Page 25 of Shattered Ice
“No.” I slide the notebook toward him and watch his hand hesitate for a fraction of a second before he grips the pencil again. “Do it.”
He starts, and I let him. I watch the way his eyes track the page, how they jump back a line and then overshoot forward, as if he’s lost his place. He writes the initial fraction wrong, pauses, and corrects it—but the denominator he copies isn’t the one on the page in front of him. A small, almost imperceptible tick starts in his jaw when he notices the mistake. He erases too hard, leaving a bald, gray spot on the paper, then rewrites the number with his grip so tight I can see the white of his knuckles. Graphite snaps; dust freckles his knuckles.
He doesn’t say a word. He just grinds through it, his frustration a palpable force in the small room.
“Stop,” I say quietly, when he crosses a seven like a one again. I reach forward with my pen and circle it. “You just transposed that.”
“I fixed it,” he snaps, his voice low and dangerous.
“You did, after you missed it. That’s wasted time.”
His eyes cut up to meet mine, blue knives holding until the room forgets to hum. “You here to grade my handwriting or teach me math?”
“Both, apparently.”
He goes still. Not stiff. Not braced. Still—like a blade laid on the table between us. His fingers flex, just once, on the pencil, as if he’s imagining how it would feel to snap it in half.
“What problem,” he says, his voice dangerously low.
I look from the angry, shredded page back to his face. The pieces don’t fit. I’ve seen him on the ice—the precision, the almost supernatural ability to read angles and predict plays in a fraction of a second. His mind is clearly not slow. But this… thisis different. It’s a consistent, baffling pattern of self-sabotage. He doesn’t just make mistakes; he makes the same kind of mistakes. The numbers move. The words slip. He sees a seven and writes a one. It’s not laziness. It’s something else, a glitch in the wiring that he’s spent his entire life trying to hide with force and speed.
And a hot, unexpected wave of anger washes over me—not at him, but for him. For the little boy who was probably told he was lazy when he was just trying to keep the words from swimming away.
“The one you cover with jokes and speed,” I answer, my voice just as low. “You’re not failing because you can’t think. You’re failing because you’re burning energy in the wrong places. Covering mistakes instead of solving them. That’s a losing strategy.”
His jaw works, a slow, grinding motion. I haven’t accused him of being stupid; I’ve accused his method of being stupid. For a guy like him, maybe that’s worse. He can’t deny flipping a number or missing a line, because the evidence is right there on the mangled page. His silence presses down, a physical weight trying to crush the air from my lungs.
“And you’ve got a better one?” he asks, his voice laced with a dangerous, mocking challenge.
“I’m observing what’s in front of me,” I counter calmly. “And what I see isn’t working.”
“Try observing this,” he says, and pushes the History book toward me with two fingers. He rotates the page to face me, knuckles anchoring the edge—permission disguised as pressure. “Give me the lecture. I’ll memorize it. You can put gold stars in your planner and pat yourself on the head.”
“You don’t need gold stars,” I say, my voice softer now, shifting tactics. “You need a new approach.”
“I need a passing grade,” he snaps, the control in his voice finally cracking.
“Those are related.”
He laughs—one sharp, ugly breath that’s more pain than humor. “Sure. Save the public service for people who didn’t ask to be here. I’m not your project.”
My spine goes colder. “You’re not. You’re a paid appointment. And I don’t like wasting time.”
He leans forward again, his broad shoulders hunching like a predator’s, until the table stays between us only because the table is there—a flimsy wooden barrier that suddenly feels as insubstantial as cardboard. The fluorescent lights catch the cold blue of his eyes, turning them to pale winter ice. The room shrinks to nothing but the harsh scrape of wood under his forearms, the slow, deliberate sound of his breath, and the faint scent of expensive cologne mingled with the sharper tang of sweat from morning practice.
“Then teach,” he says. “Or stop pretending this is anything but leverage. And don’t let anyone else near this. No substitutes.”
There it is. The truth without bandage. The raw, transactional nature of our arrangement—and the possessive weight of his warning.
“Fine,” I say. Calm. “We’ll do it my way. You don’t read the prompt. I do. You listen. Then you summarize what you heard without looking. Short. Clean. If you repeat my phrasing, I make you start over. If you use your own words, we move on.” This isn’t just a strategy; it’s a ceasefire with my flag on the table, a way for him to participate without being exposed.
He stares at me for a full count of five. Something flickers in his eyes—irritation, calculation, and a sliver of something else. Reluctance. He nods once, a clipped, barely-there motion. “Go.”
I read the first ID term. Slow. Clean. No extra words. He listens without fidgeting, his eyes fixed on the middle distance like he’s tracking a puck no one else sees. When I finish, hespeaks—the summary compressed, accurate, stripped to muscle. Not my phrasing. His.
“Again,” I say. “Next one.”
We build a rhythm. I read. He distills. When a paragraph is dense with dates and names, he closes his eyes for half a second and I can almost hear him rearranging the furniture in his head to make it all fit. He misses a date, transposing the last two digits. I make him anchor it with a trick. “The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction,” I say, keeping my voice even. “Think of it like a line change. Two sevens. Who on the team wears a double-seven?”
