Page 54 of Fractured Ice

Emma is on the bench to my left, exactly where she wasn't thirty seconds ago, which means she materialized from somewhere or she's been there the whole time and I missed her, which is less likely because Emma is difficult to miss. She's five-foot-two on a generous day, chestnut hair in its usual loose ponytail, and she has the kind of face where every single thing she's thinking is immediately visible, with warm brown eyes that go wide when she's excited and narrow when she's scheming, and right now they're doing something in between. She's got a clipboard in one hand, a stack of folders balanced against her chest, and a coffee cup, and she's looking at me with the expression she gets when she wants something and is calculating the best angle of approach.

She jumps to her feet the moment I look at her, sending two folders sliding, which she catches against her knee.

"Before you say no," she says.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to. I could see it forming." She falls into step beside me, matching my pace despite being approximately five inches shorter, which requires more effort from her end that she never acknowledges. "Your face does this thing when you're preemptively deciding against something."

"I don't have a face."

"You have so many faces." She tucks the clipboard under her arm. "Okay. Spring Festival."

"No."

"I said, before you say no."

"I'm retroactively saying no."

"Sienna." She says my name with two full syllables with weight behind them. "I need you. The SAB committee has been abandoned by four volunteers, two of whom I thought were my friends and are apparently just acquaintances who smiled at me in the dining hall. I'm running out of people who are both reliable and willing to take my calls."

"You have plenty of friends."

"I have plenty of people who respond to my texts with 'sounds fun!' and then never show up." She adjusts her folders. "I need someone who will actually be there. Present. Doing the thing they said they'd do."

"I have a project deadline."

"This is one Saturday evening."

"I have interviews to schedule, homework to do…"

"It's one booth for one hour and then floating support, which means you stand near me and hand me things and tell me I'm doing great."

"You do not need me to tell you you're doing great."

"I need it more than you'd think." She says it breezily, the way she says most things, but there's something underneath it that I've learned to clock. Emma delivers a lot of truths sideways. "Come on. It's for the youth programs fundraiser. You'll feel good about it. You'll feel virtuous. You can write about feeling virtuous."

"I'm in Sports Media Practicum, not a personal essay class."

"Everything's material." She stops walking and turns to face me, which requires her to look up slightly, which she ignores completely. "I'm asking you because you're the most competent person I know. And before you take that as a compliment, I'm saying it as a complaint. It would be much easier if you were flaky like normal people."

I look at her.

She looks back at me with enormous eyes.

"One hour at the booth," I say. "And floating."

The sound she makes is not quite human. She throws her arms around me, which is easier for her than it should be because she has the deceptive strength of someone who has been navigating a world sized for taller people her entire life, and she's already talking before she's fully let go.

"Okay so there are seven booths. I need someone to run the ring toss because the person who signed up has literally has zero people skills and I don't understand how that happened, then there's the raffle table which just needs someone responsible, and then the live auction toward the end needs⁠—"

"Emma."

"Right, one hour, floating, I know, I'm just saying in case you want more."

"I don't want more."

"You might feel moved to do more once you're there. People get swept up."