Chapter 99 Chapter 99

Chapter 99 Chapter 99

The team thing turned out to be Gino's Pizzeria on Caldwell Street, which fit eleven hockey players, their various satellites, and one fake girlfriend pretending to take notes for journalistic reasons.

I texted Priya from the parking lot.

I am at a hockey team pizza gathering.

Her response was immediate.

I'm sorry, you're WHERE

It's for the paper.

Imani Adaeze Osei you are going to tell me everything tonight.

There is nothing to tell. It's professional.

The fact that you used the word professional means there is EVERYTHING to tell. I'm coming over at nine.

I put my phone away before she could send the seventeen follow-up messages I knew were already being typed.

Inside, Gino's was exactly the kind of place that had checkered tablecloths unironically and photographs of Italian coastlines on the walls that nobody had looked at in years. The team had pushed three tables together in the back. Someone had already ordered two pitchers of soda. The energy was loud and self-satisfied in the particular way of people who had just finished doing something physical and believed this entitled them to take up space.

Cole saw me at the door and waved me over with the ease of someone who'd been expecting me, which technically he had, but it still landed differently than I anticipated.

"Guys," he said, when I reached the table, "this is Imani."

Eleven faces turned toward me with varying levels of interest.

"She's at the paper," said a boy with a gap between his front teeth that I would later learn was Fitz, the starting left winger, who said everything like it was a fun fact at a party.

"She's also my girlfriend," Cole said, mildly, and took my jacket like it was something he did all the time.

It was a good move. I noted it professionally.

The team rearranged itself in that organic way groups do and I ended up between Cole and a quiet, broad-shouldered boy named Sebastien who played defense and apparently communicated primarily through nods. On my other side, Cole was already being pulled into a conversation about a call from practice that Fitz felt strongly about.

I opened my notebook.

"You're actually taking notes," said the boy across from me. He had paint on his knuckles and a hockey jacket worn open over a thrift store t-shirt, which was a combination I hadn't expected. "At pizza."

"I take notes everywhere."

"Marcus," he said, and extended a hand. "I'm on JV but they let me come to these because Fitz is my brother and nobody's stopped me yet."

"Imani."

"I know. Cole mentioned you." He said it simply, not with any particular weight, but I felt Cole shift slightly beside me. "What kind of story are you writing?"

"Season access. Inside look at the team."

Marcus nodded slowly. He had an artist's eyes, the kind that moved over things and came back with more information than they started with. "You should talk to Sebastien. He sees everything on the ice and never gets quoted because he doesn't talk much. Best analysis on the team."

Sebastien, without looking up from his menu, said: "Accurate."

I wrote both their names down.

\---

Cole drove me home at ten, which had not been part of any agreement but happened naturally in the way things do when you've been sitting next to someone for two hours and they've refilled your soda twice without being asked.

He pulled up to my house and the porch light was on, which meant my mother was awake, which meant she had been awake since I texted her at eight saying I'd be home by ten.

"Nice house," Cole said.

"She's going to see you from the window," I said.

"Should I wave?"

"Absolutely not. She'll come outside."

He laughed. "Is that bad?"

I thought about my mother, Dr. Abena Osei, who taught literature at the university, asked every person she met what they were reading, and had opinions about character that she delivered with the warmth and precision of someone who had been perfecting the practice for fifty years.

"She will like you," I said, which was the problem. "She likes everyone. Then she'll ask me about you for weeks."

"Sounds like a good problem."

I looked at him sideways. He was watching the house with something that looked almost like genuine interest, which was not what I needed from him at ten o'clock outside my porch light.

"Same time next week?" he said.

"Practice is Wednesday."

"And there's a game Saturday."

"I know. I'll be there." I gathered my bag, my notebook, my jacket, all the physical armor of my professional purpose. "Cole."

"Yeah."

"Jade watched us for most of the night."

Something moved across his face and settled back into neutral. "I know."

"She doesn't look unbothered."

"Good."

He said it quietly, and I couldn't tell if it was satisfaction or something more complicated wearing satisfaction's clothes. I filed it away. There was a story in Cole Whitaker that had nothing to do with hockey and I was trying very hard not to be interested in it.

"Good night," I said.

"Night, Osei."

I got out. I walked to the door. I did not look back.

The porch light caught me as the door opened and my mother was standing there in her reading glasses with a cup of tea and an expression I had seen my entire life, which was the one that meant she had already noticed everything and was simply waiting for me to arrive at my own conclusions.

"You're glowing," she said.

"I'm cold. It's the same thing."

"Mm." She handed me the tea. "Come inside and tell me about your day."

"There's nothing to tell."

"The boy in the car."

"Is a source."

"Imani."

"Mama."

She smiled, the full one, and stepped aside to let me in. The house smelled like jollof and the particular warmth of a home that had been lived in long and well. My mother had a gift for that, for making whatever space she occupied feel like it had always been intended for comfort.

I sat at the kitchen island and she poured herself more tea and I told her about the rink and Gino's and Sebastien who communicated through nods and Marcus with paint on his knuckles, and I did not mention the jacket thing or the hair or the way Cole had said good like it carried more weight than the word was meant to hold.

My mother listened the way she always did, completely, without interrupting, her reading glasses pushed up on her head.

When I finished she said: "And the boy."

"He's complicated."

"The good ones are."

"Mama, it's professional."

"Mm," she said again, and picked up her book, and said nothing else, which was somehow worse than if she'd said everything.

\---

Priya arrived at nine-oh-four, which meant she had been in the car before I texted her back.

She came through the door with the energy of someone who had been holding information hostage and was prepared to collect on it. Priya Chandrasekaran was my best friend in the specific way that meant she knew every version of my face and refused to accept the polished one.

She sat cross-legged on my bed, accepted the snacks I produced from my desk drawer, and looked at me with the patience of someone who knew I would tell her everything and was simply enjoying the wait.

I told her everything.

She was quiet for four seconds, which for Priya was a geological age.

Then: "The hair tuck."

"It was for Jade's benefit."

"Imani. The hair tuck."

"It was a tactical move."

"He TUCKED YOUR HAIR."

"In a fake dating context."

"There is no fake dating context that makes a hair tuck not a hair tuck." She grabbed a cracker and pointed it at me. "You like him."

"I have a rule."

"Your rule is cowardly and I've said so from the beginning."

"You've never said anything about my rule."

"Because it had never been tested." She pulled her knees up. "Okay. So. Jade is watching, Derek is hovering, you've got season access, Cole is doing romantic gestures in a technically-deniable context, and you're writing all of it down so you don't have to feel it." She nodded. "Classic Imani."

"I'm going to ask you to leave."

"You're not." She settled deeper into my pillows. "This is going to be a whole thing."

Outside, the street was quiet. My mother had turned the television on downstairs, something with a laugh track, her unwinding sound. The house held us all in its easy, ordinary warmth.

I looked at my notebook on the desk.

Four pages from practice. Two more from Gino's. A half-formed paragraph about a boy who moved like the ice was made for him.

"It's for the story," I said.

Priya looked at me with the gentle devastation of someone who loved me enough to let me figure it out myself.

"Sure," she said. "Tell me about the story."

\---

Want Chapter Four, or should I develop any of the subplots further first?