Page 93 of Knottingley Ever After
Yes. Stupidly. Stupidly happy.
I blush. I pout. I level my voice down into something I can survive saying out loud.
“Happy.” A beat. “For now.”
Then I lift the glittery pink tumbler and lightly bop him on the head with it.
“No,” I tell him, sternly, “more pink stuff.”
“You love it,” he says, instantly, with the unshakeable certainty of a man who has been wrong many times in his life and is not, on this particular morning, available for that experience. “Admit it.”
“Nevahhhh,” I declare.
And then I slide off the stool, skip across the kitchen on the toes of my socks like a small pink criminal evading prosecution, and plant myself behind Jude’s left shoulder.
“CAP.”
“God.”
“Matteo is bullying me. With pink stuff. Without my consent. I would like to formally invoke captain’s protection. Article fourteen.”
“I CALL BULLSHIT.” From the rug. “SHE STARTED THIS. SHE INTERROGATED ME. ON CAMERA. FROM A DOORWAY.”
“He is guilty,” Rémi notes, mildly, from the coffee table, without looking up from his Lego cathedral.
“FUCK YOU, RéMI.”
“You snitched on yourself again. You volunteered the popcorn information. The popcorn information was deniable. The popcorn was the cup’s sister product. I am simply naming the obvious.”
Matteo collapses backwards into the rug, arms spread, in the formal surrender of a man undone by his own roommates.
Jude lifts the smoothie. Takes a slow sip. Sets it down. Tilts his head a half-degree at me.
“Come on,” he says. “Grab your gear. We are starting practice early today. Coach wants two extra rotation drills with the sector before we open up to the full roster, and if any of us is late we are going to wish we were not.”
“Yup.” Rémi rises from the rug. The Lego cathedral is left, mid-build, for some future morning.
“Yup,” Matteo agrees, from the floor, without rising.
“Santori. Up.”
“Mmm. Five.”
“Up.”
I nod. I drink from the new tumbler one last time before I have to abandon it on the counter and go find my skate bag. The water is cold. The slogan around the rim catches the light. The handwriting on the small folded note now tucked inside my hoodie pocket against my hip has, somewhere in the last ten minutes, started to make me feel less like a charity case and more like a person someone in this house is actively rooting for.
I move for the back hall to grab my pads.
And as I go, I let the small private chamber of my chest catch up to itself for a quiet second. First game next week. The whole machinery of this season turning over into the part where it stops being practice and starts being on the record.
And the world, the very large judgmental world that owns the broadcast cameras and the league offices and the sports columns and the slow grinding policy ratchet of who is allowed in which crease, is going to be watching with arms folded, looking for a reason. The reason to point at us and saywe tried, it did not work, do not ask again.
A world that has never, in the entire televised history of the sport, been particularly invested in seeing an Omega succeed at this level.
Not an Omega.
Nor a pack who supports an Omega with dreams.
