Strong Center

Agency

Bella dreams of tourneys. She dreams of wearing layers and layers of hockey gear in the coldest rink on hottest day in July. She dreams of sweltering in UnderArmour. She dreams she's the only man against an army. Monsters out of mythology books that multiply and multiply and multiply. She throws up an arm to shield herself.

Bella wakes with a start.

Her left arm waves, then drops back to the mattress. There is a mattress. She is in bed. She is looking at the crackled taupe paint on her ceiling. She breathes in deeply and her lungs stretch to capacity. It was just a dream. The monsters were a dream.

The heat is not a dream.

Winnie Vaughn is effectively molded to her side, wrapped up in her RMU blanket, breathing warm puffs of air against Bella's neck. Bella squeezes her eyes shut. Beads of sweat trickle around her ears and her collarbone, and her pillowcase is damp. Normally, Bella would kick off all the sheets and turn down the furnace (and piss off her roommates as a result). Today, she combs she fingers through Winnie's hair.

With a sleepy whine, Winnie somehow manages to tuck herself even closer to Bella.

"We gotta get up soon," Bella murmurs. She brushes Winnie's hair aside. She grins. Thank goodness Winnie can't see her.

"Winn?"

A moan that sounds a little like "Noooo" rumbles against Bella's chest.

"You got a doctor's appointment," Bella says gently.

"I hate doctors," Winnie mumbles to Bella.

"It'll be good, I promise."

"Mmm."

"... Or are you just gonna lay there?"

"Be nice to me, I got a doctor's appointment," Winnie says as she untangles herself from Bella's blanket.

"Okay." Bella murmurs, "I'll be nice,"

Bella Cahill took a full year to recover from surgery. The first four months, she couldn't even shoot a puck. It was worth it in the long run, but man, what a year.

Bella went under the knife in late November of her first year, around the time Robert Morris played Westwood State, which kind of sucked. That game is hyped to the max every year. Bella spent the day in a hospital bed in Illinois.

Four months later, she began the slow, bizarre process of re-learning her life's work. Nine months later, the next NCAA hockey season began, and Hanna Richards started as Robert Morris's center. One year later, Bella traveled to Westwood State for the first time, and watched her team lose in Westwood Station. She didn't properly play until her third year of college.

That's a long time.

Recovering from surgery is the worst. It's all about starting from scratch and building up a lifetime of hockey skills in a matter of months. Definitely, certifiably the worst, registered trademark. You feel like you're drowning, like water replacing the air in your lungs, like threads and loose seams replacing your veins, and the doctors have the nerve to say "you're getting better. You're improving so much." They have the nerve to call it recovery.

It wouldn't feel so bad, you know, the 42%, the 52%, the 68%, if you couldn't remember 100%. But of course you can. You can remember the week before the injury when you felt invincible and unbreakable and everything came easy as the low-scudding clouds. That's the strongest memory you'll have—the feeling of soaring on wax wings.

But surgery? It's not an instant fix. It's a process. And Almighty Hell, the weeks after surgery feel like a bigger setback than the day your wings melted. Because you can remember the flying. Every step of the way.