Chapter 17
Pinkafied
~IRIS~
“All right.”
I plant myself at the entry to the common room with the latest exhibit pinched between my thumb and forefinger, held aloft for the jury.
“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 of GQ he 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 a screw-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 words GOAL DIGGER airbrushed 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 a landed 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 contacts Captain Cap, Defenseman D, and Twenty-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 never afforded 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.”
“OH COME ON.” Matteo flings the GQ down on the rug with the theatrical betrayal of a man who has been failed by his own legal team. “I WAS SET UP TO FAIL. I had a perfect deniable defense and you all assassinated it. From the couch. With kindness. Rémi, you snitched.”
“You snitched on yourself,” Rémi says, evenly, returning to his Lego cathedral.
“Santori,” I tell him, sweetly, leveling the cup at him, “I cannot decide whether to thank you, hex you, or simply ask if there is a budget cap on this initiative that I should be aware of so I can plan my retaliation.”
“No cap, Pinky. Spend the rest of your natural life pinkafied. It is my gift to the world.”
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone, in the past half-second, careful.
I turn my head.
“Yes.”
“How are you feeling, this morning.”
I blink up at him.
How am I feeling? It is six-forty-five in the morning. The only thing I have done is harass a winger about a glitter cup. What kind of question is that.
“I am fine?” Out loud. “Why. Why are you asking it like that.”
“Your scent.” He says it neutrally, in the same level captain register he uses to ask a forward what kind of pain he is in. “It is up a notch this morning. More than yesterday. I am noting it for the record.”
Matteo, on the couch, has gone very still in the small attentive way of a winger who has clocked a play forming.
Rémi looks up from the Lego.
“Mine?” I ask, weakly. I tip my chin to my own collarbone, breathe through my nose.
The same frosted strawberry. The same cold ice.
The same sugar-pink note that, I suspect, the human nose loses the ability to register on itself within seventy-two hours of growing up inside it.
“I cannot — I am not picking anything up. I do not feel different. I do not feel anything.”
“It is faint,” Rémi says, calmly. “But it is there.”
Oh, Pinky. We are doing this.
“Remi.” Matteo, casual, the lazy edge dropped clean out of his voice. “Did you ever look into the blocker stuff with her, properly. The new appointment.”
“I was going to ask.”
“GUYS.” I throw both hands up. The pink cup rattles.
“Can we, for the love of all that is holy, not make this a kitchen-island intervention. I am drinking from a tumbler. I am wearing a hair clip in the shape of a tiny crown. I look like a Saturday morning cartoon. Have some respect for the aesthetic.”
Matteo, on the couch, slowly folds his arms across his chest.
Oh, no. He is doing the cross-arm. He is doing the cross-arm and he is going to scold me.
I groan. I drop my head back. I look at the ceiling.
“Fine. Fine. I booked it. Last Tuesday. I have an appointment next week with the Omega specialist at the campus clinic, to talk about the new blockers and other preventative measures to slow or lower the extent of a potential Heat. Appointment is set. I have not cancelled it. I am not planning to cancel it. I am going. I will sit in the waiting room. I will hold their stupid clipboard. I will be a model patient.”
I level my head. I stick out my tongue at Matteo with the dignity of a thirty-year-old career goalie reverting cleanly to seven.
“Happy?”
“Marvelous.” He winks. The cross-arm uncrosses. “Sweet tart for you when we get to the rink, sweetheart.”
Oh, damn it.
I beam. I cannot help it. The face goes giddy before I have authorized the expression, and I see Matteo clock it, and I see Jude clock him clocking it, and I see Rémi clock all three of us, and somewhere very deep inside my chest a small private file gets updated to Iris O’Shea, twenty-four-year-old grown adult Omega, can be reliably purchased for the cost of a single pastry.
Tactical disaster. They are going to use this forever.