“And why am I the Wingman?”
“’Cause you always got my back,” Rush answered. “‘Light It Up’ it is!” He smiled as he put them in queue for another unranked match. The team was quiet for a while, waiting for the system to find them a game, until Stryker finally spoke up, breaking the silence.
“Did you guys all take that test today?”
Stryker was the quietest of them all. He rarely said anything, and when he did, it was because it was gnawing at him. Rush knew one of the main reasons Stryker stuck with them was because they didn’t mind him being so quiet—and because they would always talk to him anyway when he needed to get something off his chest. So when a few long moments passed without a response, Rush stepped up to the plate.
“I think we all did, didn’t we? I heard it was in every school in the country.”
“Not me, bro,” Fuego offered up. “I’m home-schooled.”
“If by ‘home-schooled’ you mean ‘illegal,’” Snark replied. It was common knowledge among the team that Fuego was, in fact, an illegal immigrant whose family did not send him to school for fear that he might get picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“That’s what I said,” Fuego replied easily. “‘Home-schooled’ is Mexican for ‘illegal.’”
Rush couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, everyone else took it. Why, Stryker? What’s up, man?”
“It was weird, right?” Stryker said.
“Yeah,” Snark and Wingman both agreed.
“I wouldn’t know,” Rush said.
“I thought you just said you took it?” Stryker asked.
“Well, I kinda did, and I kinda didn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Snark demanded.
“Means I read the first three questions, decided it was stupid, and just filled in random blanks after that for the first two sections,” Rush admitted.
Snark laughed so hard he finally toggled his mic off to keep from splitting their eardrums.
“You didn’t,” Wingman objected.
“Truth,” Rush said.
“Wow,” was all Stryker had to say.
“Hey, guys, wait a sec,” Rush interjected, hearing his mother calling him down to dinner. “I gotta go eat. Meet back in twenty?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.”
“Sure.”
“Sounds good.”
“Awesome. See you then.” Dinner shouldn’t take long, and then he could get back to practicing for August. Come hell or high water, he would be ready.
6
Mackenzie
Even now, several months after they had moved in, Mackenzie Gray hated the carpet in the upstairs hallway. This was due largely to its color, which was ironic, she thought, given her name. But she didn’t hate all gray things, or even all gray carpets. It was just this particular carpet, this precise shade of gray, that she found so intolerable.
It was just so… undefined.
She might have liked it, had it been a solid, dependable, gunmetal sort of gray, or if it had evoked within her the thrill of angry thunderclouds on the horizon. A hint of blue could have rendered it more hopeful, like the first gleam of sun in the sky after a long, cold night. Or if it had exhibited any variegation whatsoever, she might have found its contrasts intriguing, like water-polished stones at the bottom of a river—a river you could point to on a map and say, “Here. I’m right here.”
In the end, it was just a light, industrial gray, designed to hide the telltale signs of use, cheap to replace, and thoroughly inoffensive, which was perhaps the worst thing about it. Of course, that was what passed for interior design in military housing, a fact with which Mackenzie Gray was intimately familiar, having lived on one Army base or another for all seventeen years of her life to date.
But the dark gray carpet in her last home had at least conveyed a certain sense of place. At least she had felt, standing upon it, as though she were… somewhere. The light gray carpet in the upstairs hallway here, coupled with the slightly lighter gray of the walls, left Mackenzie feeling as though she were somehow standing nowhere at all, a feeling so unsettling that she tried to avoid it whenever she could.
Not that she would ever complain about it.
Mackenzie’s father, Brian Gray, was a bona fide member of the Special Forces of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. He was—as was every other member of his elite unit—the very antithesis of petulance, and he was not about to let any of his four beloved daughters grow up to be a sniveling little whiner. So Mackenzie Gray did not complain when her family moved from base to base. She did not complain about changing schools or leaving her friends. She did not complain about having to find yet another new Muay Thai coach. She certainly was not about to complain about the carpet.
Nonetheless, she was happy to avoid a bad situation if it was within her power to do so. She had just become very good, very early in life, at knowing the difference between those situations that she could affect and those that she could not. So when it came to the carpet, she said absolutely nothing, but she quietly positioned herself as far away from it as possible.
As the oldest of the girls, Mackenzie got first pick of bedrooms in every new home. This was a long-standing rule in the Gray family, and although one or another of her three sisters had occasionally launched a campaign to challenge its fairness, the familial hierarchy had proven itself highly resistant to insurgence. So when the Grays had moved into this most recent home on this most recent base, Mackenzie had selected the only downstairs bedroom for herself—a room that had been converted from a den-slash-office, with windows overlooking the small but immaculate front lawn.
In any other family, this might have been an odd choice. The room opened directly off the living room, with the noise of the television on the other side of the wall. But Mackenzie slept like the dead, and in any event, the family had survived one paternal tour after another by relying on strict discipline and routine. Bedtimes were adhered to religiously, and the television set was turned off every night by 9:00 p.m. on the dot, without exception.
And because the only rooms upstairs were the bedrooms that belonged to Mackenzie’s mother and sisters, Mackenzie never had to brave the gray carpet except under two circumstances: when she put away her sisters’ laundry every Saturday, and when she waited in line to video chat with her father every Sunday.
It was this latter event that had her sitting now in the hallway next to Megan, who was fifteen; who sat next to Madison, who was twelve; who sat next to Mia, who was nine. This was the only situation in which Mackenzie’s age worked against her, as she was the last one to speak to her father and therefore had to sit in the dreaded hallway the longest.