Character Study: Emily, Maddie and the Friendship That Became a Rivalry in Kiss Me, Captain

Emily: the girl who calls everything "not even worth mentioning"

You learn almost everything about Emily from how she handles discomfort. The motel bedspread has a pattern "designed to hide stains of unknown origin and I chose not to investigate." Her mother's years of matchmaking get summarised as "Typical mother-daughter stuff. Not even worth mentioning." The loss of her best friend, per the blurb, got buried "somewhere she didn't have to look at it."

That's a character defined by the act of not looking. Her strength is focus — she took the scholarship, she got on the plane, she's standing on the ice at Lakeview trying to look like she belongs. Her flaw is that the same discipline she uses on her skating she uses on her feelings, and it works until it doesn't. The editorial notes call her introspective with a barrier against getting hurt, and the opening page proves it rather than announcing it.

There's tenderness in there too, which keeps her likeable. The detail that her mother called the move a mistake "But she also drove me to the airport and told me to call when I landed" is the kind of thing a bitter narrator wouldn't bother including.

Madison Reyes: the captain with the cutting smile

Maddie doesn't appear in the chapter one excerpt, so what we have is the shape of her from the blurb and editorial notes — and the shape is good. She was the inseparable best friend from ages eight to twelve. She is now polished, untouchable, elite, and captain of the team Emily has just joined. She greets Emily with a smile and words designed to wound.

Her strength, on paper, is command: she runs a team, she holds a room, she has built something out of whatever happened after her family moved away. Her flaw is the mechanism itself — the editorial notes say she uses attitude as a defence, which means the thing keeping her safe is also the thing keeping her alone. A love interest who is cruel because she's frightened is a well-worn design, and it works when the fear is specific. The premise suggests it is.

The dynamic: two people using the same armour

What makes this pairing interesting is that Emily and Maddie are not opposites in temperament, whatever the Opposites Attract tag suggests. They're the same defence strategy in two different costumes. Emily buries and deflects; Maddie polishes and cuts. Both are protecting the identical wound — a friendship that ended without explanation and left each of them deciding not to need anyone again.

That's why the blurb's closing line lands: the person who threatens everything might also be the only one who truly sees them. Of course she sees her. She knew her at eight. Nobody else at Lakeview has that file. The hostility between them isn't random campus rivalry; it's two people furious that the only witness to their childhood turned up uninvited.

Add the captain-recruit hierarchy, a shared rink, Nationals and a scholarship, and there's no exit from each other. Forced proximity rarely has a cleaner justification.

The voice

First person, present tense, Emily's POV, and funny in a dry way that never tips into performance. The opening line swears at itself; the vending machine gets a "complicated relationship"; the rink is described with real affection — "Cold and bright, the ice freshly resurfaced and gleaming under the fluorescent lights" — which tells you this narrator loves her sport even when she's miserable.

The tone is intimate and slightly self-mocking, which is exactly right for a story about someone who is about to be forced into honesty. When a narrator this good at managing her own story starts losing control of it, that's the pleasure on offer here.