Page 31 of Takedown

"When what?"

"You know what. When."

The oldest conversation there is, and no two people have ever skipped it. I gave it the consideration it deserved. "Officially? The car. Friday. Eight inches of officially."

"Unofficially."

"Unofficially." The pipes ticked. There was no reason not to say it; the museum was ash; and still it took a breath to get out, the way true things do. "The doorway. Day one. You looked at this room like you'd crossed state lines for it, and I'd never in my life watched a person not perform, and something in me — " I turned my hand over on the mat, out of words, and he watched me do it. "Day one, Danny. I told you the mop schedule because it was that or say something unforgivable."

He was quiet for a second. Then: "The mop schedule was pretty unforgivable."

"It was the best I could do under fire."

"'Wear shoes off the mat.'" He did my voice — badly, a Pennsylvania steel worker's idea of formal hall, and I have never been so insulted or so charmed. "I walked home planning your funeral."

"And unofficially?"

"You already know."

"I want it on the record. You made me put mine on the record."

He looked at the ceiling for a while. When it came, it came flat — the flatter the truer, I knew his tell by then, I'd earned it. "The tell," he said. "I insulted your shot on a Monday and you came back Friday and it was fixed. Two hours alone in here, drilling out a flaw because I said so. Nobody — " the flatness wobbled, one degree, "— nobody ever heard me like that. People heard me loud. You heard me right." A beat. "Also you looked unbelievable doing it, which didn't hurt."

"So between us," I said, "the complete timeline is: you fell for me insulting you, and I fell for you trespassing."

"Yeah."

"We should never tell anyone this story."

"Never," he agreed, warm, and we lay there grinning at the sweating pipes like the two luckiest idiots in New Hampshire, which, that week, in that basement, we were.

"Two nights," Danny said, eventually, to the ceiling. "One room."

"I'm aware."

"Two beds, probably."

"Probably." A pipe ticked. The skull presided. "Beds are just mats with opinions," I said, and felt him laugh — felt it, through the mat, through my shoulder where it touched his, the seismology of him — and he rolled his head over and looked at me in the half dark with his hair wrecked and the bruise on his hip that I had jurisdiction over hidden away under his shorts and the whole map of the next three weeks in his eyes: the tournament, the room, the season, the wrestle-off waiting at the end of everything like an exam neither of us would throw.

"Terrible system," he said. Softly. Our word for it now — the treaty language.

"The only one there is."

"Friday," he said. "Two o'clock."

And I lay on the mat in my family's basement next to a boy from a burning town, both of us smiling at a ceiling like idiots, and I thought about what I'd told him — hiding in plain sight is choosing which true thing they see — and underneath it, quiet, in the meter-reader's voice, the footnote I didn't say out loud:

And the room has to keep believing the rivalry. Which means the wrestle-off has to stay real. Which means in six weeks, one of us takes the other one's season away, in public, in front of the Ledger — and then we come back down here, to the only room that knows us, and find out what's left.

I didn't say it. It was the golden weeks. You don't read the bill during the meal.

Friday. Two o'clock. One room.

Chapter 14 — DANNY

There are two kinds of team bus, and you know which one you're on within a mile.

There's the bus to a dual you're going to lose, which is a library with wheels, and there's the bus to a tournament where the whole winter gets decided, which is a floating nation-state with its own laws, economy, and foreign policy. Ours pulled out at two on the dot — Halloran up front doing paperwork, Kirby driving, because of course Kirby drives, Kirby has apparently driven this route since the bus was a horse — and by mile three the nation-state was fully operational.