Knee Pads

03 | hip whip

CHAPTER THREE | HIP WHIP

a form of assist where a skater — usually the jammer — grabs a teammate's hips to catapult herself forward.

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          Katrina Stone was everything I wasn't.

          For starters, she was so cheerful, so bubbly it genuinely freaked me out. Secondly, her half of the room was covered in colorful post-it notes, so bright it made my eyes hurt and gave me a pounding headache if I looked at it for too long. Thirdly, she made me feel so boring in comparison as she went on and on about her life.

          She loved Yale. She loved Connecticut. Who in their right mind genuinely liked Connecticut?

          She was a Music major. She was destined for greater things, greater than the entire Ivy League, and her ultimate dream was to sell out Madison Square Garden. However, she wasn't allowed to do so before completing her superior education, as decided by her parents, so she'd come here to, at least, study something she was interested in instead of being stuck with a boring major.

          She let me take a look at her songwriting notebook. I flipped through it, absentmindedly, but the little I retained was enough to make me close it and return it as quickly as possible. I didn't need yet another reminder everyone around me was a lot more talented than I was and was in much more control than me.

          "So?" she questioned. "What did you think?"

          "Huh?" I blabbered. "What?"

          "What did you think? About the songs?"

           "Oh, um . . ." I wasn't a liar. I greatly despised liars, in fact, and having to fake a compliment about songs I hadn't really paid much attention to was one of the hardest things I'd had to do this morning. However, she was looking at me with eyes wide open in anticipation, almost bouncing up and down, and I didn't have the heart to let her down. "They're good. They're really good. Do you play any instruments?"

          Her face lit up like the freaking sun and I instantly knew my white lie had been a good decision. "Oh, totally. Lots of them. I've been taking lessons ever since I was three." I threw her a tight-lipped smile. I'd never been musically inclined, nor had I ever had any desire to be so. "What about you? Tell me about yourself. What brings you to Connecticut? I have to admit I kind of stalked you on social media as soon as I found out we were going to be roommates."

          Great. Just great.

          "My family wanted a fresh start elsewhere," I replied. That wasn't a complete lie, but I wasn't going to open up about my trauma and about how it was like to be Jordan Wu's little sister to a complete stranger. If she had stalked me on social media, she'd also found him. She'd probably recognize him from a few headlines—young ice hockey prodigy suffers career-ending injury—and would assume she knew exactly what I was going through. "Connecticut was far enough from California."

          "I've never been to California. What's it like?"

          I sighed, zipping open one of my bags. Talking about my life back in California was impossibly painful, a harsh reminder that things would never go back to how they used to be. "Sunny. Warm."

          "You just described a hundred other places."

          I shrugged. "None of those places were home. California was." I glanced back at her over my shoulder. She sat on her bed, legs crossed, and her curls bounced whenever she moved her head just a tiny bit. Her brown skin glowed golden with the morning sun. "I miss it. Everything here feels so . . . cold. Artificial. Like everyone's pretending."