ALICE Ch 271

Alice doesn’t know why, but this is the best beer she’s ever tasted. She lies on her bed in her room, feet crossed at the ankles. She takes another lazy pull from the bottle.

Beside her, Kylie yawns and brushes crumbs from her FUTA Racing tee. She wears socks that look like sharks, which would be OK if she weren’t so restless. Her little feet dancing around in those shark socks is possibly the most annoying thing that Alice has ever seen.

“Can you stop that?” Alice nudges her with a toe.

“You stop.” Kylie keeps changing channels. She kicks Alice back. “We should do your toes. Blue. Blue’s your color.”

“Why do you wear socks all the time?”

“I’m cold. Why are you dumb?”

Alice rolls her eyes. Of course Kylie’s cold; the only clothes she owns are dumb graphic tees and booty shorts.

Kylie lands on F1 coverage, and it’s Val speaking to the press. The volume is low, yet Val looks so funny to Alice. She’s always put together, but she’s so tiny, like an elf. It wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t always so serious.

“So,” Alice says, opening another beer. “Way back when we were playing soccer, Coach Riley and Coach Adella didn’t trust us at all. Nobody got to take home their stuff.”

“S’called football.”

“It’s called shut the fuck up. So, Coach Adella had these monster duffels and she would look super jacked when she carried them around even though they were just full of shin guards and balls and shit. But she was actually swole.”

“I remember.”

“You had FUTA in Australia?”

“Electricity, too,” Kylie replies.

“So, you know. There was this whole thing where Coach Riley and Coach Adella would organize the stuff. They were trying really hard. But shit wasn’t the way they left it, so they were trying to figure out what was going on. It turned out that Val was creeping into the car and alphabetizing it after practice. She went in there and organized it and then they couldn’t understand what was happening.”

“Wow.” Kylie suppresses a belch.

“What I’m saying is that she’s always been weird.”

“Can see that looking at her, can’t you?”

“She looks normal. You have to be around her for a while before you start to notice. I remember when we went for pizza… that was the night that Coach Riley and Coach Adella talked the kart people into letting us go over there and drive. I guess that was actually a huge deal, now that I think about it. I owe my F1 career to them. But, uh… at the restaurant, Val like sat there with a napkin in her lap and fixed the silverware and moved her glass, and then she’d give scary looks if you took a piece of pizza wrong.”

“Was she a good footballer?”

“Eh… she was. But she’s too small to go pro or anything. But she did good on our team with Coach Riley mentoring her. She was obsessed with Coach Riley.”

They both look over as the door opens, revealing an exhausted Glynda.

The older woman freezes, a sour look on her face.

“What are you lot doing?” she asks suspiciously.

Alice rubs her eyes and looks at the snacks and beer. “What the fuck do you think we’re doing, Glynda?”