Chapter Twenty-Three
JUNIE
Rock bottom has a texture, and the texture is queso.
By Friday evening I had been an unemployed person for fifty-seven hours, and I had spent them with rigor.
I had turned off every notification on my phone except Hazel, which left the phone eerie, a brick that used to be a weather system.
I had not answered Saint’s calls, seven of them, or his texts, which I read standing up, at arm’s length, the way you read a lease.
I had not answered Mason, or Noa, or Pickle, who sent a single message that said “miss you” and then, an hour later, “this is Pickle,” as if the mustache didn’t precede him through every door.
I had answered Rich once, formally, to confirm HR logistics, and Rich had replied with a voicemail that was mostly him blowing his nose, because Rich cries at ceremonies and apparently also at resignations, and I filed it and did not cry, because I was being professional, and professional was the last outfit I had that still fit.
Hazel came home Friday at six with her backpack of flashcards and a grocery bag, and she took one look at me on the couch in the clinch T-shirt, third consecutive day, laptop open to a spreadsheet I’d titled TRANSITION DOCUMENTATION because even my rock bottom has file naming conventions, and she put the bag down and said, “Okay,” in her triage voice, and made the queso.
The queso protocol is older than either of our careers.
Waco rules: one pot, two spoons, no plates, nobody has to talk until the first spoon hits the bottom third.
It has walked us through her organic chemistry midterm, my firing, our mother’s hip, and the death of a hamster named Coach.
We were eleven minutes in, sitting on the kitchen floor because the floor is part of the protocol, when Hazel put her spoon down, which is against protocol, and said, “Walk me through it. Not the statement. You. Walk me through the actual reasoning, out loud, like I’m stupid. ”
So I did. And I was good at it, that was the sick part, I’d had two days to polish the case.
The headline was true. I built the fake.
My name was on the document, my amendment at 11:52.
The viability review was in three weeks and the league does not grade on “it turned real underneath.” Sponsors were pausing.
Theo’s school was four miles from the arena.
Everyone I loved was load-bearing on numbers I had set on fire, and there was exactly one removable part, and I removed it, and the proof it worked was already in: the building sold out, they won, the story was becoming “team overcomes distraction,” I’d seen the headlines through my fingers.
Clean. Surgical. Everyone keeps everything.
“Everyone keeps everything,” Hazel repeated.
“Everyone who matters.”
“Junie. You’re on the kitchen floor.”
“I’m always on the kitchen floor, it’s protocol,”
“You resigned at nine a.m. by SCHEDULED POST,” she said, and her voice cracked in the middle of it, my unflappable sister, the one who is immune, and that was the first thing in two days that got all the way in.
“You queued yourself up like a taco video. Do you hear it? Do you hear what that is?” She got up on her knees on the tile so she could be taller than me, which she has done since she was six.
“You resigned to prove you’re not a lot.
Junie. Look at me. That IS the lot. That’s the actual lot, the whole warehouse.
Not the volume, not the confetti, not the captions.
THIS. The three a.m. unilateral rescue where you appoint yourself the sacrifice, solve everybody’s life without asking them, and gift-wrap the wreckage so nobody has to feel bad.
You didn’t remove the lot from the building.
You did the biggest, loudest, most Junie thing you have ever done in your LIFE, alone, at three in the morning, and called it small. ”
The spoon was still in my hand. I put it down very carefully, like it was armed.
“He said,” I started, and stopped, and she waited, nursing-student patient, and I got it out on the second try. “Deacon said I staple people to my stories. And he had receipts, Haze. This time the receipts were real.”
“Deacon,” Hazel said, “is a man in Dallas doing a concerned voice into a sock. I’m not talking about Deacon. Name me one person who matters, one, who has ever used that word on you. Take your time. I’ve got flashcards.”
And I sat on our kitchen floor and ran the audit, because I am a professional and audits are what I do, and the results came back the way audits do, indifferent to what you were hoping.
Barb, who never once asked me to be less, who said keep faking in a tone that meant keep going.
Mason, who renamed a group chat after us in week one and threatened a riot on my behalf in week eight.
Pickle, this is Pickle. Noa’s one raised eyebrow, which in her currency is a hug.
Theo, sixteen and merciless, who told me my fingerspelling looked like a fistfight and then signed keep her to his brother when he thought I couldn’t afford the translation, and I could not, at the time, afford the translation, and Saint had gone pale trying not to give it away.
My sister, on her knees on the tile, crying into the queso, against protocol.
And a man from Duluth who had heard the actual clip, played at me by a heckler through glass, and said seven words into a scrum microphone that were the exact opposite of the word, on the record, at nine million views: Junie Bloom is the best thing here.
Nobody. The count was nobody. In two years the word had come from exactly one person, and I had let his voice run the front desk of my whole life, checking everyone else in, telling me what their silences meant.
“His texts,” Hazel said, quieter now, handing me a paper towel because the protocol makes no provision for this much crying, “the ones you read like a lease. Read me one.”
I got the phone. I read it out loud. “Do not do this. It’s not yours to carry. Call me.”
“And what did you decide that meant?”
“That he was being kind on my way out.”
Hazel looked at me for a long time. “Six-time all-star of not saying things,” she said. “The man built you eleven words at six a.m. and you graded it as a form letter.” She pulled the pot away from me, which meant the protocol was ending and the assignment beginning. “You watch the game yet?”
I had not watched the game. I had lived Wednesday night with the phone dark, hearing the city do something enormous a few miles away, the way you hear weather in another county.
She set me up on the couch with the replay and a blanket and then, because she is the only person alive who knows exactly how much witness I can survive, she took her flashcards to her room and closed the door.
I watched the whole thing alone. The building came up on screen and my chest did something complicated, sixteen thousand people in a barn I helped fill, and I watched him play the game of his life in the flattest register I had ever seen on him, no chirps at the post, no glove flourish for the corner cam, the machine running to spec with nobody home in the windows, and I knew that setting, I had filed it months ago, that was the Quebec setting, the something-is-broken-park-it setting, and I had spent Wednesday morning reading that exact flatness as a verdict about me, when it was him, bleeding in the only posture he owns.
The broadcast showed the booth in the second period.
Empty, Beyoncé the Second dark, chair pushed in, and the building booed, and the announcers didn’t understand it, and then the chant started and the camera found section 118 and the announcers understood it, and I sat on my couch with both hands over my mouth while sixteen thousand strangers chanted the half of the hashtag that was mine.
And then the end. After the handshakes and the interviews, the broadcast cut back for one last beauty shot of the empty arena, the way broadcasts do, and caught something the director probably thought was just goalie eccentricity, content, a Saint Fact.
A man alone on the ice in street shoes. Standing in his crease, looking up.
The camera followed his eyeline, and it was not the banner, and it was not the scoreboard.
He tapped the pipes. Twice. Left, then right.
At the booth. The taps were pointed at the booth.
Fifteen months I had filmed that ritual, captioned it, explained it to eleven million people, the left post is older, and I knew, watching him do it to an empty chair in an empty building, at me, for me, toward the place my laugh used to sit, that I had gotten the schematic wrong the whole time.
The rope to a dead man had a second function nobody ever captioned.
A knock. It had been a knock for months, twice, left then right, is anyone home, and Wednesday night the knock went up into fifty thousand cubic meters of empty and I had not been home, because I had removed myself from the building to protect him from the inconvenience of loving me.
I cried the way the protocol never covers, ugly, with the replay menu looping.
And then I did the last thing, the thing I had been circling for two days, TRANSITION DOCUMENTATION, item nine. I opened the laptop to delete the Rulebook.
It deserved deletion, I’d reasoned. It was the murder weapon.
Every screenshot Deacon owned had crawled out of that document, and the professional move was to purge the file, close the folder, hand over the archive clean.
I opened “Operation Sweetheart: Terms and Conditions,” fifteen months of amendments, rule 4 and its pending definition, rule 5, rule 7 with the little scar of the comment thread still on it, rule 8 blank forever, rule 9. Nobody makes Junie feel like a lot.
My cursor was on the folder when I saw it.
The colored tick in the margin by rule 9, the one the doc puts on tracked changes, and I had seen it a hundred times and never once clicked it, because rule 9 arrived in week one, silently, and I had let it stand without asking, that was our whole deal, he didn’t explain and I didn’t ask.
Two years in social media and I had never audited my own founding document.
I clicked it.
Inserted by L. Lindell. Rule 9: Nobody makes Junie feel like a lot. January 24, 11:07 p.m.
January eighteenth. I sat very still and did the timeline math with the last dry part of my brain, because the math was the whole message.
The kiss cam was February 8. The diner negotiation was January eighteenth, dinner hours, a hostile merger over laminate, both of us funny, neither of us admitting the fizz, and he had gone home that night, a man who had known me for four days, who had signed nothing yet, who owed me nothing, and opened the document at 11:07 p.m. and built a load-bearing wall around a wound I had not even told him about yet.
Before the first kiss. Before rule 7 mattered. Before there was anything to fake. The oldest true thing in the whole file, sitting in the margin for fifteen months, timestamped, authored, waiting for me to finally check the receipts.
Deacon had receipts. He never had this one.
I did not delete the document. I sat with my thumb on the trackpad and the tick mark glowing and Hazel’s flashcards whispering through the wall, and out loud, to an empty living room, in the voice I use for nobody, I said, “Oh,” and then I said his name, the real one, and I reached for my phone, and it lit up in my hand before I touched it, the screen filling with a name, except it was not his, it was the group chat, Saint’s Wedding Planning Committee, waking up all at once, Mason typing, Pickle typing, Noa typing, everyone typing, and the first message through said only: JUNIE.