Page 85 of Puck You Both

I open my mouth to ask what that means, but she’s already gone, arms linked with Mama Paws.

Above all of it, on the tallest light stand, sits Hendrix. Menacingly, if you ask me.

Oh, well. I didn’t put him there and I will not be removing him. He's the photographer's problem. And God's.

Theo is mid-oration about July—there's a vision now, apparently, and the vision is him—when the door bangs open and Becker enters the building backwards.

"—I'm telling you, team aesthetics are a democracy. We vote on things. Nobody voted on this."

"It's his head," Kane says, following him in.

"It's a shared visual environment!"

"In Russia—" Petrov’s voice enters before he does, followed immediately by Groover’s, “Please, don’t.”

Behind them comes Ace with his arm around a guy I recognize as Devon, his very public boyfriend, and on the leash between them, a medium-sized dog who is very obviously the one walking them. Then half the Wolves roster, all mid-argument about something nobody's naming, and I can’t read.

Then Wall fills the doorway, and the thing reads itself.

The red is back, full blaze, fresh from the bottle and louder than a certain parrot.

Last time I saw him, it was dying quietly at the roots while Theo delivered its eulogy. Wall said nothing.

But apparently, he's decided something.

My chest attempts a maneuver I have focus to stop, because there are forty witnesses in this room and my face has become a liability I can't afford. Across the room, Theo has gone up like bread in an oven. He catches my eye. I give him the look. He receives the look, performs a full-body update, and redirects all his feelings into crouching down to whisper at Ace’s dog. Whatever he tells her, she keeps.

Becker, meanwhile, is circling Wall like unfinished business. "I want it on the record," he says, "that when I lose a bet, I serve my sentence with dignity."

"You cried," Wall says.

"With dignity." He gestures at Wall's head. "And when my sentence ends, I move on. I don't go back to the salon and order seconds."

"I told you, it grew on me."

Becker stops walking. Something behind his eyes buffers. "It's a punishment. It's not supposed to grow on you. That's not—" he turns to the room at large "—that's not how justice works."

Wall shrugs while Becker produces his phone and documents Wall’s head from two angles. "That's going on the corkboard."

"Get a hobby."

"You are the hobby."

The big one's problems, as advertised.

And I stand ten feet away holding my clipboard, one of three people in this building who know exactly why that hair is red, being so, so normal about it. Someone should give me an award.

The schedule says the co-chairs confer before the first setup, and the schedule is the boss now, so I walk over, clipboard first, like a shield.

"Wallace."

"Grześkowiak," he apparently thinks he says. What actually comes out of him though, is the usual noise in the shape of my name. But he tries.

And then we stand there, two co-chairs, conferring. In view of two rosters, a content crew, and a parrot, with everything we're not saying stacked in the four feet between us.

Theo, who is incapable of letting a silence reach adulthood, joins us and makes it worse.

"Wallace. Good weather for a calendar."