"I'd been humiliated before. This was worse."
By Friday night, Silver couldn't escape it anymore. The rumor had metastasized from forum posts to Instagram stories to TikToks with hundreds of thousands of views. Someone had edited together clips of her skating, before and after injury, with captions questioning the timeline. The worst one used her Junior Nationals fall, slowed down with dramatic music, asking "Does this look career-ending to you?"
She sat on her dorm room floor, back against her bed, watching her younger self fall over and over on loop. The algorithm had picked it up, serving it to everyone at Yale and beyond. Comments poured in from strangers who'd never held an edge, let alone landed a jump, all suddenly experts on sports medicine and ACL tears.
