Chapter 16
Knottingley Ever After
~JUDE~
The first rule of curating a movie night with a roommate you have known for nine days and would like to know for nine years is that you do not, under any circumstances, let on that you have curated the movie night.
The second rule is that you absolutely have curated the movie night.
I have chosen The Cutting Edge. A romantic comedy from 1992 about a figure skater and a hockey player.
Two stubborn people. A rink. A rivalry built on bad first impressions, dragged inch by inch into love.
It is, on its face, a perfectly defensible pick from a man whose career is on the ice, and I will not, under cross-examination, confess that the figure-skater protagonist with her tongue in her cheek and the hockey player’s wounded dignity have, in the privacy of my own head, ever read like a precise portrait of the woman currently fighting a popcorn bowl on the other side of my couch.
Plausible deniability.
It is the captain’s preferred currency.
“Alright. Behold.”
Matteo arrives in the living room carrying the largest mixing bowl in our kitchen, the popcorn inside it heaped so high it has its own weather system, and a smell hitting me before he does that is honestly best described as a war crime against the concept of buttered corn.
“What,” Rémi says, from the floor in front of the coffee table where he is, I now realize, doing something I am going to have to address in a moment, “is on it.”
“Spices. Multiple. Proprietary. Tonight’s blend includes — you are going to love this — smoked paprika, chili lime, a teaspoon of brown sugar, the merest whisper of dried oregano, and a final dusting of nutritional yeast, because we are sophisticated.”
“Santori.” Iris pads in behind him, twisting her wet pink hair up into a knot at the crown of her head and securing it with whatever woman-elastic she keeps stashed in her wrist. “Where on earth did you even get the chili lime.”
“Movie theatre.”
“Excuse me?”
“The movie theatre, sweetheart. On Wendell Street. They sell little canisters of their seasoning blends at the snack counter for four dollars apiece, the public is sleeping on this resource, and I have, frankly, made it my personal mission to be the only winger on this roster carrying a working pantry of theatre-grade pop.”
“Oh my God.” Iris settles cross-legged on the rug to inspect the bowl, sniffs it, makes a small considering noise. “I need this in my life.”
“Which is why,” Matteo announces, plonking the bowl on the coffee table in the spot where Rémi is, I now confirm, building something, “I made enough for an army.”
“Rémi,” I say.
“Hm.”
“What is that.”
He has set up, on the broad oak surface of the coffee table, a small fireproof ceramic dish ringed with a careful neat circle of river stones that I am certain he had to have hauled in from the back porch when none of us were looking.
Inside the ceramic dish, a stack of cedar shavings the size of his palm.
A pair of long matches. A spool of green wire.
A jar of marshmallows. A second jar I am ninety percent certain contains hand-cut squares of graham cracker because Rémi does not, on principle, buy graham crackers when he can make them.
Iris has clocked it too. She kneels up. “What are you doing.”
“Watch.”
Rémi, with the supreme calm of a man assembling an Ikea bookshelf, strikes a long match against the side of the box and touches it to the cedar shavings. A small, controlled flame leaps up.
Iris screams.
“WE ARE INSIDE.”
Matteo lets out a delighted bark of laughter and folds himself onto the arm of the couch to enjoy the show.
“It is contained,” Rémi says, soothingly, as the cedar catches in a small bright tongue and fills the room with the bracing resinous scent of high-altitude air.
“The stones are a buffer. The dish is fireproof. The flame is, frankly, smaller than the burner on the gas stove you cooked an egg on yesterday.”
“THE SMOKE DETECTOR.”
“If it goes off,” I hear myself say, from the kitchen doorway where I have stopped to watch this entire production unfold, “we will just blow it out with a towel.”
The room pauses, briefly.
I have, in my offhand response, given something away.
Easy, Kavanagh. Smaller words. Captain voice.
It is a small thing. A throwaway sentence.
But it has, in the way these things do, accidentally let the room see something about the architecture of the kitchen I grew up in, where a smoke alarm was a known seasonal hazard you waved a dish towel at like a flag of surrender, because the unit’s ventilation was inadequate and the landlord had not visited in four years and the only person under that roof who could be relied upon to actually replace a battery was, by age ten, me.
I do not love giving things away.
My household was not the household of a captain.
It was the household of a kid raising four little girls who were not, in the strict legal sense, his responsibility, and learning the small domestic engineering of how to make a one-bedroom apartment with two adults in it feel survivable for a fifth child who slept on the couch and a sixth who was always cold.
None of which I am, on a usual evening, accustomed to broadcasting in a room that contains a brand-new Omega with very sharp peripheral vision.
Rémi, who knows me better than anyone in this house, does not react. Matteo, who knows me better than anyone alive, lets it pass without a single word. Iris, who has known me for nine days, instead lights up.
“Oh my God, that was my whole childhood.”
She drops back onto her heels, eyes bright.
“My mum and I lived in a flat the size of a postage stamp. Two rings on the hob. The smoke detector was hardwired into the ceiling right above the stove for some genius reason, so the second she tried to fry anything, the whole alarm system went off like the building was coming down on top of us. I swear to God, by the time I was seven I had the routine down to a science. You grab the tea towel. You stand on the chair. You flap. The man across the hall would bang on the wall. Eventually, the alarm would lose interest. We would eat eggs.”
“Tea towel,” Rémi repeats, mildly, like the word is a small geographical fact.
“Or,” Iris adds, brightly, jabbing the air, “it was the good old beep. The dying-battery beep. Where the alarm has decided, at three in the morning, to die in increments, audibly, in solidarity. We never — and I cannot stress this enough — we never changed the batteries. Why does every household do that? Why is it a universal experience? Why have we all collectively agreed to live with a small mechanical screaming on the ceiling until it gives up of its own free will?”
Matteo grins, slow and unmistakable. He cuts his eyes at me.
“Hey, Pinky.”
“Yes.”
“How exactly were you going to change a smoke-alarm battery, vertically speaking, at the height of seven.”
Her face transforms.
“Excuse me,” she says, sitting up to her full kneeling height, which is approximately a foot below his sitting height, “are you about to make a remark about my stature, Matteo Santori.”
“I am simply asking a logistical question.”
“I am not short. You are simply absurdly tall. There is a difference. The difference is significant.”
“Mm-hm.” Matteo tilts his head. “Sure. Although, for the record, I know you like the height differential. I distinctly remember the height differential being a feature in the show —”
“SHUT UP.”
She comes at him.
Pure animal velocity. A small pink-haired Omega launching herself at a winger twice her size, the popcorn bowl wobbling on the coffee table, Rémi’s neat circle of stones nearly catching a knee, and Matteo himself simply laughing as she lands on him with the full force of approximately one buck-twenty soaking wet and approximately five percent of her body weight in actual indignation, and barely shifts him an inch.
“Come on, Miss Black Belt,” he taunts, holding her at arm’s length by the back of his enormous hoodie she is wearing, “take me down. Show us.”
“YOU SON OF A BITCH.”
“Love that for me.”
Rémi stands. Brushes invisible lint off his joggers. “I will get the s’mores kit before the integrity of this firepit is compromised.”
It takes us a full ten minutes to corral the chaos into a watchable configuration.
Rémi resumes his floor position on the rug, one long leg folded beneath him, the marshmallow skewers laid out beside him with the precision of a man laying surgical tools.
Matteo settles on the couch with the popcorn bowl in his lap and one arm extended along the back of the cushions, which I am, professionally, ignoring.
I claim the leather wingback that has been my chair since the day we moved in, the one Rémi has been quietly threatening to replace with something less aggressively medieval for two years.
And Iris — having lost her tackle, won her dignity, eaten three handfuls of cursed popcorn, and demanded a personal s’more on standby — folds herself into the corner of the couch nearest Rémi, drawing her knees up under the enormous hoodie she is wearing until only her face and one foot are visible above the fabric.
She looks, in the soft amber light of the candles on the mantel, smaller than her personality has any business being.
I arch an eyebrow at her.
“And whose hoodie,” I say, gently, “did you steal this evening, Pinky.”
“Have absolutely no idea,” she says, with the angelic serenity of a thief in mid-getaway. “Found it on a chair upstairs after my shower. Movie nights demand hoodies. It is a known law of physics. The trajectory cannot be altered.”
“Right,” Rémi notes, threading a marshmallow with infinite calm. “That one is Matteo’s.”