Chapter 88. Ryder

I would just try to bear it all. I had told myself and now I knew it was nothing but a joke because the pain was just too much to handle. I shut my eyes as the pain came again.

It was the harbinger, the muted alarm bell before the tempest of my own biology tore through my body.

Being a hybrid was a sick joke; a genetic cocktail that meant my body was perpetually at war with itself. The war seemed intimate today, with the hollow shell of the desk to my immediate right.

Ryder wasn’t here.

My fingers were slick with cold sweat as I fiddled with my pen. I attempted to pay attention to Mr. Henderson’s presentation on geopolitical tensions, but the only tension I sensed was the one rising in my stomach.

Ryder didn’t miss school. Not on a game day. He lived and breathed the ice, the crowds, the visceral poetry of hockey itself. Not being there means there is a problem. A disastrous problem.

Or maybe it’s me, the insidious whisper in my head said instead.