14

RTas (player ID: BashfulTactician) has accepted your invitation to join your game on CounterFlash.

~

Tavleen (facing her phone):Hi, everyone! Just wanted to let you know that the Hot Flashes and I are going to the skating rink tomorrow for some team-bonding time before the state championships! Come see us do loops.

Suraya (leaning in to kiss Tavleen's cheek):Ya habibi!

Kima:Go team!

~

"Do you have a lot of friends, Rosie?" I ask my sister on Saturday while we were watching a reality TV show called The Sea Queen, which follows rival Norwegian salmon farmers duking it out for—salmon supremacy? It was that or a new reality show in a stunning Caribbean location where contestants pretended to be super horny but were rewarded for not banging each other called Wild and Proper.

Who the eff knows anymore.

"Yes," Rosie says without hesitation. "Droves. Sometimes, they fight to be my best friend, too, but I tell them to take turns. It's exhausting."

"Really?" I say, my stomach sinking.

"Yeah," Rosie says. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason." I ponder this. "And this has always been the case? Since like, you and Stanley moved to Malaysia from America?"

"Yeaaah," she says, "it's called having potable charm."

I don't correct her. "I seem to be going through a friendship drought."

"Oh," Rosie says. "Don't you have Zee?"

"Yes, but I meant my broader friend group."

"The Hot Flashes?" Rosie says, an admiring note creeping into her voice. "They are just so cute. Good thing you're not there to spoil things."

"Rosie!" I bark.

"Okay, okay, sorry. I'm just kidding." She makes a thinking face. "Hmm. It's true I haven't seen them around you in school since your accident." She gives me a shrewd expression. "Why do you think that is?"'

"I have no idea, because I don't think it's a me problem per se."

"Uh-huh. Are you sure?"

"Absolutely." I think hard. "You know what it is, I think with everything that's happened they're just…unsure of when they should reappear in my lives."

Voilà! Breakthrough! That must be the reason: I hadn't been making my availability to hang known!

So that's why I'm at the skating rink, casually hiding behind the drinks machine and peeping at my friends, who are laughing as they loop in wild circles around one another.

I really shouldn't be stalking my own friends, but in their case, how else was I supposed to meet them? I know they are really busy training, and they might have just been trying to give me space to get over my injury and all that. That's what today's about: showing them I'm able to participate again in our usual activities, even if I'm not running competitively.

This isn't the team's usual ice-skating rink; it's in a small suburban mall in a painfully chic neighborhood, brand-new and even more expensive than the last one. The price to enter, even when I bargained with the boy at the counter saying I wasn't actually going to skate (I wasn't cleared for skating, I don't think), was criminal, but in spite of all my debating he insisted I pay full student price, which was discounted but still painful. Apparently, rules are rules, which is what the girl behind the skates rental counter said when I told her I wasn't actually going to wear the skates, I just needed them for show. I was not surprised when she handed me a pair that I suspected had not been deodorized since its last user.

I duck and pretend to be lacing up when the girls, all eleven of them, tumble out of the rink in a riotous pile, squealing and chattering.

"Hey there," I say easily, not at all what someone who is stalking her friends would say.

The chatter stops and they turn as one toward me. "Oh, hi, Agnes," Kima Li says, her eyes wide. "Are…are you, er, going to skate in your condition?"

"Me?" I lift my right leg, the one I'd injured, and said, "Well, do you see a cast on this?"

"But Coach says—"

"Well, I'm fine," I say brightly. I stand up on my ice skates and it takes all of me not to squeak as a sharp pain shoots up from my leg. I plop back down in what I hope is a nonchalant way. "Would you guys like to go back in?"

"Er…" Suraya's eyes dart around. "We're headed to the movies."

A pause. "What are you seeing?" I say, not chirpily.

"Black Ops Fifty-Five: Murder Town,"Casey Lim says. "You know, with Charlie MacLane." Charlie MacLane is a new actor that Hollywood has cooked up in a lab, a mashup of Chris Hemsworth and one of the other Chrises.

"Ooh, that sounds fun, I haven't seen that yet," I enunciate.

No one asks if I'd like to join. A different pain shoots through my body, and my legs tremble. I'm glad I'm seated.

"Why haven't you guys reached out?" I manage to say after an uncomfortable silence stretches out between us. "I've been back for over two months. I've texted you about group hangs, even invited you all several times to see me perform stand-up comedy. Aren't we friends?"

More silence. Finally, Tavleen says, "You want the truth?"

"Yes," I say immediately. "I can take it."

The girls exchange looks that are basically musical chairs of who should speak for the group. Tavleen, who I heard had usurped me as captain of the team, takes a deep breath. "To be honest, it's kind of surprising that you think of us as your friends. I mean, we adore you as our captain, obviously."

"Obviously," Suraya echoed.

Tavleen nods. "The team is the best when you're around, but we didn't think…we never thought…well, we always thought you didn't like us."

"Didn't like you!" I bark. I recover and say, "Is…? How? What?" Very eloquent.

"Yeah, I agree," Suraya says.

Holly Toi, a reserve team nobody, exchanges a glance with Tavleen before clearing her throat and saying, "To be honest, it's tough to be around you. You're kind of intense, Agnes."

"Me? Intense?" This was news!

"We like you, of course," Tavleen says, gracious in her triumph as the new queen bee. "Like, as a captain. You were just so good for the team's performance."

"The best," Yuna Shastri said haltingly. "But in your drive to make us the best, you were—kind of hard on us, though."

"Yeah, so scary," Captain Obvious McObvious, aka Suraya, says. "You really kept the pressure on us, all the time. And you and Coach Everest were feeding off each other's energy. Now he's kind of chiller. Still snappy, but not so uptight. Less murdery."

"You're so murdery on relay events. That rictus smile," Holly said.

"Those eyes," someone chimed in.

"Iused to get nervous shits all the time, the night before meets, because of you," Kima volunteered squeakily.

"Those eyes!" someone else agreed.

"And whenever we were competing, individually, oh my God," Yuna said. "You are a sore loser, on the rare occasions one of us bested you."

"I don't think I've ever seen you laugh, except in triumph," Holly said.

"Yeah. And we didn't know how to respond to your texts about your comedy sets, either," Kima mumbles. She winces, not meeting my eyes. "Don't take this the wrong way"—which was a clear sign this was going to sting—"but, erm, you're not funny, Agnes."

Not funny? WTF? Kima the chatbot think I'm not funny?

"That's also why we don't want to see you perform," says Captain Obvious. Suraya polishes the hatchet before swinging it again. "Aside from…the lack-of-friendship thing."

I will myself not to wilt. The hits were coming from all angles. I duck my head and concentrate hard at lacing my shoes so that I won't burst into tears in front of the people I formerly considered my friends, my squad.

"Look, Agnes," Tavleen says, voice gentle. "We are the team we are because of you. We really appreciate you, honestly. We stan your captainship."

"We're just…not into you as a person," said Kima.

"We're sorry," Yuna says.

The silence is back, only now there's a little person in me howling and tearing things into little confetti bits, but I tamp down my emotions and look up at them. "It's okay," I say evenly.

"Well, um, see you around I guess," Cassie says.

The girls murmur their mea culpas as I concentrate on presenting a human smile, waving them off to their movies, where they will buy bucket-size popcorns and Diet Coke to snack on while they gossip about this encounter with their sad, broken ex-captain, who thought she was their friend. That she was one of them.

I ball my fist, alternating between rage, despair, and stomach-churning embarrassment, the kind I don't even have when I bomb onstage. Serves me right for letting my guard down. Serves me right for thinking I could be just like them. I snuffle into my palm, hoping people would think I'm snorting illegal substances instead of trying to stuff my tears out of sight.

"Hey there," a wry, friendly voice says.

I look up and gape at Vern in a cleaner's uniform, short-sleeved button-up collared shirt with matching pants in dark navy with worn patches. "What are you doing here?" I ask.

He shrugs, lifts a broom up like it's a sword and exposing a floral tattoo circling his bicep that peeked from under his right sleeve. "I work here. Well, it's one of the places where I work, anyhow." He sits down next me and fishes out what I hope is a clean tissue from the depths of a side pocket, handing it to me solemnly. "Bad fall?"

Something about the way he says it disarms me. I should have been mortified to be crying in public. Instead, I am overwhelmed with a rush of kinship. I blow my nose with a honk. "You could say that."

He doesn't speak and I don't either, and after a couple of minutes I'm almost back to normal, except the rage, the rage is still there, simmering in the background.

"Who are those girls you were with?" Vern asks.

"Schoolmates," I say.

"Oh." The disdain in that one word. "They fucking with you?" he says, picking at a loose thread, still in that throwaway tone.

I bite my lip. I don't want to talk about it, yet when I look at him, I see only sympathy radiating from his eyes. Somehow, I intuit that he would understand what I was going through, so I find myself telling him everything that's happened. Not sugarcoating it. Letting all the humiliation out.

He folds his arms, a sneer curling a corner of his lips. "Their excuse for not being there for you was—you were too good at your job?"

I gave a dry laugh. "They said they didn't call because I never let them in here." I point at my heart.

He makes a disbelieving face. "That the best they could do?" A snort of laughter, a look slid my way. "Don't believe their excuses. They are just a bunch of spoiled, shitty brats. And worse, they can't even be honest enough to tell the truth to your face."

I suck in a breath, mesmerized by the story he was spinning. "What do you mean?" Yes, Vern, tell me more. Help me understand.

Vern sighs and runs his hand through his dark, slightly wavy hair. "Look, I'm sorry I'm the one who has to disabuse you of the fantasy, but they didn't keep up the friendship because they didn't care enough to do so. That's all." His fingers begin an impatient drumming on his lap. "The truth is, Agnes, you're not like those girls, even if you go to school with them. They are from another world, and no matter what you do, you'll never belong. So, they don't want to make the effort."

I see myself at the track, wearing my secondhand or thrift-shopped gear; my patched-over, beaten-up backpack that I'd had for the past two years; and my "vintage" Casio watch that I pretended to love while everyone at school sported the latest smartwatches or designer watches that cost months of salary, sometimes more. My uniform, the only thing I shared with them, is an illusion. We are not cut from the same cloth, oh, no, not at all. I never fit in from the start.

He clocks every thought of mine. I never did have a poker face. His hand closes over mine and squeezes. "It's okay, forget them. You think any of those girls have half the mettle you have? That they can say the things you say onstage?"

I scoff, wiping away a stray tear. "I—I say stupid stuff onstage to make people laugh. I'm not giving a TED Talk."

"And? You think laughter isn't as hard won as any other human emotion?"

"I d-don't know."

He shakes his head, indignant. "You know that trite saying ‘Laughter is the best medicine'? Even as people trivialize those who make them laugh, in their saddest moments, comedy is what most of them reach for, not the so-called deep stuff. Comedy is craft. Comedy is power. You're a god when you can get someone to laugh, to think, like you do. Can't you see?" He leans close, grabs my gaze with his. "And, Agnes, you're worth ten of those girls, easy. You give yourself away too easily to people who don't deserve you."

I internalized the resolute way he said this. The way he made opinion into fact. Now that I think about it, when I didn't know, didn't care what they thought about me, life was just fine. I focused on the right things. As soon as I had time to ruminate on friendships, that's when I started opening myself up to hurt, when I started wanting to be part of the gang, to force my squareness into the perfect round peg that made up their lives, when here was Vern, who didn't care about polishing himself to suit an ideal, who was authentically his own. When I look at him, I see everything I'd been trying not to see, but it's cast in a new light. My differences are my strengths—something to be proud of.

"Fuck 'em," I say. I pull off my skates and kick them aside, wincing from the force of my kick. I try to ignore the new twinge of pain in my left kneecap. "Fuck 'em." I never swear, but this feels like an incantation of power. He's right: I don't need them. I don't need any of them. They didn't deserve me, so they weren't getting any of me.

"Come on," he says, taking me by the hand. He leads me out of the rink, dropping the skates at the checkout and telling me he'll get my money back later, and past some shops to the exit leading to the parking lot.

"You see any of their cars?" he asks quietly.

I gaze around the parking lot and spot the lime-green Mini Cooper that Kima drives, which she probably got for her sixteenth birthday without needing to lift a single finger for it.

"There," I say, pointing, almost breathless with tension.

Vern quickly cases the parking lot, which has cameras near the exit, and hugs the walls, slipping down a darker stretch of the way presumably out of the camera's field of vision, his head bent low.

I see everything that happens in a daze, the quick way he darts next to Kima's car, the soft pop, and then he's headed my way, scooting with his back to the cameras as he walks quickly back to where I am.

"What happened?" I ask, even though I've guessed. I know.

He lifts up a Swiss Army knife and grins. "I brought your friends back down to earth."

"You're unhinged," I say, my eyes wide. I can't decide if I'm impressed or scared.

"That depends on who you ask," he says. He flicks his eyes at me. "I don't think you have anything to be afraid of, in your case. I take care of mine."

Okay, so maybe I'm…touched?

His voice regains its playful tone. "Now come, let's ditch the rest of my shift and to go the movies. What would you like to see?"

My answer is immediate. "How about Black Ops Fifty-Five: Murder Town?"

~

Vern:I had fun today. Anytime you want to hang again one-on-one, or take out some people for you, let me know

Me:

Me:As soon as I get my essays done, maybe next week

Vern:K. See you at comedy. You going to tomorrow's open mike or another one?

Me:Tomorrow's. See you

Vern: