Page 91 of Knottingley Ever After
“Speaking of,” Rémi notes, mildly, setting down a Lego flying buttress with the precision of a man laying a brick in a wall, “are you doing your reading thing today, on the ice break.”
“Oh. You guys have noticed I read a lot on my Kindle, huh.”
Three heads nod, perfectly in unison.
“You do read a lot,” Rémi says.
“Compulsively,” Matteo adds.
“You read between drills,” Jude notes. “You read in the back of the car. You read while you eat. You once tried to read while you were lacing your skates and walked into a wall.”
“Damning. All of it. None of it inaccurate.”
“You like it?” Rémi asks, the way he asks any direct question, which is in the manner of a man for whom an answer is genuinely useful information.
“I do. I really do.” I cross to the kitchen island, hoist myself up onto a stool, fold my legs underneath me. “I like the affordability of it, frankly. Books are a bit of a luxury for me to actually own, paperbacks especially. The Kindle helps a lot. I can read whatever I want without thinking about whether I can budget it.”
Rémi and Matteo, at the same time, frown.
“What do you mean, affordability,” Matteo asks. “A Kindle book is the same money as a paperback book. Maybe a couple dollars less.”
“Kindle Unlimited,” Jude says, into the rim of his smoothie glass.
I turn my head so fast my hair clip almost loses its grip.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Jude shrugs, the captain shrug of a man who has been caught and has decided not to deny it. “It is a lending-library program built into the Kindle. Monthly subscription. You borrow books in and out, no per-title cost. Helps when you cannot put twenty to forty dollars down on a paperback that, if you are a fast reader,lasts you an afternoon. It is, by a significant margin, the cheapest way to read voraciously in this country.”
Matteo and Rémi both, very slowly, turn their heads to look at Jude.
“How do you,” Matteo asks, with the precise affectation of a man who has just discovered something delicious, “know that. Captain. How exactly do you know all of that. Tell me. Tell the room.”
“Curiosity.” Jude takes another long pull off the smoothie. He does not blink. “I looked it up. Once. A while ago. It was on a list.”
“A list.”
“A list.”
“Oh, our captain has a list,” Matteo announces to the ceiling. “Our captain has alist.Twenty bucks says one of his sisters is a romance reader and he subsidizes her habit and the bank statement is the most beautiful document in his apartment, gentlemen.”
Jude does not deny it.
Jude does not, you will notice, deny it.
“Exactly as he explained it,” I tell them, biting the inside of my cheek to keep my face presentable, “though is the long and short of it. I am not, contrary to popular suggestion, rich like you three. So I do the saving route. Maybe when we are in the league and getting paid like adults, I can splurge on paperbacks. Build myself a tiny book nook one day, the whole production. Big armchair, a lamp, the works.”
“Why one day,” Rémi asks, frowning. “Why not now.”
“Rémi.” I level him a look. “Did you, at any point in the last calendar year, walk into an Ikea and look at the price of a bookshelf. Even the cheap one. The one made of compressed regret. They are charging upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars for what is, structurally, three boards and four screws. It isgiving bankruptcy. It is giving sorrow. I am not in the budget to be sponsoring Swedish furniture this fiscal year. Prayers cannot fix this economy. Even my best ones.”
They all smirk.
Rémi sets down the Lego in his hands. Calmly. With finality.
“Iris.”
“Yes.”
