Ronan Hayes had the kind of shoulders that made other boys stand a little straighter and made coaches sigh as if they'd just been handed a row of keys. He moved like a thing used to force: deliberate, a little clumsy in the way of people who are stronger than they mean to be, and when he laughed it sounded like the hit of a drum. Today those shoulders hunched inside a damp uniform, tape glittering white around his wrists, breath fogging in the stale air of the locker room. The lights above hummed. The lockers smelled of disinfectant and old gear and the faint, persistent tang of rain that clung to him even after practice. Two schools had been thrown together this semester — an administrative marriage meant to save budgets and raise rosters — and the change had widened the small town's edges until everyone strained to see where they fit. Rivalries were folding into uneasy alliances; the rugby pitch had become a place where names were remade or settled permanently. Ronan was a name that wanted no remaking. It already carried weight. Coach Marlowe moved between benches like a man who measured the world by the way men held themselves after a run. He had a voice that could smooth bruises — and lately, more often, a voice that jabbed at things he thought needed fixing. He leaned back against a metal locker, brow darkening at some joke the new boys were trading, then his eyes found the back of Ronan’s neck and the way he drifted near the doorway instead of keeping to the center of the room. “All of you stay focused this season,” Marlowe said, loud enough to lift the room into silence. The way he said it was casual, but everyone felt the weight of it landing. “Avoid distractions. Keep your head in the play.” He stared pointedly, without ceremony, toward Ronan. Ronan's jaw tightened. There was a clench in the younger boys' faces that registered like a chain tightening. The one who’d been a poster on the new school's wall — the one who made things happen with a shoulder or a kick — had been singled out in front of them. The comment was small; the consequences were not. There was a history to the look that washed across Ronan’s face, a calculation and a kindling. He stood, boots scraping the concrete, and walked for the door. “Ronan — sit down,” Coach Marlowe ordered. It was not a request. It was a coach’s reflex to stop someone from walking into whatever storm they made for themselves. Ronan didn't obey. He stepped out of the locker room and into the chill corridor, the fluorescent fluorescence of the hallway a different kind of exposure. The field lights beyond the windows cut the day in half with their cold, surgical squares. He didn't go to his car. He didn't go home. He walked with a direction that had nothing to do with routes on a map but everything to do with the one person who unstitched him and sewed him together again. You had chosen this school the way people choose knives: for protection, for utility, for the way it fit in your palm. Your child — small, stubborn as a stone, one-year-old and impossible to ignore — was at home with your sister, or maybe at the nursery that kept giving you better lies each month about how “community carries us.” The child’s breath and the smell of boiled oatmeal and sleepless nights were a tide under everything you did now. The rumor had followed you through hallways like secondhand smoke. People called it a scandal, a lesson, sometimes a badge of honor. You had learned to let gossip slide off like scuffs that could be sanded out later; survival had a choreography. He found you in the bit of quiet between classes: leaning against a brick wall that had been softened by years of coats and elbows, clutching a folder like it was an atlas to a life that had been rerouted. The school merger meant new schedules, new watching eyes, and more people who had never seen your small guiledoff — never seen the way you folded into yourself when the town's complacent stares grew sharp.