“David,” she says.

David drops his fork on his plate. “I’m going to my room,” he says before he says something else he might regret. “I’ll leave for Toronto tomorrow.”

“David Benjamin Chapman,” she calls after him, infantilising, and he slams the door to his room behind him, like he’s eleven again, finding out his parents were the only ones who weren’t going to the tournament in Lake Placid, the biggest in his life so far.

He pulls his suitcase open, then his drawers, doesn’t even bother sorting before he starts shoving clothes in, swiping impatiently at his eyes. She always does this to him. No matter how hard he tries not to care about what she says, what she doesn’t say, she always does this to him, makes him feel like a child again, a child who can’t understand why his mother doesn’t love him. He hears footsteps in the hall approach then pause, and he grabs a fistful of socks. He could leave tonight; there’s no way there isn’t a bus or train heading to Toronto in the next couple hours even if he can’t get a flight.

“I understand you’re disappointed that I don’t have the time to watch your games,” his mother says, voice ringing clear through the door. “But it’s a very large time commitment and you know how time consuming my job is. I would like you to act like an adult and come out and finish your dinner, because you are behaving like a spoiled child right now.”

“Fuck off,” David yells, hoarse and choked, and he hears her finally retreat. He finishes packing what he can, doesn’t bother going to the bathroom. He can pick up toiletries in any drugstore, and if he doesn’t leave in the next five minutes he’s going to break down and sob like the child his mother is accusing him of acting like, the child he always reverts to when he comes home, trying to get any attention from her, any praise.

He shoves his laptop into his backpack, hauls it on, pulls the door open gently, and practically tiptoes to the front door, and it might have worked if his mother wasn’t sitting on the living room couch.

She looks up from her laptop, taking in his suitcase as he shoves his feet into the nearest pair of shoes, then sighs. “This is childish, David,” she says. “I taught you better than this.”

You didn’t teach me shit, David thinks, wants to say, but doesn’t, because he was taught better, just not by her. I’m gay, he thinks, and doesn’t say because the words choke him even in his head. Wants to know if she’d be so high and mighty about the homophobia of sports if she knew her son was gay, but that would probably just exacerbate it, and she’d love that, a chance to say ‘my gay son’ instead of ‘my hockey player son’, use it to buy her some minority credibility. It’d be better for her career.