Page 17 of Knottingley Ever After
He files it the way I filed his, careful, like it matters, like he is the kind of person who keeps things.
Then the grin slams back down over it, bright as a stage light, and the moment is gone before I can decide whether I imagined it.
“Iris,” he says, tasting it. “Matteo Santori. Teo for short, if you’re ever feeling generous, which I’m told happens to people occasionally.” He sketches a bow, absurd, courtly, in a janitorial closet, in half his gear. “Winger. Number twenty-one. Possessor of one I.O.U., redeemable upon?—”
“Maximum inconvenience, yes, you said.” I sling the bag’s strap over my shoulder, tuck the mask under my arm, and reach past him for the door handle, which puts us close again, blood orange and cold ice.
I watch him notice, with what is visibly enormous effort, choose to behave.
“Move, Santori. Some of us have a practice to get insulted at.”
He moves — but only enough so that getting past him is a deliberate negotiation of warmth and shoulder, and as I cross the threshold into the merciful blank cold of the corridor, he says, light, lazy, pitched to follow me out the door and lodge somewhere I can’t get at it.
“Welcome to North Star, Pinky.”
I do not turn around. I will not give him the turn.
But I feel my own mouth go crooked, and I am viciously grateful he can’t see it, since I am three strides down the corridor before I let myself process that he has handed me a nickname I never agreed to — and that the truly damning thing that I’ll be furious about straight through warmups, is this:
I don’t hate it.
My jaw still remembers the exact weight of his thumb.
I scrub it with the heel of my glove hand, hard, the way you’d scrub off a smudge, and it does not come off. Somewhere ahead of me, the corridor opens its mouth onto the cold mineral roar of the rink.
I square my shoulders. I lift my chin and remind myself that it’s time to be a serious athlete at an institution that has stashed me in a cupboard.
One favor, my choice, maximum inconvenience.
We’ll see about that, Twenty-One.
CHAPTER 3
Checking
~IRIS~
There is no gentler way to be welcomed into an elite institution full of Alphas than to be shoved onto a freshly cut sheet of ice and told to demonstrate, in front of everyone, exactly how rusty you are.
I have decided this is what Cinderella felt like.
Not the part with the gown and the orchestra.
The other part.
The part where a girl who has spent her whole life sweeping cinders is suddenly bundled into a carriage that was a vegetable an hour ago and hurled toward a ballroom she was never built for, the whole ride underscored by the awareness that a clock somewhere is winding itself up to ruin her.
In the story, the magic chooses her.
In mine, I climbed into the pumpkin myself, both hands on the wheel, because the alternative was staying in a town that fit me like a coat two sizes too small.
The clock is real, though.
I will give the fairy tale that.
I have at best three months to prove my worth here,unless its like a month in their books.Currently with no pack, no contract,a invite to an elite college that’s already judging me or better yet, thinking I’m just another figure skating hoping prodigy ready to spring to life.
A deadline ticking somewhere behind my ribs in a rhythm I have learned to skate to.
