“Yes, sir.”
“What are the side effects of those blockers you are taking.”
“Oh.” She thinks about it. “I do not actually know what the new stronger ones do, since I have not started them yet. My current ones, though, are pretty mild. Hot flashes occasionally. Some disorientation. Spotting. The very occasional, fully manageable panic attack. Nothing crazy.”
Three sets of eyes lock onto her like targeting reticles.
“Iris.”
“What?”
“You are not actually serious.” I have stopped walking. “You are not standing on this sidewalk listing
She pauses.
She raises a hand, mid-air, in the universal gesture of
“It is,” she says, very carefully, “only about a thirty-five-percent increase. With prolonged use. Which my prescriber went over with me extensively, so it is not, like, a surprise. I am informed.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that has, in the past, preceded actual fights.
Fucking. Christ.
“STOP THE BLOCKERS,” the three of us declare, in roughly the same fraction of a second.
She blinks at us. Genuinely.
“I cannot. That would be detrimental for the team.”
“Who,” Jude says, in the precise voice he uses when a player has come off the ice with an injury they were trying to hide,“gives the slightest, smallest fuck about the team over your health, O’Shea.”
“I mean.” She looks at us like we have asked her to do long division in a foreign currency. “Everyone? That is sort of the whole arrangement? I do not, like, matter to this institution otherwise.”
Three of us, on a public sidewalk in a forty-five-minute commuter city in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, stop functioning.
I cannot — even now, watching her say it with the casual lightness of a woman reporting the weather — fully process the sentence. Rémi’s entire shoulders have gone tight. Jude’s jaw has done a thing I do not have the file for. The sound of her saying out loud, in front of God and the Saturday foot traffic of this overpriced shopping district, that she does not
Oh, Iris, no.
And then, with the supernatural timing of a small mercy from a god I do not strictly believe in, the cheerful pre-recorded jingle of an ice cream truck floats up the street.
Iris’s head snaps toward it.
Her entire face transforms, the gravity of the previous sixty seconds washing off her like a tide retreating, and her eyes go enormous, and she lifts up onto the toes of her boots like a small pink meerkat, and the sound that comes out of her is, frankly, illegal.
“ICE CREAM TRUCK?”
Rémi exhales. Jude’s jaw releases a fraction. I let her hand drop from mine just long enough for her to do a small thrilled bounce.
“Do they — oh my God, do you think they have a strawberry banana split? Out here? Do they sell those in Minnesota?” She is patting her pockets in the immediate animal motion of a person looking for cash. Her face falls a half-degree. “Wait. Fuck. I donot — I do not carry cash, of course I do not carry cash, who carries cash in this econ —”
I am already reaching for my own pocket.
I make eye contact with Rémi, briefly, then with Jude.
The three of us share, without anyone needing to say a word, the precise telegraphic look pack-brothers share when they have decided, in tandem, that the next item on the agenda is, in fact, ice cream.
