I
The echo of the coach's final whistle was still resounding in the gym as people ran toward the locker rooms.
Carrie, who was usually the first to leave, lagged behind. She was clutching her water bottle so tightly that her knuckles were white. She approached Leif, who was wiping sweat from the back of his neck with a towel.
She was looking at the floor. "Hey... um. Thanks...."
"It's nothing," Leif said, stuffing the towel into his bag. "They were jerks."
"Yeah, but... still."
"If they bother you again, look for me," he said, not making a big deal of it.
Carrie nodded quickly, "Okay," and practically fled toward the girls' locker room.
Frank walked over, adjusting his bag strap over his shoulder. "Seriously, bro? You're gonna be her bodyguard now? I know weird people, but she's... on another level."
"Shut up, Frank," Leif said, zipping up his bag.
Just then, Jennifer and Anita walked up, their perfect ponytails swinging.
Jennifer's blue eyes examined Leif. "What was that?"
"I just don't like assholes," Leif blurted out.
Frank snorted. "Well, you've got your work cut out for you. Mark's little group always picks on the same ones: her, Andrew, and Maria. It's like their favorite sport."
Jennifer's smile widened. "Well... I think it was great~."
She stepped closer, stood on her toes, and gave him a quick, loud kiss on the cheek.
"See you," she whispered, before grabbing Anita's arm. "Let's go!"
They walked away laughing, leaving a momentary silence.
"..."
Frank was left with his mouth wide open. He waited until they were out of earshot and then elbowed Leif in the ribs. "Holy hell! Jennifer? The Jennifer? She just marked her territory! You seriously have to give me the manual. How do you do it?"
Leif didn't even look at him.
"Don't be stupid."
He grabbed his bag and started walking toward the exit, leaving Frank alone in the middle of the gym.
"What? I'm not being stupid!" Frank yelled at him. "That was insane! Aren't you even happy? Leif! Dude, wait up!"
Leif kept walking. Frank let out a frustrated growl and went in the opposite direction.
....
And for whatever reason, Leif ended up at the community ice rink.
The place smelled of cold air, ozone, and the rubber from the rental area.
Cheap pop music bounced off the ice.
There were two people skating. One girl was gliding backward effortlessly, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that swung like a metronome. The other one... well, the other one looked like a newborn deer.
The scene pulled a half-smile from him. He used to practically live in rinks like this....
Without thinking twice, he traded his sneakers for a worn pair of rental skates. The familiar crunch of the blades hitting the ice felt like coming home.
He pushed off and began to circle, the cold air biting his face.
One of the girls there, Maria, who was trying to detach herself from the wall, saw him pass.
Her already precarious balance evaporated. Her arms flailed and she slammed into the railing to avoid falling, her face red.
The other girl, Lily, noticed Maria's distraction. She followed Leif with her eyes as he completed a lap.
A calculating smile spread across her face. She glanced sideways at Maria, who was now desperately trying not to look at Leif, and her smile became fixed.
Lily changed direction, skating backward with an arrogant grace to intercept Leif on his next lap.
"Hey," she said, her voice perfectly modulated over the music. "You're Leif, right? From school."
Leif slowed down, still moving. "Uh, yeah. Do I know you?"
His eyes showed no hint of recognition.
Poof
Just then, behind them, the sound of something hitting the ice, followed by a whimper.
Maria was curled up on the ground, holding her knee.
Leif stopped short, kicking up a cloud of ice. He looked toward Maria and then back at Lily.
"Aren't you... going to help your friend?"
Lily didn't even turn around. She laughed. "Oh, Maria? She's fine. She falls more than she skates."
"..."
Leif stared at her. He observed her perfect, careless smile, and then looked at Maria, who was trying unsuccessfully to stand up, slipping on her own hands.
"Right," Leif said.
Ignoring Lily, he pushed off hard, skated directly toward Maria, and stopped in front of her, offering his hand and asking with concern, "Are you okay? That looked like it hurt."
Maria lifted her head. The rink lights reflected off the ice, illuminating her face. She stared at Leif's hand as if it were a trick, as if she didn't understand what it was for.
Her face flushed a deep, almost painful red. She lowered her gaze again.
"I'm... I'm fine," she whispered, but made no move to get up.
Leif sighed, but it wasn't a sigh of impatience. He crouched slightly, grasped her frail wrist, and pulled her up gently.
"Come on. Up."
She stumbled as she stood, and he instinctively held her elbow to steady her. She flinched at the contact.
"You're Maria, right?" he said, not as a question, but as a confirmation. "I've seen you at the gym."
She nodded, not daring to meet his eyes.
"I'm Leif."
"I... I know," she said, her voice so low it was barely heard over the pop music blaring from the speakers.
It was then, having her close, that Leif truly saw her. And suddenly, all the loose pieces of hallway gossip clicked into place.
That Maria. From the movie "Look Away."
To begin with, Maria was a Brennan. That meant money wasn't something you talked about; it was simply there, funding her father's impeccable private clinic. Dr. Dan Brennan was the plastic surgeon for the city's elite, a man with a gold-standard reputation for his surgical precision.
The problem was, Evans didn't leave his metaphorical scalpel at the office.
At home, he managed his family with the same clinical, obsessive precision. Maria wasn't so much his daughter as his most frustrating project. Every aspect of her life was subjected to relentless scrutiny: her grades, her posture, the three pounds that, according to him, "unbalanced her silhouette." The word "acceptable" didn't exist in his vocabulary; only "perfect" existed.
The nail in the coffin was her eighteenth birthday. She didn't receive the keys to a new car in the driveway. She received a consultation.
Her father presented her with a leather-bound portfolio detailing the "improvement plan" he had designed for her. A rhinoplasty to "add definition," a slight chin augmentation. "It's my gift to you, honey," he had told her, in the same calm voice he used to consult his patients. "So you can start college showing your true self."
The idea that she might refuse never even crossed his mind.
And her mother? Amy Brennan was a masterpiece of passivity. A beautiful, perpetually sedated woman who had long ago learned that silence was the price of peace in that glass house. While her husband verbally dissected their daughter at dinner, Amy merely asked if anyone wanted more tea. Support was a foreign language she had never bothered to learn.
With that hell at home, school was simply a different version of the same.
Maria moved through the halls like a ghost, convinced that if she didn't make eye contact, if she took up the least space possible, no one could hurt her.
But predators, like Mark and his band of jerks, have a sixth sense for that. They could smell the fear and self-doubt in her like blood in the water. To them, she wasn't a person, she was a walking joke, an easy target who never fought back.
And then there was Lily.
Lily, her supposed "best friend," operated with a more subtle cruelty. Lily was the kind of friend who only remembered Maria existed when she needed lunch money, the notes from the class she missed, or, most importantly, someone to make her feel pretty and interesting by pure contrast.
Between the tyranny of her father's perfection, her mother's absent complicity, the hallway bullies, and the toxic convenience of her only friend, Maria's life had become a simple exercise in survival: trying to make herself as small as possible.
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