Page 33 of Slashed Bonds

Don’t.

Too late. I brace a palm against the tile and spend a few breaths negotiating with my own body.

Focus, Nikolai. We have work.

I shut the water off, wrap a towel around my hips, and stand in front of the mirror with my hair dripping into my eyes.

No mask in here.

No performance either, which is rarer.

The frown I’m wearing is the real one — deep, permanent-looking, the kind that makes people apologize before they’ve said anything. My eyes are dull as lake ice in the flat bathroom light. Two-toned hair plastered to my forehead, the pale front section soaked dark, the black underneath darker still.

And my skin.

That’s the headline.

The vitiligo runs everywhere. Across my chest, up one side of my throat, over the back of my right hand, down the outside of my thigh in a shape I’ve been told resembles a continent that doesn’t exist. Pale islands with soft borders sitting between the freckles and the ink, so the whole surface of me reads like a map somebody spilled bleach on.

People have two reactions and they’re both loud.

Disgust, which is honest. I’ve got no quarrel with disgust. Disgust looks you in the face.

Or admiration, which is worse.

You should model.

I’ve heard it more times than I’ve heard my own name. Some agency scout in a bar with a card and a plan for me.

Hilarious.

Why would I hand myself over to be dissected by the same species of person who tells you to your face how striking you are and then, four feet away with a drink in their hand, calls you the freckled freak with the skin condition?

I’ve heard that too. Loudly. At sixteen, in a rink corridor, from a man whose kid I’d shut out that night.

Ignorance is bliss, apparently.

I don’t have the time.

I hate pretenders. I hate hypocrites more. And a face that gets called a masterpiece in public and a defect in private is a machine for generating both.

So I stay in the net, where everyone wears a mask and nobody’s confused about what they’re looking at.

I dry off. I dress. Black on black on black, because it saves decisions.

Before that, the order.

Right sock, then left. Right skate, then left, though we’re hours from a rink and I’m putting on boots — the sequence lives in the body and it doesn’t take requests.

I tap the doorframe twice on the way out of any room I’ve slept in.

I don’t say the word shutout, and I’ll skate off the ice mid-warmup if somebody else says it near me.

I eat the same thing on game days and I’ve eaten it for six years and I’ve stopped pretending there’s a nutritional argument for it.

Everybody laughs. Cash calls it a personality disorder with a schedule.

Here’s the thing nobody enjoys hearing.