Under The Jersey

“And so, after a careful review of the university’s budgetary priorities, the decision has been made to discontinue the women’s ice hockey program, effective immediately. Scholarships will be honored through the close of this academic year.”

The associate athletic director said it to a spot on the back wall, six inches above everyone’s heads, because he could not make himself say it to their faces.

For a second nobody moved. Twenty-two women in a cramped meeting room off the Granger rink, still in their team warmups because they’d been told there was a meeting and nobody tells you to dress up to get executed. Audrey heard the words land and then heard them refuse to mean anything, the sentence sitting on the air like something spilled.

Then Coach Usha stood up in the front row, and her voice came out flat and terrible. “You’re cutting us in August.”

“The timing is regrettable. There are provisions in place—”

“You’re cutting us in August, Paul, three weeks before the season, when every other program in the country has already filled its roster.”

“I understand this is difficult.”

“You don’t understand anything.” Usha’s hands were shaking. “You just made a hundred phone calls unnecessary. You want to explain to me how a nineteen-year-old finds a new team in September?”

Beside Audrey, her linemate Casey had started to cry without sound, and across the room a freshman kept saying what under her breath, and Audrey sat very still in the middle of it and did the only thing her body knew how to do when the floor gave out.

She did the math.

Roughly eighty. Eighty women drafted into the professional league a year, across an entire continent, because the money wasn’t there and the eyes weren’t there. To be one of the eighty you had to be seen, and to be seen you had to be somewhere a scout might look, and the only somewhere she’d had was dissolving in real time in a room that smelled of old tape and industrial coffee.

Transfer. She turned the word over. Every women’s program in the conference had set its roster in the spring. Their scholarships were spoken for. She could go somewhere and sit a year, and at nineteen a year wasn’t a year. It was the difference between a scout catching her in the tiny window she got and never once knowing she’d existed.

Paul was still talking. Something about counseling resources. Audrey stopped hearing him.

She was good enough. She’d never once doubted she was good enough, and that turned out to be the cruelest part—that talent was the cheap ingredient, that a person could have every drop of it and still go dark for lack of a lit room and a camera pointed the right way.

Work hard enough, they’d told her since she was six, and someone will notice.

Nobody ever mentioned the fine print. That noticing needed someone to be looking. That the crowd bothering to look at her game could fit in a scorer’s booth with seats to spare.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

She called Dustin from the parking lot because Dustin was who you called when the floor went.

He’d been that since they were seven and he’d taught her to skate on the retention pond behind his house, and she’d taught him that girls could throw a check. Twelve years later he picked up on the second ring, chewing something, cheerful as a golden retriever who hadn’t heard the news.

“They cut us.” She got it out before he could say hi. “The program. Gone in the spring.”

The chewing stopped. “Aud.”

“Don’t.” Her voice did a thing she hated. She pressed the heel of her hand into her eye until it stopped. “Don’t be nice about it or I’ll lose it in a parking lot.”

“Okay.” A pause, and she could hear him thinking, that devious little engine under the friendly surface spinning up. “Okay, so where do you go.”

“Nowhere. That’s the point. Everyone’s full. I lose the season.”

“For real? There’s nothing?”

“There’s sit out a year and pray, which for me is the same as nothing.”

Silence on the line. Long enough that she pulled the phone from her ear to check the call hadn’t dropped. When he spoke again his voice had changed, gone careful, testing.

“Don’t play as you,” he said.

“What?”

“I deferred Lakeview. You know that. I’ve got a student ID in a drawer, housing, the email, the whole account, and I’m not using any of it this year.” He was speeding up now, warming to it, and dread bloomed in her chest because she knew that tempo. “Their men’s team runs open tryouts. Walk-ons. You’d have to—I mean, you’d have to be me, but—”

“Dustin.”

“You could just go as me.”

“That is identity fraud.”

“Only if you get caught.”

“That is not how crime works.” She was already out of the car, pacing, some animal part of her up and moving before her sense could stop it. “That’s not a loophole, that’s just the definition of the crime, you absolute—Dustin, they’d arrest me. They’d arrest you.”

“Would they?” He sounded genuinely curious, which was worse. “It’s my name. My account. I’m allowed to let a friend use my Netflix.”

“It’s not Netflix, it’s a Division One roster spot under a false identity.”

“Semantics.”

“That is the opposite of semantics.”

But she’d gone quiet, and he heard the quiet, because he always heard the quiet. He didn’t push. He let it sit on the line between them, two hundred miles of it, until the thing they both already knew rose up and looked at her.

One season. One roster. A men’s program that filmed its games, that got watched, that put its scorers on a video board thirty feet tall. Footage a scout might trip over. One chance to be somewhere the eyes actually were, even if the eyes thought she was a boy named Dustin Becker.

“I’m small,” she said, to the empty lot. “Even for the women’s game I’m small. I could pass. I actually—God help me, I could actually pass.”

“See.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.”

“It’s the worst idea anyone has ever had.” She was crying again and laughing now too, the two things braided into one useless sound. “It’s a felony, Dustin.”

“So don’t get caught,” he said, gentle. “One season, Aud. That’s all. Get your footage. Make somebody look.”

♥︎♥︎♥︎

Telling her parents was the part that cost.

She did it three days later on a bad overseas connection, her mother’s face pixelating on the screen from a hotel in a city eight time zones away, and Audrey looked into that grainy warmth and told her the clean version. She’d transferred. Lakeview, a fresh start, a bigger school. Her mother wept with happiness and called her father in from the balcony to hear, and the two of them beamed at her through the smeared connection, so proud, so relieved, celebrating a comeback that did not exist.

“I’m so glad, baby,” her mother said. “I was so worried when I heard. But this—this is wonderful. You landed on your feet.”

“Yeah, Mom.” Audrey kept her face still, the skill she’d been building for a week already. “I landed on my feet.”

She ended the call and sat in the dark of her half-packed room and let the shame come, because it was going to come whether she let it or not. The lie to her parents was the heaviest thing she’d ever carried, heavier than the plan, heavier than the fear. Someday she’d explain it. Someday, if this worked, she’d get to explain it holding a contract, and that possibility was the only thing that made the shame lie down and be quiet.

Dustin mailed the ID overnight. It arrived in a padded envelope with a sticky note in his terrible handwriting—welcome to being me, try not to ruin my credit—and a comb, for reasons she never got him to explain.

She sat on her floor and slid the card out and looked at it. BECKER, DUSTIN R. A photo two years old, a boy with her same dark hair and a jaw that was close enough, a stranger she was about to move into like a house.

She practiced the name out loud until it stopped catching in her throat.

Then she stood in front of the mirror in the base layers she’d bought a size too tight, the compression garment already flattening her into a shape the world would read wrong, and she pulled her hair back, and she lowered her voice a half-register until it lived somewhere in the basement of her chest.

“Becker,” she told the mirror.

The mirror believed her. That was the terrifying part. The mirror believed her completely.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

Open tryouts were on a Tuesday, and the Lakeview rink was a real one—bigger than anything Granger had ever given her, glass gleaming, a video board dark and waiting over center ice.

Audrey stood on the sidewalk in a stranger’s name with a borrowed bag on her shoulder and her heart going somewhere it had no business going. Through the doors she could hear it already, the music of a rink filling with skaters, blades and shouts and the crack of pucks off boards, and every note of it pulled at her like a hook set behind the ribs.

Last chance. Last window. She’d burned her whole real life down to a footnote to get one more look at it.

She took the comb out of her pocket, because she understood now, because Dustin was an idiot and a genius and had known she’d need something of his to hold. She ran it through her hair once, pulled it back tight, and pushed through the doors as a boy named Dustin Becker, walking in to try out for a men’s team that would have thrown her out on sight if it knew the truth.

Nobody looked twice.

She’d been counting on that, and it still hollowed her out a little, how easy it was to disappear into someone the world was willing to see.