All We Need Is Daylight

Thursday evening’s practice is longer than what Frank has grown accustomed to. It also doesn’t help that he’s practically dead on his feet by the middle of the afternoon. He’s honestly not entirely sure he’s going to make it through practice without literally falling asleep. He is determined to stay focused, though, because tomorrow is the team’s second game, and even if he isn’t playing, he’s going to give it his all to prove that he’s got what it takes.

He isn’t as excited about receiving his jersey from Gerard as it is clear that Gerard is expecting him to be. He’s not apathetic about it, because he is excited, he’s thankful to have the proof that he’s part of this team. It’s just been a really long day, and he cannot find it in him to be over the moon about something when he’s honestly trying his hardest not to fall asleep where he stands.

Frank’s got too many things on his mind, which is never good when he gets out on the ice, because a busy mind means he can’t concentrate on what’s going on around him. He is thinking too much about everything to do with the world outside the ice, so his reactions become far too delayed concerning what’s going on inside the ice. He’s too in his head, he needs to climb down and be here rather than everywhere else, but he can’t talk himself down.

Frank trips up during practice, an indication as to just how fatigued he really is. He flies to the ground, hitting his arm on the ground pretty hard, but it’s nothing he can’t work through. Pete and Mikey both skate over to him to check that he’s okay, but Frank shakes it off, or at least, he tries to. He can’t help but let it get to him though.

“Shape up, Iero, you look asleep out there!” Gerard yells at him from his position right in front of the bench. Coach is staring at him too, looking disappointed, which is so much worse than angry. Anger he can deal with, anger is fine, but disappointment makes him feel helpless. There’s nothing that you can do to overcome the feelings of others being disappointed in you, even if you give your all, you still have the memory of someone expecting more from you, more that you just can’t deliver.

Frank’s skills dwindle during practice today. He’s not giving it his all, and he’s not doing his best. It’s because he doesn’t believe in himself at all today. He’s got too many thoughts all at once, and all of them are negative.

He knows it’s because he’s tired, he’s been awake for over fifteen hours now, it’s bound to get to him, but still, he feels like he should’ve been able to avoid falling flat on his face. He can’t afford to start getting clumsy, he just can’t. He’s got to do the best he can, and if he doesn’t get enough sleep he can’t be that.

Right now, though, he doesn’t know he can possibly be ready for hockey and still attend all of his classes. The two seem mutually exclusive. Either he can get enough sleep and be ready for hockey, or he can go to his classes and be too tired to play by the time he gets to practice.

He went around to all of his professors today so that he could get a list of everything he needs to get done, and it’s weighing him down like an anchor. He might just drown.

Frank’s still got an insane number of chapters to read in too many textbooks, and he has assignments to make up, and he has game strategies to memorize, and he needs to work out so that he can get back in shape to figure skate, and he’s got to practice figure skating, and he’s got to practice hockey, and on top of that he’s got his sanity to retain. It’s just too much. It’s too much. He feels like the weight of the world is coming down on him, and he doesn’t have enough of himself to invest in all of the things he needs to do. He just feels overworked, tired, desperate, homesick, and unwanted.

At every turn, people have done their best to disprove that he’s unwanted, but still Frank feels it in his bones, he feels it like a fact. There are so many people who don’t want him here, and so many of those people are on the team. Frank had originally thought that most of the team were on his side, but it turns out most of them aren’t. Pete, Mikey, Ray, Travie, and Brendon are the only ones who actually like him, and the jury is still out on Brendon. The rest of them have made it clear in various ways that the same is not true for them. That’s ten guys, more than half the team, all of whom wish he wasn’t here.

His professors aren’t cutting him any slack, he’s still got to catch up on every assignment they’ve given out so far, and a month may not seem like a long time, but that’s about three assignments per week, for five classes, times four weeks. And he’s got more chapters to read than he originally anticipated, because he thought there would only be one per week, but some of his professors assign as many as four chapters per week, and Frank just doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to take it all.

By the time that practice is over, Frank feels like he just might explode from the strain of it all. He can’t even allow himself the mercy of going to bed once he gets back to his dorm, he’s got four essays to write, a case study, upwards of twenty-five textbook chapters to read, and a little over four hundred questions to give full sentence answers to. All while refusing to do anything but the best that he can do.

“Frank, are you okay?” Pete asks when they get to the locker room after practice, Frank practically dripping from sweat. He’s sure that he could quite literally wring his own hair out if he were to try. He feels gross, weak, tired, and useless.

“What?” Frank asks, and then he makes an exasperated, and almost pleading sound in response.

“So, that’s a no?” Pete asks.

“I’ve just, I’ve got… I’ve got so much to do. I have so much work, and I… I don’t know how I’m ever gonna catch up. And I’ve also got to catch up with the team so that Gerard will let me on the ice, and I just don’t know how I’m going to do it all,” Frank says, and he’s honestly on the verge of crying.

“Oh, man dude,” Pete says, making a face of sympathy that Frank appreciates, but it doesn’t exactly help him.

“I just, I’ve got to do everything all at once, and I don’t know how I can do any one of those things, nevertheless all of them.”

Pete nods, and he wrinkles his eyebrows, which is how you know he’s deep in thought. Pete always wrinkles his eyebrows together when he’s thinking about something, as Frank’s noticed.

“What classes do you have?” Pete asks, “And what professors?” Frank gives him a rundown of his classes, and the professors he has. Pete gives him a look that actually sparks some amount of hope in Frank.

“Okay, so, I never throw away a notebook, not a single one,” Pete says, “I had three of your five professors, so, I mean, if you need them, I can give you all the chapter and lesson notes I took, and I can also get you some of the other stuff I have from those classes, if it’ll help?”

“Pete, are you serious?” Frank asks, looking like he’s going to hug him, which he wouldn’t do even if he weren’t sweaty and gross. Hugging is very intimate for a hockey player unless you just won a game, in which case, fuck rules.

“Yeah,” Pete says, “it’s no problem for me to give that stuff to you. I don’t need any of it anymore, really.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Pete says, “I only wish I still had my old textbooks, because I’m a master highlighter. I’m like, the half-blood prince when it comes to highlighting.”

“Anything you can give me, that’s what I’ll accept,” Frank says.

“Okay, yeah,” Pete nods, “I’ll get it all for you once I change. You should come over to my dorm though, ‘cause it might take me a while to find that shit.”

“Yeah, definitely!” Frank says, ready to get down on his knees and grovel at Pete’s feet.

Frank changes quickly, quicker than he usually does, because he’s eager to get those notes from Pete, and to get studying them so that he can go to fucking bed. Frank is still sweaty, and he’ll take a shower later, but first he wants those notes. He stinks right now, and he knows it, but the only people he’s going to be near are Pete and Ray, and they’re just going to have to deal with it.

Once they’ve both changed, Frank follows Pete to his dorm which is a lot further than Frank’s is in relation to the ice rink, but the cold air outside is soothing compared to the heat and sweat from practice. Pete takes him to one of the dorms that’s not as tall, but quite a bid wider than Frank’s, named Barker hall. Pete’s on the first floor, which is a relief, as he hadn’t wanted to climb the stairs, even if it is only four or five stories tall.

Frank is surprised, when Pete swipes his card to open the front door, to see Morgan and one of his goons following them. He grabs the door after Pete as the two of them walk through, and when Frank turns his head to look at him, Morgan is looking back with his evil, beady eyes. Frank quickly turns his head to look straight ahead of him, and follows Pete down what seems to be a very twisty and convoluted hallway compared to the short and straight one that Frank is used to.

Morgan has branched off with his goon, but still follows behind them, which makes Frank feel slightly worried. He knows he’s just paranoid, but it’s unsettling being so near to Morgan with no one but Pete around.

Pete finally comes to a stop in front of a room, which is clearly his as evidenced by the whiteboard on the door that says Neverland, which Frank has come to assume is an obsession of Pete’s. Pete probably fancies himself to be Peter Pan.

Pete opens the door, and Frank turns around to see Morgan entering into a different room, just a few doors down. Frank sighs a little in relief, thankful to escape Morgan. Frank feels slightly bad for Pete though, having to live not only in the same dorm, but in the same hall as Morgan.

Frank’s got all of the other freshman hockey players on his floor, obviously including Ray, but also Mikey, and Brendon. Apparently, Mikey’s roommate is a lacrosse player, but Frank hasn’t actually met the guy. He doesn’t know much of anything about Brendon other than that he hates Morgan, and that he has psychology with him.

“It must suck living so close to Morgan,” Frank says, when he enters into Pete’s room.

Pete’s room very much looks like his personality. It’s very, very Pete. There’s barely an inch of wall not covered in posters. Even Ray doesn’t have so many posters. His room is quite a bit larger than Frank’s, because there are two beds, neither of which are lofted. It’s clear which side of the room is Pete’s though, because not only does he have band posters, but he’s got a couple hockey posters too. He’s got the arbitrary Wayne Gretzky, almost the same print that Frank has, and he’s got a couple Blackhawks photos. Frank’s only got Gretzky and Ovechkin, who are arguably his two favorite hockey players of all time, even though neither of them ever actually played for the Devils.

“Oh, almost all the upperclassman hockey players are on this floor,” Pete says, “him and Garret are roommates, and honestly, both of them are dicks. Garret is almost a bigger dick than he is.”

“Is he on the team too?” Frank asks.

“Yeah,” Pete nods, “he’s that big bulky one with the Smurf nose.”

“Oh,” Frank nods. “How can anyone be a bigger dick than Morgan?”

“He’s just a quieter dick compared to Morgan,” Pete says, “but he hates you just as much. Hates me more than he hates you though, so, there’s that. Call it a consolation prize.”

Pete starts rummaging around his desk, which is a mess to say the least. One side of the room is definitely a little bit cleaner than the other side, but neither is particularly clean. Pete’s is the messy side, with clothes strewn about across the floor, on the bed, and surprisingly, very little in the hamper he’s got set out next to the closet. Pete’s desk has a stack about a mile high of textbooks, and Frank only now remembers that he doesn’t know what Pete is majoring in.

“What are you studying?” Frank asks, because he has been made aware that small talk is the only thing that prevents long awkward silences. However, Frank is the king of long awkward silences.

“Political science,” Pete says, and he makes a face to reflect how he feels about it. He seems about as enthusiastic about political science as Frank is about engineering.

“Uh, why, might I ask?”

“Because I have a mother,” Pete replies, and then Frank nods.

“Oh, gotcha,” he nods. “What do you actually want to do?”

Pete shrugs, “I wanna join a band, probably. I don’t think I really want to do hockey forever.”

“I can’t see myself doing anything but,” Frank says.

“Well, honestly, with your skill, it’s almost an insult if you were to do something other than hockey. Like, can you imagine someone like Beyoncé just not singing? Or Meryl Streep not acting? You’d be robbing the world of something great if you didn’t play hockey. Not to say that you couldn’t do something else, and if you wanted to, that’s just something the world would have to live with, it’s just, it seems an awful waste not to show the world your skills.”

“You weren’t…” Frank starts, “You weren’t on the team when Gerard played, were you?”

“No,” Pete shakes his head, “I’m a junior, he quit before I got here.”

“Okay,” Frank says.

“I saw him play a couple of times, though,” he replies, which perks Frank’s interests, because that’s all he’d wanted to hear about.

“How was he?” Frank asks.

“Damn good,” Pete replies. “A shame he left. Never really knew why. But I got to work under him, have done for my entire time at this school. Even though we haven’t won anything, I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun playing. Gerard, he may be a bit of a bitch out there, but he’s a good dude. A really great dude, honestly, one of the best.”

“He said he left because it was too much pressure. Everyone was pressuring him to live up to what his father set up for him, and it made him not like the sport anymore. But he came back anyway.”

“I think a championship win would mean more to him than anyone else on that team,” Pete says. “He may not look it, but he’s desperate. I think he’ll never truly be happy until he coaches our team to victory. I don’t think he can be. Can you imagine being raised on all that? Knowing from birth that his father did something that great, and then having your entire life become a legacy about doing it again? Sometimes I feel bad for him. It must be hell.”

“I didn’t think of it like that,” Frank says. He truly hadn’t. Gerard must be suffocating under something like that. To be raised his entire life being told how amazing a feat his father accomplished, only to make it to college and not be able to do the same? Four years in, still without a trophy to show off? Frank can’t even imagine how hard that is.

Frank doesn’t have anything to prove when he plays hockey, or at least, he didn’t until he came to this school. But until now, he was never proving anything to anyone. He didn’t have a family member to make proud, didn’t have any ulterior motive behind winning other than that he likes the game, and wants it. Of course he wants to win, but it’s never been a pressure before. Mostly, because he’s never really had that much trouble winning.

Frank’s not arrogant, it’s never been arrogance that makes him win, he’s just good. He doesn’t let that go to his head, he wants to keep important things up there rather than fill it with air.

“Here we go!” Pete says, looking happy when he pulls out a shoe box from under his desk, which has a pile of old notebooks in it. He pulls out a yellow, black, and blue notebook, and then beckons for Frank to take them from him, which he does so, gladly. He knows it’s not going to cut out a lot of his workload, but having someone else’s notes means that he might be able to not die. He’s still going to go through hell and back, and will likely still be completely exhausted for the next three months, but at least he won’t actually kick the bucket.

“I’ve got a couple folders on my computer with assignments, and some more notes. Obviously, you can’t copy them or anything, but it might help you out having an example or two to go by. I can put those on a flash drive and get them to you tomorrow, if that’s cool?”

“Absolutely!” Frank says, excitedly. “Honestly, everything you can give me will be a big help. Thank you so much for all of this. You’re literally the nicest person ever for giving me this much.”

“No, don’t worry about it,” Pete says, “classes are tough, and that’s when you only gotta do a couple things a week, but you’ve got four weeks to catch up on. Anything I can do to help, just name it. Short of writing a paper for you, I’m here for you. But like, fuck, you need a coffee run at midnight, I’m your man.”

Pete then asks Frank for his phone, and puts his number in so that Frank can bother him whenever he needs to. Frank is so beyond grateful, he could kiss the boy. And it’s not just because Pete’s pretty, he’s actually so indebted to him that he’d do anything he asked.

“You should probably go, man, you’ve got a lot of studying to do.”

“Yeah,” Frank nods, because he really, truly does.

“Thank you again,” Frank says, and then just whispers a chorus of “thank you’s” under his breath as he heads for the door. The door opens before Frank can get to it, and he’s met with a familiar face standing on the other side.

“Hey, Frank!” Patrick says, looking surprised, but not unhappy to see Frank there.

“Hi,” Frank replies.

“Hey Patrick!” Pete says, excitedly when he sees him, “I was just giving Frank some of my old notes, ‘cause he’s got like a shit ton of work to catch up on.”

“Oh, right,” Patrick says, nodding, “gotta be tough starting the semester so late.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Frank replies, with a sound at the end of his sentence that says something along the lines of ‘please kill me.’

He hadn’t realized that Pete and Patrick were roommates until now. It makes a lot of sense though, considering that Patrick is apparently Pete’s best friend.

“Good luck, man,” Patrick says, with the utmost sympathy in his eyes.

“Yeah, you’ll need it,” Pete says.

“Thanks,” Frank says, walking through the door that Patrick leaves ajar for him.

Patrick watches Frank leave, waiting till he’s gone to close the door behind him. Before Frank goes too far down the hall, Patrick remembers the article and calls over, “Oh, by the way, my article about you goes live tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, okay,” Frank says, nodding, and then feels very weird at the idea of an article about him at this school that he’s attended for three days. It’s weird having an article all to himself.

Frank’s no stranger to having newspaper articles written about him, not by a long shot. On top of being in the school newspaper every week when the team won a game, he was featured in the local news every other week. Occasionally, he’d even be in a statewide newspaper. All that happened when he had been on his team for a while, though. He’d been a figure, almost, but he’d been on his team for three years by the end of that run. It wasn’t weird, or a surprise to anyone to see his name in print.

At Armstrong, though, no one knows who he is. No one is likely to care either. Frank doesn’t imagine many people attend the hockey games at Armstrong, no one wants to attend a game that they know is going to be lost, not when other sports teams who are actually good at their game are probably playing at the same time. The article may even go completely unread, save by two or three students. It’ll be weird for Frank to be in an article that doesn’t display a heading about him winning. It’s just going to be about him. Frank isn’t all that interesting. He doesn’t have a lot of substance beyond the surface. He’s a hockey player, and if you scrape off that layer, what you find is more hockey.

Frank walks back to his dorm in relative quiet. There’s a few groups of people still out and about, but it’s almost ten, so most everyone is in their dorm for the night. Frank won’t get the chance to go to bed quite yet, though, because he really does have a lot of work to get done.

Frank sighs, because he knows he’s going to have to skip an early morning practice tomorrow. He won’t get the chance to do any figure skating, since he’s got another early morning class again tomorrow, and he has studying to do which is sure to take him late into the night.

He’d been kind of looking forward to seeing Gerard in the morning, it had been a comfort to him even this morning when he didn’t even have enough time to really talk to him. Come to think of it, Frank hasn’t talked almost at all to Gerard today. It feels like a bit of a loss, but there’s nothing to be done of it now.

Frank makes his way through the campus, looking around at the buildings around him, all a plain, boring brick, but he’s growing used to the surroundings. The trees are still a vivid array of colors, and the light of the moon and stars above him, as well as the streetlamps, light them all up in what would be a beautiful painting if Frank had the skill to paint it.

Frank has lived in, or near enough, to a big city for his entire life, he’s never ever seen a sky quite as clear as the sky here is. This town is not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but it’s not anywhere important either. It is definitively a town, not a city. It’s very small, very quaint, very welcoming. But mostly, it’s so quiet and small, that you can see the stars almost as well as if you were on a camping trip. They’re huge, bright, and there’s so many more than Frank’s ever seen in the city. The lights of the city always drown out the vibrancy of the night sky above, which is a pity, because no words could do the sky justice like this.

It’s something tiny to get worked up over, the night sky. It’s so normal, you see it every day, it shouldn’t be beautiful. It shouldn’t be special. It’s as normal as the sun, literally. But you’re not really living if you don’t take the time to appreciate the sky every now and again. The sky is special, a wonder of the world that can be seen around the globe. It’s easy to take it for granted, but it’s unfair to the beauty of this world.

Frank looks up at it, until the second he can’t anymore. The minute he steps foot into his dorm, he feels like he’s lost something magnificent, and he really wishes he could look at it some more, but unfortunately, he does have quite a bit of work ahead of him tonight.

He tries not to think about all the work he’s got to do. He had thought he might be able to weasel by with some amount of sanity retained. He also hoped some of his professors might cut him some slack, given how he’s missed four weeks of classes. In high school, they probably would have, but that is not the case here.

Frank is used to having too much to do. He’s very much accustomed to not having a social life, or break time. Frank’s never even watched a movie on Netflix, he’s literally just been too busy. The last movie he saw in theaters was Return of the King. He hasn’t watched TV regularly since Lost ended. That’s how little free time he has.

But now, he is more than overworked. He’s being tortured. He’s got so much to do, he’s got to catch up on everything he loves and doesn’t love. He’s got school to catch up on, hockey, and figure skating. All the while trying to maintain what he supposes are now his friends. He doesn’t know how he’s going to do all of those things at once.

Right now, his biggest stressor is all of the homework, studying, and reading he needs to get done. His professors were at least somewhat understanding, so he has about a month of leeway on the majority of his assignments, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to get any peace in the next month. Ideally, he’ll have read and caught up on all the readings in the next two weeks, and then he’ll start on the assignments. He can’t very well do homework on a chapter that he hasn’t read yet, though.

He also needs to spend a lot of extra time in the coming week getting himself ready to play hockey. That’s probably the most pressing thing, even if he does have an Everest of a workload. He needs to be playing in games, he needs to be on the ice during them. He doesn’t have a choice about that. If he doesn’t get on the ice soon, he surely will crumble under the weight of it all. Despite how stressful a game can be, it’s probably the only kind of stress relief that Frank has. He doesn’t get too overwhelmed by the competition, he actually finds games to be the only thing that help him to relax.

Frank wishes he were playing tomorrow. He’s not looking forward to having to show up to the game and watch his team, in all likelihood, lose. He can’t fathom how painful it’s going to be to have to sit right next to Gerard and watch Gerard’s face as the team he loves gets scored on, again and again. Gerard’s reactions might just kill him.

Frank can’t think about any of that right now, though, he tells himself as he walks down the hall to his room. He has to focus on the here and now, he has to read a psychology textbook like there’s no fucking tomorrow. And when he gets sick of that, he has to read a chemistry textbook like there’s no tomorrow. After that, he has to read an English textbook like there’s no tomorrow. Frank just has to forget about tomorrow entirely.

Frank’s night has only just begun, he’s sure. He just hopes he gets enough sleep for the insanity that is to become tomorrow.