Page 126 of Puck You Both

The sound three hundred people make is not describable with the vocabulary I keep. Hendrix pulls back, looks at me with one eye, then the other, evaluating the offer.

"What the puuuuck," he announces, satisfied, and the tension bursts.

There’s a standing ovation. For me, or the bird, unclear, and I don't need the distinction. Mama Paws is laughing, the band, showing real professionalism, plays a little sting. Hendrix takes one lap of the ceiling to collect his applause and returns to the perch, where he preens like he’s been proven right about everything once again.

Theo is doubled over with his hands on his knees. When he surfaces, wiping his eyes, he passes close enough to say it under the applause, for me only. "Best save all season."

Patrick applauds like a rival applauds, which is perfect.

Crisis averted. Secret intact.

The coat check line is short by the time I get there some three hours later, gala thinning, my people scattered into goodbyes. I'm holding two claim tickets, because Theo handed me his on his way to say goodnight to Wanda, a small domestic transaction that nobody watching would think twice about, and I'm thinking about nothing, trying to rest my brain, the first empty-headed minute of my whole night. Right up until the whole night gets shattered.

"Both of them, huh?"

I turn my head so fast I get a whiplash, and find Becker standing next to me, bow tie undone and his voice down low.

My heart takes one long step down a staircase.

I could ask what he means and deflect. There's a version of me, from about October, who would. But that version didn't stand in a hotel stairwell arguing with himself, or learn a Polish name off an app, or buy a chair.

I take one, long breath.

"Pretty much," I say.

Becker's face goes on a journey. I count the stops. Shock, recount, vindication, something wet, and then it lands somewhere I didn't forecast, which is awe.

"You— You absolute legend, you!" he says, and I shush him. "You couldn't just get one like regular people. You had to win the category."

"Tell no one." I hand the attendant the tickets. "I'm telling the team Friday. Dinner, my place."

"You're hosting." He says it like I've just claimed the Sun rises on the West. "You've never hosted. Oh my god, so it is real. You—" He stops himself with both hands, physically. "I will carry this secret to the grave."

"Thank you."

"Wait. Wait!" His palms drop. "Friday's in four days. Wall. I can’t carry it four days. I'm asking you, man to man—" he points toward the ballroom, at the perch, at the entire concept of Hendrix "—I am begging you to move it up."

"Friday."

"Thursday. Meet me at Thursday."

"Friday."

He accepts the coats from the attendant because his hands need a job, looking at them for a few seconds, doing the math on whose is the one that isn’t mine, and his eye develops a small tic that I predict will still be there Friday.

"Four days," he says, mostly to the coats. "I'm going to need a new corkboard."

He walks off, practically vibrating, and I stand at the coat check with two coats over my arm, one mine, one not, in a hotel where nobody knows anything for four more days.

Soon has a date now.

I confirmed it myself. Twice.

Chapter 24

WALL

MY PLAN HAS five phases, and I've run it twice. Once on paper, once standing alone in my living room, pointing at where everyone will sit.