Page 7 of Shattered Ice
I pick at a loose thread on my blanket, twisting it around my finger until the tip turns purple. “Oh, he’s eased up. Fine, really. Everything’s fine.” The lie slides out smooth as glass, but it leaves a raw track in my throat.
She pauses. Her voice shifts, knowing. “Clara.”
“It’s okay,” I spit out, too quick. “Just a long week.”
“How long?”
My fingers knot in the cheap blanket. I want to tell her how they’ve tied my future to a boy who doesn’t even bother to show up for labs, how my whole scholarship is a noose someone else’s son holds tight. But I swallow it. She’s working twelve-hour shifts. My success is supposed to buy her peace, not pile on another stone. “Long like… espresso burns and a paper I cranked out in two hours,” I say, making it sound like a joke.
“Okay. But you’d tell me if something was actually wrong, right?”
“Of course.” My throat tightens around the words.
“Good. Because I’m proud of you, Clara.” She always says it; tonight it sticks under my ribs and burns. “You’re doing something no one in our family’s ever done. I know it’s hard and I know it’s lonely. But you belong there. Don’t let them make you feel small.”
Her words slip under my armor like a blade I can’t block.Here, small is the only way they let us exist.“I’m trying,” I whisper.
“I know you are.” Silence. The radiator clanks and hisses, the sound hollow as it bounces off cinderblock walls, matching the empty echo inside my chest.
“I miss you,” I say.
“I miss you more,” she answers. “But we’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
We hang up. The silence after is sharp. My phone buzzes almost immediately.
Zoë: Party. Elm. Midnight. Don’t be a nun.
Genny: Ignore her. Study. But text me if she drags you out.
A laugh slips out, a crack in the gloom. For a second, the room feels less like a cage. I roll to my side, eyes tracing the cracks in the wall until they dissolve into shadow. My mom’s voice is still warm in my chest, Zoë’s chaos in my texts, Genny’s calm right behind it—a thin shield.
I whisper into the dark, the words a vow to the girl who stitched her own chair together with dental floss.
“No one gets to take this from me. They think I’m a safeguard? Fine. I’ll be a fucking fortress.”
“My future isn’t a footnote in his story. It’s the only one I get to write. And I’ll protect it with teeth and fire.”
“Adrian Hale wants to be my executioner? He’ll find out I fight like hell.”
Chapter 5
Clara
Thefourthfloorofthe Briarcliff library after 10 p.m. is a different country. The casual daytime students have been replaced by the hardcore, the desperate—the ones who know survival here is measured in sleepless nights and caffeine toxicity. The air is thick with the scent of stale coffee, old paper, and a low-grade, collective panic. Fluorescent lights hum like insects trapped under glass, drilling into the silence. It’s a quiet desperation, punctuated only by the whisper of turning pages and the aggressive slash of a highlighter. This was my natural habitat. Or at least, it used to be.
Tonight, my focus is a fractured thing. I’m staring at a page of my Cognitive Neuroscience textbook, at the intricate, nightmarish diagrams of dopaminergic pathways, but my brainrefuses to process them. The elegant, logical dance of molecules is a blur. All I see is Professor Lansing’s face.
The memory plays on a relentless loop: the cold, clinical way he ambushed me at the café; the dismissive flick of his eyes; the words that landed like a death sentence.If he’s suspended, your scholarship may be at risk.He didn’t save me. He staked a flag in the middle of my future, claiming it for the university, for Adrian Hale. Even my degree feels stamped with his name.
Focus, Clara.My own voice is a harsh command in my head.This matters more. The amygdala’s fear response doesn’t care that Adrian Hale is the reason I’m in this mess.
I force my eyes back to the page, trying to trace the path of a neural circuit, but my mind just supplies the image of Lansing’s impassive expression, his complete lack of empathy. The controlled violence of it. Adrian is a storm system of a different kind, and his chaotic energy is bleeding into every corner of my carefully ordered life, contaminating the one place I always felt safe: my own mind.
I grip my pen tighter and try to rewrite the reaction mechanism. My handwriting, usually neat and controlled, is tight and spiky. My own notes look like they were written by a stranger. I let out a low, frustrated breath.This is his fault.Before him, I could lose myself in this work for hours, the complex logic a welcome fortress. Now, the fortress has been breached.
A small notification dings on my laptop, the sound offensively cheerful in the library’s hush. An email from the psychology department. I click it open, expecting a reminder about lab safety protocols or a change in office hours.
Subject: PSYCH 415 - Required Online Materials Update
