Page 54 of How We Play the Game
I glance over at Ivan, who wiggles his prodigious eyebrows at me. He really wasn’t kidding. I am basically already in with Brian!
“I absolutely do,” I say with a little too much enthusiasm—my voice echoing back to me in the weirdly sparse hallway. “Thank you so much, Brian. I—”
“That’s great.” Brian stops in his tracks so abruptly I almost walk right into him. He turns on his heel in front of his suite at the end of the hall, his own name written on the gold nameplate beside the doorframe. “Ivan, do you mind coming in here for a minute?”
There’s a pause as Ivan looks over at me with a look that’s either panic, confusion, or both. My brows knit together in confusion as I glance between Ivan and Brian and back again.
“Y-yeah. Sure.” Ivan’s smile seems forced as his arm falls away from my shoulders and he takes a slight step away from me.
Brian still has enough energy to power Times Square, though, as he gives me a megawatt smile. “Thank you, Zora. Again, really good work today.”
“Th-thank you,” I stammer out, managing to stop myself from bowing at the last second and taking an uncertain step back instead.
Brian and Ivan disappear into Brian’s office in the blink of an eye, the enthusiastic lilt of Brian’s voice carrying even through the thick wood of the door. I stay rooted in place for longer than I should, unsure if I should leave or hang around and wait for Ivan. Wedidsay we wanted to debrief after our match today—go over any moments where we might’ve slipped on camera, or things we can do to improve for next time. And then there’s the whole Cass thing, which I’ll need to sort out at some point. My head spins just from the thought of having to face that conversation.
Still, something keeps me rooted in place. The softly muffled sound of Brian’s voice. Of Ivan saying something I can just barely make out. I take one step toward the door. Adrenaline and curiosity pushing down my conscience and pulling my body forward. Then another, and another. Until, finally, I’m close enough that those muffled sounds begin to take shape. And I can hear exactly what’s on the other side.
IVAN ALL ALONG
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THERE WERE WORSE places to be than inside Brian Juno’s cushy box at the Wizzard Theater. Worse places like the minuscule town in Ohio in which Ivan’s parents decided to have their daughter, the minuscule house where they raised her, and the minuscule bedroom-slash-office they converted when a second child arrived twelve years after the first. Even as a kid Ivan knew that he was somewhat supplementary to the plan his parents made for their lives, and for his sister’s, so he endeavored to spend as little time in that house as necessary, and he succeeded.
The trick to staying out of the house was to make as many other people as possible desire his company. When he was a kid, Ivan maintained a packed schedule of sleepovers, spaghetti dinners at the neighbors’ houses, camping trips, and anything else that kept him away from the borrowed feeling he felt whenever he crossed the threshold to his childhood home. Invitations were his currency, and invitations only came when people wanted you around.
To his peers, Ivan radiated the kind of nice-guy coolness that makes teachers and authority figures disbelieve the stereotype of popular kids. He knew everyone’s birthday, their favorite color, what games they played and how to beat them, and prided himself on making at least one person feel special every day. To his neighbors he was a Good Kid, attending church on Sundays with one family, Saturday service at his town’s only synagogue with another, complimenting each casserole-bearing doyenne when they shyly unfolded the tinfoil lids keeping their post-service luncheon hot in the basement or meeting hall. He found if he was pleasant enough and asked people questions that got them talking about themselves, no one minded when he declined to participate further in their religion because as far as Ivan was concerned, God was bagels.
Ivan grew up cooking with moms, memorizing all kinds of sports statistics to chop it up with the dads, smiling at the girls who rarely got smiles, and holding court with guys who weren’t sure if they wanted to kick him, date him, or be him. He was good at being liked almost wherever he went, shapeshifting from one paragon to another, and it was fuckingexhausting.
Rather, it had been exhausting. Recently Ivan had caught a break. A huge, Zora-shaped break. A girl, a whole, complicated, brilliant, outrageously hot girl who saw exactly who Ivan was underneath the countless layers of people-pleasing character work. And she liked what she saw. Eventually.
He knew when he met Zora that she was someone special. At the time he assumed “special” meant “put on this earth to test me,” but looking back there was something else he’d felt when he first looked into her clever black eyes: he felt seen.Back then the feeling was terrible—nothing he said or did charmed her or convinced her to give him the little bit of leeway he’d been cultivating with other people since he learned to talk. Christ, she literally met him once before she decided to shoot him in the face, andhe deserved it!
The night of the Fourth, when the fireworks had finished and the two of them walked back toward Lincoln Center, Ivan admitted to Zora how shook he’d been that day.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I thought about you,” he’d said. The hundreds of people leaving Central Park after the fireworks had caught up with them, cocooning both Zora and Ivan in the cozy anonymity of a summer-drunk (and probably drunk-drunk) evening crowd. “After Wizzcon. Couldn’t get you out of my head, really.”
“Same,” Zora admitted. “Usually after I beat someone, I don’t think about them ever again, but you got under my skin like a splinter. At first I thought I just had a wildly overdeveloped sense of revenge—”
“You do. Iñigo Montoya–ass.”
“—but that wasn’t totally the reason why. The memory just stayed frozen up there in my head. When you touched my shoulder, when you looked at me. I was just so … I thought it was angry? Though now I realize it was probably something else. Horny-angry. Horngry.”
That was the least sexy thing Ivan had ever heard, so he kissed her.
“I can’t pretend around you,” he’d said later, as they idled outside their building, too caught up in the heat of the day and each other to head inside just yet. “Scares the shit out of me.”
“I can tell,” Zora replied. “It’s hilarious.” Ivan laughed at that, imagining a sign attached to the left side of Zora’s chest.Do not enter, it read, invitingly. “I can’t pretend around you either. Or anyone, really. I’m a single-speed bike.”
“It’s the best speed. My favorite speed, my only speed. If it’s over the speed limit, I’m getting a ticket.”
“Relax.” Zora hadn’t meant it unkindly. She’d swung around on a No Parking street sign and used the momentum to kiss him again. “And, yeah, I do see the irony of my uptight ass telling you to relax.”
“Watch it,” Ivan said in the thankfully brief moments when her mouth wasn’t interrupting his mouth. “Just because you’re my fake girlfriend doesn’t mean I won’t fight you for talking shit about my fake girlfriend.”
“Oh.” Zora pulled away and tilted her head thoughtfully. “Right. That. Should we maybe—”
“Narrative consistency,” he’d reminded her. “Is just ‘girlfriend’ fine?”
