Page 40 of Payback On The Ice

Me: 30 is huge. proud of you

Me: tell priya some of us eat salad. not me but some of us

N: lol

N: practice good?

Me: all good

I put the phone face down on the bench. I sit down on the bench next to it. I'm too slow doing it. My ribs grab and I make that noise again, out loud, to nobody.

Then I sit there.

I don't change. I don't shower. I just sit in the empty room in my sweaty base layer with my ice pack, and I breathe in little sips, and I look at the stall up by the door. The full one. His pads hanging on their hooks, dripping onto the rubber mat.

He watched.

I knew he hated me. That's fine. I've known that since the first day. I can take being hated. I'm good at it. But I thought⁠—

I don't know what I thought.

I thought Doug's cage meant something. The way he looked at me. The way he asked, you want this, and actually waited to hear what I said. The way his hand shook after.

I thought maybe in there, I was a person to him.

And then a knee came down on my ribs and he stood there.

I sit in the room until the lights go off on their timer and leave me in the dark.

I've got a shift at four.

I almost don't go. I've got the sheet from Deb that says rest, and every step out to the highway feels like somebody's sliding a knife between my ribs and twisting. But Mom's rent is due on the first, and her hours got cut at the nursing home again, and there's nobody else.

So I walk out to the Kwik Stop on Route 9 and put on the vest and the name tag that says THEO in a font that looks like a birthday card.

"You look like crap," says Hank, the night manager, who's maybe seventy and has been working here since it was a Phillips 66.

"Thanks, Hank."

"You need to go home?"

"I'm good."

Everybody keeps asking me that today.

At ten a truck comes in with the pop delivery, and Hank's back is bad, so I unload it. Two-liter cases. Twelve-packs. I carry them from the back door to the cooler one at a time, held out in front of me and away from my left side. On the fourth case of Mountain Dew, something in my ribs pulls, and I have to stop and put both hands on the cooler door and stand there with my forehead on the cold glass.

"Kid," Hank says from the register.

"I'm good."

I finish the truck. It takes forty minutes. Hank makes me a coffee, the way I like it, with too much hazelnut creamer, and doesn't charge me.

At one, I walk home.

It's eight degrees out. My hoodie's not enough and I know it, and I can't make myself walk faster. Every breath I take makes a little cloud in front of my face and a little stab in my side. Birch Street's all dark. The house is dark except for the porch light, and one window upstairs.

His.