Run 9a
Obviously I’m still pandemic-slow, but here’s a piece of that running-shoe story. Myka still has no idea what Helena did, knows, or thinks, but she’s about to find out some pretty salient information... anyway, the two of them, their past, all of it. The things they want seem irreconcilable, but sometimes it’s a matter of knowing when to bend. (And recognizing that there can be good reasons to do so.) See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7a, part 7b, and part 8 for details about those wants and reasons. I’ll be focusing intensely on my gift exchange story after this, in hopes of getting it into decent shape by the deadline, which is bearing down pretty relentlessly... can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with this time around!
Run 9a
Not long after Pete told her about the deal, Myka got a call from Claudia Donovan.
“Who are you?” the little shouty genius demanded.
“Myka Bering, from AAI,” she said. Pedantic but true. “Didn’t we go over this before?”
“But, like, running the world, is that your side hustle?”
“I wish,” Myka said, not altogether truthfully. “This one time I got lucky.”
“Luck? Please. You’re officially a starred contact for life.”
Myka huffed out a noise: half amused, half incredulous. “Probably won’t help you with anything.”
“Who knows what tomorrow’s ‘anything’ might look like. For life,” Claudia emphasized.
She was certainly right about tomorrow. Right about today, in fact. “Thank you? I think? This is the strangest day of my existence,” Myka told her, and that was pretty close to altogether truthful.
Claudia snorted. “Lady, every time I think that, there’s three more in a row, bang bang bang. Enjoy your symptom.” She abruptly ended the call, leaving Myka trying to think through what being a starred contact for life in Claudia World was going to mean for the minute-by-minute progression of that life. Probably something about exhaustion—
—but before she could turn that into a complete thought, Giselle marched up to her desk, announcing, “I just listened to a fascinating conversation.”
“Conference call?” Myka tried, hoping it was something normal and business-y, which would suggest everyone might someday in the non-distant future get back to that normal. A normal that was mostly business-y.
“In a waaaay,” Giselle dragged, then snickered. “You should lurk the elevators more.”
“No thanks. I don’t want to know everybody’s business, and I definitely don’t want them knowing mine.”
“That’s what made the conversation fascinating.”
That sounded way too bright. “Knowing everybody’s business?”
“Knowing yours.”
“Mine.” Myka was not looking forward to whatever was coming next.
“Helena and Pete had a conversation. That’s what I listened to. Then Pete and I had a conversation.”
“Please don’t make me have to care about either of those things.”
“The funny part is, right before that, I’d been saying to Helena about how she and I could pass some time. You know.”
How could that possibly be the funny part? “Well. Then I guess you should. Pass some time.” Ripping me up inside, Myka thought. She had no right. But: pass, some, time. Rip, rip, rip.
“Or not.” Giselle paused. “You don’t have a boyfriend. Why didn’t I get that?”
That made for a stutter-stop, such that Myka couldn’t read her own mind: was she proud of having staved off this realization for as long as she had? Relieved to have been freed from the “should I confess, and if so, when” pressure? Disgruntled—or, even more disturbing, pleased—that her status quo with Giselle was now likely to change? Getting back to normal was a dream that was never going to come true. “Is it better or worse if I tell you Pete had basically the same response when he found out?”
“He’s the one who let it slip,” Giselle said. “After Helena told him off for being unfaithful to you.”
“After... what?”
“He was trying it with Kelly. Like he does.”
“Like you did,” Myka pointed out.
“How was I supposed to know she had her eye on some decathlete? Don’t change the subject.”
“What exactly is the subject?”
“Helena asked him if he loves you.”
Myka, having no rational way to think about that, resorted to sarcasm. “Does he? I’m on tenterhooks.” She pushed it even further from her with, “I don’t even know what tenterhooks are, but I’m on them.”
“Anyway she was on fire about how he better treat you right if he does,” Giselle said, not bothering with any of Myka’s resorting or pushing.
Still no way to think about it. “Helena. On fire about how Pete better treat me right. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“The most,” Giselle said, lengthily skeptical.
“In all honesty, maybe so. Other than Claudia Donovan saying I’m a starred contact for life.” But also there was a banal peacock, Myka’s memory ghosted at her. Saying ridiculous words, and you heard them.
“So where are you?” Giselle asked.
A very good question. Where, really, was she? That was as difficult to assess as was her response to Giselle knowing the truth. Was she happy that she’d managed to best Helena? Disappointed in herself for still wanting to put her hands on the enemy, for still being desperate to put her hands on the enemy? Terrified of the limbo in which answering “yes” to both those questions stranded her? The answer to that last question, at least, was a clear “yes,” never mind any others.
She waited too long to respond. Giselle shook her head and said, “Your mouth’s not moving, but I see your mind flying, trying to make it all make sense. It won’t. What she does to you, it won’t.”
Waiting, flying; what Helena did to Myka. “It’s fake,” she said. “What she does. To me: making me... not me,” she ended, weakly, but she felt it as an admission. A confession. All about what Helena did: it was wrong, cheating, fake.
Giselle pushed that off: “So what? You worried about breaking records? I mean maybe you could, you and Helena, but what’s the international sex organization keeping the books?”
“Why would you say that?” Myka demanded. A prudish snap: nothing but a resentful defense against how close Giselle’s arrow had zinged.
Myka’s outrage was, unsurprisingly, ineffective; Giselle’s dismissive yet amused lift of a corner of her mouth made that clear. “As I said to Pete a little while ago: Could we be honest, here it’s just us? You wouldn’t act like you’re acting if it wasn’t about personal bests. Not you? It’s more you. You and Helena both; I can see what’s going on. Is it gonna stop going on?”
And what was Myka supposed to say to that? Lie and deny it, or tell the truth and feel her face burn to no purpose at all?
“Obviously I can’t tell you much about Helena you don’t already know,” Giselle said, as if that would give Myka a way to talk about it.
It gave her nothing but objections... but objections were in fact a way to talk. “Of course you can. You did. You told me who her father is. You told me what her company’s investing in.”
“Those things aren’t about Helena. That self she is. Pay attention, because one thing I really can tell you—the biggest, even though it isn’t about that full-down self she is either, or maybe it is?—is that she lost her job.”
She—what? “What?” said Myka’s mouth, echoing her head.
“Right, what: what are you going to do about that?”
Myka stiffened her body, a conscious hardening that nevertheless seemed involuntary, an animal defensive instinct. “Why do I have to—”
“Please. You haven’t figured out she told me about Ingenumedix? So you could leverage it into a deal?”
No. No. No. “You said it was a tip from someone who cares about competition being fair!”
“Did I? Well, then, maybe she does. She sure evened things up between you two, right?”
“So she helped me cheat,” Myka said, with a heaviness. Helena maneuvering Myka into doing what she herself had done. Cheating. That made for a painful—intentionally painful?—symmetry.
“So she helped. Stop there.”
Myka accused, “She used you to do it. Used you!” Because Helena had to be at fault here. Had to be.
“She asked me to do a thing and I did it,” Giselle said. “Asked me, and I did it. Is that using?”
How could Giselle not see Helena’s fault? Myka said, “But I kept you out of it,” trying to make clear that she’d seen the danger the whole situation posed. She knew it was a desperate flail, a last I’m different shot at holding herself apart from what Helena had done.
“Does that matter?” Giselle asked, completely reasonably. “Is that a thing I said you should do? Come on. Now you know, so she deserves some real word from you. Here’s her details.” Giselle lifted her phone and tapped, presumably those details. Myka pointedly kept her eyes on Giselle, away from her own phone. “She’s supposed to leave tonight,” Giselle said. And then she was the one to wait, not to answer, but rather for an answer.
I can outwait you, Myka thought, articulating it just that way in her head. She crossed her arms.
Giselle took that as a response—correctly—and she frowned disapproval. “Don’t let her,” she said. It was an order.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Myka snarled. Resist, resist, resist. That had to be the right path.
She expected Giselle to snarl back. Instead she said, calm, “So when I was at Texas. One assistant coach—let’s call him Coach A—everybody said they loved, but they didn’t really. Another, Coach B, we said we hated her, but that wasn’t true either. You know why?”
“How could I possibly know that.” Something about real athletes. Exactly what Myka didn’t need to know she didn’t know right now.
“Coach A,” Giselle said, now gentle, like an elementary school teacher. “He didn’t care if you skipped the ‘optional’ 4am workouts. But Coach B? She called you a loser if you did.” Then she waited, as if Myka was supposed to jump to the point.
Whatever the point was, Myka was determined to resent it, and to show that, she demanded, “Why are you telling me this? I’m not an athlete, so how could I understand?” She put her pain of exclusion right out there, hoping that would make Giselle just stop. Just stop with this story and whatever it was meant for. Just stop and let Myka understand, feel, believe, that all of this had come to an end.
Giselle sighed. “Coach A? Let you do what you wanted. Handed out permission like candy. Coach B? No.”
And then Myka did see the point of Giselle’s parable: “You’re right,” she conceded. “With Helena, I did what losers do: only what I wanted.”
Giselle shook her head. Again softly elementary, she said, “Trust you to get the takeaway one-eighty wrong. You didn’t wait for the moral of the story: the absolute best was when Coach B said ‘You’ve worked hard. Sleep in tomorrow.’ What I see here is, you’ve worked hard.”
“Oh good. I get to sleep in?” Myka sneered, knowing her defenses for how increasingly pathetic they were.
“Permission,” Giselle said. “Who’ll you take it from?”
That brought Myka up short. Permission. Who would she take it from?
Giselle raised an eyebrow. She’d seen the stop. “I’ll try again. When was the last time somebody gave you permission, and then you did the thing because of that?”
Now Myka surprised herself by telling the truth: “My father said to meet something halfway.”
“So he’s the one. Get on that.”
“I wouldn’t tell my father about any of this for anything,” Myka said. “Not even if I could have that other timeline where Deceits don’t exist.”
Giselle nodded, and Myka hated that nod, because she knew what would come next. Giselle didn’t disappoint: “Call him. I mean it. Right this minute.”
“No,” Myka said. Because Giselle was absolutely right.
Giselle shrugged. “Be a mule, then. Let it be known I tried. And I will let it be known.”
“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.” Myka said this aloud, not intending to but doing so anyway, meaning “don’t tell Helena,” praying for “don’t tell Helena,” but was that only because she couldn’t stand the idea of being the one to push Giselle toward talking to Helena again? That pain, that rip, rip, rip... “If I call my father, will you not?”
“That’s the real thing for you,” Giselle said, shrewd and satisfied—and justified, because she had indeed been right. To Myka’s nod, she said, “Then okay. Do it now, and show me your phone.”
“You need proof?”
“Otherwise you’ll do some kind of lawyer jiu-jitsu move that’ll stand up in court, and the real job won’t get done.”
“I can’t do jiu-jitsu,” Myka said, sullen.
“You went to law school.”
“It didn’t take.” Clearly she hadn’t learned enough there to enable her to make a case for standing up and bolting for the elevators... proof of that was her inability to imagine a way to avoid finding her father on her phone and initiating a call. She hoped, fantastically, that it would simply fail to connect, so she could use that as evidence that she wasn’t meant to receive any permission from anybody about any part of this.
Of course it started ringing.
“Anyway,” Giselle said, “Pete’s hooking me up with this cute new lady in HR, so I’m out of both sides of this game.”
Out of both sides of... that meant no talking to Helena, not in the way Myka feared, which meant no danger, which meant Myka didn’t need to talk to her father after all. She scrabbled to disconnect, but he answered with a cheery, “How’s my athlete wrangler?”
Myka tried her best to look daggers at Giselle, who swanned off happily. Innocently.
How Myka envied her: it was certainly nice that somebody was out of this game. “I’m fine,” she told her father. It was true in a physical sense. But: “Mostly,” she allowed, because he would hear some wobble, a signal she’d try to hide but couldn’t. Wouldn’t? “Here’s a thing. Speaking of wrangling athletes. You know those shoes we’ve been trying to keep out of competition? I think we might be able to, finally.”
“That seems good.”
“I’m not sure it is. There’s a deal, and I think I facilitated it... but someone helped me with that. With proprietary information. Feels like cheating.” That might have been as much as she could say. She again considered disconnecting—but if she did, he’d just call right back, and then she’d have to articulate a reason.
“Well,” he said. That sounded dangerously noncommittal, and she braced herself for rebuke. “To stop real cheating? Still seems good.”
“I didn’t expect that to be your position,” she understated.
“The world confounds our expectations,” he said. That caused Myka a little choke of recognition—the idea of expectations, the perils of their being confounded—which she tried to disguise. Obviously she didn’t succeed, for: “Someone,” her father said. “I hope you know I mostly try not to be your nosy old dad, but who’s this ‘someone’?”
Myka could find no way to respond.
“Sounds important,” he said, and then he kept quiet.
She tried waiting.
It didn’t work any better with him than it had with Giselle, and she buckled under the silence. “Yes,” she capitulated. “To me. But.” How much could she say? “There was some past that wasn’t great. With... them.”
Her father hummed a “thinking” hum—pure, like a pitchpipe. Then: “Have you thanked them?”
“What?”
He exhaled an aggrieved sigh. “Your mother and I taught you reasonably well, I thought. It didn’t occur to you to offer thanks in return for help?”
“I told you, there was past that wasn’t great,” Myka said, and for that she received his quiet, no-answer object lesson again. “You’re a better person than I am,” she finally managed.
“Not better. Older.”
Better. Older. “You’d hate her,” Myka said, for the space of this one statement giving up on “them,” on diffidence, on trying to maintain distance between herself and all that had happened.
“No doubt, and I’ll try to be all cagey about that, to be polite. Then again I might make up my own mind. When you bring her home, I mean.”
Myka hurried, hurried hurried hurried, to assure him, “It won’t come to that.” But for a moment, she did entertain the idea of bringing Helena home. She saw it: Helena, charming her parents. Helena, charming Myka herself even more by charming her parents. Helena, charming... oh god.
“You’re a good kid who’s always been terrible at predicting the future,” her father told her, and it might have been the truest thing he’d ever said. The last part, anyway; as for being a good kid, Myka was pretty sure she didn’t qualify. Or maybe when she was actually a kid she’d been good, but then again, when she was a kid, she’d known, with strict boundaries, what “good” meant. Where it applied. What qualified.
Her work phone rang then, giving her instant relief, but the display name just as quickly made her queasy. “I have to go,” she said. “Dan Badger’s office is calling.”
“Speaking of important people. But about the other one, let us know when you’re ready. Been waiting for someone to be important to you.”
Myka could think of nothing to say to that other than what she’d told Claudia: “This is the strangest day of my existence.” She moved to disconnect the call then, for Badger’s office wouldn’t want to be kept waiting, but not before she heard her father say, with a knowing chuckle, “Wait till you meet your child.”
TBC
