Chapter Twenty-One
JUNIE
We clinched a playoff berth on a Tuesday in Moontower Arena, and for about six hours the world was perfect, and I want those six hours in the record before everything else, because they happened and they were mine.
The episode was titled RECEIPTS, all caps, and the thumbnail was Deacon’s face doing concerned. I made myself listen to all of it, which took ninety minutes, and I sat very still the whole time the way you sit still for a needle.
He had the intern, Bryce, on as a guest, laundered as “a source formerly inside the organization’s media operation,” and Bryce sounded twenty-two and miserable and coached.
And he had the frame, which was the actual weapon, because screenshots are just paper until somebody folds them into a shape.
The frame was: the Austin Chupacabras, a franchise begging a league for its life, manufactured a romance between an employee and a player, documented it like a business deal, because it was one, and sold it to you, to sponsors, to a league office deciding this month whether Austin deserves a team.
IT WAS ALL FAKE. He said that phrase eleven times.
I counted, because counting was a thing my hands could do.
And then, at the one hour ten mark, he played the old clip.
Of course he played the old clip. “She’s a lot.
Like, a LOT.” His own voice, two years younger, laughing at me on a different podcast, and then present-day Deacon came back in, warm, reasonable, doing the concerned face in audio, and said, “And look, I know Junie. I worked with Junie. This is what she does. She’s not a bad person.
She just needs it. The attention. The story.
She will build you a whole fake world and staple a team to it, because being that much is the only setting she has. ”
I sat at my kitchen table and the feeling arrived, and I want to describe it accurately because I spent two years pretending it had a different shape.
Heartbreak would come later, on its own schedule.
At 4 a.m. what arrived was recognition. The old clip had lived in my head rent-free for two years and the whole time some tenant lawyer in my chest had been fighting the case, saying he was wrong, he was small, you were never a lot, and I had almost, lately, in a taco truck light, in a diner booth, in a bed with no cameras in it, begun to believe my own counsel.
And now here was the same voice saying the same thing, except this time he had exhibits, and this time, and I need this sentence in the file because it is the load-bearing one, this time he wasn’t wrong about the facts.
There was a fake. I built it. I drafted the terms. I put a kiss on a content calendar.
I had taken a grieving man’s superstitions and a Deaf kid’s brother and a locker room full of people who liked me and I had built a story on top of them for engagement numbers, and yes, it had turned real underneath, it had turned so real I could not breathe around it, but nobody was going to litigate “underneath” on a Wednesday morning.
The headline was true. The lot was true.
It was just, for the first time, at franchise scale.
The sponsor emails started at 5 a.m. because sponsor lawyers are also awake at terrible hours.
H-E-B “requesting a call.” The credit union “pausing the April creative.” A cheerful automated flag from the league’s brand-safety monitor, which is a sentence that should not exist, letting me know that mentions of the franchise had spiked 4,000 percent with negative sentiment, and would I like a report.
I would not like a report. I ran the reports myself, that was the horror of it, I had the dashboards, and I watched my own numbers do the thing I’d spent fifteen months making them do, up and up and up, the best engagement night in franchise history, all of it on fire.
The viability review was April 30. Rich had a folder about Hartford on his desk that he thought I hadn’t seen.
The league’s own account had reposted the tape story two weeks ago; now the ratio under that post was a crime scene.
Every person in that building had a job attached to those numbers.
Pickle had just gotten his mother season tickets.
Theo, and my mind went to Theo at 4:51 a.m. and stayed there a long time, Theo was at a school four miles from the arena because his brother had done math with a map, and the map ran through attendance targets, and the attendance targets now ran through me, through my document, through my amendment at 11:52 p.m. that a stranger in Dallas had just read out loud in my voice.
I did not call Saint.
I want to be honest about why, because “she didn’t call him” is where a stupider story would hide a plot, and this is not that.
I didn’t call him because it was 5 a.m. before the biggest game of his life.
Because his whole architecture is ritual, oatmeal at 4:40, pipes, sleep, the machine run to spec, and the machine was all he had of Olle, and I knew exactly what it cost him when the machine got jostled.
Because he had done the interview, built the wall, given a camera his dead grandfather to buy us time, and the wall had not been enough, and I could not stand in his doorway at dawn and watch his face learn that.
Because everything Deacon said about the team was survivable, but the part about me, the she needs it, she staples people to it part, was going to be standing in the room with us, and what if, and here is the wiring, here is the two-year-old wiring doing exactly what it was installed to do, what if Saint looked at the exhibits and did the math and arrived, reasonably, quietly, in Swedish, at the same total.
A lot. Like, a LOT. At franchise scale.
So I did the other thing. The old thing. The thing I know how to do at 3 a.m. with steady hands.
I opened my laptop and I fixed it.
The apology statement first, because that was just craft.
I had written crisis statements for influencers who bit people.
I wrote the Chupacabras a clean one: the organization acknowledges, the arrangement began as, no player initiated, full stop, the responsibility rests with a member of the media staff, who has resigned.
I made the team blameless, made Saint blameless, dated the real feelings to after, which was even true, depending which of us you asked and when.
It was good. It was the best work I’ve ever done and I did it against myself.
Then the resignation. Four sentences to Rich and Barb, cc HR. I thanked them for the best fifteen months of my life and I meant it so hard I had to stop typing twice.
Then, and this is the piece I need the record to hold, because Hazel would later identify it as the exact moment the wiring closed the loop: I felt better.
Calm came down over the kitchen table like a dust cover.
Because this was the deal I had made with the world at twenty-five, the deal the podcast clip taught me: you can stay, you can be loved even, as long as you are prepared, at all times, to make yourself small enough to carry out of the building without anyone straining anything.
Everyone keeps their job. The team keeps its story.
Saint keeps his brother’s zip code. The lot removes itself.
Tidy. I had the removal drafted by 6:20 and I felt, God help me, professional.
I scheduled the statement to the team accounts for 9:00 a.m. I scheduled the resignation email for 9:00 a.m. I lined them up in the queue the way I have lined up a thousand posts, thumbnail checked, copy proofed, and my cursor hovered over the little clock icon that I had used to schedule taco crawls and kiss cams and a video of a cat asleep in a taco bed, 2. 3 million views.
Out the kitchen window, Austin was going lilac at the edges.
The bats would be back under the bridge in a month.
Game one was in fourteen hours. In Saint’s kitchen across town, in a little while, a pot of steel-cut oatmeal was going to go on at 4:40 out of pure muscle memory, for a game day, because the rituals hold whether or not the world does, that was the whole point of them, that was what his grandfather left him instead of a verdict about middle relief.
I clicked schedule. Both of them. 9:00 a.m.
Then I put my phone face down on the table, next to a cold cup of tea, and sat alone in the best apartment I had ever had, in a city I had made fall in love with a hockey team, and waited to stop being the story.
The tea went fully cold. Out on the street a car passed with its windows down, someone else’s playlist trailing after it like a scarf, and I sat with my scheduled posts the way you sit with a packed suitcase, and I did not cry yet, because there would be time for that at scale tomorrow, on the record, at franchise volume.
Protecting people quietly. It was the one thing I had always known how to do.
It did not occur to me until much, much later that nobody in that building had asked to be protected from me.