Page 49 of Knottingley Ever After
Tired of being the only one of me in every room.
Tired of arriving in a new country and discovering the bureaucracy here has the same words fornothat the old bureaucracy did, just polished to a higher shine.
I dig my own phone out of my coat pocket.
The screen flickers on. One bar of service appears, holds long enough to insult me, and dies. Reappears. Dies again. The little wheel of trying spins on the home menu and refuses to commit to anything more useful than that.
I sit there in the cold and watch it try.
And I wait.
Because somewhere in the back of my chest, against every cynical instinct I have ever owned, a small idiot version of me is still waiting for it.
Pete. Lonnie. Coach Daniels. Anyone. Alanded safe?Ahow was the flight?One single check-in, posted across the ocean from the town I have just spent my whole life trying to earn my way out of, to confirm that the absence of me has been noticed.
Nothing comes through.
The bar holds. The notifications panel is empty. No missed calls. No texts. No tagged photos from the farewell party where Pete cried into a Solo cup.
Not even a forwarded link to one of Lonnie’s godawful TikToks.
The signal dies again. The wheel spins.
Were any of them genuine?
The thought lands in my sternum like a slap, and the embarrassing part is that I have to actively decide not to cry on a public bench about it.
Iris O’Shea does not cry on benches.
I’m a goalie with a sense of humor and a long established policy of being too pissed off to weep about a town she was always going to outgrow anyway…
I blink hard at the maple. I count its branches. Count the cars in the lot behind it. The panes of glass in the window of the building across the path and refuse, with the discipline of a woman who has trained for it, to let a single drop fall.
Tonight will be the worst of it.
That is the part I see coming and can already taste. The temporary placement room they’ve booked me into is somewhere in the freshman quad. A bed. A desk. A window. I will sit on the bed in my pyjamas, the phone will not work, and I will doom-scroll TikTok on the dead-and-resurrecting bars I do have, watching strangers tour their cozy two-bed apartments with a candle lit in every room and a partner sleeping just off-screen.
And truthfully, I will hate, with a precision usually reserved for opposing wingers, how much I want someone to text.
Not even about anything. Just to say my name out loud in a sentence that does not need an answer.
It is not a big deal.
It is, though. Quietly. A lot of this is.
I have spent five years training myself to lower the bar.
Telling myself the chirps were affection.
Telling myself the silences were busy.
Telling myself a small frozen rink in West Yorkshire would build me bonds that did not need maintenance to survive a postal code change.
The truth, sitting on this bench with my dead phone, is that I built my whole social architecture on people who were standing in the same room as me, and the building of it apparently does not have a door that opens from anywhere else.
I have to blink three more times before the maple stops swimming.
Then something vibrates.
