Everybody’s Got Opinions
Bennett
There comes a point when avoiding help becomes significantly more exhausting than accepting it—usually right around the time an entire town decides you’re not doing this alone anymore.
You can call it meddling. You can call it an ambush.
You can even pretend it’s highly organized emotional warfare disguised as a group text.
But when people start showing up with snacks, opinions, and an alarming amount of enthusiasm for your personal growth?
That’s not chaos. That’s community. And community, for better or worse, has a way of getting exactly what it wants.
Playlist: "Help" by The Beatles
I stand in the doorway of Glamboozled for a full thirty seconds before anyone notices I'm there.
There’s a particular kind of chaos that only Gisele LaRue can generate while simultaneously looking completely in control of it.
Sample boxes stacked four deep against the back wall.
Her phone going off every forty-five seconds.
Carrie running between stations like she’s air traffic control at O’hare, using hairbrushes instead of lighted marshalling wands.
Color swatches fanned across every available surface.
a man named Derek on speakerphone explaining, with great passion, the difference between two shades of nude that look identical to me and apparently represent entirely different brand philosophies.
“Bennett.” Gisele spots me, holds up one finger without breaking her conversation with Derek, and points me toward the waiting area with the efficiency of a woman who has mentally triaged me as non-urgent.
I’m not sure how I feel about that.
But I sit.
I watch the chaos.
Derek is still talking. Gisele is now simultaneously responding to him, marking tasks in a binder, and mouthing an apology at me that I wave off because I don’t actually mind. Watching her work is one of my favorite things, a fact I’m still getting used to admitting to myself.
She’s wearing her hair up today, a few pieces falling loose around her face, and she’s got product on her hands from something she was mixing when I walked in, and she looks completely, thoroughly beautiful in the way she always does when she doesn’t know she’s being watched.
I’ve been in love with this woman for twelve years.
Probably longer if I admit it to myself.
I’m still getting used to that, too.
Derek finally winds down. Gisele thanks him with the professional warmth she deploys like a precision instrument, hangs up, and turns to face me with an exhale that says she’s been holding that breath for approximately three hours.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s a lot.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s more than I expected.” She looks around the salon with an expression that’s somewhere between exhilarated and mildly horrified. “I thought the Luxe deal would be exciting and it is. It’s incredibly exciting, but it’s just also—”
“A lot.”
“So much.” She laughs, short and real. “Come to the back. I have fifteen minutes before my next client, and we need to talk.”
The back room is the one island of relative calm. Post-it board still on the wall. Bingo card on the table. The worn couch that has absorbed more of my emotional revelations than any piece of furniture should reasonably have to.
She hands me a yellow Post-it before she even sits down.
“Check in,” she says. “Fast.”
I look at it. Look at her. “We’re doing this in fifteen minutes?”
“We’re doing the beginning of this in fifteen minutes.” She tucks her legs underneath her, which is her settling-in position, and gives me the look—the one that means don’t argue, just talk. “Pick one.”
“Overwhelmed,” I say, because it’s true and it’s faster than arguing.
“At what?”
“Everything.” I set the Post-it down. “Practice is rough. Franklin’s been in the observation deck twice this week.
Boone’s trying to have feelings conversations with me, and I keep shutting him down and then feeling guilty about it.
And I show up here and you’re—” I gesture at the wall of luxe chaos visible through the doorway. “In the middle of something enormous.”
“I am,” she agrees. “And that’s actually what I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay.”
She takes a breath. “I can’t do the daily sessions anymore. Not right now. Not until the launch event is over and things settle.” She holds my gaze when she says it, watching for the reaction.
I keep my face neutral. Feel the thing she’s watching for anyway—a small contraction, somewhere in my chest.
“That’s fine,” I say.
“It’s not fine. It’s an adjustment, and I want you to know it doesn’t mean I’m stepping back from—” she pauses, choosing her word, “—us. It just means I need to redistribute your emotional education.”
“You need to what?”
She picks up her phone, turns it to face me.
The group text has forty-seven messages in it since this morning.
I take the phone and scroll. The contact list at the top reads like a Sorrowville census: Shep, Boone, Brogan, Mom, Joely, Virgil, Coach Duff, Lynsie, Britt, Holden, Nurse aggie, Doc lindy, Pru, and a contact simply labeled Slammy that I choose not to examine too closely.
“You added Slammy to a group text,” I say.
“Slammy is very supportive.”
“Gisele.”
“Operation Soft Boy support team,” she says, with the calm confidence of a woman who has thought this through and made peace with it. “They’ve all agreed to help with your continued emotional development while I’m handling the Luxe chaos. Shep wants you after practice today.”
I look up from the phone. “Shep. As in Sawyer.”
“He has an activity planned.”
“That’s the most frightening thing you’ve ever said to me. And you once made me do a breathing exercise on a gym mat.”
“He cleared it with me.” She takes the phone back before I can read the messages in detail, which tells me the messages in detail would not help my anxiety. “I gave everyone specific guidelines. Nobody is going to push you past what you can handle.”
“Has anyone met Shep?”
“He’s enthusiastic, but he genuinely cares about you.” She tilts her head. “They all do. That’s the thing, Bennett. You’ve spent three years convinced you have to hold this team together alone. Half the town wants to help you, and you keep looking at it like it’s an ambush.”
“It is an ambush. It’s a scheduled ambush with a group text.”
“It’s people who love you showing up.” She says it simply, the way she says things that are true and slightly devastating. “Let them.”
I look at her.
She looks back.
The fifteen minutes are probably up.
“Fine,” I say.
“Fine?”
“I’ll go with Shep. I won’t like it. But I’ll go.”
Her face does the thing—that particular softening that she thinks she hides and absolutely does not hide. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Depending on what he’s planned, you may be getting a very pointed Post-it about this.”
“I look forward to it.” She stands, because her next client has probably arrived, and Gisele doesn’t keep clients waiting. She moves toward the door, then stops. Turns back. Crosses the room and kisses me once, quick and certain, her hand briefly on my jaw.
“I’m not going anywhere, Hothead,” she says against my mouth. “I’m just busy. Don’t spiral over this.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I catch her hand before she can pull back and hold it for a second. “Yeah. I do.”
She squeezes my fingers and goes.
Sitting in the back room for another minute, I listen to the salon come back to life around me.
Carrie greeting someone at the front. Gisele’s professional voice shifting into the warm register she uses with clients.
The particular hum of a busy small business that belongs entirely to one person who built it from nothing.
I pick up my phone.
The group text has two new messages.
Shep: Cap. 4pm. power play. Dress casual. Don’t overthink it.
Shep: Also don’t look up what we’re doing. Trust the process.
Virgil: I’ll be there.
Shep: Virgil you weren’t invited
Virgil: I’ll be there.
Beth: I made snacks :)
Shep: Beth also wasn’t invited
Beth: I own the place, you little chaos goblin.
Nurse Aggie: I cleared my four o’clock diaper rash. See you there, sweetheart.
Shep: Aggie
Boone: We’re all coming Sawyer
Shep: This was supposed to be an intimate emotional support session. A bonding moment between me and my Cap.
Brogan: Power Play at 4. Got it.
Coach Duff: I don’t understand this telephone
Pru: Coach Duff I will drive you.
Slammy: ??
I stare at the fist bump up from Slammy for a long moment.
Then I put my phone in my pocket, stand up, and go find Boone.
Practice is exactly as rough as I knew it would be.
Not visibly—we execute, we run the sequences, we do everything a professional hockey team is supposed to do in a Tuesday practice. but I know this team. I know the difference between playing and going through the motions, and today we’re deep in the second category.
The slump is real. We know it. Everyone in the building knows it, including Franklin, who appears on the observation deck twenty minutes in and doesn’t leave.
I feel him up there the same way you feel weather changing—a pressure shift, something in the air.
“Tighten up,” I call, pushing the next drill harder. “We’re sloppy on the transition. Again.”
They go again. Better. Not good enough.
The problem isn’t talent. It’s never been talent. It’s the weight of a team that’s been bracing for impact for too long, moving tight and careful instead of loose and instinctive, playing afraid of losing instead of hungry to win.
I know that problem intimately because I am that problem.
Coach Duff is still dealing with some personal matters that cause him to be in and out of the arena.
So I’ve been running practices the same way I run everything—gripped too tight, controlled to the millimeter, leaving no room for error or instinct or the kind of beautiful improvised play that wins games in the third period. I’ve been coaching fear.
Shep skates past me during a line change and drops his voice low. “Franklin’s been up there for twenty minutes.”
“I know.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not even slightly.”
“Cool.” He taps my stick with his. “Power Play at four. Don’t bail. The people are counting on you.”
“I’m not going to bail.”
“You have a history of bailing.”
“I’m not going to bail, Shep.”
He grins and skates away, and I blow the whistle for the next drill. Franklin watches from above with his arms crossed and his expression doing the math on a team that needs to win eight of its last thirteen games to have any shot at the playoffs.
And the playoffs are important to his bottom line.
Eight of thirteen.
It’s possible. Barely. If something changes.
I watch my team run the drill—see the places where they’re good, genuinely good, talented in ways I sometimes forget to acknowledge because I’m too busy cataloging the gaps—and I think about what Gisele said this morning.
You’ve spent three years convinced you have to hold this team together alone.
I blow the whistle.
“Good,” I say, instead of the correction I was going to make. “That’s what it looks like. Do it again.”
Shep actually stops skating to stare at me.
I ignore him and call the next sequence.