Page 268 of Slashed Bonds

“We’re going to get charged with animal murder.”

A beat.

“RUN!”

He’s gone.

I mean that. He’s gone the way a thing’s gone when you blink. One second he’s got his hands on the cart and the next the cart is moving at a speed no shopping cart has ever been designed to move, with Maddie in it, with her hands clamped on the sides and her mouth open.

“ANIMAL MURD—AAAAH!”

Her scream goes across the parking lot like a siren. And the cart’s gone around the corner of the building toward the garden center, and Greenie’s gone with it, and I’m standing there with my racket down understanding for the first time that Jude Greenwich should have been a track star, because the man has a gear the rest of us don’t have and he’s been hiding it behind a phone.

The twins look at each other.

One nod. And they’re gone too, in the other direction, each with a cart, each cart with a jar of pickles rattling in it, running in perfect step like a drill they’ve practiced.

We’re still processing. Me, Nikolai, Killian, Cassian, standing in a loose line in front of a net made of string with a bird at our feet and our coaches twenty feet away.

Viper points.

From the hood of the car, with the camera still in her other hand. One finger, at the ground.

“He’s alive.”

We look back.

The seagull’s awake. It’s sitting up, if a seagull sits, and it shakes its feathers out from the neck down in one long ripple, and it looks at us, one eye, with an expression of total contempt. Then it’s up. One hop, two, wings out, and it’s in the air and gone over the roof of the store like it was never essentially dead, and the four that came to mourn it look at each other and leave too.

Silence.

Then Viper sighs. The long one. The whole-sentence one.

“I’ll go get them.” She slides off the hood. “They’re hiding in the camping section or something equally foolish.”

She goes. Camera over her shoulder, hands in her jacket, at a walk, because Viper has never once in her life run after anyone.

We look back at Roz.

She’s shaking her head. Slow. With the reading glasses in her hair and Halloran beside her doing a thing with his mouth that might, on another man, be a smile.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t see shit,” she says. “But don’t get fucking arrested. I’m not bailing a single one of you.”

“Thanks, Coach!”

All four of us. A cheer, ragged, rackets up.

And Valerie’s laughing, and Dox has turned to look at the dumpsters so nobody sees whatever his face is doing, and Halloran puts a hand on Roz’s back and steers her toward the doors, and the four of them go into the store like four people who came for milk.

We’re laughing again.

All of us. Nikolai bent over his knees. Killian with his head back and the noise coming out of him that I’ve heard four times now. Cassian with his gloved hand over his face, shoulders going, and me, with my wrapped hand on my stomach because the ink’s lit a fire in there and the laughing’s feeding it.

This.

I stand in a parking lot with my racket down and I let it land. The cold. The breath in the air. A net made of carts. A pink woman screaming around the corner of a garden center. Two coaches who pretended not to see. A man with a crown on his ring finger laughing into a glove.

Eight weeks ago I had a door with four locks and a dog, and I was certain, the way you’re certain about gravity, that this was a thing other people got. Teams. Jokes. A coach who’d say don’t get arrested and mean it as love. I’d had it once, at Halbrook, and I’d found out it was rented, and I’d decided the lease wasn’t offered twice.