Off the Ice

The Hallway Collision

The morning I arrived at New York Montessori High School, my hands would not stop shaking.

It wasn't even cold out, not really, just that early September kind of crisp that made you want to pull your sleeves down over your fingers anyway. I stood at the edge of the main entrance with my schedule printed out and folded into quarters, because I didn't trust myself to find everything on my phone with my nerves acting the way they were. The building was bigger than anything I'd ever gone to school in, all glass and brick and ivy climbing up one side like it had been planted there specifically to look impressive in brochures.

I had pictured this moment about a thousand different ways since the acceptance email. In most of them, I walked in looking calm and collected, the kind of new student people assumed had been there for years. In reality, I stood frozen at the door for a solid thirty seconds before a group of juniors pushed past me, and one of them said "you coming or what" in a tone that wasn't unkind, just impatient, and that was enough to get my feet moving again.

George had texted me that morning telling me to meet him by the courtyard fountain before first period, but of course my dorm was on the opposite side of campus from the courtyard, and my orientation packet map might as well have been written in another language for how much sense it made to me. I gave myself twelve minutes to get there. I was going to need every single one of them.

The hallways were loud in a way I hadn't expected, not chaotic exactly, but full, packed with people who all seemed to already know exactly where they belonged. I kept my eyes on my schedule and my phone, trying to cross reference the room numbers with the map, walking faster than I probably should have been in a hallway that crowded.

I didn't see him until it was too late.

One second I was staring down at my phone trying to figure out if I needed to go left or right at the end of the corridor, and the next I had walked directly into someone's shoulder hard enough that my phone went flying out of my hand and my schedule fluttered to the floor like a dying bird. I stumbled back a step, my cheeks already burning before I even looked up to see who I'd hit.

He was tall. That was the first thing I registered, even through the haze of embarrassment, tall and broad in a way that made me feel like I'd walked into a wall that happened to be wearing a varsity jacket. He caught his balance easily, barely stumbling at all, while I was still trying to remember how my own legs worked.

And then I actually looked at his face.

My stomach dropped somewhere around my shoes.

It was Carlton.

Of all the people in this entire school, of all the hallways, on my very first day, I had managed to walk face first into Carlton Fernandez like some kind of cosmic joke designed specifically to humiliate me. For one insane second, some small stupid part of me almost laughed, because five years of imagining what it would be like to finally meet him in person, and this was how it happened. Phone skidding across the floor. Papers everywhere. My whole face on fire.

"Sorry," I managed, already crouching to grab my schedule before someone stepped on it. "I wasn't looking, I'm so sorry."

I expected, I don't know, maybe nothing. Maybe him barely registering that the collision had happened at all before moving on with his day like people probably bounced off him constantly and it meant nothing.

I did not expect him to look at me the way he did.

"Watch where you're going next time," he said, and his voice had an edge to it that caught me off guard, sharp in a way that didn't match anything I had built up in my head over the years. "Some of us actually have places to be."

"I said I was sorry," I said, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.

"Yeah, well." He was already bending down to grab his own bag, which had slipped off his shoulder in the collision, and he didn't even really look at me again as he said it. "Maybe pay attention next time instead of walking around with your face in your phone. It's not that hard."

Something in me wanted to say something back, wanted to point out that he'd been walking just as fast as I was, that hallways were crowded and things happened, that he didn't have to be quite so cutting about a completely accidental bump into someone's shoulder. But my throat had gone tight and my hands were still shaking, this time for a completely different reason than before, and by the time I found any words at all he had already turned and walked off down the hallway without looking back, his friends falling into step beside him like nothing had happened.

I stood there for a second just holding my schedule, feeling impossibly stupid.

A girl I didn't know, dark hair, kind eyes, paused next to me on her way past and helped me scoop the last of my papers off the floor. "Don't worry about him," she said, not unkindly. "He's not usually that bad. Might just be a rough morning."

I thanked her, though I wasn't sure I believed it, and once she'd disappeared into the crowd I finally let myself breathe out properly, my chest feeling tight in a way that had nothing to do with nerves about being lost anymore.

Five years. Five years of watching interviews and memorizing tiny details and building some picture in my head of who he probably was underneath the hockey jacket and the captain title, and in less than thirty seconds all of that had just gotten rearranged into something much less flattering. I didn't know what I had expected exactly. Maybe not for him to know who I was, that was never realistic. But I hadn't expected him to be actively rude either, especially not over something that small.

By the time I found George by the fountain, I was still rattled enough that he noticed immediately.

"Okay, what happened," he said, standing up from the edge of the fountain the second he saw my face. "You look like someone stole your lunch money."

"I bumped into someone in the hallway."

"That's it? That's the whole crisis?"

"It was Carlton."

George's eyebrows shot up, because of course he knew, he'd been hearing about my ridiculous crush for years, had probably heard more about Carlton Fernandez than any human being who wasn't actually dating the guy should reasonably know. "Oh no. Please tell me it went well."

"It did not go well."

I told him the whole thing while we walked to first period together, the collision, the way his voice had gone sharp, the comment about paying attention to where I was going like I'd done it on purpose. George listened with his jaw tightening slightly, the way it always did when someone was unkind to me, though he didn't say much beyond a quiet "that's kind of harsh for a hallway bump."

"It's fine," I said, even though it didn't feel fine yet. "It's not like I actually thought meeting him would go some certain way. I don't know why I'm even this bothered by it."

But the truth was, I did know why. Some small, quiet part of me had spent years building a version of Carlton Fernandez that existed only in my head, made up of interviews and highlight reels and secondhand stories from other people. That version had never once been unkind to a stranger over something as small as an accidental bump in a crowded hallway.

I didn't know yet that this was only the beginning, or that the boy who had just brushed past me without a second glance would end up being the person who changed everything about my time at this school. All I knew, standing outside my first class with my schedule creased from where I'd clutched it too tightly, was that New York Montessori High School was already turning out to be nothing like I had imagined.