Knee Pads

02 | t-stop

CHAPTER TWO | T-STOP

a technique for slowing down or stopping. the player drags one skate behind the other to form a t shape.

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          My final days in Sacramento were, generally speaking, uneventful.

          I spent most of my free time being ridiculously pissed off at Theo, dodging her text messages and phone calls like any mature person would do, and running away from Jordan. The latter was a considerably harder feat, since we still lived in the same house and all, but I was afraid I'd crack if I failed to avoid him.

          I knew both of those decisions would come back to bite me in the ass when I least expected them to. Avoiding Jordan wouldn't work in the long run, as we'd all be moving to Connecticut (puke) together and our parents were adamant on making everyone be involved in his recovery. If I wanted him to get better, I needed to be less selfish and pull my head out of my ass—I knew that.

          That didn't change the fact that I was hurt.

          Technically, the bottle he had thrown at me could have seriously injured me. I'd escaped pretty much unscathed, and the most visible wounds were a few small cuts here and there on my arms and hands, so I was relatively fine on that aspect. The main problem was, well, literally everything else.

          I knew this was something we'd both have to work on, most likely during family therapy, but I wasn't ready to do so just yet. I needed time and space to process the changes affecting my own life first.

          Packing my bags wasn't easy.

          We weren't simply going away on vacation; it was definitely a permanent thing. My mother's prized china collection had finally left the cabinets in the living room, and it wasn't because it needed to get cleaned. The entire house was full of boxes of all sizes, and we'd all been procrastinating packing up the biggest pieces of furniture.

          I didn't have nearly enough upper body strength to be of much help with the heavier stuff, so it wasn't uncommon to see me retreat into my bedroom and pretend I was eager to leave.

          What hurt the most to pack were my ice skates.

          Even though I hadn't used them in a while (a long while), they had once been a symbol of my relationship with Jordan and one of the things that had brought us closer to each other. Ice hockey had once been one of his favorite things in the world, before he'd turned to alcohol after a failed shot at getting into the NHL, and I supposed I enjoyed ice skating quite a lot.

          I stopped skating when he stopped playing. It simply wasn't the same without him and I had no desire to ever skate again—in any shape of form—if he wasn't there.

          On our final day in Sacramento, right before we headed off to the airport to brace ourselves for an eleven-hour flight to New Haven, Theo stopped by the house. In case my radio silence hadn't been obvious enough, I begged my mom to tell her I wasn't home in a futile attempt to convince her I did not want to talk to her—or see her, even.

          "Wren, honey, I'm not fighting your battles for you," my mother said, watching me run up the stairs, like I'd done so many times before. "You'll regret not saying goodbye to her. Trust me on that one."

          "She's the reason why we're leaving," I pointed out. My blood boiled in my veins, bubbling up and threatening to burst out of my vessels, but even I knew I could never stay mad at Theo for too long. It was the reason why we kept running in circles. "I don't have to tell her a single thing."