Battle of the Captains

Ethan

The ice doesn't lie. That's the first thing my dad ever taught me, back when I was six years old and falling on my face every ten seconds at the community rink. The ice doesn't care who you are or how many people showed up to watch you fail. It just tells you the truth. Skate hard enough, and it holds you up. Cut corners, and it puts you on your back.

I think about that every single morning when I lace up before the rest of the team even shows up.

Six a.m. practice, three days before Rivalry Week, and my legs are already burning by the second lap. Coach Reyes blows the whistle for line drills and I take it like it's personal, because it is. Everything is personal this week. That's the whole point of Rivalry Week. Northridge against itself, hockey against football, the Wolves against the Hawks, except the Hawks don't play hockey and never will, and somehow that doesn't stop half the school from treating Noah Brooks like he invented the concept of winning.

"Carter, ease up," Reyes calls from the boards. "You're not the only guy on this ice."

I ease up. Barely.

By the time practice ends, my jersey's soaked through and my thighs feel like wet rope, and I still have to shower, change, and be a human being in front of a camera in twenty minutes. The athletic department wants "hype content" for Rivalry Week. Some intern with a ring light is waiting for me outside the locker room, bouncing on her heels like she's about to interview an actual celebrity instead of a guy who spent his morning falling on ice on purpose.

"Just a few quick questions," she says. "For the website. Maybe socials too."

"Sure."

She asks about our record. I tell her the truth, which is that we're undefeated in conference and ranked in the top ten nationally, not that anyone on this campus seems to notice. She asks about the fundraiser we ran last month, the one where we out-raised the football team by almost four thousand dollars for the children's hospital. She asks about our team GPA, which beats every other program at this school, football included, by a significant margin.

Then she asks the question I know is coming, because it's always coming.

"So Rivalry Week kicks off Friday. Any thoughts on Noah Brooks?"

I should smile. I should say something safe, something the athletic department can slap on a poster without getting emails from angry parents. That's what I'm supposed to do.

Instead I think about walking past the football team's trophy case every day on my way to class. I think about the banner they hung across the quad last fall that said UNDEFEATED SEASON in letters four feet tall, like anyone forgot, like the entire town didn't already know because the local news covered every single game while our conference championship got a two-line mention on page six of the campus paper. I think about how Noah Brooks gets his picture taken shaking hands with the mayor for throwing a ball forty yards, and how nobody outside this rink has any idea what it costs to skate a shift at full speed for forty-five seconds and then do it nine more times.

"Quarterbacks throw balls," I say. "Hockey players earn respect."

The intern's eyes go wide, like she just watched something happen that she wasn't sure was allowed. I don't take it back. I don't soften it. I mean every word.

I don't think about it again until lunch, when Marcus slides into the seat across from me with his phone already turned around so I can see the screen.

"Bro."

"What."

"You're everywhere."

I look. The clip is fifteen seconds long and it already has more views than our team's entire social media following combined. Someone's set it to music. Someone else has made it into a meme with my face next to a hockey stick and the caption ICE BOY SPITTING FACTS. The comments are a war zone, half the school defending me like I just delivered a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the other half acting like I personally insulted their mothers.

"It wasn't that deep," I say.

"It's very deep. It's the deepest thing that's happened at this school since the football team lost a scrimmage to a community college."

I almost laugh. Almost.

Word travels fast on a campus this size, faster once it hits the internet, and by the time I'm walking to my afternoon class I've had two guys I don't even know clap me on the shoulder and one girl ask if she can get a photo. It's strange, this sudden visibility. The Wolves have been quietly excellent for three years running and nobody blinked. One sentence about a quarterback and suddenly I'm a main character.

I hear later, secondhand, what happened in the football team's film room when the clip played on somebody's phone during their break. Marcus gets the story from his roommate, who dates one of the wide receivers.

Apparently it started with silence. Then somebody laughed, and once one guy started, the whole room went off, howling, slapping the table, somebody yelling *oh he did NOT* loud enough that a coach stuck his head in to see what the commotion was. And in the middle of all that, Noah Brooks just sat there. Didn't laugh. Didn't get mad, either, not the way you'd expect from a guy who just got called irrelevant on camera by the captain of another team.

He smirked instead. Slow, like he wasn't in any hurry.

"Ice Boy wants attention," he said.

That part didn't stay in the film room either. Somebody filmed it. Of course somebody filmed it. By the time I see the clip myself I'm sitting in the back of my econ lecture, only half listening to a lecture on supply curves, and I watch Noah Brooks lean back in his chair with that stupid easy grin, the one that's on every poster in the athletic building, the one that makes people forget he's exactly as arrogant as every other golden boy who's ever thrown a ball for a living.

Ice Boy wants attention.

I don't want attention. I want people to know what it actually takes to be good at something that doesn't come with a marching band and a homecoming crown. But if Noah Brooks wants to turn this into a thing, fine. I've never once in my life backed down from a thing.

The reporters catch up to him outside the athletic complex an hour later. I'm not there, but I don't need to be, because within the hour it's everywhere too, posted and reposted until it might as well be carved into the side of the building.

Someone asks him if he has a response for me.

Noah looks straight at the camera like he already knew the question was coming, like he'd been waiting for it all day.

"Tell your captain I'll see him Friday."

I read it standing outside the library, phone in hand, and something in my chest goes tight and hot at the same time, some ugly, competitive thing I don't examine too closely. Friday is the opening event of Rivalry Week. The joint press conference, both captains, same stage, same room, cameras from three local stations and half the school paper crammed into folding chairs to watch us pretend to be civil.

I put my phone away and head to practice.

Friday, I think. Fine. I'll see him too.

Noah

Everybody knows my name. That's not ego, it's just a fact of life at Northridge, the same way everybody knows the dining hall closes at nine and the shuttle bus is always late. I've walked this campus for three years and I don't think I've made it from the dorms to the stadium without somebody yelling my name at least twice. Freshmen who've never spoken to me act like we're old friends. Professors who don't care about football still know who I am because their kids do.

I used to think that would get old. It hasn't yet.

I'm eating breakfast in the dining hall Wednesday morning when my center, Deshawn, drops his tray across from me and slides his phone over before he's even sat down all the way.

"You seen this?"

I have not seen this. I see it now. Some kid with a ring light stuck a microphone in Ethan Carter's face and Ethan, in his infinite ice-cold wisdom, decided that was the moment to tell the world hockey playe