Thin Ice {UNDER CONSTRUCTION}

One

Some people loved the smell of chocolate, or newly-cut grass, or fresh rain. Some loved the smell of baking bread, of Christmas trees, or of flowers.

Not Alyssandra.

The scent of the ice was her favorite smell.

Cold, clean, and consigning her to oblivion.

When Lys stepped out onto the ice, everything else fell away, like she had finally awoken from an ongoing nightmare.

But the real twist was that that nightmare was her everyday life.

Though her parents' deaths were more than a year ago, it didn't get any easier. Lys didn't think it ever would.

Late at night, when her roommates were asleep, she released herself to the hollow hole in her chest, crying - screaming - into her pillow.

But during the day she was normal Lys, easygoing Lys, funny Lys.

She knew she couldn't fool her teammates as easily as everyone else, but they would rather believe her act than actually get to the brunt of the problem.

Lys understood, she really did. Boys didn't deal with emotions well, especially not female emotions.

But she still wished that one of them would slap her, say "Snap out of it, Lyssandra" and force her out onto the ice with a stick in her hand and skates on her feet.

Force her back into the world of adrenaline, violence, and competition that was hockey.

To her teammates knowledge, Lys hadn't been on the ice since she had taken the year off the team after her parent's accident.

But Lys missed the ice too much to not skate.

So she snuck out at night, on the nights that she didn't sob herself hoarse. She snuck out those nights so she wouldn't sob herself hoarse, wouldn't give into that ever painful pit in her stomach.

She still had a spare key for the rink from Coach, thanks to being last season's captain of the Terrance University Timberwolves. Every night that she let herself into the public ice rink in town that doubled as the Timberwolves' rink, she'd tie on her skates and make the first glide onto the ice that almost left her breathless.

She never reached for a hockey stick or a puck in the year she'd been frequenting the rink, never bothered with the goal nets or practicing her drills.

She, who had been the best starting forward the Timberwolves had had in years, felt no urge to play hockey whatsoever.

Instead, she skated endless circles into the ice, forming looping, etched designs on the ice that looked as dizzying and complicated as her life.

It was her catharsis, a way to remind herself who she was and why that mattered.

But that feeling of self-discovery and utter abandonment to the joy of skating left her as soon as her skates hit dry ground.

Which is why, now, she snuck out every night, and skated the entirety of it, six hours passing as though it was actually six minutes.

It wasn't like she slept anyway, not with the nightmares and the incessant crying fits.

She'd sometimes take naps between her classes that were gloriously free of nightmares, or find herself falling asleep in her lectures, drooling onto the notebook below her.

She knew that she should be sleeping better, coping better, but skating was like an addiction, and her parents' death was the downfall that led to her dependency on it.