Chapter 72: Everyone Else Heals

Georgia

I watch a boy walk off a broken collarbone in two days, and I still can’t put weight on my own leg.

Three weeks since the Classic.

Three weeks since my knee gave out in front of a stadium full of scouts and my mother screaming my name, her voice cutting through the roar of the crowd like it was the only sound that mattered.

I’ve followed every step of the progression Coach Ferreira warned me about. Wheelchair. Brace. Now a cane and a limp that makes me feel about ninety years old. Some mornings I catch my reflection in the dorm window, hunched over the cane, and I barely recognize the girl staring back. She used to fly across the ice. Now she can barely cross a room without wincing.

My knee still screams every time I put weight on it. The pain has become a kind of companion, dull and constant, flaring bright with every wrong step.

I can’t go home. Mollie made that clear before she left, her heels clicking against hospital tile like a countdown.

"You’ll recover better under proper supervision," she’d told me, her tone clipped and final, the kind that didn’t invite argument.

Which really meant she wasn’t willing to let go of her comeback narrative just because my body had other plans. I could see it in the tight set of her jaw, the way she’d already been rehearsing the story she planned to tell the press before I’d even been discharged.

I can’t leave in the middle of the semester anyway. Not without withdrawing completely. And some stubborn part of me, the same part that used to throw a triple axel just to prove I could, refuses to let Rosethorne become one more thing that’s taken away before I’m ready to give it up.

So I stay.

I go to class with my cane, my brace, and the slow, careful limp I’ve gotten very good at pretending doesn’t bother me.

It bothers me. It bothers me more than I let anyone see.

Every day, I watch everyone else recover from injuries that should have taken them weeks, sometimes months, in a fraction of the time it’s taking me to do anything. At first I told myself I was imagining it, that grief and boredom were making me paranoid. But the pattern keeps repeating, too consistent to dismiss.

Today’s example is a hockey player. Some sophomore who took a hit during practice hard enough to break his collarbone. I remember hearing about it secondhand, the way news like that spreads through a school in low, worried whispers.

I pass him in the hallway two days later.

No sling.

No brace.

Nothing.

He’s laughing with his friends, rolling his shoulder like the whole thing never happened, his voice loud and easy in the crowded hall.

I stop walking. My cane presses against the tile, and for a moment the noise around me seems to fade, narrowing down to just him and that impossible, easy laugh.

I stare at him for a second too long.

"You good?" one of his friends asks, teasing, as he claps the sophomore on the shoulder. The injured one. Or the shoulder that was supposed to be injured.

"Yeah, man, I’m fine," the sophomore answers easily, rolling the shoulder with a grin. "Barely even remember it."

No wince.

No hesitation.

Nothing.

I start walking again before anyone catches me staring, my pulse tapping an uneasy rhythm against my ribs. My knee throbs with every step, sharp little reminders that my body hasn’t forgotten anything.

By the time I reach class, there’s a bitter little knot sitting in my stomach, tightening with every breath.

And it isn’t the first time.

A girl in my English class sprains her ankle badly enough during gym that two people have to help her to the nurse’s office, one arm slung over each shoulder, her face pale with pain.

She’s back the next day. Walking normally. No swelling. No bruising. Nothing. She even laughs at something in class, quick and bright, as though the day before had happened to someone else entirely.

Then there’s the lacrosse player. I watch him take a fall during practice that makes me cringe from halfway across the field, his body twisting awkwardly before hitting the turf. He limps off with his teammates hovering around him, their faces tight with concern.

That evening, he’s at dinner. Walking normally. Eating. Laughing at something on his phone, utterly unbothered, as if gravity itself had decided to be gentle with him.

I stare at my own tray for a long time after I see him, appetite gone, thoughts spiraling.

Okay. Maybe I’m being ridiculous. Maybe some people just heal faster. That has to be it.

Except it keeps happening. Over and over. Small things. Little moments I keep collecting without meaning to, like evidence I don’t want to have.

Some nights, I try to find that pull again. The warm, desperate thread I felt reaching from my chest toward the stands when I hit the ice. I close my eyes and search for it in the dark, half hoping, half afraid it will answer.

Nothing.

It never comes. Whatever it was, it’s gone quiet, and the silence feels like its own kind of wound.

I don’t know if that’s a relief or another loss.

The equipment review hasn’t come up again, either. Not since the nurse mentioned it in the hospital, her voice careful in a way that had made my skin prickle even then.

I don’t know if that means they found nothing. Or if no one has bothered to tell me. Maybe both are possible.

I hate that I don’t know. The not-knowing gnaws at me more than the pain does some days.

At physical therapy, I try to stop thinking about it. It doesn’t work. My mind keeps circling back, the way a tongue keeps finding a sore tooth.

My therapist wraps a resistance band around my ankle and gives me an encouraging smile, the kind meant to soothe more than inform.

"You’re doing everything right, Georgia," she tells me gently. "Bodies heal at their own pace. Yours isn’t broken. It’s just slow."

I stare at the band, watching her fingers work the fabric with practiced efficiency.

"How long does a broken collarbone usually take?"

She pauses, just barely, but I catch it.

"Usually?"

"Yeah. Average recovery time."

Her hands still for half a second. It’s barely anything. I notice anyway, some instinct sharpened by weeks of watching for exactly this kind of hesitation.

"Six to eight weeks," she says. "Typically, for a clean break."

"I saw a kid back on the ice two days after his snapped in practice."

Her expression doesn’t change. "That seems unlikely."

"Why?"

"Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked."

She’s already reaching for my ankle again, her movements brisk, deliberately casual.

I watch her hands. "Have you worked with other students here?" I ask. "Athletes, I mean. Do you see this a lot?"

"I see a lot of patients, Georgia." Her smile stays in place. Her eyes don’t. For just a second, they go blank. Professional. Careful, like a door quietly closing.

"Every body’s different," she says. "I wouldn’t read too much into one hallway conversation."

I want to ask her what I’m supposed to read into the fact that everyone else here seems to heal by different rules. I don’t. The question sits heavy on my tongue, unspoken, useless.

Instead, I watch her adjust the resistance band. She suddenly seems very interested in getting it positioned correctly, focusing on the small task with a little too much intensity.

I file that away. Another thing I don’t understand. Another thing no one wants to explain.

And then I think about Puck.

I remember the hit he took at that hockey game weeks ago. The sound, wet and sickening, the kind that still visits me in half-formed nightmares. The way I was sure I’d just watched something break, something that should have ended his season, maybe his ability to walk without pain for months.

Then he was back on the ice. Seconds later. As if his body had never heard of injury, as if pain were a rumor he’d simply chosen not to believe.

I think about the article I found. Dominic Valentine. Career-ending. Unusual aggression. I think about golden eyes, and impossible reflexes, and the strange, humming wrongness that seems to live just beneath the surface of this place.

The strange things I’ve seen since arriving here. And all the people at Rosethorne who seem to live just outside the rules everyone else follows.

Everyone except me.

By the time I get back to my dorm that evening, my leg is shaking, muscles trembling with the effort of simply existing upright.

The walk from the dining hall shouldn’t take that long. It feels like it takes forever, each step a small negotiation with my own body.

Mandi is out again, probably at some student council thing, and normally I’d complain about her being gone so often, missing the easy chatter that usually fills the room. Tonight, I’m grateful. I need the quiet, the space to let my thoughts settle without an audience.

I lower myself onto my bed carefully and prop my cane against the nightstand. My knee pulses beneath the brace, a steady, insistent ache.

I reach under my mattress and pull out my notebook. The motion has become automatic, weeks of doing this until it feels like ritual.

I open to a fresh page.

Usually, I’d make a list. Injuries. Recovery times. Names. Things I’ve seen. Questions I can’t ask out loud.

Tonight, I don’t. I just stare at the blank page, feeling strangely exposed by its emptiness.

My pen rests between my fingers, heavier than it should be.

I try to think of one person I’ve seen get hurt here and stay hurt the way I have.

One.

I can’t. Not one. The realization settles into my chest like a stone.

My stomach twists. Either I’m the only person at this school whose body follows normal rules, or there’s something about me that doesn’t qualify for whatever the rest of them get. Something missing. Something broken in a different, more permanent way.

And my physical therapist knows more than she’s telling me. Or she doesn’t. Either way, she isn’t going to be the one who gives me answers.

I put the pen down. Hard. The first word leaves a deep mark in the paper.

Then the next.

I write the sentence slowly, each letter deliberate, as if carving it into the page instead of writing it.

Why does everyone here heal except me?

I underline it. Once. Then again, pressing harder the second time, like the force of it might summon an answer.

The ink presses so hard into the page that I can feel the grooves beneath my fingertips.

I stare at the words. My knee aches. The room is quiet, the kind of silence that feels heavier than noise.

No answer comes. Not tonight.

But I know one thing now, something that settles cold and certain in my chest.

I need to find out why.