Chapter Fifteen
JUNIE
There is a species of performance so bad it wraps around and becomes a confession.
Community theater knows it. Toddlers hiding vegetables know it.
And on the Thursday after the storm, the entire Austin Chupacabras organization got to watch two adult professionals discover it live, because Saint and I came back from the road trip and committed to the bit of “still fake” with an intensity that should be studied by intelligence agencies as a cautionary tale.
I want to walk through the evidence the way the team experienced it, because I’ve had time to review the tape, so to speak, and it’s damning.
Exhibit A: proximity management. Before the storm, Saint and I had drifted into an unratified orbit, bench, tunnel, adjacent bus seats, the diner.
Normal. Established. Baseline. After the storm, we corrected.
We corrected so hard that on Thursday I filmed practice from the OPPOSITE side of the rink, a side with worse light, a side I have never once used, a side Gus refers to as “the bad side” while resurfacing, and Saint, for his part, took his water breaks at the far blue line facing a wall.
A wall. He hydrated at a wall, formally, like it owed him money, and eighteen professional athletes watched their starting goalie network with load-bearing concrete and drew their own conclusions.
Exhibit B: verbal register. We had, prior to the storm, a public language, the volley and the deadpan, the bit that built an empire.
Post-storm, in front of witnesses, we spoke to each other like a bank.
On Thursday I asked him, on camera, for content, his taco rating from the road trip, a layup, our oldest routine, and this man looked into my lens and said, “The tacos were satisfactory,” SATISFACTORY, a word that has never once trended, and I said, “Great, thanks so much,” THANKS SO MUCH, like he was a vendor, and Pickle, in the background of the shot, turned to look directly at the camera like a man in a workplace documentary.
Exhibit C, and this is the one that broke containment: the mix-up.
Friday morning, team breakfast at the facility, and the catering line had oatmeal on it, and I fixed a bowl without thinking, steel-cut, cinnamon, banana, muscle memory of a woman who had watched it made at 4:40 approximately sixty times, and carried it to the table and set it down in front of him, ALSO without thinking, mid-conversation with Noa about reel formats, and kept walking, and it wasn’t until I heard the entire table stop chewing that I understood what I’d done.
I had assembled a superstitious goalie’s dead grandfather’s ritual meal from memory and delivered it to him like a wife of forty years, in front of the whole roster, at nine in the morning, while maintaining, officially, that we were colleagues executing a marketing initiative.
Saint looked at the bowl. The table looked at Saint. Saint picked up the spoon and said, “It’s not 4:40,” and ate it anyway, all of it, and Mason had to leave the room.
They knew. Of course they knew. Rule 1 was intact on a technicality, nobody had lied to the team, we simply hadn’t briefed them, per the amendment’s own disclosure carve-out, a clause I had drafted at 11:52 p.m. with tremendous foresight and zero understanding that the team had never needed a briefing in its life.
The team read us the way Noa reads an MRI.
There was no announcement, no confrontation.
There was just a locker room full of grown men being unbearably delicate, offering it up in little courtesies, Pickle wordlessly moving his bag so I could film from the good angle, Gus resurfacing the bad side without being asked “in case you want options,” Coach Barb watching our whole Thursday performance from the bench with her gum going slow, the way it goes when she’s deciding whether something needs coaching, and concluding, audibly, to her assistant: “Leave it. It’s working itself out. Painfully. Like a splinter.”
The committee, naturally, convened. I wasn’t supposed to see it, it happened in the sub-chat, the one they think I don’t know about, the one Noa screenshots for me when the content is, in her words, medically relevant.
Pickle had been whispering, actually physically whispering, in the room, and then made the classic rookie error of also whispering in writing:
Pickle: ok serious question. are they faking being fake now Mason: stay out of it, rookie Mason: (but yes.)
I read that on my phone in the media room and laughed alone for a solid minute, the real laugh, the Waco one, and then stopped laughing, because faking being fake was, technically, forensically, exactly correct, and there is nothing more destabilizing than being accurately diagnosed by a twenty-two-year-old with a misdemeanor mustache.
Because here is what the performance was FOR, and I could only admit this in the media room with the lights half off: the storm had happened, and the clause had sunset, and nobody had invoked it.
Which meant that whatever was running between us was now running with no rule under it.
Undocumented. Unlicensed. Load path unknown.
And a woman with my particular wiring, when she finds herself standing on a floor with no documented load rating, does not stand still and trust the engineering.
She performs normalcy at maximum volume and files things.
Speaking of filing. The screenshot was still in my phone.
“DV 3.11, do not answer.” I hadn’t answered.
I also hadn’t told anyone, still, which sat in me like a swallowed key, and every time Saint did something across a rink, hydrated at a wall, ate a nine a.m. oatmeal without complaint, said satisfactory with his eyes doing the two-degree thaw, the key got heavier, and I kept not saying anything, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t know why.
Deacon was mine. My mess, my era, my proof of a lot.
You don’t hand a man forty-one saves into the building and then ask him to carry your old luggage too.
That’s the math. The math is wrong, Hazel would say the math is malpractice, but it was the only math I had, so I filed it and performed Thursday and delivered oatmeal like a sleeper agent.
But I did do one thing. I want it in the record, because nobody saw it and nobody was meant to, and it matters more than everything above it.
On Monday, on my lunch break, I didn’t eat at my desk.
I told Solange the ring light I had errands, which was insane, she’s a light, and I drove eleven minutes to the public library on Cesar Chavez, and I sat in the back corner carrel with headphones and my phone propped against a stack of somebody’s returned mysteries, and I opened a beginner ASL course, lesson one, and started learning to sign.
Not for content. Not for the account, God, never for the account.
I turned my phone’s camera OFF for it, that’s how you know it was real, a thing I did with my hands that no one would ever see.
Because there was a sixteen-year-old at a school across town who had Thursday tacos and Saturday sign-outs and a brother who’d moved to the desert for him and would sooner retire than say so publicly, and if that kid was ever going to look at me across a pancake stack, I did not want to arrive as the social media manager who needed an interpreter.
I wanted to be able to say hello myself, badly, in person, with my own hands.
Lesson one. Thank you, I already knew, from Dot.
Hello. Nice to meet you. My name is J-U-N-I-E, fingerspelled so slowly the app’s little example lady seemed concerned for me.
Forty-five minutes. Then I drove back, ate a granola bar at a red light, told no one, and filmed Pickle’s mustache update for the account like a woman with no secrets at all.
Tuesdays and Mondays, going forward, I decided. Lunch breaks. The library. Nobody’s business.
Back at the rink that afternoon, warmups, I set up in the tunnel per the routine we’d built without ever calling it a routine, and the team filed past in full ceremonial delicacy, and Gus said something about Tuna’s new travel carrier being a scandal against nature, and I laughed, the real one, it gets out around Gus, and down the tunnel I saw it land.
Saint, last out, always last, paused mid-stride for half a second, the way you pause when you’ve located something, filed it, load checked, bearing true, and then walked past me to the ice with a nod of flawless professional distance, colleague to colleague, nothing to see here, still fake, everybody.
“Satisfactory?” I said to his back, deadpan, colleague to colleague.
He tapped the tunnel doorframe as he went through it. Twice. Left, then right.
The whole bench saw it. Nobody said a word.
Mason put his glove over Pickle’s entire face, pre-emptively, and the anthem started, and I stood in the tunnel with my camera and my swallowed key and my secret library hands, zero rules underneath me, performing fine at altitude, and I filmed the man in the crease like it was a job, which it was, officially, per a document, thanks so much.