiling and trying to let the news actually sink in. Months of flashcards taped to my mirror. Practice tests until the pages went soft at the edges. Nights where I fell asleep at my desk and woke up with pen marks on my cheek. All of it had led to this one email, and it still didn't feel completely real.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. George.

Did you check yet??? I've been sitting here for an hour like an idiot

I smiled and typed back. I GOT IN

The reply came almost instantly, like he'd been holding his phone in his hand waiting. KNEW IT. told you all that studying would pay off. proud of you jenna, seriously

George had been my best friend since the fourth grade, back when he was the kid who ate glue and I was the kid who cried during multiplication tests. We had grown up a lot since then, thankfully, but he was still the one person who showed up every single time, no explanation needed. He already went to New York Montessori as a day student, which meant come fall I wouldn't be walking into a school full of strangers completely alone. That thought alone untangled some of the knots in my stomach.

I typed out a reply, something about how I owed him a lifetime supply of the terrible gas station snacks he liked, and then I set my phone down and let myself lie there in the quiet, replaying the whole night in my head.

That was when the other thought crept back in, the one I had been shoving down all evening because I didn't want it distracting me from something that actually mattered.

Carlton Fernandez went to New York Montessori High School.

I sat up a little at the realization, even though I already knew it, had known it for as long as I'd been applying there, if I was being honest with myself. It just hit different now that it wasn't hypothetical anymore. Now it was real. In the fall, I would be walking the same hallways as him. Sitting somewhere in the same building while he sat in a classroom on some other floor. Existing in the same small world instead of just watching him from behind a screen.

I had liked him since fifth grade, which even to me sounded like an embarrassingly long time to carry a crush on someone who had no idea I existed. But it wasn't the kind of thing that just switched off because it was inconvenient or a little ridiculous. If anything, the years had only made it worse, because I'd had that much longer to learn every detail about him without ever having a real conversation.

I knew he was team captain now. Number seventeen on the Blackhawks. I knew his favorite pre game meal, and the song he always played before stepping onto the ice, because his interviews weren't exactly hard to find if you knew where to look, and I had looked a lot. It was a little humiliating how much space he took up in my head considering he had never once spoken to me in real life. Not a hallway nod. Not a passing glance. Nothing.

I told myself, the way I always did, that it didn't matter. That I was one of probably a hundred girls who felt exactly this way about him, sneaking looks across a cafeteria I hadn't even sat in yet, memorizing a face that had never once memorized mine back. It was a private thing. A harmless thing. Something that existed quietly in the background of my life while the real stuff, the scholarship, my grades, my actual future, stayed up front where it belonged.

Except now the background and the foreground were about to occupy the same building.

I pulled my blanket up and tried to picture it. Walking through doors I'd only seen in photos on the school's website. Sitting in classrooms with people who had grown up together their whole lives while I tried to figure out where I fit. And somewhere in all of it, walking those same halls every single day like he owned them, would be Carlton.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself the scholarship was the only thing worth thinking about tonight, the proof that all those sleepless nights had actually meant something. But as I finally started drifting off, a small stubborn part of me couldn't help wondering what it might feel like to see him in person for the first time. Not through a screen. Not through someone else's photos. Just there, close enough to be real.

For now, all I let myself hold onto was the joy of the moment. Everything else, I figured, would work itself out once I actually got there.

I had no idea how wrong I was about to be.