Keira
The away arena was louder than ours, meaner somehow, the kind of place where the crowd seemed to boo before anything had even happened. I sat in the family section between Monica and a security guard whose only job, apparently, was to make sure nobody got close enough to touch me, which felt like an overreaction until I saw the size of the crowd waiting outside.
I met Damien Cross during the pregame handshake line, the kind of formality both teams observed even though everyone in the building knew this rivalry ran deeper than sportsmanship. He peeled off from his teammates the second he spotted me in the front row, flashing a smile so practiced it looked engineered in a lab somewhere.
"You must be the famous Keira," he said, extending a hand. "Damien Cross. Captain, in case the si
