Chapter One: New Name

Rory The first thing I did at Thornebridge University was lie to a man about my gender. The second thing I did was sign my name to it in pen, like a criminal with excellent penmanship. "Rory Monroe," I said, sliding my transfer paperwork across the housing counter like it was a poker hand I was bluffing on. Which, in fairness, it was — I just also happened to be bluffing with my entire identity. The clerk didn't look up. Lanyard, bored eyes, the general aura of a man counting down to his lunch break with the intensity of a hostage negotiator. "Off-campus waiver's on file. Family circumstances." He said it the way people say things they've read a thousand times and stopped hearing. "You're all set, Mr. Monroe." *Mr. Monroe.* I did not flinch. I had practiced not flinching in a bathroom mirror for three weeks, which is either extremely dedicated or a cry for help, and at this point I genuinely could not tell you which. "Great," I said, and my voice came out lower than my actual one, rougher at the edges, exactly the register I'd drilled into my throat like a war crime against my own vocal cords. "Where do I sign?" He slid the pen across without looking up, and just like that, I became a boy on paper, at a school four hundred miles from home, for reasons that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the fact that somebody had ruined my sister's life and was currently walking around this exact campus like gravity still applied to him and consequences didn't. I signed my real first name — because it works both ways, because our mother apparently had opinions about gender the day she filled out the birth certificate — and I did *not* think about Kora's face the day the video hit every group chat at her old school. I did not think about her packing boxes with her jaw locked so tight I thought her teeth would crack. I did not think about the fact that whoever did that to her was, according to three months of obsessive digging through tagged photos and deleted-but-not-really-deleted posts, currently enrolled here, orbiting a last name I'd read so many times it had stopped looking like a word. *Sterling.* I thought about literally none of that. I took my key and walked out into the kind of golden September afternoon that belongs on a brochure, which — considering what this school charges per semester — it probably was one. My studio was six blocks off campus, above a laundromat that smelled permanently of fabric softener and made a noise at 2 a.m. like it was staging its own death scene, complete with dramatic pauses. It was perfect. No roommates. No one to notice that "Rory Monroe" showered at strategic hours, kept his — my — hair buzzed close, and had recently developed a full-body flinch reflex to the word *bro.* I dropped my duffel bag on the mattress and pulled out the flyer I'd basically committed to memory at this point. **MEN'S ICE HOCKEY — OPEN TRYOUTS. FORWARD SPOT AVAILABLE. THORNEBRIDGE RINK, 6 A.M. THURSDAY.** Underneath, in smaller print, like even the athletic department didn't quite believe its own hype: *Coached by the reigning conference champions.* I'd played hockey since I was seven, back when Kora did ballet and I did the thing our dad actually showed up for, and by seventeen I was skating circles around half the boys on my old rec league — none of whom enjoyed admitting that out loud, for reasons I refuse to speculate on. It was, unfairly, the one skill I owned that could get me inside the one team where a Sterling was captain. Ballet would not have gotten me this far. I want that on record. I hadn't seen his face yet. I'd seen one blurry i********: photo, mid-celebration after last season's playoff win, arms up, jersey untucked, grinning like the world owed him money and had just paid up in full. Jarvis Sterling. Twenty years old. Captain of a championship team. Son of a man whose name was on three buildings I'd already passed on the walk from the housing office, which is a genuinely unreasonable number of buildings for one guy to have. I didn't know yet there were two of him. I unpacked exactly four things: skates, a photo of me and Kora from before everything, a burner phone reserved strictly for the digging, and the folder. The folder mattered most. Three months of screenshots, a spreadsheet cross-referencing names against Kora's old contacts like I was running a very depressing dating app, and, paper-clipped to the front, one printed photo pulled off a public account — Kora, laughing, arm slung around a dark-haired boy with an easy smile, tagged at some off-campus party the summer before her world ended. The caption, posted by someone else, someone I still hadn't identified, read: *S. Sterling's girl for the night lol* I didn't know which brother that meant. I genuinely did not know, lying on that mattress with the laundromat groaning two floors down, that in less than seventy-two hours I'd be standing on ice locking eyes with one of them before I'd even finished lacing my skates, and that the answer to *which one* would end up being a lot more complicated than a group chat caption from two years ago could ever explain. I set my alarm for 5 a.m., turned off the light, and lay there running the lie through my head one more time until it sounded almost like the truth. Thursday morning, I was going to walk onto that ice as a boy nobody had ever heard of, in front of a team about to decide, in under an hour, whether my entire plan lived or died in a single scrimmage. Somewhere on this campus, someone thought they'd gotten away clean. They had absolutely no idea what was about to skate into their locker room.