Page 35 of Shattered Ice
It doesn’t work. It never does. The first sentence is fine. The second slips—little words skitter, substitutions I don’t choosesneak in. By the third line, I’m not reading; I’m guessing, my brain racing ahead of my eyes, trying to build the meaning from context instead of from the letters. The words taste like ash. The familiar, hot flush of shame climbs the back of my neck.
I press my thumb and forefinger to my eyelids until I see spots of color. A memory surfaces, sharp and unwanted: I’m nine years old, at the massive oak table in our kitchen, my father standing over me, his shadow swallowing the page of my homework. The room smelled of the roast chicken my mother had made, but under his stare, the scent turned metallic, like iron and blood.
He points one, blunt finger at a misspelled word, his nail a perfect, clean crescent.
“Again,” he says, his voice quiet and cold. “Read it again until you get it right.Hales are not careless.”
I remember the hard wooden chair under my legs, the way the light gleamed on the polished table, making the white page almost blinding. I tried again, my small voice trembling, my eyes desperately scanning the letters that seemed to rearrange themselves out of spite.Thier. Their. The-ir.I knew how it was supposed to look, but the path from my brain to my mouth was a broken bridge. I read it wrong three more times. He never raised his voice. He just stood there, his disappointment a physical weight in the room, pressing down on my small shoulders until I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
I’m back in my dorm room, but the feeling is the same. I am nine years old again, trapped, stupid, and failing.Hales don’t underachieve. Hales don’t get benched.
I pick up a piece of scratch paper and try to copy a date from the textbook. 1877 becomes 1787, then 187—and I carve the last seven into the page with so much force the lead snaps and the paper tears. Graphite dust tastes bitter on my tongue, as if the pencil itself bled for me. I sit very still, staring at the rip. Thesame helpless rage, the same feeling of being betrayed by my own mind, is a rope around my throat. I pick up the torn scrap, fold it twice, then again, until it’s a small, hard pellet, and throw it in the trash.
It’s useless. My shoulders slump, the fight draining out of me.This is who I am.
But her notes are still there. The line of her handwriting doesn’t wiggle. The margins have rules.Dates as jerseys,one of her notes says. I look at the date from the torn page. 1877. I think of my own number: 17. Backwards 77. It’s ugly. It’s stupid. But the number locks into place in my head, solid and immovable for the first time.
The humiliation of it is a bitter pill, clawing up my throat raw and jagged as glass. But then I remember her voice from the library. “Half pace.” I hate the phrase. It sounds like an insult, like being slow, being weak. She said it softly, but it was a dare. I force myself to try.
I whisper the first sentence of the next paragraph, my own voice a low, threatening sound in the quiet room, as if I can intimidate the words into submission. I force my eyes to move slowly, tracing the shape of each word instead of jumping ahead. At half pace, the little words don’t disappear as often. At half pace, the paragraph doesn’t just land. It makes sense.
It works.
The realization hits me not with relief, but with a complex, violent storm of emotions.It fucking works.A surge of white-hot rage flashes through me—rage at my father for seeing a character flaw where there was only a mechanical problem; rage at every teacher who ever called me lazy. Each correct word feels like a punch landed. And then, a wave of profound, soul-deep humiliation. This quiet, sharp-edged girl figured out a way around my defenses in two sessions that no one else ever could, or ever cared to, in a lifetime. The urge to thank her makes mesick, like gagging on blood. She thinks she gave me a tool. What she gave me was a leash. I don’t want to owe her this.
I slam the book shut, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the cage-room. I lean back in my chair, breathing like I’m under a bench press, the air sawing in and out of my lungs. My ears burn with shame.
This isn’t softness. It isn’t pity. It’s engineering. It’s a strategy. She didn’t look at me and see someone broken who needed fixing. She saw a weapon that had jammed and dared to rearm it. It’s the most clinical, impersonal, and deeply respectful thing anyone has ever done for me.
I look at her neat notes on my desk and then at my own chaotic, torn scratch paper. Two different worlds, two different ways of fighting. Mine is brute force. Hers is strategy. Mine is about breaking through walls. Hers is about finding the key to the lock. The thought is a strange comfort. It’s a language I understand. Her notes aren’t an insult anymore. They’re a blueprint.
She hadn’t given me a crutch. She’d given me a weapon.
She handed me a blade, and she has no idea I’ll aim it at her first.
Chapter 21
Clara
Twodays.Fortwosolid days, I exist in a self-imposed exile of shame and silence. Two days of the same suffocating loop: class, work, dorm room. Class. Work. Dorm room. The silence is a physical weight, pressing in on me, sealing over me like a coffin lid—tight, airless, suffocating. I haven’t spoken to Zoë or Genny. I haven’t heard from Adrian. His absence is worse than his presence, like a shadow stalking even when the light is gone. I am an island, and the tide is rising.
I’m staring at my laptop, at the access code for my psychology seminar that now sits, paid for, in my student portal. I caved. I used the last of my emergency funds and overdrafted my account to buy it because the thought of accepting help feltworse than starving for a week. The victory feels hollow, bitter. It tastes metallic, like biting a split lip in the dark.
A soft knock on the door. Not Zoë’s usual battering ram. The sound snaps like a mousetrap in my chest. My heart gives a hopeful, stupid lurch.Adrian.
I open the door, my disappointment a sharp, physical pang when I see it’s not him. It’s Zoë and Genny. They stand in the hallway, their expressions a mixture of stubbornness and concern, Zoë holding two cups of coffee like a peace offering.
“We’re not leaving,” Genny says, her voice quiet but firm, leaving no room for argument.
“You were a spectacular asshole the other night,” Zoë adds, pushing past me into the room. “But we get it. So we forgive you. Now stop being a martyr and talk to us.”
I want to push them away again. The pride and the shame are still there, a hard knot in my throat. But I’m too tired to fight. I just sink onto the edge of my bed.
Genny sits in my desk chair, her gaze landing on my open laptop. “You bought it,” she says, her voice flat.
I just nod, staring at my hands.
“You overdrafted your account to buy it, didn’t you?” she asks, her voice softening with an understanding that makes my eyes burn.
