“Which one of you,” I demand, with the rasp of a woman who has not yet had coffee and is now contractually unable to acquire any without leaving fingerprints, “is pinkafying my life.”
Three heads come up at once.
Matteo, sprawled across the longest couch in his sleep shorts and a faded grey thermal, looks up from a glossy issue ofGQhe has been studying with the singular focus of a man preparing for the SAT. Rémi, at the coffee table on the rug, looks up from the half-built Lego construction — architectural, gothic, possibly a cathedral — that has been blooming under his patient hands for the past three mornings. Jude, at the kitchen island just over my shoulder, lowers the green smoothie he has been working on with the slow methodical pulls of a man drinking medicine for someone else’s sins, and considers the exhibit.
The exhibit is a tumbler. Insulated. Glittered. The exact shade of pink that you have to manufacture on purpose. It has ascrew-on lid, a built-in straw, and a stamped slogan around the rim that says, in cursive:DRINK MORE WATER, HOT STUFF.
It was sitting on my desk when I woke up at six.
There was, sitting beside it, a small folded note in handwriting I cannot prove belongs to anyone in this room but that I have, in the past fourteen days, become familiar enough with to suspect.
Cup number seven.
That is the running count, since I am, evidently, the only person in this house bothering to keep one.
The previous six items, for the record: a pair of socks with embroidered strawberries on the cuffs. A small ceramic mug shaped like a cat with the handle as its tail. A glittery hair clip in the shape of a tiny crown. A reusable shopping tote with the wordsGOAL DIGGERairbrushed across the front. A scented candle, lavender vanilla, that appeared on my bedside table the morning after I had vaguely mentioned, in passing, that I was having trouble falling asleep in a strange room. And, two days ago, a Kindle case in soft baby-pink leather, slipped into my hoodie pocket without comment by a hand I did not see.
Two weeks in this house. Practice. Drills. Morning training. Afternoon classes I am attending because the scholarship requires it. More practice on the ice. Showers, dinners, the slow merciful normalization of an athletic routine that has, against my prior expectations, started to feel like a life I might actually be allowed to keep. And, accumulating across every surface in my converted storage-room bedroom like a quiet pink tide, the unmistakable evidence that someone in this house has been treating my comfort as a small, undeclared hobby.
Coach Declan and I have not had another kitchen incident.
That, also, has been a project. I take his orders. I take his corrections. I run his drills. On the ice he is my coach and I am his goalie, and the two of us have been doing the elaborate,exhausting work of pretending, in front of every other body in the rink, that the only history we share is the one written on a clipboard. It has been fine. For now. The kind of fine that I am, frankly, not going to interrogate, because interrogating it would only confirm what I already know: that the fine is built on his discipline, not mine, and the moment the discipline slips the kitchen will happen again.
My new pink phone has, in the past two weeks, been a quieter little instrument than I imagined.
Three numbers in it that mean anything. No checking in from Pete. None from Lonnie. None, predictably, from Coach Daniels. None, less predictably and considerably more cuttingly, from my own mother. The small idiot version of me that hung on for alanded safe?through the first ten days has, sometime in the second week, quietly packed up her sign and gone home. I do not know what is worse, frankly. Hoping, or having stopped.
What I do know is that the only three numbers in the device that matter are saved under the contactsCaptain Cap, Defenseman D,andTwenty-One,and that the men attached to those contacts have, in the past fourteen days, executed a quiet, undeclared campaign to make me feel, on a granular daily basis, that my existence is worth a hot tumbler and a lavender candle and a Kindle case in baby pink.
It is becoming a problem.
It is becoming a very particular kind of problem that the three of them are equally responsible for and that I do not, this morning, have the bandwidth to be honest about.
Which is why I am, instead, picking on a tumbler.
I lift it higher. I shake it once. The straw rattles inside the lid.
“Santori.”
“Why,” Matteo says, with the wounded dignity of a man framed for a crime he has, in fact, committed, “am I always the chosen victim of these proceedings, Pinky. Why am I neverafforded the presumption of innocence. The American legal system has standards.”
“Matteo.”
He flings an accusing finger in Rémi’s direction. “It was Rémi.”
“That,” Jude observes, in the small dry voice he uses to issue facts, “is the most unbelievable shit I have heard before nine in the morning all week.”
He pads up behind me. His amber-and-bourbon warmth lays itself over my shoulder as he leans, casually, to inspect the tumbler from over the top of my head. His breath, very faintly, smells of the kale-something-spirulina war crime he has been drinking. I do not let myself enjoy the proximity. I do not.
“Hm.” He considers the glitter. “It is cute, though. Fits your vibe.”
“IT KEEPS ICE FROM MELTING,” Matteo announces, helpfully, from the couch.
Silence.
Rémi closes his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose. The smallest, most resigned sigh escapes him, and from the floor in front of the coffee table the millimeter Rémi smile makes a brief, doomed appearance.
“And,” Rémi notes, “gives himself away.”
