Chapter Text
The final straw is Patrick Leary, a name practically unrecognizable to even the most devout Ravens fans, because he is a third-string defensive dealer, or as third-string as Ravens are allowed to be.
Allison only remembers him because, in a heated check during her final season with the Foxes, during his five odd minutes of game time, he shoves her into the plexiglass wall, snarling a chirp she had learned long ago to tune out, and tries to hold her there. He tries, but he doesn’t succeed for long. The minute Allison realizes she can’t wrench away from his grip, she head butts him hard enough to leave a dent in the metal grilling of his helmet.
They both receive yellow cards.
Leary’s coach subs him out a minute later. With some satisfaction, Allison notes when his name disappears from the lineup, a week or so after the bruises on her arms do. Leary is spending some time in a psychiatric facility Allison hopes is nothing like the pricey one her parents shipped her off to.
It clearly doesn’t help him much. His skills are still miles below Allison’s when she faces him again that spring.
Two weeks later, Patrick Leary officially signs with the Houston Sirens.
Allison has yet to receive a call from any professional team.
Which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. What she should do is grab a DVD of her best plays (hello, championships anyone?), hop in her pink convertible, and show herself into the recruitment teams’ office for whatever professional team she pleases.
Before, in high school, her coach told her no twice before letting her on the team. She’d never played before, and her skills weren’t up to par with the other girls, certainly not with the boys. She threatened to show up to practice anyway.
Her parents’ no was harder to circumvent. She punished herself for it longer than she should’ve. But she caught up. She always catches up.
She decides she’ll wait until after championships. They lose to the Trojans. No one calls.
Allison’s final project in her senior seminar fashion class is to create a collection. Allison flies out to New York, buys fabric worth its weight in gold, flies back, and spends the next week sewing.
Her professor calls her work uninspired and dull. Allison flies back to New York and calls an old friend of her parents. He calls it visionary and offers her a job.
Allison declines, but leverages his offer to get the Council of Fashion Designers of America to approve her for an official New York Fashion Week runway show in September.
Play her cards wrong, and she’ll be designing glossy angel wings and bustiers for Victoria’s Secret come February. Play them right, and she’ll have her own fledgling brand.
When Kevin finds out, he storms into the girls’ dorm room. Dan let him in, the traitor. Allison lounges on the couch with her feet up as he paces himself into a fury.
“Don’t be stupid. This is stupid,” Kevin preaches to no one.
Allison has only ever seen him look at her with this much emotion once before, when she said Jeremy Knox was overrated in hopes of settling her bet on if they were screwing. She thinks about saying it again to see what color his face will turn. He’s gone pink, then red, and is now rapidly approaching a rich purple shade Allison would buy silk in.
“What do you care?” Allison continues filing her nails, lifting them to inspect them in the light. “You’ve bitched about my skills for years.”
“You’re decent.” Kevin says, “You work well with the backline, you stopped overextending on precision passes this year—there are plenty of professional teams that should have you.”
Allison glances up at him and curls her lip. She can taste a flicker of her Glossy Summer Sparkle Peach Lipgloss.
“You’re obnoxious.”
“So? So are you,” Kevin snaps, barrelling on. “The Houston Sirens, for one, they need to balance Thea’s strength with speed. I’ll put in a word and—
“No.”
“Why?”
He taps one foot insufferably and waits for an answer. Allison feels a pang of sympathy for the monster, having to deal with Kevin constantly chasing him around. She's starting to wish she had a knife herself.
Kevin won’t leave until she gives him an answer.
“I’m not wasting this,” Allison says finally, gesturing expansively at herself, “on decent.”
“What, you’re giving up because you won’t be Court?” Kevin says, like it’s obvious. Like Allison is an idiot if she ever thought otherwise or dared to begrudge that reality for one second.
Allison purchases fifty Muldani posters throughout her time in high school, replacing and reframing each time her mother throws one out.
She listens to every commentator in her first year with the Foxes, no matter how vitriolic. She notes down her faults.
She watches clips of checks hurling her to the ground, sees the comments whining that the ladies should have their own league away from such aggressive behavior. She hates those comments more than the ones that say the bitch had it coming. Somehow, the clips always stop before she gets back up.
Allison loves Exy, but she accepted a long time ago that Exy will never love her back.
At best, they will martyr her, like visionary, motherly, dead Kayleigh Day.
But she’s not about to say any of that to the Son of Exy. She is not about to fall to her knees and thank the Queen for deigning to knight her with decent (for a girl). She knows she is. She is.
She was, she says, giggling at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side, actually pretty decent.
“Oh, who am I kidding?” Allison lifts her glass to cheers with her date. He seems to be reeling from the sight of 20 plus models racing to get wasted, still in their makeup from the show. Her show. “I was fucking amazing. We won championships.”
The room glitters, humming with chatter and the sickly sweet smell of blended perfumes. It’s also spinning a little, but Allison doesn’t mind that.
“No, yeah, that checks out, you have that, um.” Her date seems to decide however he was going to finish the sentence is unsuitable and trails off. Allison arches one perfect eyebrow and waits. “Athletic look?”
Allison knows what she looks like. Her shoulders ripple with muscle. Golden hair cascades down her back like a Disney Prince’s wet dream, maintained by upwards of 20 products (including dye, though she’ll never admit it). Her skin is naturally tan. She’s six feet in heels.
Her mother is 5’2 on a good day. On her wedding day, Charlotte Chu turned Reynolds weighed 95 lbs. Her husband could completely encircle her waist with his hands. She would bring this up a lot, in a vaguely disappointed tone, during Allison’s high school years, and Allison would retort that Charlotte married a 6’2 former linebacker. The point eludes her mother to this day.
Allison knows she’s beautiful. If her date wants one of her barely legal models with tits like mosquito bites and canyons between their thighs, she’ll happily send him packing and find another one.
“No, I get it. I played some Exy back in high school,” her date hurriedly adds. “Hey, how many goals do you think I could get past you?”
Someone snorts. Allison turns, feeling fury boil up in her chest—her high school teammates always laughed at the tabloid articles—and lays eyes on the bartender. He’s looking at her date, not her.
“Zero.” He and Allison say in unison.
“Zero? Come on, be realistic.”
“Dude,” The bartender’s voice is dripping with disdain. “It’s the Foxes. And Reynolds was a powerhouse.”
“Sure.” Her date is getting agitated now that another man is involved in the conversation. “I’m not saying it’d be easy, but I could—
“And I’m—I was a dealer, idiot,” Allison adds, before the guy behind the counter can counter on her behalf. She carefully enunciates every word. “Not a goalkeeper. I’d knock you on your ass before you got anywhere near the goal, and that’s if you could get a hold of the ball. Somehow, I doubt your noodle arms are up to the task.”
“Bitch.” Her date says, like it’s a realization.
“That’s more like it.” Allison grins with all her teeth. Four of them are implants: Two molars and her upper canines. Her natural canines were pointed like vampire fangs. The implant's edges are flat.
“I’m Bryan. Bryan Rogan,” the bartender says, as Nick Jack Max, whatever his name is, storms off. Allison looks him up and down.
A blurry tattoo pokes out from under the sleeves of his collared shirt, trailing down his hand. His eyes are dark, his hair choppy and close-cropped. He could lift her without breaking a sweat.
She kind of wants to lick him and see if he tastes like the whiskey he pours her.
“Allison.” She says, and knocks back her shot. “Reynolds.”
“I know who you are.”
“You should. This whole party is for me.”
“You enjoying it?” Bryan asks.
“What do you think?” Allison snaps her fingers and waits for another shot to appear.
“You’re drinking a lot for someone who scored what I’m hearing was a very impressive runway slot.” He keeps his eyes on the liquor, keeps his voice even, but she senses the amusement in his tone all the same.
It figures that her first love will never be taken seriously because it’s for women, her second love will never take her seriously because she’s a woman, and her third love is dead.
“I take it back,” Allison says. “I don’t care what you think.”
“What, you don’t trust my opinion on tulle?”
“My opinion,” Allison says slowly, “Is that you should shut up and come home with me before I change my mind.”
“My shift isn’t over.”
Allison says nothing.
“Not that that would mean anything to someone like you,” Bryan says, then adds more seriously, “You’re drunk.”
Allison spins, flawlessly walks ten steps heel-toe heel-toe. It doesn’t help her case. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a boy is saying I thought you weren’t gonna wake up, low, which means she’s not nearly drunk enough.
She stays until the end of Bryan’s shift. He drives her home in his rat trap of a car. He sleeps on her couch.
In the morning, she kicks him out on principle. He’s only a little offended.
They go out that Friday, and he’s back in her apartment by Sunday. The deadline for pro team roster releases passes while he feels her up on the couch. Allison doesn’t think about it. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t check the lineups. She eats buttery popcorn that smells like the movie theater date she's too good to go on.
Two girls go pro this year, one less than last year. Lalia Dermott, Trojan goalkeeper, to the Boston Hurricanes. Emmie Silva, Penn State dealer, to Brazil’s national team. The promising Raven girls are both dead.
Bryan Rogan grew up poor in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest of four siblings, raised by a single mom. With the assistance of Allison, Allison’s mother, and MyFamily.com, they track down Bryan’s dad's side. They’re comfortable, maybe even well off, as Charlotte Reynolds puts it, and acceptably loaded, as Allison blithely translates for Bryan. One phone call, and Bryan’s (now married) father apologizes for his youthful indiscretion. He offers to offset the inconvenience of growing up with zero child support for as long as needed, provided Bryan doesn’t go to the press or show up for Christmas dinner. Bryan tells him to fuck off.
“What, it’s just money–you should take it,” Allison says, and Bryan slams the door behind him so hard the whole apartment rattles.
Two weeks later, they’re back together. A month after that, he’s talking about moving in (absolutely not). By early December, she’s Skyping Dan and Matt, who’s visiting Dan for the weekend, and casually mentioning,
“I’m fine, really, it’s just my boyfriend needs to either stop drunk calling me or start buying proper apology flowers.”
Dan sighs. Matt stuffs his face with crackers and leans close to the screen to mumble,
“‘Ou ‘ave a ‘oyfriend ‘ow?”
“Did Dan not tell you about Bryan?” Probably Dan was hoping he’d disappear before she had to. Cracker chunks go flying. Dan smacks Matt on the back, yelping.
“Did you say Bryan?” Matt asks. “You’re dating a Bryan?”
“Uh, yeah? Is there a problem,” Allison says, not really caring if there is.
Dan opens her mouth, probably to start listing the fights Allison stupidly told her about, but Matt quickly says,
“Nope, no problem, happy for you Allison.”
Allison starts work on her second collection, determined to prove her first one wasn’t a fluke. She catches one of her models doing coke in the bathroom, and something small and nasty inside her hisses I always knew they were cheating too. She ignores it, goes to the gym, and lifts heavy until it shuts up.
Charlotte Reynolds starts speaking to Allison in public again, but still won’t answer her texts. Still, she’s depositing money into Allison’s account every month, which is a nice change, even if she hasn’t added her back to the family accounts yet.
The Foxes decide to spend the tail end of winter break together. Allison plans the trip, of course. Bryan watches as she grabs an apple and calls her travel agent to secure a Bermuda rental with a private beachfront, a hot tub, and a pool, featuring six bedrooms, a private bar, and an en-suite bathroom in the room she's sharing with Renee.
“Why am I not invited again?” Bryan asks. He took the money, not that he bothered to tell Allison she was right, and since then, he’s been more enthused about indulgences of all kinds, mostly substance-related.
“I don’t have a plus one,” Allison says. Nicky does, and Aaron, but they’re both in relationships she can bet on.
“You’re planning the vacation.”
“I didn’t plan myself a plus one.” Allison takes another bite and relishes the crunch between her teeth–she always forgets how much she likes Red Delicious until they’re out of season, and then she has to fly some in.
“Fine,” Bryan says, “But I think it’s weird. You don’t even talk to any of them.”
“I do,” Allison says. Renee writes when she can. It’s less than Allison thought she would. Dan calls her. Kevin hasn’t spoken to her since the pro team rosters dropped, and Allison isn’t about to reach out to him to see if he’s giving her the silent treatment. If he is, he’ll need to try harder than that. Allison’s mother prohibited anyone in the household from speaking to her when she started acting out in high school. It took a while, but Allison learned to prefer it to the arguments. She expects Bryan to keep arguing, has a retort sitting on her tongue, but Bryan goes,
“Uh, what are you doing?”
Allison kitten licks a bit of juice off her finger and glances back at him, confused, and it hits her that he’s watched her eat the whole apple, from sweet flesh to crunchy core to bitter stem.
Reggie had asked that too once, when he caught her at it her freshman year, and said the only things he’d ever seen eat the core were the pigs on his Da’s farm.
Allison’s cheeks had flamed an angry red, flustered for once.
“She’s not wasting food, piss off.” Dan had said, tugging Allison away before Reggie could see the curious look Dan couldn’t quite wipe off her face.
Now, Bryan says, “Damn, you must be starving.”
“Wrong girl,” Allison mutters, rolling her eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You said something,” Bryan insists.
“Do you need me to buy you hearing aids?”
“Fine, don’t tell me,” Bryan says.
Allison looks at her long acrylics.
She could explain some of it, maybe, start small. It was so long ago.
Except if she lets herself have an apple, she has to eat the whole thing. If she throws any part of it away, she might go back for another apple to make up for what she lost out on. She’d finish that one, then have another, sprinkling it with cinnamon and then giving up and going for the peanut butter, creamy and heavy on her tongue, then chocolate–she’d messed it all up anyway, might as well, and then–she can’t tell Bryan this. She won’t. It’s not who she is anymore.
An easier explanation, then, is that if Allison left a smear of sauce on her plate in treatment, she had to lick it off the plate. The urge has never quite left her.
Oh, and by the way, Bryan dear, Allison is never, ever, going to have the natural cues that tell her when she’s full.
Hell, Allison is probably going to end up like Grandma Lottie, shoving her cup of chocolate pudding away in hospice. A minute on the lips is a lifetime on the hips, and Allison has hips for days; they check her opponents on the court as easily as they sway when she dances, pressing close to a boy who can’t decide whether he’s lucky or cursed to have her.
One more drink and I’d ask you to marry me.
One more drink and I’d say yes.
But Bryan has already gone and gotten her another apple from the bowl. They fight about it–she hadn’t asked him to get her any goddamn fruit–and he throws it into the wall instead, storms out. He gets her drugstore flowers to apologize. Allison crushes them under her Louboutins. Then Bryan gets into her mother’s good graces and gets her a Birkin, and she likes that much better.
It’ll be nice to see the Foxes.
Two weeks before her flight, Allison pins silk to a dress form and craves existing with them, even if they’re going to bitch about Bryan and stuff her full of greasy pizza and double chocolate chunk ice cream she doesn’t need anymore, now that she’s not running herself ragged in practice every day. Her body hasn’t caught up to that reality yet; she’s still always hungry, so she’ll have to swim laps after meals, and–Allison cuts herself off with a vicious shake of her head. What is she thinking?
Since when has she cared about any of that? Well, she knows when, but that tired, angry, lonely girl is gone. She’s been gone for years, and Allison snaps her back now, bitch, of all the dumb suggestions she could’ve concocted, swimming is among the dumbest. As if she’d mess up her hair. Allison lounges. Occasionally, she tans. She doesn’t swim.
But if she won’t swim, she’ll have to run, and the others will have questions about that, because Allison doesn’t train on vacation even when she has–had–championships to prepare for. So, unless she wants to go creeping up to the en suite bathroom, put the soap bottle in the sink and turn on the tap, until all anyone can hear is the echoing of running water–
This time, Allison stands up, shoves away her dress form – it sways precariously – and leaves her office before checking if it will fall. She calls Bryan. He picks up on the third ring.
“I’m done with work for the day,” she says.
“Must be nice to make your own hours.”
“You picking me up, or am I finding someone who will?” Allison means it to be playful, maybe, but Bryan’s voice is tinged with more exasperation than affection when he replies.
“Jesus, woman, I’m on my way. You could learn to ask nicely.”
“Asking is for people who need permission,” Allison informs him, and they go back and forth arguing until Bryan pulls up outside. He hauls her halfway through the car window in a kiss.
Back in his apartment, she scratches red lines down his back.
He hisses afterwards–didn’t have the wherewithal to complain during–twisting, trying to see over his shoulder to where tiny pinpricks of blood bloom.
“You’re like a cat, Allie, damn.”
And another boy is jogging towards her, chasing her down the track, yelling Hey Alley Cat, Allie, come on Allison wait up I said I was sorry, and she’s picking up speed, leaving him in the dust because she’ll never let a boy outrun her.
But he did outrun her, in the end. A few more years now and she’ll have lost him for longer than she knew him.
She’s older now than he’ll ever get to be.
“Big baby.” Allison runs her hand over Bryan’s back, less a comfort and more a reminder that the man in front of her is real. He’s alive. His blood stains her pointer finger pink.
He says go out and she says order in but he already made the reservations.
Allison orders a salad because she’s craving carbonara smothered in sauce with bread on the side, slathered with butter and herbs in a layer so thick it leaves a trail of oil on the plate. Would she have room for more after?
She thinks she would. She could go for a slice of chocolate cake oozing cherry filling, and that would be alright, probably even romantic, she could trade bites with Bryan without feeling the urge to coil her arms around her plate and snarl back off, that’s my food.
But it wouldn’t end there. She’d return to her empty apartment (she wouldn’t stay over at Bryan’s place feeling like this), gaping, a pit with a neverending maw.
Cherries as a starter, the juice bursting over her tongue, whipped cream, dark chocolate, slices of artisanal bread until she's gnawing on the whole loaf, more animal than girl–woman now–she’s all grown up and hasn’t done this in years.
Tonight it lurks just below her skin. Tonight it’s like she never left.
I could eat the whole world, she thought once in high school, in a panic, stomach swollen and roiling but still not fucking full. Allison didn’t think of the necessary conclusion then, but she knows it now, that she’d swallow the world and hurl it back up, never satisfied.
“—and I think, not now, of course, I know you’d bitch at me for it, but soon, you know?” Bryan is speaking, and she really couldn’t give less of a shit because this restaurant has two Michelin stars too many to decide an innovative take on the salad is bitter and limp and sodden in a sauce that's probably fifty cals per tablespoon. Allison’s most pedestrian take is that sauce should be served in a cup on the side.
“You bitch more than I do,” Allison says. Can she send the salad back?
“But I figured, you know, why not show it now, and you have time to get it replaced with whatever's in style. And then we can run whatever kinda fancy official thing you want this spring.” Bryan says. She probably can’t send the salad back. Bryan will ask why, and then they’ll fight, and she is trying, really trying, to suffer him tonight.
“Right, sure,” Allison says. All her models are into juicing; their piss is probably bright green, and Allison takes another bite and hopes all their smoothies taste exactly like whatever rotten leaf is wreaking havoc on her tongue.
“Oh, good,” Bryan says. “I hoped you’d agree.”
He slides a little box across the table and a ring sparkling and far more expensive than he can afford glimmers up at her. It’s oval cut, with an obnoxious amount of carats, and a slim gold band. He’s definitely consulted Allison’s mother on this–she probably jumped to answer his text. It looks exactly like the rings she’d point at as a child when her mother brought her along jewelry shopping.
“Wow,” Bryan says, “You haven't started screeching at me, so I’m assuming I did better than I thought.”
He looks nervous. He should be; they’ve known each other for three months, and he’s trying to get her to commit to planning his own proposal in the spring. He knows he can’t do better than her, obviously.
Can Allison do better than him? Does she even want to? These days, she’s not sure that better ever gets her anywhere but standing in front of a mirror cataloging her faults.
Bryan starts to slide the box back across the table. Allison drops her fork. She darts out her hand and closes it over the box, snapping it shut with a little thud that sounds impossibly loud in the quiet restaurant.
“Keep this one,” Allison says. “This is decent.”