6. Jett #2
I shut it so smooth she probably couldn't tell I'd done it on purpose. "Aw, you know. Hockey was always the thing. Skated before I could walk."
"You skated before you could walk."
"Practically."
"You were fourteen." She said it to her notebook. Not a gotcha. Just the fact, set down quiet between us, so I'd know she was holding it.
"Huh. Must've misremembered."
"Must have."
That was the part that kept catching me, the whole forty-five minutes.
She knew. Every dodge I made, she knew it was a dodge, because she'd known the kid I was dodging away from.
I'd never done this interview, the lie-about-myself interview, in front of somebody who could check my work.
It was like lying to a teacher who's already holding the answer key.
Letting you do it anyway. Watching. Marking nothing down.
The other thing that kept catching me, which I'd have died before admitting to anyone in that room or any room, was that Ashley Hartley had grown into a woman.
Not the way a teenager grows into the version of themselves you've been picturing for nine years.
The opposite. She'd grown out of the seventeen-year-old I'd kept her frozen as, and into someone else entirely.
The face was the same face. The hair was darker, longer, pinned back in a way that meant she'd thought about it that morning.
She'd put earrings in. She'd put on a sweater the color of a deep evening sky, sleeves rolled to her elbows because the room ran warm.
Her forearms were a thing I had no right to be noticing.
The soft shape where her wrist turned. The tendon working when she wrote.
I caught my eyes on her hand a second too long when she paused to flip a page, and felt the click of my own brain registering it before I could shut it off.
I shut it off.
I shut it off so hard I had to physically reset my posture in the chair, which is a tell anyone in the room who knew me, which was Brynn, would catch.
I was sitting across from the worst thing that ever happened to me at seventeen, and my body had taken one half second to clock that the worst thing had become a beautiful woman.
That was not a thing I was going to permit.
Not for a fraction of a second. That kind of register was reserved for women I hadn't spent eight years cutting out of my life with a dull knife.
Ashley Hartley did not get to be on the receiving end of any flicker of any part of me. Ever again. On principle.
The principle held. The half second had already happened.
I shut my hands into fists under the table and asked her to repeat the question.
She did. Eyes on her notebook. If she'd caught my reset, she didn't show it.
I gave her another joke.
About thirty minutes in, I glanced down toward the end of the table, just a flick of the eyes, and Brynn was watching us.
Not her laptop. Us. She caught me catch her and gave me a small what are you doing eyebrow lift, a Brynn classic, an invitation to be normal that I declined by looking away.
When I looked back a minute later she was on the laptop again.
But she'd seen something. I knew Brynn. I knew the small frown she got when a piece of her information was missing.
I gave Dani forty-five minutes of nothing, and she took every word of it down like it was something.
Finally Brynn closed her laptop and clapped her hands once, soft.
"All right, you two, I told the room we'd be done by three.
Dani, you've got more time on the schedule, this is just session one.
Jett, you were a delight." She said delight with a quarter-twist of dryness that meant she had not, in fact, found me delightful. "Get out of my arena, I have calls."
Dani clicked off the recorder. "Thank you, Jett. Really."
I stood. Did not button any of the charm back on.
Looked at her across that table for one second, the first second all hour I'd let myself actually look at her, and I watched her hold it, the way she'd held my eyes once across a gym nine years ago.
Except this time she wasn't laughing. This time she looked like a woman waiting to find out the date of her own execution.
"See you next time, Ms. Hartley," I said.
I walked out. Past Brynn, who tracked me to the door without saying anything, the frown still living in the corner of her mouth where she thought I couldn't see it.
I made it to the players' lot before my hands started shaking, which was later than they should have, which I was proud of in a stupid hollow way.
I sat in my car and gripped the wheel at ten and two like I was wringing it out, and I breathed, and I thought, with a clarity that scared me, I should call Coach right now.
It was the smart play. The clean play. Tell Coach there's a conflict, get a new writer assigned, never sit in a room with her again.
Victoria would grumble, but Victoria would do it.
The whole problem would evaporate by Wednesday.
I had my phone in my hand. I had Coach's name pulled up.
I didn't press it.
Because pressing it meant the conversation, and the conversation meant why, and the why was a door I'd welded shut so long ago I wasn't sure I still had the tools to open it on purpose, in front of someone, in daylight.
She bullied me. In high school. She's the reason I left home.
I tried saying it in my head, in Coach's office, out loud to the man, and my whole body said no.
And underneath Coach was Brynn, and underneath Brynn was the rest of the team, and underneath all of them was the kid in the suit, and I was not letting any of it out of the closet I'd put it in.
I'd rather sit across from her for ten more interviews than be looked at like that once. Especially by Brynn.
So that was the deal I made in the car. Not even consciously.
More like a thing I noticed I'd already decided.
I wasn't telling anyone. Not Coach, not Brynn, not the team.
I'd do the interviews. I'd give her nothing and let her write her little article out of the nothing, and then she'd be gone, back to wherever, out of Brynn's orbit and mine, and the kid in the suit would stay buried where I put him.
It was a good plan.
It lasted right up until the part of my brain I didn't control offered up, unbidden, the image of her hand not-quite-steady on that pen.
And the fact that she'd let me see it shake instead of hiding it.
And the small unwelcome thought that came with it, that whatever nine years had done to Ashley Hartley, it hadn't left her unmarked either.
I shoved that thought out of the car and drove home.
I did not call Coach.
I told myself that was strategy.
It was the first lie I told myself about her, and it was nowhere near the last.