CHAPTER EIGHT | CANNONBALLING

throwing a teammate into the path of an opposing player.

▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂

          Even though I hadn't joined the team (my brain wanted to keep all my options open), the other girls seemed to be treating me like I had, though I mostly blamed Katrina and Marley for that.

          Katrina dragged me along with her everywhere she went whenever we weren't in class—which was a considerable feat, considering we were a year apart and our schedules didn't match that much—and, whenever she wasn't available, Marley, a senior, took over for her. If, at first, I believed the girls from the team had other friends besides each other, I had certainly been proved wrong, as they went everywhere together.

          During the week between the end of tryouts and the release of the list of the people who had made it into the team, I found myself to be quite the nervous wreck, contrary to how I thought I'd be. It was just a stupid game, one that was, without a doubt, a massive security risk, but I couldn't help but hope my efforts had been enough, even if I had only taken part in tryouts just to spite Corinne.

          I didn't think it was possible for Corinne to despise me even more, but she kept finding new ways to surprise me with every interaction we shared. Drew, an honorary member of the team, was also Corinne's morality pet and the only person she ever listened to when she needed to keep a cool head. I was a clear threat to that, as she nearly smashed whatever she was holding at the mere sight of me, and I really wanted to believe she wasn't furious at me because of what had gone down during tryouts.

          Though I felt terrible for her and didn't think she deserved to be treated the way her own mother treated her, that wasn't my fault. It wasn't my duty to get involved or to try and salvage or fix their relationship, much like it wasn't my fault that they didn't get along. Their issues were a lot deeper than just sports rivalry, and I had my fair share of family drama to deal with at the moment. I didn't need hers on my plate.

          Between worrying about the roller derby team, ignoring Corinne's bad mood, and one-upping myself academically due to my crippling fear of failure, somehow I still found time to worry about Jordan.

          My parents said the lack of news meant good news—after all, Jordan's treatment team insisted on keeping us on a need to know basis—but I begged to differ. I knew my brother in a way some random doctors could never, and I'd go as far as saying I knew him better than he knew himself sometimes. Whenever he plunged into a dark hole, spiralling down towards a void of self-destruction, somewhere I almost couldn't reach him, I'd still pull him back to me. I still knew who he was, even if everything and every odd was against us.

          My parents were getting a bit too involved, both with Jordan's treatment and with my studies. I suspected it probably was a way of making up for all the years they had left us to our own devices and only able to depend on one another, even if Jordan had always been their baby. I felt suddenly suffocated, not used to them being so present, and I was quite taken by surprise when they mentioned the roller derby tryouts during their weekly call.

          "I hope you signed up, Wren!" my mother had told me, holding the phone too close to her face so it occupied pretty much the entire screen. My father, in the background, struggled to be seen behind her. "Jordan would be so happy to see you skate—"

          "That sport is a tad bit too dangerous, 亲爱," my father had pointed out. "We saw videos of it. It's like hand to hand combat on roller skates. It's a bit different from figure skating, no?"

          "Well, it's not on ice," I'd said, applying some ice to my hip, right where I had slammed it against the floor after being shoved aside by Corinne. Casual roller derby things; I was still convinced I could have gotten out of tryouts with much worse injuries. They had both looked at me expectantly, as though they were waiting for me to accept their suggestion. "I suppose this is the moment when I tell you I . . . already tried out, actually. Katrina made me do it."

          "Hey, for the record, I didn't make her do anything," Katrina had intervened, sitting on her bed, her laptop open in front of her. "She decided to support me, and I guess she couldn't resist giving it a shot."

          I couldn't tell them she was right on a technicality. I also couldn't tell them I'd tried out for the team purely out of spite. They'd proceed to encourage me to put my differences with Corinne aside, for the sake of the team or the greater good or whatever bullshit they wanted to preach about, and I simply could not do such a thing, not with the way she was treating me.

          "So?" my mother had questioned.

          "So what?"

          "Did you get in? How hard can it be?"

          "I still don't know." Katrina looked genuinely offended by the 'how hard can it be' question and I remembered she had been trained by two generations of Fontaines, the people who treated roller derby as something as essential as oxygen. "I'll get an answer next week, I guess."

          "Keep us updated, then! I cannot wait to tell Jordan—"

          "I have to go." Katrina's scowl had given place to a look full of curiosity, as I rarely mentioned Jordan whenever she was around—if ever, really—and I didn't want to get into that conversation so soon. I didn't know just how gossipy the girls on the team were and I didn't want them to start talking about me more than they already were—over Corinne, over Coach Fontaine, over Marley. "See you."

          Present time: Corinne Fontaine herself was lying on my bed, holding her phone with one hand and a cup of coffee with the other.

          It wasn't the ideal thing to find in my dorm room after a particularly tedious Linear Algebra lecture, but I supposed it could be worse. Though there was the usual crease between her eyebrows, this time it looked more like a sign of being focused instead of her characteristic anger. I entered the room carefully, handling her as the dangerous animal she was, and decided I wouldn't acknowledge her presence until she announced herself.

          I had plenty of questions. First of all: I needed to know how she had gotten inside the room. Secondly, I wanted to know what the hell she was doing there. Surely she had better things to do than voluntarily hang out with someone she didn't even like.

          I set my heavy textbooks down on my desk, pushed open the curtains, and even had time to change into a cardigan instead of wearing my leather jacket, but she still didn't say anything. There was a book in front of her, but she paid as much attention to it as she did to me, so I leaned against the window, arms crossed, and waited.

          Even that turned out to be unbearable after a while, so I cleared my throat.

          "Please be quiet," she said. "I'm trying to study."

          "On your phone?" I asked, skeptically.

          "No, Wren, with my feet."

          "And do you really have to do that here? In my dorm room? I'm pretty sure you have a room of your own."

          One of the corners of her pink lips twitched, the eyebrow crease deepening, and she reached out for one of the pastel markers she had brought along with her. "Katrina is my friend."

          "In case you haven't noticed, Kat's not here at the moment and probably won't be for a while." She shot me a brief glare, gripping the marker so tightly her knuckles turned even whiter. "We're not friends, you and I, and this just so happens to also be my room, not just Kat's, which means she and I have to compromise and meet halfway with the people we let in."

          "I'd watch your tone, if I were you." She removed the cap from the marker with her teeth. "Your fate on the roller derby team kind of lies with me, so, if you still have any hope of getting in, you might want to chill a little bit. You know. Just in case, considering your performance at tryouts wasn't frankly that good—"

          "Your mother didn't seem to agree with you."

          I had a horrible, annoying tendency to run my mouth.

          I never, never knew when to think before I spoke or to keep my mouth shut, which had, throughout the years, led to quite a share of embarrassing situations. I didn't think of myself as a particularly nasty person, regardless of how tightly I held on to my grudges, and I immediately regretted using the mother card.

          For a split second, I feared she might slap me, punch me in the face, or throw me off the window. Maybe even a combination of all three forms of physical assault. However, she simply got up from the bed, the embodiment of cool anger instead of exploding on me like a nuclear bomb, and mimicked me perfectly—arms crossed, an eyebrow raised.

          Corinne Fontaine was perfectly capable of ruining my life. I knew it, she knew it, and I knew she knew I knew it.

          The only thing I had going on for me was that I was a little bit taller than her thanks to my boots, whereas she was wearing Converse sneakers. She rode a motorbike and slammed girls aside for fun. I did pirouettes and struggled to open water bottles, jars, and heavy doors. I was all bruised from tryouts and the only thing hurt about her was her ego.

          Corinne laughed—a bubbly, girly sound. "I personally think it's funny that you think you can hurt my feelings like that. Who taught you that, huh? Marley? Is she really stepping that low just so she can be promoted to team captain instead of co-captain? Is this really her idea of a coup d'État?"

          "You're delusional, Corinne," I argued, dropping my arms and walking away from her. She didn't give up, though, and I never expected her to. "You're seriously delusional. I said something I shouldn't have, and I really do sympathize with you when it comes to your relationship with your mother—"

          "Don't bring my mother into this." Her voice dropped to a lower, more threatening tone. I wasn't afraid of her per se, but I didn't feel that comfortable being alone in a room with someone who had nearly run me over the first time we met, especially when she was this pissed off. "The fact that you're using that, out of all things, to try and get under my skin when I trusted you—"

          "It's not exactly trusting if you're pissed drunk and thinking you're talking to a wall."

          Her nostrils flared. "Just because you have the emotional range of a Louboutin and can't get a hint, it doesn't mean I wasn't trusting you when I told you about her, even if you didn't get it. Do you think I walk around the campus blabbering about the absolute hell she has put me through all my life or that the girls from the team just so happened to not pick up on it? Have you ever stopped to think about my home life or my father, like my mother popped me out thanks to divine intervention?"

          My first instinct was to tell her I didn't expect anything else coming from her, considering she paraded around like she was the second coming of Jesus, but, fortunately, that was one of the rare times I managed to bite my tongue and stay quiet.

          "I don't know about it and I don't really want to know, but I have a feeling you won't give me a choice," I said. "You're going to dump it all on me, be so honest and vulnerable with me it freaks me out, then throw it to my face whenever we inevitably argue again."

          "Oh, fuck you, Wren." She returned to my bed, as though I hadn't pretty much kicked her out moments before. "You kind of have a point there, though. Why do I bother trying to talk to you when you're as open to conversation as a brick wall?"

          "Did that ever stop you?"

          "Fair enough." Corinne crossed her legs over my duvet after being considerate enough to take off her shoes without me having to ask her to do so. "So, anyway, in case it's not obvious enough already, my mother is a very proud person. One would go as far as calling her egotistical, self-obsessed, self-absorbed, whatever."

          I sat on my desk. Not on the chair; on the desk. "So that's where you get it from."

          Corinne took a deep breath, shaking a little bit, as though she was trying to control herself before lunging at me. "Moving on, if you don't have anything constructive to say. The Fontaine name is a great deal to her, more than it is to me, which might be one of the reasons why she's so smothering. That's also why she has never been a fan of contaminating the family name by . . . you know. Getting too involved with men. One day, she remembered she had to find a way to continue the legacy, since my uncle isn't really interested in having children, and had the most brilliant idea to contact a sperm bank."

          "You're kidding."

          She threw me a deadpan look. "Do I look like I'm kidding?"

          "You're hilarious, Corinne. Ha-ha. I can hardly breathe—ow!"

          "Anyway"—she sighed, as I kneeled down to pick up the marker she had thrown at me—"she probably thought that was the best idea she'd ever gotten, since cloning herself wasn't really an option. Like, don't get me wrong, she's dated people and all, but she's not the type of person to settle down and become someone's wife. Sylvie Fontaine is Sylvie Fontaine's wife and no one else's. So, no father for me. Just some anonymous guy she handpicked." Corinne ironically clapped. "At least she got what she wanted all along, right?"

          "Which was . . ."

          She rolled her eyes, groaning. "Are you seriously that dense? Do I have to explain everything to you?"

          "By all means, please do. I know how much you love to hear yourself speak."

          Was I pushing my luck by pushing her buttons? Maybe. Was it secretly hilarious to rile her up because it was just that easy? Perhaps. She reminded me of Theo a little bit, except Corinne had a hair-trigger temper and Theo had better emotional control. That comparison was one of the very few things I had here, in Connecticut, to remind me of home; even though I definitely didn't want to think about Corinne more than what was absolutely necessary, it was still a flicker of the life I could have had.

          "She got a miniature Sylvie to pamper, dress up, and throw to the wolves," Corinne continued, leaning her back against the wall, and I pushed aside my books to find a more comfortable position. Kat's bed was off limits and I didn't want to join Corinne on my bed, as that felt a tad bit too intimate. It wasn't like Drew freaking Sterling would come bursting into my dorm room, but I didn't want to take any chances. "Girls my age were taking ballet classes or piano lessons. I was roller skating with a national roller derby champion six days per week. I was allowed to have a day off a week because she didn't want me to exhaust myself and put her through the humiliation of watching me injure myself or, worse, lose a competition."

          "Have you ever injured yourself?"

          "A few times, yeah. Nothing too serious, fortunately, but there was this one time I sprained my ankle when I fell." She shifted uncomfortably, avoiding my eyes, as though she expected me to criticize her for failing the Fontaine perfection test. I wanted to hate her so bad, but she kept finding new ways to humanize herself in my eyes, and she was becoming more and more of an extremely layered, complex person to me instead of a caricature of one. I didn't like how that made me feel or the type of person that made me for constantly vilifying her. "There was a moment when I thought I'd never get to skate again. She was furious, obviously, because she thought I was being too careless, even though this is roller derby. I love what I do, from the bottom of my heart, but part of me felt secretly glad there was a chance for me to get out."

          I sighed. "I'm sorry, Corinne. That sounds terrible."

          "I got used to it, eventually. It took me years to look around me and realize this wasn't normal." Her voice had since lost all the aggressiveness from before. She was fully sober now—albeit a bit over-caffeinated—and a foreign feeling was attempting to overpower me. My brain screamed at me that she needed some comfort, but I stayed frozen where I was; I didn't want to overcomplicate a relationship that was complicated enough as is. "So, there you have it. I'm really glad my mother's appreciation for you fills up your cold, dead heart with so much joy and warmth, but I've spent my entire life trying to make her proud of me and all it did was make me miserable in return. Should I get you a t-shirt?"

          "That was not what I—"

          She gathered her things, then rolled out of bed. "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but . . ." She shrugged, already standing by the door. I couldn't quite ignore the sudden sadness in her eyes. "Welcome to the team, Wren. I'm sure you'll do great."

          Corinne didn't slam the door on her way out. Somehow, I would have felt a lot better if she had.

▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂

i am a corinne fontaine stan through and through

should i make merch? here's an idea

also if you go back to the foreword you'll see that i added marley and drew to the cast. no aesthetics for them because i lost the psd file for it oops