13. Kate
KATE
Damn Valentine’s Day flowers.
Stupid drugstore teddy bear.
The chocolate-covered cherries I could deal with—by eating them.
But I can’t throw out or donate a teddy bear that’s holding a heart. I’m not a monster.
And these flowers that the busboy delivered yesterday are beautiful.
I’ll just wait until they aren’t beautiful anymore.
I won’t change the water so it turns putrid and the stems get all moldy.
Then I will unceremoniously toss them into the organics bin.
Or maybe I’ll do it ceremoniously. I’m just hoping that if I glare at them long enough they’ll shrivel up and die faster so I don’t have to be reminded of The Icebreaker Who Breaks Things That Aren’t Ice.
Yes, that is the best nickname I’ve come up with in the past twenty-four hours.
Runners up include: The Fort Worth Fraud, Most Valuable Peckerhead, and The Sin Bin Sociopath.
I plan to tell everyone about the bet on the podcast, and I’ve designed a new logo for him on Canva.
Not for the Icebreakers, for Adam. It’s a cartoony illustration of a beer mug with his severed head floating in it, and instead of two crossed hockey sticks behind the mug it’s a broken heart. And the word Heartbreaker underneath.
And I will be debuting a new Shrew Crew song on the pod as well.
It goes a little something like this:
Sprinkle sprinkle, Cowpoke Grump
Must have thought I was a chump.
Made a bet with all his friends.
Hope he likes how this game ends.
Sprinkle sprinkle, what an ass.
Good thing I’ve got balls of brass.
It’s a work in progress.
I sent Tina and Eunice those lyrics, and Eunice sent back a voice memo that was just an accordion fart sound.
The front door buzzes. I am so mad at my rapidly beating heart for hoping that it might be Adam Foley. Obviously I hope it’s him so I can ignore him. But when I press the button, I hear my sisters-in-shrew-crew yapping.
“Let us in, or I’ll eat all of this ice cream!” Eunice threatens before I can say anything.
I buzz them in and open the door to my apartment.
Eunice and Tina are booking it up the stairs.
I haven’t seen Eunice run like this since someone brought homemade mini doughnuts to a brew crew game and nobody told her until there were only two left.
Tina hands me a large, opened bag of ketchup-flavored potato chips, and Eunice hands me a sweaty pint of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
“Turn on YouTube!” Tina says.
“Sit your ass down, clown.” Eunice points to my sofa.
Tina turns on my TV and uses the remote to open the YouTube app, clicking on the Net Zeroes channel.
“What is going on?”
“Just shut up and watch the magic happen,” Eunice says.
And I always do what Eunice says, so I sit down.
Except when I see what’s on my TV screen I have to say, “What the fuck? They’re doing a livestream without me?
!” They’re in the basement studio at Rhys’s house.
I had no idea. Why didn’t even Chuck, our camera operator, let me know? Chuck can’t keep a secret.
Eunice gives me a dirty look, so I shut up.
The camera’s on Lance, who’s staring at his laptop, telling Rhys what the live viewer count is, and it’s obscenely high. Then he reads a comment from the chat and says the words hashtag Poguely. The camera does a slow reveal to the desk I usually sit at on the set and…I forget how to breathe.