Breaking the Ice

Liam's POV My father used to say that you can measure a man by what he does in the ten minutes before everything matters. I was seventeen the first time he said it, sitting in a locker room not so different from this one, and I didn't fully understand it then. I do now. The ten minutes before is when the masks come off. When the guy who talks the loudest in practice gets very quiet, and the guy nobody noticed all week suddenly fills the room. It's the most honest ten minutes of any athlete's day. I've been watching it for three years. Learning it. Using it. I pull my jersey down over my shoulder pads and reach for the captain's armband on the shelf above my locker. The fabric is worn soft at the edges from two seasons of use. I fasten it around my left bicep without looking — I've done it so many times my hands know the motion better than my brain does — and for a second I just stand there, one hand still resting on it. Outside these walls, the arena is already filling up. I can feel it more than hear it — that low vibration that moves through the floor and into your feet when a few thousand people find their seats all at once. Northbridge's opening scrimmage pulls the whole campus every year. Students, professors, local press. It doesn't go on the record. Everyone pretends it doesn't matter. Everyone is lying. "You're staring at your armband again." Adrian. I don't have to turn around to know the exact look on his face right now — that easy half-grin he wears the way some guys wear cologne, like it costs him nothing and he knows exactly what it does to a room. "I'm thinking," I say. "You're nervous." "I'm thinking," I say again. He drops onto the bench beside me, already fully geared up, number nine across his chest. Adrian Kingsley has been my closest friend since our freshman year, which means he has also been the most irritating person in my life for the same amount of time. Today he's leading the opposing side of a split scrimmage — Coach Brooks' idea, captain against assistant captain, a way to light a fire under both squads before the season proper begins. It'll work. It always works. Adrian and I bring out something in each other on the ice that neither of us quite finds anywhere else. Not hostility — it's more complicated than that. The specific hunger of competing against someone who actually knows what you're capable of. "You think about what you're going to say?" he asks. "I know what I'm going to say." "You say that every time and then you go off script." "And it always works." He tips his head like he's conceding the point, which costs him, I can tell. "Just don't make me look bad out there," he says, standing. "I've got a reputation." "You have a haircut," I say. "That's different." He laughs — a real one, shoulders and everything — and moves off toward his side of the room. I stand up. The energy in the space has been building for the last few minutes without anyone directing it, conversations overlapping, music coming from someone's phone, the rhythmic sound of tape being pulled from a roll in the corner. This is the part I've learned to read. The noise that isn't quite ready yet. The anticipation that hasn't found its shape. I let it peak. Then I clap once. One hard c***k of sound, and everything stops. Twenty-two heads turn. Marcus kills the music. I don't raise my voice. I never have to. "I'll make it short," I say. "You all know why we're here. You know what we put in this summer — the early mornings, the sessions nobody was watching, the days you trained through things you didn't tell anyone about. That work is in you now. It lives in your legs, your hands, your reaction time. Tonight isn't about performing it for the scouts in those seats or the cameras at the boards." I pause, looking around the room slowly — I want eye contact, not an audience. "Tonight is just the first time you get to remember why you love this. So play like it. Play for the guy next to you. Name on the front, not the number on the back. We clear?" The room answers in that way it does — not words, more a sound. A collective settling, like everyone just exhaled the same breath. "Good." I reach for my helmet. "Let's —" "Hold on." Marcus, hand half-raised, head turning slowly like he's counting. "We're one short." The room shifts. I do the count in my head before he finishes the sentence. Team Two's side of the room. Eleven. There should be twelve. A few guys glance toward the door. Someone floats a guess about a late arrival from the academic building, but it dies in the middle because that's when we hear it — footsteps in the corridor outside. Unhurried. Deliberate. Then the door swings open. Coach Brooks walks in first, clipboard under his arm, face doing the thing it always does — nothing. Twenty-two athletes and not one of them makes a sound when that man enters a space. I've never been able to decide if it's respect or fear or something older than both. But it isn't Coach that holds us. It's the girl behind him. She's in full gear — Wolves practice jersey, pads, skates hooked over two fingers at her side, helmet tucked under her opposite arm. Dark red hair pulled tight. She walks into the room like she decided before she got here that she wasn't going to apologize for it, chin level, eyes moving across every face with a calm so deliberate it had to be practiced. Nobody speaks. Coach looks around the room once, then opens his clipboard. "This is Scarlett Sinclair," he says, like he's reading off a stat line. "Transfer student. She'll be filling the open position on Team Two. Warm-ups in ten." He closes the clipboard. That's it. That's the whole announcement. I look at her. She looks back at me — just a second, just long enough for me to register that she isn't nervous, isn't apologetic, isn't asking anyone's permission — and then she moves her gaze past me like I'm part of the furniture. Something tightens in my chest. Ten minutes to warm-up. I don't know what just walked into my season. But whatever it is, I already know it isn't going to be simple.