I turn, eyes back on the ground, before I can see how either of them might be looking at me—the disappointment, or maybe the surprise that my stupidity really does know no bounds.
I don’t feel any sort of relief when I get to the elevator. It’s dread, actually. Sinking in my stomach as the elevator descends down, down, down into the press room.
I used to love press—especially last season when we were winning and definitely after getting the first World Series title in team history.
I used to love doing it with Matty, too. We made a good team—and the media loved it when we’d sit at the table together. Laughing and fighting and generally being dumb, like best friends who might as well be brothers usually are.
But all anyone wants to ask me about since this season is the fact that his seat is forever empty.
They want to ask what it was like to win a World Series with him.
What it was like to lose him.
What I think he’d make of our record this season.
What I’m doing differently on and off the field because he’s gone.
What grief does to you.
What it means to be without him.
I know it’ll be worse today. I haven’t worn the memorial jersey in weeks. They’ll wonder why. They’ll dig and dig and dig at whatever’s left of me.
And when I lift a hand in greeting, a tight smile plastered on my face before I settle into the press chair behind the table, cameras lit and waiting, media holding microphones and recorders at the ready—when our manager points to the reporterfrom our local network, I brace my hands against the table and wait for it.
But she asks a different question. They all do, actually.
“Who’s the girl?”
Ren
Cookies are, by their definition, supposed to provide comfort.
Nourishment and nutrition, even, depending on the ingredient list.
Probably.
I don’t know much about the anthropological origins of baking—ask me about nesting or social behaviour of the velociraptor, I’m on it. I can even rhyme off all relevant radiometric dating numbers on the surrounding rocks of the most important fossils ever found.
Whatever Natufian hunter-gatherers in Jordan used to bake has nothing on the potassium-40-to-argon ratio in volcanic ash.
But these cookies?
The ones sitting pretty on a chipped, plastic tray in front of me on the table in the staff room? Painted like cartoon imaginings of theTyrannosaurus rexwith their tiny arms, bright eyes, and smiles revealing sharp teeth?
I’ve got nothing on them.
Leaning forward in my seat, eyes narrowed, nose turned up, I peer down at the tray and wonder if I’ll be able to see all my failures spelled out in the pretty swirls of icing.
I’m about to reach out and snap the small arms off the one painted a colour I’ll call puke when the chair beside me screeches as it’s pulled out from the table.
Imani huffs, the puff of air sending her hair out of her face, and she adjusts her glasses after the giant folder she was carrying hits the desk with a thud. “Hi. I thought I’d be late, I was in the prep lab and—oh, who brought cookies?”
“Probably Graham, or the hiring committee,” I mutter, folding my arms across my chest so I don’t go on a rampage and start snapping forelimbs.
Her brow furrows with the tilt of her head but understanding winks behind her eyes when they trace the shape of the cookies. “No one else got cookies when they started.”
“Well, no one else was considered an ‘emerging expert’ and ‘one of the most promising young scientific minds in the field of paleontology’ when it comes to theTyrannosaurus rex.” I spout off the accolades that belong to Scott before I can think better of it.
