“Almardon, you brought a gift, right?” Jack asks.
I did. I spent forty-five minutes trying to figure out what you bring to a White Elephant at your secret girlfriend’s family Christmas party. Mackie said the limit was a hundred dollars, but “nobody actually follows it.” I bought a bottle of bourbon. It’s the safest, most boring gift in the pile and I know it, but I don’t care because I was not equipped to make creative decisions while my brain was running simulations of all the ways tonight could go wrong.
Chloe is explaining the rules. There are a lot of rules. There are more rules than I expected for a gift exchange, and some of them sound made up. Barrett still hasn’t looked away from me, and Mackie is sitting on her knees on the floor sorting presents not looking at me.
This night is never going to end.
16
MACKIE
Barrett didn’t saymuch after Zach left.
He waited until Zach’s footsteps faded then looked at me with the face of a man who has seen too much in one evening and would like a refund on the last five minutes. “Mackinnon. Have some decorum.”
Decorum. DECORUM. Dean Barrett—of all people—is lecturing me about decorum. I don’t have proof of anything and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I do, but I have overheard half-conversations that go silent when I round corners and one VERY specific thing my dad said about Coach B that made my mom choke on her coffee and there are RUMORS, okay, there are whispers on this team about Barrett that would suggest he is maybenotthe person to be delivering this particular sermon. But sure. Decorum. From him. Got it.
I can still feel the phantom shape of Zach’s hand over my mouth and his voice rough against my ear saying things I refuse to think about right now and my godfather is standing on the basement stairs in my parents’ house looking at me like I’m theproblem here and I want to scream YOU ARE NOT AS INNOCENT AS YOU THINK YOU ARE, DEAN.
“Yes, sir.” Is all I actually respond with, sounding not at all like someone whose knees still feel like jelly. The greatest performance of my entire life and nobody will ever know. He nodded once like that meant this was completely over, then walked back upstairs like he’d come down for a glass of water and found nothing worth mentioning.
I stood on the stairs for maybe ten seconds after he left waiting for my legs to remember how walking works, then went to the bathroom to make sure I didn’t look like I was just ravished. My reflection stared back at me like WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, MACKINNON and I didn’t have a compelling answer.
And the worst part—the thing that circles in my head the whole way up those stairs and is still circling there now, impossible to ignore—is that the first feeling wasn’t embarrassment. It should have been. Any sane person gets caught like that and the mortification hits like a truck. Barrett SAW us. He saw my dress hanging open and Zach’s hands on me and and I should be spiraling about that right now.
But the feeling that hit first, hot and immediate and completely irrational, was frustration. Because I had my hands on Zach’s belt and his mouth was opening to answer and I WANTED to hear what he was going to say. Then the door opened and the whole thing shattered.
I’m not upset Barrett caught us. I’m upset about when. And that scares me more than the secret does.
Now I’m on the living room floor sorting White Elephant gifts, like a person who did not just have her world rearranged, while Zach sits on the couch between Rodriguez and Brody looking like he might genuinely lose consciousness. He’s holding a beer he hasn’t touched and every time Barrett speaks he flinches. I want tocrawl over there and grab his hand and tell him Barrett isn’t going to say anything. I KNOW Barrett. He’s been filing things away on this team for years, the stuff he sees, the stuff he pretends not to see, and this is just one more secret going into the vault. But my dad is three feet away and my mom is passing out numbers and Rodriguez is already arguing about the rules and I can’t exactly announce that everything is fine because we’d have to explain what everything IS.
“You can steal twice,” my mom says, handing Rodriguez a number. “After three, the gift is dead.”
“Define dead.”
“It means no one can take it.”
“But what if?—”
“No.”
“You didn’t even hear?—”
“NO, Rodriguez.”
My parents have been hosting some form of Christmas party for years and the White Elephant game always goes like this. The first few gifts are unremarkable, things like nice scarf and glove sets, bottles of alcohol, some sort of fancy, appropriately bougie item, sometimes a gift card if the person has zero creativity. Elliot opens a cashmere scarf and Brody immediately says “I’m stealing that later” and she says “try it” in a voice that makes even me a little more scared of her than I already am. Then Rodriguez opens a weighted blanket, wraps it around himself immediately, sits back down, and declares that the game is over for him. “Nobody is taking this from me,” he says. “I will fight every person in this room.”
“It’s just a blanket,” Brody says.
“It’s a WEIGHTED blanket. It’s like being hugged by something that actually loves you. I have never felt safer.” He pulls it tighter around his shoulders and glares at everyone.
Brody unwraps a custom bobblehead of Rodriguez that Rodriguez clearly had made of himself. The head is enormouswith a terrifying smile. It’s wearing a tiny Puckaneers jersey and holding a mini hockey stick and Rodriguez looks proud, which might actually be the most disturbing part.
“You got a bobblehead made ofyourselffor a gift exchange?” Brody says.
“You’re welcome.”
“This is the most narcissistic thing I’ve ever seen.”
