Chapter 108: Scrubbed

POV: Georgia

The silence after I hang up on my mother is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

I sit with the phone still warm in my hand and wait for the guilt to arrive, the way it always has. A minute passes. Then another. It doesn’t come. Instead, there’s just the room, too quiet without her voice cutting through it, and a strange hollowness where the familiar dread should be. I keep waiting, almost suspicious of the absence, like my body is playing a trick on me. But no - the guilt simply isn’t there.

What’s there instead is a buzzing energy with nowhere to go. My hands want something to do.

So I pull my laptop onto my knees.

I open the screenshot and look at the top of the page.

The game took place in the second week of February. There’s a rink name and a date.

Okay. That’s something I can use.

I search the date, the rink name, Valentine, and witnesses - because reporters always write a second story when something goes wrong. Page one is nothing. Page two is youth hockey newsletters and recipe blogs. I keep scrolling.

The door clicks open.

"I am so tired of laminated agendas," Mandi announces, dropping her bag on the floor and flopping face first onto her bed. "If one more person says the word ’synergy’ in a council meeting I’m going to scream into a fire extinguisher."

"That bad?"

"They spent forty minutes on the napkin color for the gala." She rolls onto her side and squints at me. "What are you doing? You look weird."

"Weird how?"

"Like a detective who just found a clue and doesn’t want anyone to see."

I close the laptop lid halfway. "Homework."

"Liar." She says it kindly, though, and doesn’t push. She pulls her blanket over her head and mumbles, "Wake me when it’s dinner."

I wait until her breathing slows. Then I open the laptop again and keep digging.

Twenty minutes later, on page nine, I finally find a link that looks wrong.

It isn’t a news site. It’s a web archive, one of those old, ugly pages that stores copies of websites from years ago. The result is a local paper’s sports section from the week after the game. The title is plain: Valentine Injured in Collision at Regional Game. That sounds like the sort of headline you’d forget immediately. But the preview underneath makes my skin prickle.

Several spectators described the play as...

I click.

The page takes forever to load. When it finally does, it’s formatted in the clunky, old-fashioned way of websites nobody has updated in years. A grainy photo of a hockey rink sits at the top. Underneath it is a long article, much longer than the one I’ve been staring at for weeks.

I read the first paragraph and stop breathing.

One spectator said the sound was "like a branch snapping, but louder, and it came from his whole body." Another said the player who delivered the hit "moved faster than he should have been able to move, like he wasn’t skating at all."

My fingers go cold on the keyboard.

I keep reading. A referee is quoted saying he’d officiated for twenty years and had never seen anything like it. A parent says the player who made the hit "didn’t look angry, he looked scared," and that when it was over, the boy stood there with his hands out in front of him, staring at them. A paramedic describes Dominic’s injuries as "inconsistent with a standard collision."

Inconsistent. The word is the same one the first article used, but it’s being used differently now. The first one said Puck’s behavior was inconsistent with how he usually played. This one says the damage was inconsistent with anything a sixteen-year-old boy could do.

The first article is short. Polite and clean.

I check the current link and compare it to the saved screenshot. The words under the photo have changed. Someone has taken the witness quotes out of the later reprints, the ones passed around to other sites. The version most people can find now is the soft one. The messy one hides on a broken old archive page that I only found because I searched a date.

My heart pounds.

This isn’t how a story disappears by accident. Newspapers don’t quietly delete the most interesting parts of an article for no reason. Somebody read what the witnesses said and decided the world shouldn’t see it, then made sure the world didn’t. They went through every copy.

That takes effort. It takes time and money and a lot of people willing to make phone calls and change files. It takes someone who knows exactly where a story has been published and exactly who to ask to fix it.

I think of Mandi saying everyone here knows everything. I think of Darcy’s family, their law firm, their donations. Maybe it was them. Maybe the Valentines wanted it quiet.

But that doesn’t feel right. If the Valentines wanted to hurt Puck, they’d want the story loud. They’d want the real version out there.

The version that exists is the one that protects someone from questions. The one that makes a hit that broke a boy’s body sound like a bad afternoon.

I scroll back to the top of the old, clean article, the one I’ve carried around on my phone for weeks. I’ve never looked at the bottom of it. There’s always been a tiny line there, in gray, right under the final paragraph. I zoom in as far as it will go.

Report prepared with assistance from Calloway & Wren Communications.

The name in the footer of Rosethorne’s website.

I put my hand flat against my mouth.

The same firm that wrote the statement about Puck’s hit also handles everything Rosethorne tells the outside world. The people who made the story small are the people who speak for the school.

My stomach drops, a long, slow fall, like missing a step in the dark. It feels like someone has shoved me in the chest.

If the school buried this, then Puck was never just a boy who lost control once. He was a liability someone decided to manage, the way they managed Mandi, the way they’re circling me now that I know too much. Every person I’ve trusted here might answer to the same quiet machine that rewrote this article, which means I can’t take a single name off my list of suspects - not Liam, not Darcy, maybe not even Mandi, snoring three feet away.

I close the laptop slowly, like it might bite me, and sit with the glow still burning behind my eyes. Someone combed through every copy of this story and erased what mattered. That kind of work leaves fingerprints. If I can find out who cleaned the record, I’ll know exactly who’s really running this school - and I intend to start with Calloway & Wren.