“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Griddle, your knee is the size of a basketball.”
Gideon waves Harrow away from her beaten, bruised basketball of a knee. “Ehhhhhh, you know how knees are. I’ve had worse. And anyway, how would you know how big a basketball is? Have you ever even seen one in real life?”
Harrow fixes her with a glare colder than the air in the empty, piss-smelling locker room. Gideon had offered to take them to a locker room with less of a urinal aroma, but Harrow had just tossed her head and said that all of them smelled like piss, and this one at least had Gideon’s gear already in it. Gideon’s gear, Gideon was informed, smelled worse than the locker room and weighed more than Harrow, and Harrow would under no circumstances be carrying it anywhere. “Don’t push your luck,” she warns Gideon. “I’m the one with the phone, and if I deem it necessary, I will call you an ambulance.”
Gideon gasps. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would, so shut your mouth and get on your feet. I’m driving you to Urgent Care.”
“Ouch. Not even the E.R. for poor wounded Gideon.”
Harrow pushes herself to her feet and brushes bits of locker room detritus off the knees of her pitch-black jeans. “Just a moment ago, you were saying it wasn’t that bad.” Gideon has no answer to this, and Harrow bulldozes on without waiting for her to think one up. She’s not sure she could, anyway, what with the throbbing in her knee that’s somehow both an ache and a sharp pain. Memories of Corona’s torn meniscus from last season make themselves known, and she says a silent prayer to somebody for the protection of her soft joint bits. “I’m going to tell Teacher you’re out of the game. Wrap your knee up and get ready to walk on it while I’m gone.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Gideon snaps off a sarcastic salute and Harrow flips her off on the way out the door.
Alone with the odor of sweat, pee, and that unidentifiable hockey funk, the reality of Gideon’s situation begins to sink in. She’s just injured her knee so badly that it had bruised before she’d even gotten her gear off. She may be stupid, but she’s not an idiot, and she knows the angle her leg had twisted at when Cytherea took her to the wall can’t mean anything good. Sectionals begin in two weeks, and if Gideon’s seriously injured, her team’s going to enter the game down a player. Worse, Gideon would have to watch from the bench like some sort of dweeb.
And of course this would happen on the one weekend Harrowhark Nonagesimus deigned to attend a game. It’s not as though Gideon cares about impressing her, but it’s a bit humiliating to get hurt ten minutes into a game in front of one’s childhood nemesis. Gideon’s better than that. She could have shown Harrow exactly the kind of skill she was calling “pedestrian at best,” but all she’d shown today was her ability to be driven into the boards by someone half her size.
Okay, so maybe Gideon does care about impressing her, but only in the way one’s able to care more deeply about the thoughts and opinions of the person you loathe most in the world than perhaps anyone else.
The pain of attempting to wrap her knee drives any remaining thought from her head. Funnily enough, it’s her skin that hurts the most, smarting like a sunburn, and she thinks it might be because whatever’s going on inside hurts too much for her brain to keep track of. Somehow, she manages to grit her teeth long enough to wrap her knee in two layers of neon pink and white sport tape. By the time Harrow gets back, she’s not even crying anymore.