good grief

Summary:

“Lenny,” she says quickly. “It says Lenny on all my paperwork. Lenny Marijuana."

“Oh,” Mike says. “You mean… Marijuana as in-”

“As in the drug,” Lenny says flatly. “And yes, as in my brothers, and no, I don’t want to talk about it, and no, I especially don’t want to talk about it with you.”

(In which Eleanor Marijuana, youngest sister to Dom and Randy, spends a decade in the shadows, falls in love, goes roller skating, pitches a shutout, and gets to grow up.)

Fandom: Blaseball

Published: 21 November 2020

Word count: 27.2k

Ao3 link: good grief

Notes

A/N: When Lenny first came out of the shadows, I cracked a joke about wanting the lore to be that it's Dom and Randy's kid sister. Someone reminded me about it recently, and the idea grabbed me by the throat. So here is my manifesto about it.

Thanks and love to everyone who cheered me on, especially Jason, who drew cool punk teen Lenny last month and kept her alive in my mind. And Tam, who laughed at the jokes and fixed the typos.

Content warnings: teenagers in horror scenarios, memory loss, semi-unreality, drinking/drug use (adult and underage), familial abandonment, sibling death, grief, vomiting (not detailed but it's there)

They’re all going to sign their contracts together. Dom insists on looking over everything first, as though he understands any of it. Randy agrees that it’s better safe than sorry.

Lenny just wants to get it done already. Hers is going to be different anyways because she’s pitching, so it’s going to take extra time, and pitcher slots are going fast. It already looks like they’re not all going to be on the Millennials together. If they wait much longer they’ll all get signed to different teams, and then where will they be?

“On different teams,” Randy says dryly when she asks. He doesn’t seem nearly as worried. Probably because he’s a batter, and teams need more batters. And also he’s a decent player, so teams will be happy to have him.

Lenny’s not a good pitcher. She’s way younger than both of her brothers, which Dom keeps saying means she has time to grow, but she knows it means that she’s not as good. She’s only getting this opportunity because Dom and Randy insisted with the recruiters. But it’s cool having brothers who back her up like this. And besides, there’s no way she’s letting them become professional players without her.

“You’re a little young for the team,” says the ILB rep that’s helping them. Lenny jumps. She keeps forgetting that there’s someone else in this room as Dom squints down at contracts. “Isn’t that right?”

Randy snorts. “You’re gonna make her mad.”

Lenny just out her chin, ignoring that. “I’m here because I’m good enough to pitch major league,” she says, with more confidence than she feels. “It doesn’t matter that I'm thirteen.”

The rep smiles, as though she’s said something quite funny. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. Tell me, Eleanor, how do you feel about being in the spotlight?”

She falters right away. “Uh,” she says. “I know I’m going to be. And that’s fine. I just don’t have as much practice as a lot of the other players, but I’ll get used to it once I’m on the team..”

The rep nods. “What if I told you there was a way you could be on the team and have more time to practice?”

Lenny looks over at Randy nervously, but he just gestures at her, like this is hers to figure out. When she looks over at Dom, he’s still totally absorbed in what he’s reading — or maybe he’s just high and zoned out, she can’t always tell the difference.

Slowly, she turns back to the rep. “I’d still be on the team?”

“Part of them from the beginning.”

“Which team?”

“We have plenty of vacancies, but I believe you would be a good fit for Seattle.”

Lenny sort of knows the Seattle team. None of the rosters are final, of course, but it looks like they’re going for a rock band vibe. And she likes that kind of thing. She’s been teaching herself bass guitar with YouTube, and with a busted-up bass that someone left out by a dumpster. She could totally fit in in Seattle.

“But I’d have time?” she says hesitantly. The rep nods. She looks over at Randy. “Is this real?”

Randy shrugs. “I mean, the whole league seems sketchy as hell to me, but I don’t think there’s a problem with saying yes.”

Lenny nods decisively and turns back to the rep. “Okay, sign me up.”

“Excellent!” The rep goes over to the table and picks up one of the contracts.

Dom glances over. “You guys making choices without me?”

“I’m gonna be on the Seattle team,” Lenny says. It’s not false bravado for once: it’s actually thrilling to say out loud. She’s going to play for the Garages. She’s going to be a part of the team.

The rep sets down a new contract in front of her. “For your perusal.”

“Is this the same as the one my brother looked at?”

“More or less, yes.”

Lenny cranes her neck. “Dom? Hey, Dom-”

“If it’s the same you can go ahead, Len, it’s fine.”

Lenny sucks in a breath. She didn’t think it would be this easy. “Wow,” she whispers. The rep hands her a pen, and she flips through the contract, signing and initialing. She’s dimly aware of Randy smiling proudly at her, of Dom humming Eleanor Rigby under his breath the way he does when he’s trying to make her laugh. She’s not paying attention to that, though. She’s busy feeling weightless, thinking about playing, thinking about her brothers.

She signs her name with a flourish. She knows that she should sign as Eleanor, her legal name, but nobody has ever really called her that. She’s always been Lenny and so that’s what she signs and initials. Lenny Marijuana, the newest player of Internet League Blaseball.

She doesn’t feel Randy’s eyes slide off of her. She doesn’t hear Dom stop humming.

But she knows. Somehow, she knows something’s wrong. “Randy?” she says, and he doesn’t look up. “Dom?” she says, and he doesn’t even blink. There’s something sharp rising in her throat that might be fear or bile or guilt as she whirls on the representative. “What did you do?”

The rep smiles pleasantly. “Welcome to the shadows of the Seattle Garages, Ms. Marijuana. We expect that you’ll have the opportunity to play eventually.”

“The shadows?” Lenny repeats. “What does that mean?”

“You’ll find out in due time. Given that you’re a minor, we will be selecting another player in the shadows for you to live with.”

“Why aren’t Dom and Randy looking at me?”

“There are rules about these things.”

“What, so they’re not allowed to look at me?”

“They’re not official players yet. Once they’re players, they will be able to see you and speak to you. During siestas and off-seasons, they might even be able to remember if they do.”

“Might?” Lenny says, strangled. “What, so they might not?”

The rep smiles. It doesn’t feel pleasant anymore. “You should have read your contract more closely.”

Lenny runs out of the room. She’s aiming for the bathroom but she ends up stumbling towards the first potted plant that she sees, and she throws up until she’s dizzy. Nobody comes and looks for her. Nobody even asks her if she’s okay.

They can’t see her. Nobody can.

Nobody can see her except for other players, she realizes. But her brothers are going to be signing contracts soon, too. And then Dom is going to scream at this rep and Randy is going to take her home and everything is going to be fine, everything is going to be fine-

When she gets back to the room it’s empty. There are two freshly inked contracts sitting on the table: one for the New York Millennials, and one for the Moab Sunbeams. Hers isn’t even there anymore.

Lenny’s knees give out. She can’t even bring herself to cry.

Goodwin Morin is… tall.

“Seven feet and three inches,” she says. “It’s the first thing a lot of people notice about me.”

She’s using that not-quite-upbeat tone that people use when they talk to teenagers and they’re not sure if it’s okay to be upbeat. Lenny can tell that Goodwin wasn’t expecting to be assigned babysitting duty, especially not for years on end. But she’s trying, which helps.

“Seven foot three,” Lenny repeats. She’s barely over five feet tall, but she’s supposed to keep having growth spurts. “Do you… like it?”

“I have to duck under doorways,” Goodwin says dryly. “But beyond that I can’t say I mind.”

“That, uh.” Lenny pauses. It’s almost painful, trying to remember how to have conversations. “That’s cool?”

Being in the shadows is not, in the most technical sense, bad. She’s still corporeal, and she can still hold a conversation with someone if she tries hard enough. The only hard part is afterwards when their eyes slide off of her, and she knows that she’s part of the background again. She knows that they’ve forgotten her, or maybe just decided she’s not there.

She hasn’t seen her brothers since she signed the contracts. She considered trying to go back to Dom’s apartment to talk to them about this, but the thought of them not remembering the conversation had her running back to that potted plant to throw up again. So she snuck in while they were gone and packed a bag and got on a bus to Seattle.

Technically, she’s supposed to be living with Goodwin for a while. And Goodwin has an actual house. Lenny has never lived in a house, which is a side effect of growing up in New York City. It seems like Goodwin’s actually from Seattle, and she’s also a pretty average pitcher. Good company, then.

The problem here is that Lenny’s younger than everyone. Even Chorby Short is fifteen, putting her at two years older than Lenny, and everyone had been calling Chorby the baby. Lenny feels like a baby. She feels like she’s in a whole new world, trying to learn a whole new language.

Goodwin gives her a look, like she’s reading Lenny’s mind. “It’s not all going to be bad,” she says quietly. “We can figure it out.”

Lenny swallows. “You think so?”

“Sure. I mean…” she pauses, clearly casting around for some kind of positive side. “We get to be friends with all the other shadow players. It’s like having our own team. And hey, if people can’t see us or remember us, we don’t have to pay for food at restaurants anymore.”

Lenny laughs before she can help herself. “My brother would love that,” she says, and she means it. Except now she’s just thinking about Dom. She wonders if he knows why there’s a bunch of girls’ clothes left in his apartment. She wonders what he sees when he looks at his phone background. It used to be a picture of her and Randy sleeping on the couch together. She wonders if he changed it.

“You have a brother?” Goodwin asks, in what’s probably supposed to be an encouraging tone. It comes across more like she’s trying to talk to a skittish animal.

“Two,” she says, and her voice nearly cracks. “Uh, one’s going to be on the Millennials, and one’s on the Sunbeams, and they both don’t…”

“Oh,” Goodwin says softly. “Oh.”

Lenny nods, not trusting herself to speak. She wants a hug from her brothers more than anything in the world.

Goodwin does not hug the same way that Dom does, or Randy. Her arms are too long and she’s not very good at it. But she squeezes Lenny tight and that, that part is the same.

She goes to a lot of games.

Not Garages games. It turns out that being trapped in the eternal expectation of playing but not actually being able to play soured her quite a lot on the Garages. And it’s nerve-wracking every time she sits in the stands, especially once the incinerations start. Lenny wakes up every single day terrified that one of her brothers will die and the other one won’t even be able to remember her.

But Mcdowell Karim likes to drive, so they go on a lot of road trips to see other teams. Lenny goes with them sometimes. She likes going to Lovers games because they’re closest, and Jazz Hands games because she likes the mountains. She has favorite players and favorite pitchers. She and Chorby go to Magic games together and watch the players in awe.

She doesn’t go to Sunbeams or Millennials games. After a while nobody asks her to.

She has something like a rhythm, when she’s not out of town. Wake up. Get coffee with Sparks Beans. Check the weather for Dom and Randy’s games. Go to practice with the other shadow players, or occasionally go to a game, or go to an arcade with Goodwin to play pinball or something. She doesn’t watch her brothers play. All she ever does is make sure they survived.

The other players in the shadows are kind. Chorby shows her some of the magic she can do. Goodwin, for all her initial stumbles, is a good caretaker, careful and respectful and compassionate. Mcdowell is the only one who calls her Eleanor, and it’s something she holds close, treasures dearly: an artifact of who she was before.

She dyes her hair a dozen times. She gets a lot of piercings. She wears a lot of flannel and then realizes she hates flannel, and then she learns to sew and makes a lot of horrible flannel patchwork blankets. She buys new shoes. She buys used shoes. She goes vegan for one horrible week and paleo for another.

It’s not enough to keep her mind off things. But it’s something.

“Why don’t we start a band?” Lenny asks one day.

Goodwin shrugs. “I don’t play anything.”

“Isn’t the Garages’ whole thing that they’re a band?”

“Well, that’s part of their thing. I think their real thing is that they’re a blaseball team, you know.”

Lenny huffs. It’s been two seasons in the shadows, she’s nearly fifteen, and she’s actually pretty good at the bass. Or, well, she’s better than she used to be. She records a lot of videos of herself playing, and when she can stomach watching them, it sounds… better. She’s more confident than she used to be.

She would feel way more confident if she had a real band, but of course, she doesn’t, because she’s trapped in the shadows.

“Why don’t you play me a song?” Goodwin says suddenly.

Lenny narrows her eyes. “What?”

“Well, you’re always practicing in your bedroom, don’t you want an audience?”

“I joined the shadows so people wouldn’t look at me.”

That’s bait for an argument. Unfortunately, Goodwin doesn’t rise to it. “I’d like to hear you sometime,” she says, and for a second Lenny can’t breathe because she’s had this exact conversation with Randy before. “Just let me know when.”

“Okay,” she says, winded. Goodwin doesn’t push it. That’s one of the great things about Goodwin: she’s incredibly good at knowing exactly when to cut it out. They’re not strangers anymore, and they’re in it for the long haul, so Lenny is trying her best to be… friendly. Or at least nice.

Goodwin doesn’t ask again. But on the day Lenny sits down on the couch and sings an ugly, clumsy rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Water, she claps and cheers like Lenny’s a hero. So that’s pretty cool.

On the day of the first extended siesta, Chorby finds her sitting in a park and says, “I can go with you to New York, if that’s what you need.”

Lenny’s shaking her head before the sentence is over. She’s been growing her hair out and she kind of hates the way it skims the top of her ears, the way it swishes with the movement. “I can’t.”

“Lenny,” Chorby says exasperatedly, and plops down next to her. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Lenny hates the shadows more than she knew she could, but she’s happy to have a best friend. Chorby shows her magic tricks and talks about Yellowstone in hushed, awed tones that Lenny is deeply jealous of. She spends a lot of her time transformed into a frog, but whenever Lenny’s there she seems to be a human. They sneak into movies together, and there’s a guest room in Goodwin’s house that’s practically Chorby’s second bedroom. She just turned eighteen, and Lenny’s kind of hoping that she moves in for good, even though she knows it’s more likely that she’ll move out of Mcdowell’s attic and live on her own.

“I can’t,” Lenny repeats, like it’s obvious. “C’mon, Bee, you know that.”

“You have to try.”

“They won’t remember me.”

“This is the one time they actually might.”

“I haven’t seen them in three years,” Lenny says. Randy looks different now, Hellmouth different. Dom looks tired. She doesn’t watch their games but she can’t help but see them sometimes. She was the only one of the shadow players who wasn’t at the last series, watching the Tigers and the Mills play. She doesn’t regret not going, either. “What if they don’t-”

“They’re going to recognize you,” Chorby says in exasperation. “Look, think about it like a road trip, right? I’ve never been to New York. We can take a couple weeks and drive there, sneak into a Broadway show, you show me your favorite restaurants, we visit your brothers if you want to.” She pauses. “And to be clear, you will want to, because I want you to.”

Lenny swallows. “Okay,” she says, even though she doesn’t want to.

They borrow Mcdowell’s van, and Goodwin gives them gas money, and they’re off. Lenny drives, mostly, because Chorby keeps deciding at random intervals that she’d rather be a frog, but it’s still a good trip because that means Lenny gets to pick most of the music. They sleep in the van at rest stops. They have fun.

Lenny didn’t realize it, but it has been a very long time since she actually had fun.

And Chorby was right: it’s good to be back in New York, especially after five days on the road. Some things have changed but some are the same, and they’re able to sneak into museums and shows and live glamorous lives in between eating hot dogs from carts and tracking down delis that Lenny only half-remembers.

She points out buildings and memories attached: that’s the street corner where Randy nearly got arrested for egging a cop car, this is where she and some of the other Blittle League players used to come after school. That, that’s the bodega Dom worked nights at whenever times got tough. And that-

“Is where you used to live,” Chorby guesses, from the look on Lenny’s face. “We don’t have to do this yet.”

“I don’t know if he’s still there,” Lenny says. She can’t look away from the apartment building. She thinks, absently, of the stairwells. Dom used to chase her up and down the stairs. She knows the patterns of the stains on the walls, could draw them right now if she tried. “Isn’t the whole thing that the Millennials all share an apartment?”

“That’s just team housing, they don’t have to use it. He could still be there, especially over siesta.”

“I don’t know about this.”

Chorby reaches out and squeezes her hand. “Do you want me to go ahead and check and then call you?”

And that, somehow, is what makes Lenny shake her head. It’s her disappointment to handle, her fear, not Chorby’s. “We can go,” she says.

The side door still doesn’t latch the whole way, so they can sneak in and head up to the second floor without any real problems. Chorby doesn’t let go of Lenny’s hand and she’s grateful for the contact, even if she can’t say it. She can’t say anything right now, actually. Can’t even really breathe.

Walking through the hallways feels like a lucid dream. She’s thought about this so many times, and she can hardly believe she’s actually here. She feels bigger and smaller all at once as she leads Chorby through the hallway and comes to a stop in front of the right door. The place she lived for years.

“Len,” Chorby says, very softly. “Do you need me to knock?”

Lenny swallows and nods. If it were anyone other than Chorby it would be embarrassing, but Chorby is… well, her best friend. Chorby won’t care about having to knock on a door for her.

And she doesn’t hesitate. She lifts a hand and raps on the door twice, sharply. Her other hand is still tangled with Lenny’s.

“In a second,” Randy calls from inside. Lenny claps her hand to her mouth. “Dom, were you expecting someone?”

“Chorby, we have to go,” Lenny whispers through her fingers. “Chorby, I can’t- Chorby-”

“Nope,” Chorby says. She’s not even reacting to Lenny clutching her fingers so hard that she’s certain she’s about to snap them in half. “We made it too far to stop now, come on.”

“What if,” Lenny says, and there are a billion ends to that sentence that die in her mouth as the door swings open.

There’s a second, a horrible second, where Randy doesn’t recognize her. She can see it in his face, a perfunctory blank look that doesn’t go away even as he meets her eyes. It’s one of the worst feelings she’s ever felt. She opens her mouth to start talking and spit out some kind of excuse about how it’s the wrong apartment, and turn and run down the hall and-

“Lenny?” Randy whispers, and it cracks her in half.

She lets go of Chorby’s hand and flings herself forward before she can even think about it. She’s taller now than she used to be, almost the same height as Randy, which is a kick in the teeth just like his horns and orange skin. But he holds her the same way, buries his nose in her hair and breathes deep.

“Randy?” Dom calls from the apartment. Lenny doesn’t look up, doesn’t want to watch her other brother look at her like a stranger, but Randy turns. “Who’s at the- oh my god.”

“Dom,” Randy says, and there’s a note of fear in his voice that makes Lenny’s arms tighten around him instinctively. “It- why did we-”

“I can explain later,” Lenny says, muffled by Randy’s shoulder. “Like, in an hour or something, when we’re all done crying.”

“Yeah,” Dom says, strangled. “Yeah. Oh, my god, Eleanor?”

“Come over here and hug me,” Lenny says, and Dom comes over and sweeps the both of them into his arms.

And for the first time in three years, Lenny feels herself relax.

Crying for an hour turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. But Chorby orders pizza at some point while they’re all standing in the doorway, so before long they all sit on the floor together, in a circle around the stack of pizza boxes.

“Bee,” Lenny says, staring at the stack. “Are you trying to feed an army?”

“I didn’t know what everyone likes,” Chorby says defensively. “So I tried to cover the bases. I figured we can… you know, have leftovers, or hand them out to people on the street.”

“Is that also why you ordered lots of soda?”

“No, that’s because-” Chorby goes rummaging in her boot and pulls out a flask. “You know.”

Lenny holds a hand out and wiggles her fingers. “Gimme.”

“Lenny,” Randy says, looking scandalized. “You’re-”

“Fifteen, so I’m about as old as you were when you came home high the first time,” Lenny says, as haughtily as she can manage. “And Chorby brought it for me, right?”

“No, that one’s mine. This one-” another flask from the other boot- “is yours. You guys can share it if you want, but I figured the boys would have something in the apartment if they want it.”

“We do,” Dom says, so seriously that Lenny has to clamp down on a wild high-pitched giggle. “I mean, drink responsibly, whatever, I don’t care about that. Lenny, what’s going on?”

“Yeah,” Randy says, looking uncharacteristically serious. Or, well, maybe it’s characteristic now. She hopes not. “Why did you wait so long to come see us?”

Lenny opens her mouth, ready to finally explain everything, and only stops at the last second. “Uh, Bee?”

“Mhm?”

“Do you think they’ll remember if we explain?”

Chorby tilts her head thoughtfully. “Actually, I can see why that would make them forget.”

Lenny sighs. “Blaseball,” she mumbles. “Always making things impossible.”

Dom zeroes in on that right away. “You signed a contract.”

“Yeah.”

“With Seattle,” Randy says, with the urgency of someone remembering something important far too late. “But you’re not on the team.”

Lenny bites her lip. Chorby’s right: if the active players aren’t supposed to know about the shadows yet, then they’re probably not going to remember her if she talks about the shadows. But maybe… “I’m not on the roster right now.”

“So you’re not on the team?”

“No,” Chorby says, deliberate and careful. “We’re not on the active roster.”

It clicks for Dom and Randy at the same time. Both of them look stunned, like they never even considered the possibility of additional players. Lenny lets out a breath. “But you guys aren’t actively playing right now. So there’s a chance that if we play our cards right, you’ll be able to remember… at least some of this visit.”

“Remember?” Dom repeats, stricken. “You mean we might not remember? Have you been here before?”

“I haven’t seen you since I signed the contract,” Lenny says. She doesn’t mean it to be sad, but Dom and Randy both look horrified, and it feels like a vise squeezing on her ribs. “No, don’t do that, I shouldn’t have signed it.”

“We shouldn’t have let you,” Randy says, voice thick. “It- for the last three years, you’ve just been alone… where?”

“Seattle. And I’m not alone.” Lenny’s eyes flick up to Chorby, who smiles, encouraging. “There are a lot of us. I’ve been staying with someone. We’ve been having practices and stuff. It’s been okay.”

“It’s been okay?” Dom repeats. There’s something in his voice that’s hopeful and something desperate and too much for Lenny to ever unpack.

She nods and forces herself to meet his eyes, even though it just makes her want to cry again. “Yeah,” she says, and all things considered, it’s not the truth, but it’s not a lie either. “It- it could’ve been a lot worse, I think.”

“At least you’re safe,” Randy says, which- wow, Lenny doesn’t want to think about that for a second longer than she has to. “Probably safer than us.”

“Probably,” she manages. The inside of her mouth feels like sand, suddenly. “I just… wanted to come here. Since I had the chance. I thought it was worth trying.”

“How long can you stay?” Dom says. He keeps looking at her with this uncomfortable desperation, like he’s drinking her in. Like he thinks she might disappear if he blinks — and, really, he’s right. Isn’t that what happened last time?

Lenny glances at Chorby. “When did Mcdowell need the van back?” She knows the answer is too soon. “Because we can-”

Chorby shakes her head. “I can drive back myself.”

“No, Chorby, you don’t-”

“Eleanor,” Chorby says, which is enough to bring Lenny up short. She doesn’t think Chorby’s used her full name once in the last three years. Chorby smiles gently. “I actually think I’m going to go to Yellowstone for a little while, once you’re settled here. Visit a couple of other national parks. I haven’t gotten out much for the last few years, and I’d like to change that. So you can stay here as long as you want, and take a bus or a plane back. It’ll be fine.”

“Bee,” Lenny says, on the verge of tears. “Thank you.”

Chorby smiles. “Of course,” she says, and then her smile goes a little mischievous. “And I get the feeling you want alone time, right?”

“Bee-”

“Because I can hop on out.”

“Oh my god-”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Chorby says, and then promptly transforms into a frog.

“Uh,” Randy says, strangled. “Is that supposed to happen?”

“Don’t you live in hell now?” Lenny reaches her hands out, and Chorby hops into them. She drops her on one knee and reaches for the pizza boxes. “There’s no way you’ve never seen something like that.”

“She does that a lot?” Dom says faintly. “Can she understand us?”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t really have a memory span.” Lenny pats Chorby’s head absently and pulls out a slice of veggie pizza. She sets it in front of Chorby, who immediately hops down and starts eating it. “This happens a lot, don’t worry about it.”

Randy and Dom exchange a bemused look, which Lenny ignores. She was good at that even before the shadows, a side effect of being the youngest by a wide margin. At last, Randy says, “Well, you can stay for the whole siesta. Seriously.”

“Oh, I’m going to,” Lenny says, with a lot of confidence that she wasn’t feeling until he said that. This is going to be a long siesta, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to handle it. “I was always going to be here. Can’t get rid of me.”

“Never,” Dom says, with so much vehemence that she’s a little startled. “Can you stay here even during the regular season? Even if we don’t remember-”

Lenny shakes her head on instinct. “I,” she says, and then she has to stop, overwhelmed by tears already. Dom and Randy reach out hands to put on her knees, almost at the same time, and for a second she feels like she’s thirteen again.

The truth is that she’s not sure. Away games have never been a problem, even when she was away from Seattle for multiple nights in a row. And this siesta road trip hasn’t caused problems at all. She’s not scared of the shadows.

But she’s scared of being forgotten. She has the same conversation with the barista about septum piercings every day. The people in her life don’t remember her. She’s not sure she could handle that blank look from Randy happening every day.

“I don’t think so,” she says. It’s only half a lie.

Dom and Randy exchange one more stricken look, but Dom says, “That’s okay. Stay with us as long as you can.”

Randy reaches a hand up and brushes away a tear. “There’ll be more siestas,” he promises. “And more times for your friends to order us enough pizza to feed Dom’s entire team, and more days when you’re here.”

“I’ll be here,” she promises. “If I can, I’ll be here.”

“Good,” Randy says, and Dom makes a noise in agreement, and Lenny decides that today, just this once, she isn’t going to ask herself how long she can handle staying. She’s just going to stay.

She stays the whole siesta, actually.

Nobody’s more surprised than Lenny, but she doesn’t leave until the day before the season starts. She spends the whole time in New York, except for one very scary trip to the Hellmouth that she doesn’t plan on repeating anytime soon. She meets the Millennials, and the Sunbeams. Dom and Randy handle all the questions about her with as much grace as possible — which isn’t much, all told, but they try.

There’s not much to say about the shadows. She’s terrified that telling them too much will make them forget, or that not saying enough will mean they don’t bother to remember. But she talks about her friends. She introduces them both to Goodwin over FaceTime because they want to meet the person who’s been taking care of her. Goodwin is close to tears the whole time, a dam that finally breaks when Dom thanks her over and over again.

Chorby goes to Yellowstone after a few days, presumably to meet the Magic. Lenny’s expecting pictures of the team, but the pictures she sends are all geysers and mountains, breathtaking views. There’s only one picture of Chorby in the whole batch, a blurry selfie in front of a waterfall. Randy steals Lenny’s phone and sets it as her background, and Dom figures out how to prevent her from changing it for three weeks. She hates them both.

But she has her brothers back. For a few stellar months in New York, she has her brothers back.

It ends too soon, but they go to the airport with her on the last day. All of them had what Dom called a “big stupid group cry” in the apartment, but Lenny thinks they might have another one in front of the airport security line.

“We’ll call you if we remember,” Dom promises, over and over. “We’ll call. We love you, Lenny.”

“I know,” Lenny says. “I know. I love you too.”

Randy doesn’t say much, just hugs her and makes her promise to make smart choices. Dom doesn’t shut up, which is just as sweet in a different way.

When the plane lands in Seattle, there are no missed calls. There’s only one text, from Winnie McCall on the Millennials. All it says is I still remember you.

She tries not to be disappointed. But it’s disappointing anyways. And she doesn’t want to go through calling or texting and get ignored time and time again, so she doesn’t bother. It’s easier this way, she tells herself. It’s easier than getting her hopes up and being forgotten. It’s easier for Dom and Randy not to notice that something’s missing. It’s better.

Chorby’s waiting for her at the airport, and Goodwin’s waiting for them both at the house. And Lenny thinks: if she can’t have her brothers, at least she has this.

“You’re sure you don’t want to call your brothers?” Goodwin says, for the hundredth time. “I know it’s been a couple of years, but-”

Lenny shakes her head. “We can celebrate next siesta, we’ll have a lot of birthdays to catch up on.”

Goodwin and Chorby exchange a skeptical look. Lenny narrowly avoids rolling her eyes. “It’s my birthday, I’m eighteen, come on, let’s get the party started.”

The party in question is the three of them at a roller skating rink at midnight. The rest of the team is going to be there any minute. It’s not going to be a huge affair, but it’s going to be fun. At least, she hopes it is.

Season six of blaseball starts in a week, and Lenny’s lucky enough that her birthday is right before it. It’s been a difficult couple of years, honestly. She hasn’t gone to as many games, and she’s been struggling in team practice. She’s all but given up on writing music. But Goodwin assures her that every seventeen-year-old feels like the world is falling apart, and the team is there to help her out.

The only problem is that everyone has been… super weird about Dom and Randy. Like, weirder than they’ve ever been. She was with her brothers for her sixteenth birthday during the siesta, and everyone seems to think that she should call them for her eighteenth.

And Lenny doesn’t know how to explain that she can’t. Everyone has met active blaseball players at this point, and everyone has been forgotten, but as far as she knows none of them knew someone before joining the shadows. So none of them understand the roller coaster swoop in her gut every time she ran out for groceries and took too long coming back and they’d forgotten her again in the meantime. None of them understand Dom squinting at his phone trying to read a text message that Lenny sent him, not quite able to make sense of it.

So she’s given up on explaining. It’s easier just to steamroll, to let everyone think she’s being weird and push for what she wants. And right now, she just wants to have a normal party.

“Bee,” she says, and tugs Chorby’s hand. “Do a lap with me, come on, we gotta warm up.”

Chorby wobbles on her skates, but she gets to the rink with Lenny. “How are you so good at this?”

“We did it a lot when I was a kid.”

She purses her lips. “Lenny, you know we could call them.”

“We could call Winnie, sure, but she might forget us afterwards, and we’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

“Like?”

Lenny grins at Chorby. “Like how it’s my birthday so you have to let me skate circles around you.” She does a lazy circle around Chorby, who valiantly stays upright. “It’s your present to me.”

Chorby’s actual present to Lenny had two parts. The first is that she helped dye Lenny’s hair a horrible pastel shade of Sunbeams yellow, then black to cover it up before anyone saw it, and still went with her to get her tongue pierced afterwards. Which all kind of falls into the realm of normal stuff they do for each other, actually. Lenny spent the next week helping Chorby learn a spell to turn herself into a cat and then frantically helping her learn to turn back. But Chorby called it a birthday present, so it counts.

The second present, though, the real present was a photo album. A couple of them were clearly taken during Lenny’s siesta visit, and a couple more were clearly stolen from the apartment. But there are also pictures of Lenny and Chorby at the first game they went to together, and pictures of Mcdowell reading Lenny’s palm. There are pictures of her that time she repainted her bedroom in Goodwin’s house and somehow ended up covered in deep purple paint. And there are blank pages in the back, pages that Lenny plans on filling one day.

So Chorby doesn’t owe her anything. If anything Lenny owes Chorby a hell of a lot. But instead she skates in circles around Chorby and then says, casually, “If you need help balancing, you can hold onto me.”

Both of Chorby’s hands clamp onto Lenny’s elbow immediately, holding her in place. Lenny lets out a surprised laugh, trying her best not to stumble, and Chorby glares at her. “Don’t offer if you’re not gonna help.”

“I’m gonna help.” Lenny rests her free hand on top of both of Chorby’s. “Just do what I do, okay? Nice and easy.”

“Nice and easy,” Chorby repeats, sounding strained. “If I go down, you’re going down with me.”

Lenny grins at her. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They do fall, a couple of times. Lenny gets some impressive bruises on her knees, which Chorby won’t stop apologizing for. But Lenny’s happy about it. Falling down just means they’re learning, or something. It’s pretty cool.

It is a normal day.

That’s the thing that’s horrible, looking back: it’s a normal day. Goodwin and Lenny agreed to stay at home instead of going to practice, just this once. Lenny’s old enough to live on her own by now, but she’s been with Goodwin for half a decade and she doesn’t see the point in leaving. She’s happy here, and Goodwin is happy to have her. She says things about empty houses and not wanting to be a lonely old woman, but Lenny thinks the real reason is that Goodwin would just… miss her if she left.

Ostensibly Lenny’s supposed to help clean, but she normally takes care of the kitchen and vacuuming, and she prefers to do that when she’s home alone. Goodwin knows that. They have a system. Right now Goodwin is dusting the baseboards, a weird, finicky cleaning thing that she does once in a blue moon. Lenny is weirdly fond of it, even if she doesn’t help. It’s nice having clean baseboards. It feels like the kind of thing you do in a home.

And so here she is, sitting on the couch eating popcorn when her phone buzzes. Lenny groans, because her phone is across the couch from her, and she absolutely doesn’t want to move.

“Sorry, are you bored in there?” Goodwin calls from the other room. “Would you rather help me dust?”

“No,” Lenny yells back, and grabs her phone. It’s a text from Mcdowell: If I had known, I would have warned you.

Lenny blinks. Mcdowell has always been able to see the future, or at least bits and pieces, and they’ve never said anything like this to her before. It feels like it’s either incredibly passive aggressive or-

Or an apology.

She grabs the TV remote before the thought is fully formed in her head. She turns on BNN, and there’s something sick in the back of her throat, and she can’t breathe, because Mcdowell wouldn’t say that unless-

“For those of you just joining us,” says the anchor, “there has been another incineration. Randall Marijuna of the Breckenridge Jazz Hands has been replaced by Steph Weeks.”

Lenny smacks a hand over her mouth. She’s going to throw up. She’s going to throw up, but she can’t move, because there’s a picture of her brother on the TV, and this can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.

Her phone buzzes again. And again. And a couple more times, and then Goodwin says from behind her, “Len, what are- oh, god.”

And that’s what does it. She springs to her feet and sprints past Goodwin, who barely reacts, and bends over the toilet and heaves.

When she was seven and Randy was thirteen, he used to take her to the library after school. Dom would work when he was done with school so it was just the two of them most days, and they were supposed to stay home. But Randy took her to libraries and playgrounds and, once, a Blittle League game.

Dom might’ve been the one to put a bat in her hand, but Randy was the one who gave her a glove. And she’s never going to forget seeing him again — god, seeing him for the last time almost three years ago — that moment when he didn’t recognize her, and then that gorgeous, elastic moment when he did.

Incinerated is an ugly word. Incinerated is a horrible thing to think about. Incinerated is a word that doesn’t belong with any name, but not Randy, not Randy, god, not Randy.

She throws up until there’s nothing but bile and then she stays there, forehead pressed against the lid of the toilet, breathing hard. Her eyes are closed, but she can tell when Goodwin comes into the bathroom, kneels down next to her.

“Sorry,” she croaks. It’s not the point of any of this, but she feels like she has to say it. “You just cleaned.”

“Lenny,” Goodwin murmurs, “don’t do that, come on.”

Lenny sniffs. “I feel gross.”

“Yeah, I bet. C’mere, kiddo.”

She doesn’t wait any longer, just flings herself forward. She knows even with her eyes closed that Goodwin will be waiting with arms wide open to catch her. So she throws her arms around Goodwin’s neck, and waits for a hand to settle solidly between her shoulder blades in return. And it’s only then that she finally, finally starts crying.

She’s not sure what wakes her up at first. She’s actually not sure of… anything. She feels terrible, throat raw and eyes crusty, so she doesn’t move. Her head’s in someone’s lap. She thinks she’s on the couch. She thinks she’s miserable.

“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Chorby says quietly. She must be near the door; that must’ve been what woke Lenny up. “Especially with…”

“Yeah,” a voice says, not quite familiar enough to recognize. “Thanks for calling. Where-”

“Over here.” There are some footsteps. “We, uh, all kind of crashed here.”

“There are so many of you,” says another voice, disbelieving. “I thought it would be just a couple players, not… this.”

Lenny knows that voice. She shoots upright, ignoring the way that her head is pounding. “Dom?” she croaks.

He looks like just as much of a mess as she feels, exhausted and ragged. He looks at her for a second in not-quite recognition before he lets out a breath. “Hell,” he mutters.

Lenny nods. “I know the feeling,” she says, aiming for something light, literally any levity, but it falls flat. “You’re… here.”

“Winnie dragged me out. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

“Because if I said you had a secret sister you forgot, I was worried you would’ve jumped out of the airplane window,” Winnie says. It has the cadence of a joke, but it doesn’t feel like one. She nods at Lenny. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Lenny says. Most of the team is asleep, sprawled across Goodwin’s living room, so she carefully gets up and picks her way over to them. She stumbles at the end, but Chorby catches her with a hand on her waist. “Bee…”

“Thank me next week, when you’re a person again.”

“Shut up, I’ll thank you now.” Lenny pauses, goes to say thanks, and then her breath catches in her throat as the enormity of what’s going on sinks in. Chorby doesn’t have anyone outside of the shadows; not even the Magic players she met remember her. Winnie, and by extension Dom, is their last link to the active players, and they agreed that they wouldn’t risk contacting her again in case she forgets this time.

But Winnie’s here. Because Randy’s dead.

“Oh, god, Lenny, stop,” Chorby says, looking horrified at whatever look is on her face. “Seriously, I get it. Go upstairs, or something.”

Lenny nods. Dom loops an arm around her waist and she leans into it, leads him up the stairs to her bedroom. She can hear Chorby and Winnie talking behind them, but she doesn’t bother listening.

As soon as they get to the bedroom she all but throws Dom down onto the bed. “Lie down,” she says, and it’s partly because he looks like he’s about to collapse, mostly because she’s already sick of standing up.

He scoots so his back is against the wall, one arm spread out across the pillows. Lenny lies down and curls up so her face is against his chest and one hand is against his waist, and he wraps his arm around her shoulders. “You know you have a mullet, right?”

“Yeah, I’m trying it out.”

“And you have more piercings.”

“Four in each ear, the septum, the tongue, and the eyebrow.” She pauses. “And the belly button.”

Dom sighs. “Should know these things,” he mutters. “I should be here. God, Lenny, I’m so sorry, I-”

“Stop doing that, it’s not your fault.”

“You’re a kid.”

“I’m eighteen now,” she says, which pulls him up short. “And even if I weren’t, you don’t- we both have a lot to deal with right now. You don’t have to help me out here.”

Dom shakes his head. “Len,” he says, voice cracking, “this might be the only chance I get to help you.”

Her fingers dig into his ribs on instinct. “Don’t say that.”

“I haven’t seen you in three years. Out of the last six years we’ve only spent a few months together. And a lot can happen in blaseball.”

“Dom, shut up.”

His fingers stroke against the base of her skull. “I’m not saying I’m planning on jumping in front of an umpire or anything, I’m just saying that we don’t get to do this very often. And I’m here, and you’re-” he cuts off with what sounds like a laugh.

Lenny wriggles so she can look him in the face. “I’m what?”

“I was going to say you’re by yourself, but I can tell that’s not true. Winnie hauled me over here because of Chorby, and Goodwin’s been taking care of you. And the whole team was downstairs.”

“I’m not alone,” Lenny agrees. “But if you’re here, you might as well take care of me too.”

Dom smiles. He still looks so tired and so sad, but at least this is something. “Always,” he whispers. “For as long as I’m here, Len.”

She presses her face against his neck and breathes deep. “I miss him,” she says. “I don’t think I’m ever going to not miss him.”

“That’s okay.” His hand rubs her back, gently, carefully. “Maybe it gets easier, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we just learn to carry it better. But one day we’re going to learn to carry it.”

“Yeah,” Lenny whispers, and decides not to point out that he keeps saying we, like he’s going to be here past tomorrow morning.

Lenny has never really paid attention to elections. It never seemed important — she can’t bet on games, she doesn’t get to interact with new players, she doesn’t get to benefit from blessings — and right now the last thing she wants to do is pay attention to anything.

At least, that’s true until Goodwin glances at the news on election day and says, “Oh, my god, they did necromancy.”

Lenny, who is mid-sip of orange juice, chokes spectacularly. She wipes away the bits dripping out of her mouth and says, “They did what?”

Goodwin lifts up her phone. “They brought Hotdogfingers back from the dead. That idol stuff.”

“Huh,” Lenny says. “Do the Garages have six pitchers now?” That’s some garbage, if they do. She and Goodwin and the rest have been waiting for six years to play, and a literal dead woman gets the chance first? Absolutely not.

“No, it says-” Goodwin stands up suddenly. “Mike Townsend retreats to the shadows.”

“What?”

“It says-”

“I heard you!” Lenny slams her orange juice down on the side table, heart pounding. “Does that mean the other players know about the shadows now? Do you think they’ll be able to see us, or remember us, or-”

“Len.” Goodwin reaches down and squeezes her shoulder, and Lenny’s jaw snaps shut. Goodwin knows, of course, that she’s not asking about the Theodore Duendes and Allison Abbotts of the world. She’s asking about Dom. “We can figure that out later. First, it sounds like we might need to throw a welcome party.”

Lenny clambers to her feet, feeling dizzy. It’s been a rough few months without Randy. She missed a lot of team practices. She hasn’t dyed her hair in weeks. Winnie, thankfully, had remembered Chorby in the shadows, but not Lenny. It’s not perfect, but it’s a connection if they need it, the one bright side of the heaviest storm cloud in the world.

But Goodwin’s right. If Mike Townsend is actually in the shadows now, then he deserves a proper hello. God knows he’s probably confused.

“Okay,” she says, with more bravado than she feels. “Let’s find him.”

It turns out to be a short quest: Mike Townsend is at the Big Garage, wandering around the field. Lenny kind of feels bad for the guy. She doesn’t know much of anything about him, but she knows he’s not very good and not very popular. This whole deal probably feels like a kick in the ribs.

“Townsend,” Goodwin calls, and lifts an arm to wave hello.

He turns, looking confused. “Uh, hi, fans aren’t supposed to be on the field but-”

“We’re shadow pitchers,” Lenny says, which shuts him right up. “What, did you think it was just you?”

Mike looks warily between the two of them. It strikes Lenny that they must be a funny pair: Goodwin more than seven feet tall but smiling like she’s Superman, Lenny with her roots grown out and her makeup from last Tuesday still smudged on her face.

“I didn’t know,” he says after a second. “I kind of thought the team was just pranking me when they kept acting like they didn’t remember me.”

Lenny sighs. This guy is going to need some help getting through this.

“It sucks,” she says. Goodwin gives her a disapproving look, which she ignores. “Being here is the short end of the stick. You can talk to the team, but they’re not going to remember you. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known them. It’s going to be hard. You don’t even get to play.”

“You’re not doing a great job of making me feel better.”

She rolls her eyes. “But we still have a good time here. We don’t have to worry about getting incinerated. We’re all really good at dining and dashing. It’s not the same as living a life, but it’s still a life to live. So you don’t have to mope about it.”

Slowly, Mike nods. “Alright. I want to meet everyone. What did you say your names were?”

“I’m Goodwin Morin. And this is Eleanor-”

“Lenny,” she says quickly. “It says Lenny on all my paperwork, and Goodwin only calls me Eleanor when she’s mad at me or trying to make me look stupid.”

Goodwin rolls her eyes, although she smiles indulgently. “This is Lenny Marijuana.”

“Oh,” Mike says, and Lenny doesn’t like the way he says it. “You mean… Marijuana as in-”

“As in the drug,” Lenny says flatly. “And yes, as in my brothers, and no, I don’t want to talk about it, and no, I especially don’t want to talk about it with you.”

“You were playing nice for so long,” Goodwin mutters. “You gave the shadows spiel, you’re practically an expert, and-”

“She’s an expert with a sore spot,” Mike says, surprising Lenny. “I don’t blame her.”

Lenny scowls. “Don’t make excuses for me.”

“I’d never,” Mike says, and it straddles the line between dry and sincere, and right then and there she decides she likes him. “I’m Mike, by the way. Townsend. Although I guess you knew that.”

“Yeah,” Goodwin admits, “but it’s alright. Welcome to the shadows, Mike. We’re happy to have you here.”

Dom doesn’t call. It’s fine. It was kind of a pipe dream anyways.

Townsend’s actually kind of a funny dude. He fits right in and asks all the right questions, a combination of things that Lenny feels smart for knowing the answers to and stupid for never thinking to ask. He insists on going to Houston to try and visit their shadows, because apparently one of the Spies pitchers also joined up at the same election. Lenny doesn’t go with him but Chorby does, and they come back in high spirits.

“It’s good to see shadow players from other teams,” Chorby explains. “It’s weird, because it’s like talking to ghosts or something. We can’t completely interact. But I liked remembering that it’s not just us.”

Lenny starts playing closer attention to the news, because if someone else could go to the shadows she wants to know about it. There’s only one blessing about it up for grabs, so she’s not keeping close track of that. And there’s that idol stuff, but it’s not like anyone’s going to idolize her, so she doesn’t need to pay attention.

The games, though. The games.

She’s at Mike’s apartment when it happens. He’s been trying to teach her to bake bread, with incredibly mixed results, and he’s mid-spiel about how her nail polish is going to flake off into the sourdough when she checks her phone and then drops it. He gives her a quizzical look. “Are you bored about food safety?”

“No.” Lenny pauses. “Uh, yes, but that’s not it. Jaylen just killed three people.”

Mike’s eyebrows slowly start to rise. “Like, with a knife or something?”

“No, it’s- you know that thing she does where she hits people with pitches? A bunch of them just got incinerated.”

He leans over her shoulder to look at her phone screen, squinting at the names. She wonders if he’s looking for anyone in particular. “So it only impacts those teams?”

“Yeah, it looks like it.”

“Jesus, Jay,” Mike mutters, and Lenny suddenly feels like she’s on the outside of something important. “Okay. Debts to pay, huh?”

“She owes you a debt,” Lenny says. She doesn’t mean to say it. Mike doesn’t talk about Jaylen, the same way that Lenny doesn’t talk about her brothers. But he’s here because of her — not because he signed a contract that he didn’t read, not because he figured the shadows were as good as he’d ever get. Because someone had to go away so Jaylen could come back.

Lenny likes Mike. And Mike’s too nice to hate Jaylen. Fortunately for him, Lenny’s not.

But he just shakes his head. “No, she doesn’t. Someone was always going to have to go. And you guys are way nicer than the real Garages.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard the songs. They sound like assholes.”

“Yeah, they kind of were. They were my assholes, but they were still assholes.”

“Gross,” Lenny mutters. “Are the Garages playing the Mills this season?”

“We don’t get to know that yet.”

She cuts him a weird look. “What do you mean?”

“We don’t know what games we’re playing till the day before. Full schedules are forbidden knowledge.”

Lenny shakes her head mockingly. “Michael, the fact that I exist is forbidden knowledge. Live a little and learn to look up full schedules. We have better Google in the shadows.”

“Huh,” Mike says thoughtfully. “I wonder if that works for TV spoilers.”

“Sometimes, but it’s never for the spoilers you actually want to read.” Lenny pulls open the Mills schedule, where it’s saved on her phone. And sure enough, right there: Jaylen, pitching against the Millennials, in about a month.

Next to her, she can feel Mike pause, like he’s trying to work his way up to saying something. She’s about to tell him not to bother, when he says, “I’ll go with you.”

“What?”

“If you want to go to-” he motions at her phone. “That game, or any of the others. If you think something bad is going to happen, and you don’t want Goodwin or Chorby or whoever to be there with you, then I’ll go with you instead.”

“You’re my friend too,” Lenny says. She doesn’t actually mean to say it. She likes being in the limbo where they argue about baking bread and whether or not it’s a bad idea to try and pierce Chorby’s ears herself. She likes not having to do it.

When she looks, Mike is smiling faintly. “Thanks,” he says simply, and she can tell he means it. “But I play a different part in your life than they do, and that’s fine. I’m just saying if you want space but don’t want to be alone, let me know.”

She manages a nod and sets her phone down. She kind of thinks she’s going to cry, which is gross and horrible. “Keep yelling at me about food safety or something, I’m sick of talking about feelings.”

“I feel very strongly about food safety,” says Mike, and it’s exactly sincere enough to get her to laugh.

Lenny doesn’t go to the game between the Millennials and the Garages. But she watches it. Her first ever time watching a Millennials game, and she watches in her bedroom huddled under the covers. Her back is pressed against the wall. She keeps thinking of Dom, holding her till she fell asleep.

Jaylen hits him with a pitch. Lenny swallows hard and looks up plane tickets.

Goodwin and Chorby both offer to go with her to Miami, but she tells them no. They know her too well. They were both there after Randy, and she doesn’t want them to see her like that. Hopefully there’s not an “after Dom” too, but if there is, the only person who’s going to be with her is Mike. He doesn’t ask questions when she sends him the travel itinerary, just sends a thumbs-up emoji.

This is how Lenny ends up on the Dale’s party yacht with Mike Townsend of all people, standing in a corner. They already made introductions to the other players in the Dale’s shadows, so now they’re just watching people, sipping punch together.

There were no incinerations in the first game, Dom or otherwise. Lenny has it in her to be grateful for that.

“I’ve never been on the yacht before,” Mike says, apropos of nothing.

Lenny snorts. “Really?”

He shrugs. “This isn’t really my scene. I don’t think it’s yours either.”

“It’s not, but…” she pauses to sip her punch, thinking about it. “But it’s better than staying in the hotel room, right?”

That’s not enough to encompass everything, of course. Ostensibly the party is celebrating another game without incinerations, and in some ways it also feels like a wake for Dom, celebrating his life in case it ends soon. But Lenny’s not here for that. She’s here because if she’s stuck in a hotel room with Townsend, she’s going to run them both into the ground with what-ifs and anxiety attacks. This might not be fun, but it’s more fun than that.

“I guess,” Mike says. “People keep looking at me weird.”

“They probably sort of recognize you.”

“How does that work, anyways?”

Lenny shrugs. “Beats me, I never read my contract. Other players and coaches and stuff can talk to you if they want, but they don’t normally remember.”

“Is that why you don’t live with your brothers?” Lenny shoots him a look, and he amends very quickly, “Brother.”

“Michael.”

“Brothers both past and present.”

Lenny rolls her eyes. “Yeah,” she admits. “I couldn’t do that to myself. Or to them.”

It’s not quite an answer, but Mike nods all the same. “It’s not too late to go back to Seattle, you know.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Whatever you say.”

“It is,” Lenny repeats. Because one of the newer guys on the Mills keeps looking at her, and Winnie McCall has waved at her, and she saw Dom across the yacht. She can’t go. Not now.

Mike nods and sips his punch. “I miss Sparks’s Irish coffee. Now that’s a party drink.”

“Yeah,” Lenny says, and sips hers too.

The second game, though.

They’re in decent seats, within eyeshot of the away team dugout. Lenny’s idea. She insisted, and Mike had caved, because he’s a pushover, or maybe because he knew that she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

It’s a pretty good game. Dom hits a double and scores a run, and she’s clapping and cheering in her seat. The Mills are running away with it, scoring run after run, and it’s thrilling to watch.

“You don’t go to a lot of games,” Mike says at one point. It’s not a judgment, just an observation.

She shrugs. “I used to. Kind of stopped a year or two ago. You see one, you’ve seen them all.”

“You’re having fun, though.”

“Of course I am.”

“So go to more games,” Mike says, like it’s obvious. She supposes that maybe it is.

It’s almost enough that she forgets. Actually, it is enough that she forgets, which makes it worse. Everything is still dark, but she’s been to eclipse games before. It’s normal. Nothing to watch out for. She’s watching Dom in the dugout, watching him laughing with his team, watching him-

And then, suddenly, Mike’s hand is over her eyes.

She knows what it means in an instant. “Don’t-”

His other hand grabs her wrist, keeping her from pulling his hand down. “Stop.”

“Let go of me, I have to see-”

“No, you don’t.”

“Mike-”

She can tell exactly when Dom gets incinerated, because the whole stadium goes perfectly silent. Even Mike, sitting next to her, seems to freeze for a second, but he still waits before dropping his hand away.

“Why did you do that,” Lenny says. She can’t even look at him. It feels like her heart is frozen inside her ribs. She’s staring at where Dom was sitting, even though nobody’s there anymore, even though the Mills are all scrambling in the dugout now. She thinks she can hear crying. “Why did you do that? I’ve seen it before.”

“In person?”

“No, but-”

“I was never going to let you watch that,” Mike says, and he sounds exhausted. He’s not looking at her either. “The first time it happens, I hope it’s a stranger or something. But I’m not going to let you watch your brother die.”

Lenny closes her eyes. She hates to admit it but he has a point, because when she closes her eyes she can still see Dom, mid-laugh. Just the same way when she thinks of Randy it’s thinking about him lying on the couch with her playing Minecraft. She doesn’t need to know what Dom looked like in those last seconds. She doesn’t need to know the look on his face.

But.

“Am I an only child now?” Lenny says. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from far away.

“That’s for you to decide,” Mike answers. “They’re still your brothers, even if they’re gone.”

She nods. It feels like the whole world is tilting around her. “I want to go home.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “I thought you might.”

“I’m also going to throw up in a couple seconds, I think.”

“You think?”

“It happened last time.”

“Do you want to get to the bathroom?”

Lenny stands up and immediately doubles over with nausea. “Nope.”

She hates Mike for taking that decision away from her. But she also loves him, because he brushes the long bits of her hair out of her face as she throws up in the stands, and books the plane tickets home, and packs the hotel room while she sits and stares in the mirror and tries to see Dom’s eyebrows or Randy’s nose in her face. She loves him because he knows better than to say a single word to her.

They get to the airport, like she’s in some kind of dream. Lenny is cocooned in a blanket that Mike stole from their hotel, sitting by herself at the gate while he gets them water bottles and snacks, when her phone rings. She’s already talked to Goodwin and Chorby — or, more accurately, she made Mike talk to them — so she answers without looking. “Yeah?”

“Hey,” Winnie McCall says. “I, uh, I wouldn’t normally call, but since I saw you on the yacht, I, uh. Are you still around?”

“No, we’re about to go back to Seattle.”

“Right, you and Townsend.” She lets out a breath. “Lenny. I know you’re gonna hear it a lot, but I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too. You probably-” she lifts a hand and tugs at her hair sharply, trying to keep herself from crying. “You probably knew him better than I did, the last few years.”

“He was still your brother.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just calling to let you know I have some of his and Randy’s things to send you. We’re doing away games for a little while longer but I’ll try to remember. I want you to have them. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lenny says. Her voice is cracking, god, she can’t do this, she can’t do this. “Winnie, I have to-”

“Go if you need to. And call me if you need to talk to someone.”

“I will,” she says, half promise and half lie. “Go… spend time with your team. If anyone asks, tell them I’m sorry.”

“I will,” Winnie says, as though anyone is going to ask. “I will. Bye, Lenny.”

“Bye, Winnie,” Lenny says, and pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

These are some of the things that Lenny inherits from her brothers:

Receipts. It turns out that Dom never threw receipts away for anything, so Lenny and Goodwin go through them together, slowly, trying to make sure he wasn’t secretly in massive debt. It looks like he wasn’t, thankfully.

Journals. Mostly Randy’s. Most of them are empty; the ones that aren’t are filled with scribbles and gibberish. Lenny steals a couple of her favorite notebooks, in case she wants to use one later.

Boxes and boxes of clothes. She goes through everything, all of Randy’s crop tops and Dom’s hoodies, and takes what she wants, and then lets everyone else take their pick. Goodwin can’t wear most of it because she’s far too tall, but she takes a lot of hats. Chorby takes most of the brightly colored things. Mike takes a couple of Dom’s jackets, even if Lenny never sees him wearing them. The rest of the things go to either the team or homeless shelters.

A truly incredible amount of weed. Just… so much weed.

Photos. Some are clearly Dom’s and some are clearly Randy’s. Most of those go into a box under Lenny’s bed, and only a couple make it into the photo album from Chorby, but Goodwin insists on putting a couple up. There’s one that Lenny looks at a lot: the three of them as kids, before they were scouted for the league, getting all dressed up for something. Lenny’s in a dress and scowling at the camera, all of nine years old. She doesn’t even remember it.

Cologne. Neither of them ever wore it, so she’s not sure who it belonged to or why, but she starts wearing it. It smells kind of gross. She gets used to it.

And, hidden in everything else, a jewelry box. One that was Lenny’s when she was in elementary school. When she opens it there are two letters inside, both addressed to her.

She puts the letters back inside the box. She can read those another day.

Chorby says, “I’m not sure about this.”

“I mean, I’ve done it before,” Mike points out. “This is actually the first time I’ve done it somewhere other than a basement, so I think it’s a step up.”

“Your apartment kitchen is still not a real tattoo parlor.”

Mike shrugs. “I’m not the person you need to talk out of this.”

“And you’re not going to talk me out of it,” Lenny adds. “You’re here for moral support, and if you can’t be supportive I’ll kick you out and call Goodwin.”

Chorby rolls her eyes. “Of course I’m going to support you, I’m just saying-”

“Look,” Mike says, and whirs the tattoo gun for emphasis. “I’m basically an expert at this. We have the stencils done, I cleaned everything like four times before you got here and twice after, it’s fine.”

“None of that makes it a good idea.”

Lenny sighs noisily and lifts up the hem of her shirt so her ribs are exposed. “Look, it’s my trauma anniversary and we get to celebrate it my way, and I want a tattoo. Deal?”

“I’m not sure,” Chorby says again. “But if you are, then I’m gonna safety pin your shirt up so you don’t have to hold it in place the whole time.”

“Thanks,” Mike says, and starts doing something with the stencil that Lenny doesn’t pay attention to. He lowers his voice as he leans in. “And for the record, if you need to stop, say you need to stop. No shame in having to take breaks.”

Lenny nods, not trusting herself to speak. She still hasn’t read the letters from Dom or Randy, but she realized one day that they must’ve signed them. So she’s getting the signatures on her ribs. A part of her brothers, here with her forever.

It’s been two years since Randy died, just over a year since Dom, and it’s been harder than she expected. Of course it has. At the beginning she didn’t understand why it hurt so much because she never saw them anyways. Now she understands that it hurts because she’ll never see them again. There’s that Hall of Flame thing, but that’s not the same. That’s not them here, in front of her.

“Alright,” Chorby says, materializing with a couple safety pins and a glass of water. “Len, drink up, I’ll get your shirt done.”

“Thanks,” Lenny says quietly. “Both of you, thanks.”

“No problem,” Mike says mildly. “When this is over you can pierce my ears and we’ll call it even.”

Chorby snorts and lifts a hand to her ears, the only time Lenny’s ever pierced someone else. “She’s not half bad at it.”

“I thought you got an infection,” Mike says, completely poker-faced.

“Sorry,” Lenny says with a wince. She still feels bad about that.

Chorby rolls her eyes and then stands back to observe her safety pin work. “Mike, will that get in your way?”

“No, that’s perfect.” He gives the tattoo gun one more whir. “Ready?”

Lenny takes a deep breath. Chorby, as if reading her mind, moves to sit on Lenny’s other side and grabs her hand. Lenny squeezes it and then nods. “Ready.”

Tattoos on the ribs, it turns out, are not fun to get. But it’s worth it when she looks in the mirror and sees her brothers’ names. It’s worth it when she gets to imagine them standing next to her, still with her every day.

Season eight is boring. Or maybe Lenny’s just bored because she doesn’t feel like watching games anymore. She tried to take Mike’s advice and go to more games, but it never felt worth it in the same way. And even team practices are slowly but surely losing their shine.

Things are getting easier, though, even as they’re getting harder. With Mike there she has someone to play bass with, and he can give her actual advice, unlike Goodwin and Mcdowell who applaud profusely even when she does a horrible job. It’s nice playing music with someone else. It’s nice just having someone else there, someone new.

Things are getting easier. And then, one day in the postseason, Chorby calls at three in the morning.

“Bee,” Lenny groans. “What’s going on?”

“Lenny,” Chorby says, and Lenny sits up immediately, because Chorby sounds like she’s crying. In the eight years they’ve known each other, Lenny has never seen her cry before. “Lenny, I’m on the idol board.”

It takes her a second to process that sentence, because it doesn’t make sense. “What?”

“The idol board, for the popular players.”

“That’s not possible,” Lenny says. Her heart is pounding. “Nobody’s supposed to know we exist, how could you be on the idol board?”

“I don’t know,” Chorby sobs. Lenny doesn’t remember deciding to get up, but she’s already moving, throwing on a jacket over her pajamas and looking for shoes. “I don’t know what’s happening, I just looked because I couldn’t sleep and now — Lenny, I think they’re trying to get me the lottery blessing.”

“Lottery blessing,” Lenny repeats. “Like… like Jaylen? Like they’re trying to get you onto a team?”

“I’m in the right spot for it.”

“When are elections?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

Lenny curses under her breath. Not enough time to do anything about it other than a team meeting and praying. “Alright, Bee, breathe for me, okay? Take a deep breath-”

“What if I don’t want to go?” Chorby whispers.

Lenny has to stop to rest her forehead against the doorframe. There are a thousand things she could say. She doesn’t want Chorby to go either. She doesn’t want to go to Chicago or Halifax or whatever to watch games and have Chorby stare at her for fifteen seconds before remembering who she is. It was bad enough doing this for her brothers. She doesn’t want to lose someone else to this.

And she’s jealous. God, she’s so jealous she can feel it in her teeth, threatening to pour out of her mouth. Maybe she doesn’t want to leave the safety of the shadows, but she wants to be a person again. She wants to make eye contact with strangers and get complimented on her piercings and be a part of the world.

But she’s not the one on the idol board. It’s not about her.

“We’ll talk about it,” Lenny says at last. “We will. But we signed up to play, Bee, there’s… I don’t know how much we can do.”

“I know,” Chorby says. “Yeah. Len, I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, okay? Do you want me to stay on the phone?”

“No, god, don’t-”

“I already have shoes on,” Lenny says, like it’s a trump card. And it works like one, because Chorby groans but she stops arguing. “Hang tight, okay? I’ll be there soon.”

“Okay.” Chorby takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, and Lenny tries to relax with the sound. “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

Lenny hangs up. She’s not surprised when she steps out of the room to see Goodwin looking at her blearily. “I’m going to Chorby’s.”

Goodwin nods slowly, clearly not quite awake. “Everything okay?”

Lenny wants to say no, but then Goodwin will try to come with her. “For now,” she says instead, because it’s kind of the same thing. “But we’re probably going to need a team meeting tomorrow. Go back to bed, it’s okay.”

“Mmmm-hm.” Goodwin reaches out and ruffles Lenny’s hair, an absent motion with a heavy hand. “Text me when you get there, have fun.”

Fun. Lenny wishes this was something fun.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, and all but runs out the door.

Chorby is inconsolable all night, and the next day, and the morning of elections. Lenny sort of gets it: if this works, Chorby’s about to be the first player in the entire league to come out of the shadows. It’s a lot of pressure. None of them know how it’s going to work. It’s terrifying.

The team meeting doesn’t do much. Townsend’s the only one with any personal experience with blessings, and so they all grill him: is it really as random as people think? How did it feel coming into the shadows? What should they prepare for?

“Even when we know what’s coming, we’re not prepared,” Mike says tiredly. He doesn’t look at Chorby, because Chorby hasn’t made eye contact with anyone all day. She’s just sitting, holding Lenny’s hand and looking absolutely miserable. “I’ll do what I can, but there’s no way to be prepared for it.”

Goodwin throws a party that night, the most frantic and horrible party Lenny’s ever been to. Chorby does her best to put on a brave face and says goodbye to everyone, has one last conversation for them to remember her by.

Except Lenny.

And, okay, maybe it’s a little full of herself to assume, but she thinks that it’s because she’s going to spend that night with Chorby or something. Except then Chorby slips out before the end of the night and doesn’t answer Lenny’s calls and Mcdowell’s avoiding eye contact too, which means it’s on purpose. It means Chorby’s not saying goodbye to her.

She considers going to Chorby’s apartment again, but at the last minute she decides she can’t. If Chorby wants her there, she’ll call. And clearly Chorby doesn’t want her there right now. Lenny might not like it, but she can respect it.

The morning of the elections the whole team gathers in their favorite meeting spot: the concession stand of Big Garage. The actual Garages never seem to come here, and so there’s no chance of getting caught and having to explain the shadows.

Lenny doesn’t approach Chorby. Doesn’t say anything to her, just waits and checks the clock until results come in. She talks to Townsend and Goodwin and whoever else will listen to her. She thinks — maybe she’s projecting here, but she thinks — that they feel bad for her.

At four and a half minutes before results come in, Lenny’s talking to Sparks about the pros and cons of macchiatos when Chorby grabs her arm. “Can I cut in?”

“Always,” Lenny says, and immediately wants to kick herself. They don’t have a lot more time left for always.

But Sparks waves them off, and so Chorby drags Lenny out of the stand, into some of the stadium seating. They get to a spot just out of eyeshot and Chorby drops Lenny’s arm, wringing her hands. “Lenny,” she says, and god, if Lenny was mad before it’s all gone. All she wants to do is stop Chorby from sounding so sad ever again. “I’m so sorry.”

Lenny shakes her head. “Bee, it’s okay, don’t-”

“Not-” Chorby waves a hand. “I’m not apologizing for… for taking time for myself, or whatever. I needed that.”

“Yeah,” Lenny says, feeling oddly proud. “You did.”

“I’m sorry that I’m leaving you.”

“You’re not.”

“I might not have a choice, but it’s still happening, and-” Chorby takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to. I need you to know that I don’t want this to happen.”

“There’s a siesta after this,” Lenny points out. She’s been trying not to think too much about this, trying not to assume, but it’s hard to avoid. “I can come see you, wherever you are. I can stay with you for a while.”

“I’m counting on it.” Chorby smiles, and Lenny grins back, relieved. At least, she’s relieved until Chorby’s smile starts to fade, and she lifts a hand to cup Lenny’s face. “Eleanor,” she whispers, reverent and heartbroken and terrible. “What am I going to do without you?”

Lenny swallows. There are a million jokes she could make, anything to make Chorby smile one last time. But she can’t bring herself to say any of them.

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” she says, and if Chorby hears the wobble in her voice she doesn’t react. “You’re going to hit some home runs and kick some ass. And one day I’m going to get out of the shadows, and I’m going to strike you out. And it’s going to be like nothing ever changed.”

Chorby’s thumb sweeps across her cheekbone. Lenny thinks that maybe that was the wrong answer.

“I hope so,” Chorby says at last. “I’m going to need time to get settled wherever I end up, but you’d better come see me during siesta, okay?”

“Okay,” Lenny whispers.

Chorby nods. Her hand slides from cheek to chin, lifting Lenny’s head slightly. Chorby’s always had an inch or two on her, but Lenny feels infinitely smaller in this moment, and she can’t look away.

She wants to kiss her, she realizes suddenly. She wants to kiss Chorby and hold onto her and beg her to stay and hope that when Chorby goes away Lenny will get to go with her, clinging close until she can’t anymore. She wants to wake up in bed together. She wants to be there when Chorby needs her at three in the morning and not have to go any further than the living room to see her. She wants, she wants, she wants.

But Lenny’s in the shadows. She doesn’t get to want things.

“You’re going to be okay,” she says. The words feel like ash in her mouth.

“You too,” Chorby whispers. “I’ll see you, okay? This isn’t goodbye.”

“It isn’t goodbye,” Lenny echoes.

Chorby nods one last time and steps away. Lenny doesn’t have time to miss the contact before Chorby turns into a frog in front of her, looks up and ribbits.

Lenny raises her eyebrows. “I think you’ve got somewhere to go, Bee.”

Chorby ribbits one more time and then hops away. Lenny stands and watches her go. She doesn’t let herself cry, not yet, because she knows how blaseball works, and this isn’t over. The transaction isn’t complete.

Sure enough, about three minutes later, a man rounds the same corner that Chorby disappeared behind. He stops short when he sees her. “Hey,” he says, uncertain. “Sorry, not sure how I got here. This is Seattle, right?”

“Yep.” Lenny looks him up and down. She thinks she recognizes him, but she couldn’t put a team to his face. “You’re… Barrett, right?”

“Bradley. Terrell Bradley.”

She nods. “Hi, Terrell Bradley. I’m Lenny Marijuana. Welcome to the shadows.”

He blinks. “Okay. Whoa. We got one of the shadow blessings?”

“Sure did.”

“Do you know who we got in exchange?”

Lenny swallows. “Yeah,” she says, and her voice sounds odd and sad and far away. “I’ll tell you all about her one day. But right now you should meet the team.”

“Are there a lot of you here?” Terrell frowns. “Is Townsend here? That guy seems like he’s been through a lot, he needs a chance to have a real team again.”

Lenny’s going to like this guy. When she’s done hating his guts for being the reason that Chorby’s gone, she thinks they’re going to get along great.

“Do you want to meet them?” she asks.

“In a second, but first-” He takes a couple steps closer. “I hate to assume, and I know we just met, but kid, you look like you need a hug.”

Lenny laughs wetly. “God, more than anything,” she says, and when Terrell hugs her she clings to it. She manages not to cry into his jersey, salvaging at least part of the first impression, but she still buries her face in his neck and holds on for dear life.

She waits a month. Thirty grueling days of knowing that Chorby is in Yellowstone and that she needs time and Lenny can’t go. Not yet, no matter how badly she wants to be there and meet the team and stay up too late watching YouTube and shopping online. She wants to congratulate Chorby on ending up with her favorite team, ask her how it feels to be in Yellowstone every single day, ask her if she’s happy.

But Chorby asked for time, so Lenny waits. In the meantime everyone keeps being weirdly nice to her. Terrell, who turns out to be an absolute delight, is living with Goodwin until he finds his own place. Together the both of them are a pseudo-parental force to be reckoned with. Goodwin is aggressively acting normal, which is at least a kind of weird that Lenny appreciates.

Mike is being his own kind of normal-weird, which is comforting. He offers to help restring her bass, which means he helps her with the first one and then leaves the rest to her.

“I could give you another tattoo,” he says, out of nowhere. “If you wanted.”

Lenny makes a face. “If I might see her again, won’t that be weird?”

“I mean, I wasn’t going to suggest a tattoo of Chorby,” he says, deadpan. “But yeah, that’d be pretty weird if she didn’t know about it first.”

She groans. “I don’t know, I have too many ideas and not enough time or space on my body to get all the tattoos I want.”

“Any you know for sure you want?”

“Like a dozen.”

“Any that I could do, because I’m cheaper than a professional?”

Mike is way cheaper than a professional. She pays him in a combination of cash, coffee, and weed. It rules. He’s definitely not as good as a professional, but the ones on her ribs never got infected, so she’ll call it a win.

“I’ll think about it,” she decides.

“Cool,” Mike says. “I think you’re handling this all great, by the way. Bang-up job.”

Lenny sticks her tongue out at him. “Didn’t ask for your approval, Michael.”

“No, of course you didn’t, I’m just saying that clearly you’re coping really well.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”

Mike shrugs. “You’re being very mature about it, is my point.”

“I’m an adult.”

“I don’t know how to break this to you, but when you’re a real adult, you know that being twenty years old is not being an adult.”

She rolls her eyes and keeps working on her bass. She means to drop it, she does, except then she blurts out, “Some nights I can’t sleep because I miss her and when I finally fall asleep I dream about her.”

“I used to dream about Jaylen,” Mike answers, without hesitating. “The team was all together when she got incinerated, we all saw it. It was all I dreamed about for years.”

“What do you dream about now?”

“Blaseball.” He pauses, thinking about it. “Peanuts. Shadows. You know, normal things.”

“Other incinerations?”

“Always. I’ve seen plenty of those happen.”

Lenny nods. She wonders if he’s thinking about Dom. She wonders if he saw it happen to Dom, actually. She never asked.

“Does it get easier?” she asks, voice low.

Mike smiles, not looking particularly happy. “Sure,” he says. “Or maybe you just get used to it.”

It’s a twelve hour drive from Seattle to Yellowstone, and even further to get to where Chorby’s renting in southern Montana.

Lenny makes it in about ten hours, through a combination of willpower, anxiety, incredibly strong coffee, and the weird stuff that Mcdowell did to make their van faster. She drives through Idaho and the smallest corner of Wyoming, just to say she did.

It’s not a bad drive. She did most of the road trip to New York herself all those years ago, when she was just shy of sixteen and convinced she was a great driver. Now Lenny knows she’s a terrible driver, and she has a good time with it.

So it’s a normal drive. A normal walk up to Chorby’s apartment. A normal knock on the door. A normal feeling of absolute paralysis that takes over as soon as she knocks.

The thing is, Chorby got out. Chorby can be just a regular player with new friends, someone who was in the shadows but doesn’t remember them. Chorby can have a life defined by playing blaseball and living in the light and not by some girl she used to know.

But Lenny’s selfish. And besides, Chorby asked her to visit.

So she doesn’t turn and run, even though she so badly wants to. She forces herself to stand and wait, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides, until the door swings open.

A frog looks up at her. She’s wearing a witch hat, a new detail.

Lenny huffs out a laugh. “Sick accessory.”

The frog ribbits at her. And then, in a flurry of movement, jumps up and becomes a human woman, staring at Lenny with the widest eyes she’s ever seen.

“Hi,” Lenny says cautiously. “Um, I know the coming out of the shadows might break your brain really badly, so I don’t know if you remember me, but-”

“Lenny,” Chorby breathes, which is all the warning she gets before she’s pulled into an absolutely crushing hug. Lenny’s arms come up to wrap around Chorby’s waist, and Chorby lets out a stuttering breath that tickles the side of Lenny’s face. “Oh, my god.”

“Yeah,” Lenny says. “I know. I did my makeup differently today, that’s probably why you were surprised.”

“It looks good,” Chorby mumbles. “I know you’re kidding, but it looks good.”

It occurs to Lenny in an abrupt, uncomfortable flash that they’re pressed up incredibly close against each other, and also that she still wants to kiss Chorby more than she wants to breathe right now. It’s almost intoxicating, being this close to her again.

Instead, she forces herself to pull back a little bit. Except no, that’s not any better, because now she and Chorby are face to face and Chorby’s fingers are still against the back of her head and it’s so close, too close-

“You gonna invite me in or do I have to ask nicely?” she says, and Chorby’s lips quirk up into a smile.

The apartment is decorated with a lot of the same stuff that Lenny remembers. “It just showed up one day,” she explains. “I never came back for my things, they just… got here.”

“Do you remember a lot about Seattle?” Lenny asks. It’s an honest, curious question, but Chorby looks away quickly. “Not that it’s a big deal.”

“I know I was there for a long time,” Chorby answers. It sounds like she’s picking and choosing her words very, very carefully. “I know there were people I cared about. I just can’t remember them.”

Lenny frowns. “Can you remember Goodwin?”

Chorby winces and lifts a hand to her forehead. “Even you asking that makes me feel like I have a migraine.”

“Can you remember Townsend?”

“I-” she blinks. “Sort of, actually. I bet that’s because he used to be active, right? Everyone gets to know he exists. He’s funny.”

“Never tell him that,” Lenny mutters. Chorby gives her a pained half-smile, and Lenny instantly feels terrible. “I mean- not that- I don’t think you’ll go back or-”

“Len, sit down,” Chorby sighs. Lenny doesn’t hesitate before plopping down on the couch. Chorby follows her, sitting next to her and dropping her face into the crook of Lenny’s neck. “You know something stupid?”

“What?”

“I couldn’t even remember your name and I was still lonelier than I’ve ever been my entire life, until you knocked on that door.”

Lenny swallows, throat dry. This isn’t her first time being left behind, and Chorby knows that, and she feels strangely guilty that it hurt in a different way for her. That it was less acute, even though it was still almost impossible.

“That’s not stupid,” she says, voice small. “And I’m here now. So it’s okay.”

“Yeah,” Chorby murmurs, and that’s how Lenny knows they’re not going to talk about the fact that she’s only here for a couple weeks, or the fact that it took eight years for Chorby to get out and by the time Lenny does too they might be different people, or… any of it.

She’s okay with that. She’s trying very hard to be okay with it.

They get groceries delivered. And takeout. And they watch movies. They go for walks together. Lenny gets to go to one Magic party, and she spends half her time talking to everyone in their shadows instead of the actual team.

She also goes to most of the practices. Not because she wants to watch Chorby. Just because if she doesn’t go, then Chorby will forget.

It’s supposed to be two weeks, because Mcdowell wants their van back, but she makes some excuse to stay at the end of the second week, and then another at the end of the third. By the end of the fifth week they tell her that they just need the van back in nine days, a hard cutoff, and she can keep it as long as she wants till then.

Which means there’s a countdown. Nine more days before she’s gone.

“I could always stay,” she says, at the end of the seventh day.

They’re lying in Chorby’s bed together. Chorby’s half on top of her, drawing lazy circles on Lenny’s shoulder with her fingers. Lenny’s hand is tangled in Chorby’s hair. It’s a heady feeling, and it’s summer-warm, and Lenny thinks she could stay here forever.

“No, you couldn’t,” Chorby says quietly. “You have to go back.”

“We used to go to away games all the time.”

“That’s different from living in another team’s shadows.”

“I’ll commute.”

Chorby doesn’t laugh. She pulls away so she’s leaning over Lenny, propped up on one elbow and looking serious. “We don’t know what that does, Len. We don’t know if it would hurt you.”

“We can find out,” Lenny argues. Her heart is racing suddenly, like it figured out what’s going on before her brain has. “Chorby, come on. It wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

But Chorby shakes her head. “I’m not playing that game with your safety. I’m not.”

“It’s my choice.”

“I’m telling you no.”

Lenny sits up, almost too abruptly for Chorby to move out of the way. “Then tell me you don’t want me here.”

“Lenny,” Chorby says. It sounds like she’s saying please.

“I’m serious,” she insists. “Look at me right now and tell me you don’t want me here and I’ll drop it and I’ll leave.”

“Stop, Lenny-”

“Look me in the goddamn eye and say-”

She doesn’t get the chance to finish, because before she can, Chorby’s mouth is on hers.

Lenny has kissed people before, once or twice. Parties and spin the bottle and that type of thing. It’s easy for her to be anonymous, if she wants. But kissing Chorby is completely different. It’s so much gentler, her mouth against Lenny’s, her hands bracing Lenny’s elbows. There’s no room to be anonymous, nowhere to hide.

She lets her eyes slip shut for a second. She’s not in the business of lying to herself but now, for this second, she wants this to be normal. She wants this to be okay.

So she kisses Chorby for all that she’s worth. She’s not surprised when it starts tasting salty, isn’t sure which one of them is crying or if it’s both. She’s not surprised when Chorby pulls back and says, “That’s why.”

Lenny huffs out a laugh in disbelief. Her eyes are still closed. “That’s why you want me to go?”

“That’s why I want you to stay,” Chorby whispers, a hitch in her breath. “And that’s why I can’t ask you to when we don’t know what it means, and…” she trails off.

Lenny finally opens her eyes and leans forward to cup Chorby’s cheek. “And?”

Chorby meets her eyes and takes a shaky breath. “I’m not going to remember,” she whispers. “I could never be that lucky. I’m going to forget you. And you’re going to be stuck by yourself again, knowing that someone who loves you doesn’t know who you are.”

Her heart aches. She swipes her thumb across Chorby’s face, catching a tear that’s trickling down. “That was true fifteen minutes ago,” she whispers. “And last week, and for that month before I got here. I always knew it was part of the deal. This doesn’t change anything.”

“I feel like I’m stringing you along.”

“You’re not.”

“Aren’t I?”

“If we could be together, you would want that.” Another tear, another swipe. Chorby’s still not smiling, but she’s also not looking away. “I know you would. It’s okay. This isn’t your fault.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to say goodbye to you.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Lenny promises. “We’ll get there, it’s okay, I’m here.”

Chorby nods slowly, and then her lips part for a second. “Oh, god, I didn’t even ask before I kissed you.”

Lenny snorts. “Believe me, I didn’t have a problem with it.”

“Oh,” Chorby says. And then, shyly: “Can I do it again?”

“Please,” Lenny says fervently. It’s a terrible idea, and they both know it. It’s just so hard to care about that when Chorby leans in again.

They stay in bed until Chorby falls asleep, curled up in bed. She normally sleeps as a frog, but today she stays human, holding Lenny close.

Lenny doesn’t fall asleep. She waits until Chorby is snoring, and then slips out of bed. She’s been packing most of her stuff up subtly over the last couple of days, so it’s easy to get the last bits and bobs around the apartment. A phone charger, a deck of cards.

At the last minute she decides to leave behind a pair of earrings, a couple of black studs that she hardly ever wears. They go on top of the dresser, with another small heap of jewelry. In return she opens Chorby’s closet, freezes for a second at the sight of an old T-shirt Randy used to wear, and then shakes herself into moving again. She’s working on a time limit here. Chorby’s not the heaviest of sleepers.

She takes one of Chorby’s shirts, a black blouse with a white bow on the collar. Chorby almost never wears it, but it still smells like her. Lenny thinks if she has a good jacket to wear it with, she can make it work.

And Lenny leaves. Because Chorby’s right: she’s not going to remember this. With any luck she’ll wake up and won’t remember the heartbreak. She’ll think it was a one night stand or something, and move on, and be at peace. She won’t have to cry. She won’t have to be sad about it at all.

Lenny knows that’s not how it works. But it’s easy, as she starts Mcdowell’s van and drives away, to pretend that it is.

Lenny turns twenty-one four days before the siesta ends. The team throws a small party, more getting together and drinking than actually celebrating. She wears Chorby’s blouse, tucked into cargo pants and underneath a leather jacket. Everyone very politely does not ask about it.

Goodwin gets her a new bass — or, as she explains, a new used bass. It’s still not terrific, but it’s significantly better than the literal dumpster bass that Lenny’s been playing since she was thirteen, so she cries and then plays a mini-concert for Goodwin and Terrell.

Mike offers to give her another tattoo, or at least a discount on the next one. She doesn’t get one yet, but she thinks about it. She has an idea.

And Terrell does the best and worst thing of all: he gets tickets for the first three games that the Magic play in Yellowstone.

“I miss my team,” he tells her plainly. “And I don’t want to go by myself, and you’ve got someone to miss too. So we can go be sad sacks together, and eat some hot dogs.”

Lenny swallows. “Okay,” she says, and thinks about Mike and Dom, and hopes that this won’t be the same. “That sounds… fun.”

Terrell pulls out all the stops: good plane tickets, a hotel room for each of them, actual VIP seats that he assures her were comped. She doesn’t believe him one bit. He keeps saying he wants to treat her to something nice. It’s all overly sincere and it’s definitely a little weird.

But it is nice. It kind of makes her feel like a kid, a normal kid who didn’t stop existing for most of a decade.

The Magic are playing the Shoe Thieves, and they lose their first two games in spectacular fashion. Terrell’s in good spirits, though, clapping for every single hit and run like it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. He whispers to Lenny between at-bats about every single player, rumors and inside jokes and shared memories. He wasn’t on the team for long, but he still loves them. She can feel it.

And every time it’s Chorby, she tells him something in return. She talks about Chorby teaching her how to make bright makeup look good, and that time Chorby completely wrecked a pair of Lenny’s Doc Martens trying to customize them for her.

Chorby is playing mostly as a frog, and she doesn’t get a single hit in either of the first two games. But it’s okay, Lenny thinks. The team is being so kind to her, cheering her on every single time. Terrell looks proud of the whole team. Lenny understands.

And then in the third game, less than a day before Lenny and Terrell are going to go home: Chorby steps up to bat, takes a deep breath, and hits the most beautiful, soaring home run Lenny has ever seen in her life.

The fans are screaming. Terrell is screaming. Lenny is screaming, too, laughing and cheering, and she doesn’t realize for several minutes that she’s crying.

Terrell doesn’t say anything, just lifts an arm, and she tucks herself against his side. “I knew she could do it,” she says.

He nods. “I did too,” he answers.

They get back two days later. Lenny dyes her hair blue, like the Garages, a nice deep indigo. And then, painstakingly, she dip-dyes the end of it a shimmering Magic gold.

“Garages are really gunning for the shadows blessings,” Lenny says.

Mike hums, like he’s not quite listening to her. He’s probably not. He got a used banjo a while ago and he’s been picking at it for hours. It’s warbling and terrible and he doesn’t even seem to be having fun. She thinks it’s an anxiety thing, although god only knows what Townsend has to be anxious about. He doesn’t normally tell her that kind of thing.

“Weird strategy,” she continues. “All things considered. But I’m no expert.”

She’s not an expert, but she’s also not an idiot. There’s only one reason the Garages would have a vested interest in the shadows, and he’s in front of her playing the banjo and not meeting her eyes. No wonder he’s been acting weird.

“So I’ve been thinking,” she says. “I’m cashing in on that tattoo.”

That’s enough to get him to look up. “Yeah?”

She hands him the folded up paper with her scratchy designs. “Can you make these look less like garbage?”

His eyes scan them, and she can see the moment he realizes what the symbols mean. A coffee bean for Sparks, a crystal for Mcdowell, a little tattoo gun for him. A house that looks a lot like Goodwin’s. A frog.

“Yeah,” he says. “Where do you want them?”

Lenny lifts her forearm and traces a finger down it, starting at the crook of her elbow and tracing down to her wrist. “Just a straight line.”

He nods. “I can work with this.”

“I’ll pay extra if you get it done tomorrow.”

“Don’t pay me extra.”

“I’ll pay you five times more.”

“Shut up,” Mike says, and she does, grinning.

It takes longer than one day for Mike to get the designs workable, but he still works fast. They’re done by the end of the season. In fact, he finishes the tattoo fifteen minutes before they sit down to watch the final game of the playoffs. Shoe Thieves versus Crabs, a surprise showdown for the ages.

Lenny plops down on the couch between Sparks and Terrell, clutching her plastic-wrapped arm to her chest like it’s in a cast. “Who are we rooting for?”

She gets five answers from all directions and rolls her eyes. “Thanks,” she mutters.

It’s a good game. Stu hits a home run at the end, a beautiful hit that sends the Crabs into shame at the last possible minute, and they’re all screaming at the TV when it goes black.

“Oh no,” Mike says.

Lenny looks at him sharply. “Oh no?”

He shakes his head, looking grim. “Just a bad feeling.”

And he’s right. God, he’s right.

Nobody says a word as the shelled players step onto the field. Nobody says a word as Jaylen pitches, and pitches, and pitches. And nobody says a word when Jessica Telephone hits a home run and the Shoe Thieves all collapse onto the field.

Mike gets up and walks out. Lenny springs up and races after him. No one else even so much as turns to watch either of them go. Not that she can blame them. They’re all watching the peanut, spinning on the TV. Lenny wonders if she could see it in the sky, if she looked in the right place.

“Don’t,” he says, as soon as she’s outside. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Lenny just rolls her eyes and goes fishing in her pocket. She doesn’t want to talk about it with him, either. But she saw the way he was staring every time Jaylen threw a pitch. She knows. “You wanna smoke?”

He looks at her warily. “Weed or cigarettes?”

“Whatever’s in this jacket pocket right now. Probably cigarettes.”

“Sure,” he sighs. “Got a light?”

“Always.”

They stand there in silence with the cigarettes, perfectly still on Goodwin’s porch. Mike’s hands are shaking, and Lenny does her best not to stare at him. But she can’t help it. She forgets, sometimes, that he had a life before this. He’s probably met all the Shoe Thieves. He’s probably scared for his friends.

Eventually he says, “I think I have to go to Charleston.”

“Do you want company?”

“No.” A beat, then: “No, thanks.”

Lenny waves him off. “Don’t be polite at me, it’s gross. Go whenever you need. I’ll let people know.”

“Thanks.”

“And…” she swallows. She still hates Jaylen, but this isn’t about her. “And she’s going to be okay, you know.”

He snorts. “I think this is going to get worse before it gets better.”

“How’s it going to get better?”

“Dunno.” Mike takes a drag of the cigarette and blows the smoke into the air, watches it disappear in front of the porch lights. He leans back against the wall behind him, cocks his head absently. “Probably a miracle or something.”

On the morning of elections, the team goes back to the concession stand. Blessings are tricky: just because the Garages have been pushing for shadow blessings doesn’t mean they’re going to get them. But Lenny knows, somewhere deep in her gut, that this is it. Chorby was the first in a long line that they’re going to lose.

Mike’s been back from Charleston for a week, and he hasn’t said much. He spends election day standing next to Lenny and nursing his coffee. She’s weirdly proud that he picked her as his defender. She’s got a good glare, not that she needs to use it much. Most of the team is giving him space.

There’s something almost funereal to the gathering, a weird, mournful air that Lenny’s trying not to think too much about. Instead she chats with Mcdowell for a long time about cars and tarot, two of their favorite things. It’s a normal election day. A normal wait in the concession stand.

And then Lenny feels it. A yank in her gut, like something pulling her outside. It’s warm, but not unpleasant, like there’s a ball of light in her stomach trying to fly in a specific direction. She gasps, and she’s gratified to see that Mike and Mcdowell both do too. When she cranes her neck she can see Sparks also standing at attention.

“Is this it?” Mcdowell says, voice quiet.

Mike nods. “Must be.”

The whole party goes completely still around them. Lenny can’t breathe. This wasn’t supposed to happen to her. She was supposed to stay here forever, not this-

“Whoa,” Goodwin says suddenly. Lenny whips around just as Goodwin lifts her hands, and two additional pairs of shadow hands move alongside them. Her eyes are gleaming. “Uh… was there something that was supposed to do this?”

“I think so.” Lenny takes a step towards her, ignoring the sharpening pull in her ribs, and reaches out to catch one of Goodwin’s hands in hers. “I, uh. Goodwin, I have to go.”

Goodwin’s entire face drops. “Oh.”

“And I think we should hurry,” Mike says. His voice is light, but she can hear the undercurrent of tension. “Gods don’t like to be kept waiting, you know.”

“Right,” Lenny whispers, without looking away from Goodwin. “I just, uh. I just. You should know. That. Um.”

Goodwin smiles. It’s tense and sad and unnatural, but her eyes are soft. “Eleanor,” she says quietly. “I’m so proud of you. You’ve grown up so much.”

Lenny hasn’t had a birthday without Goodwin since she was 13. She doesn’t remember her mom, doesn’t even completely remember what it was like living with her brothers in New York. But she remembers Goodwin, and her house, and her bedroom, and going to arcades together and cleaning the house and everything. She has a life here. And she’s about to lose it.

She takes another step forward, hissing between her teeth as the blessing tries to pull her away. “Goodwin-”

Goodwin gets the hint and steps forward, wrapping her arms around Lenny and holding tight. It’s incredibly weird, because she can feel hands on her back, but also on her shoulders, and also carding through her hair. She’s gotten better at hugs, and Lenny is going to miss this. She’s going to miss it so badly.

There’s another pull, and this one’s so sharp that she actually stumbles back out of the hug. “I have to go,” she says, and she’s not going to cry, not when she has to meet a whole new team in five minutes. “I love you.”

“I love you. Give ‘em hell.” Goodwin glances up, looking at Mike, then Sparks, then Mcdowell. “All of you.”

“Always,” Mike promises. His fingers settle on Lenny’s elbow. “Goodbye, everyone.”

Sparks and Mcdowell echo him. Lenny just swallows hard and waves.

She can feel the pull going away as the four of them walk through the stadium. None of them say anything, but they round a corner together, the same corner that Lenny watched Chorby hop around a year ago.

And then Lenny stops short. Because there are only three Garages players standing just on the other side.

“Mike,” she whispers. “Why aren’t there four of them?”

“Sometimes blessings go wrong,” Mike says. He sounds tired. “If I had to guess, one of us is going to be walking back.”

Lenny reaches out and links hands with Mcdowell, on her other side. Mike’s hand slips from her elbow to her hand, and she thinks Sparks reaches for Mcdowell. The four of them walk slowly, together.

The Garages are all watching them with trepidation, but Nolanestophia’s the first one to take a step forward. “Is this the shadows?”

“Yes,” Mcdowell says. They step forward, and then past her. Nolanestophia sighs, almost in relief, as she slides towards the shadows. Mcdowell turns back. “The rest of the team is waiting for you, but- oh.”

Sparks steps forward and reaches a hand out. “Mcdowell,” they say quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Mcdowell shakes their head, a small grimace on their lips. “It was too good to be true. Enjoy the coffee, Sparks.” The two of them clasp hands together, and then Mcdowell steps back, and Sparks steps forward.

Lenny reaches out to squeeze Mcdowell’s hand. They smile wanly at her. “Thank you, Eleanor,” they murmur, and she knows that it means goodbye.

Ortiz Morse looks at Mike. “Hey, Townsend.”

“Hey, Morse.”

“This is it, huh?”

“This is it. But you get used to it. They’re good people.”

Ortiz nods. “If you see the Talkers, tell them I miss them every day.”

“I will,” Mike says, and steps forward. Ortiz takes his place easily.

And that just leaves Lenny. She looks at the woman across from her. “Lori, right?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Lenny.”

“Have you been waiting a long time?”

Lenny smiles faintly. “Yeah, I kind of have.”

Lori steps forward and pulls Lenny into a hug. “Congratulations,” she whispers, and there’s not a trace of sadness in it. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Lenny breathes, and then she steps into the light.

It feels different. She wasn’t actually expecting it, but she feels more… alive. Her body is warmer. Her pulse is thrumming in her wrists and throat and fingertips, almost like a living being flying through her. She wants to gasp with the weight of it, with the feeling of being alive again. She didn’t even know it was missing.

“Good luck,” says Mcdowell. “All of you. We’ll be rooting for you.”

Lenny swallows. “Thanks,” she whispers.

There’s no signal that it’s time to go, but all seven of them turn around at the same time. Lenny grabs Mike’s hand on instinct, takes Sparks’s a second later.. And together they start walking.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Lenny asks, curious.

Mike shrugs. “I’ve got a guess. We’ve got a common area, it’s a parking garage and a practice space.”

“What do you want to say when you see them?”

“I don’t know.” He pauses. “Something cool.”

Sparks snorts. “Good luck.”

Mike shoots them a wounded look. “I’m cool.”

“Nobody who attempts to be cool on purpose ever is.”

The three of them stop in front of a door. Mike gestures. “Uh. This is it.”

“Cool,” Lenny breathes. It’s a lot harder to be sad about the shadows when the actual door is right in front of her.

Sparks frowns. “Are we sure this is the right place?”

Lenny leans in and presses her ear to the door. Mike follows suit, and she averts her eyes so she doesn’t have to see his face. “There are voices,” he murmurs. He sounds hopeful.

She straightens up and tugs at the lapels of her jacket, trying to muster up some confidence.. “You ready to make an entrance?”

“Oh god,” Mike says, and very wisely lets go of her hand. Sparks follows suit. “You know what? Take it away.”

Lenny grins. And then she lifts her foot as high as she can, kicks the door in, and shouts at the top of her lungs, “What’s up, assholes?”

The room goes completely still. It’s perfect.

“Eleanor,” Sparks hisses. She can tell they’re mortified. “That’s not appropriate.”

“Yeah, seriously,” Mike says. Every eye in the room slides over to him, and Lenny follows suit, turning to look at him. He smiles at her. “Come on, Lenny, watch your fucking language.”

She groans out loud. Unfortunately it’s lost in the chaos, because Duende stands up and yells Mike’s name, and then they’re swarmed. Or, more accurately, Mike is swarmed. It looks like everyone wants to tell him how much they missed him. She hopes that they’re being honest.

Lenny and Sparks manage to duck out of the way. She glances up at them. “How are you feeling?”

“Incomplete,” Sparks answers. Their eyes are still on Mike, who’s laughing in embarrassment in the middle of a knot of people. “And complete.”

She nods slowly and lifts her arm to look at the tattoo. A coffee bean for Sparks, a tattoo gun for Mike, a frog for Chorby. And a house for the woman with the extra arms, and a crystal for the person they left behind, and… more symbols. They’ve already slipped away. She doesn’t know what they mean. She has a list written down somewhere, is relying on her stuff showing up the way Chorby said hers did, but she doesn’t know if the list will come. Or if she’ll be able to read it.

Nine years in the shadows and she has to hope that there’s a list there to help her remember her family.

She shakes her head. Sparks gives her a questioning look, and she sighs. “I hope it was worth it.”

“I do too,” Sparks says, and then neither of them say anything for a while, just watching Mike.

The team is all nice. It’s incredibly strange being there, but they’re accommodating. Lenny bunks with Betsy Trombone for two nights before her things mysteriously show up and she moves into her own place, for the first time ever. It’s horribly quiet. She doesn’t like it.

Lenny’s not planning on leaving Seattle, but the Millennials call her ten days after she shows up and invite her over. So she goes, gets a great hug from Winnie, finally introduces herself properly to everyone. And after that she spends a couple days in Breckenridge, and a couple more days in the Hellmouth. Everyone has stories about her brothers, and she gets to sit and listen in awe of them. It’s incredible. She feels like a kid.

She gets back to Seattle with a journal full of stories and a phone full of new numbers. She intends to go straight home, but Sparks asks her to swing by the Big Garage, so she figures she should. She kind of feels bad for leaving them alone, especially since Mike’s also busy. Now that he’s famous Mike Townsend, everyone wants a piece of him. So the least she can do is see what Sparks needs.

“Hey, Beans,” she calls as she wanders in. “You in here? I’m-”

“I can’t believe that worked,” says Chorby.

Lenny stumbles to a stop. Her backpack drops to the floor. “Uh,” she croaks, because what the hell else is there to do? “Hi?”

Chorby crosses her arms. Lenny swallows on instinct. She didn’t go to any Magic games after the one with Terrell, didn’t even really watch many on TV, so she hasn’t seen Chorby in… a minute.

“Sorry about the trickery,” Sparks says, rushing out of a side room. “It seemed urgent.”

She waves them off. “Don’t worry about it. And hey, I’m back in town if you want to go-”

“Not a good time,” Chorby says flatly.

Lenny nods at Sparks as they leave. “I would’ve come if you called,” she says softly.

Chorby doesn’t answer, lips pressed together in a thin line. Lenny wants to groan. She’s never been good at waiting, which is unfortunate, because Chorby is a horrifyingly patient person. But if Chorby’s willing to wait, Lenny can wait her out. Or try to.

In the end it only takes a couple minutes of silence before Chorby looks away, glaring at a corner of the room, and says, “You didn’t think about your cologne.”

Lenny blinks. “What?”

“You left in the middle of the night, and you took all your stuff — and one of my shirts, by the way, I noticed that.”

“You don’t wear it.”

Chorby ignores her. “And you disappeared, and only left behind a pair of earrings, which I’m assuming was on purpose. But you have that cologne you got from your brothers, and you wear it whenever you’re nervous or excited, and you must’ve been excited to see me. So I woke up in the morning, and I couldn’t remember you, but my entire apartment still smelled like that cologne. So I knew something was missing. It was like before, but… but worse, because it was everywhere, right in front of me, and I still couldn’t put it together.”

Lenny closes her eyes. It’s such a habit that she hadn’t thought twice about it when she put the cologne on. She hadn’t considered it at all. “Bee, I’m so-”

“Tell me why,” Chorby says abruptly. “Look at me and tell me why you left.”

“Because-” she forces herself to open her eyes and face Chorby head-on. Chorby’s eyes are shining with tears that she’s not quite crying, and Lenny takes a deep breath. “Because I thought that it would be easier for you to wake up alone than to say goodbye.”

“That is not your choice,” Chorby says, and every word is razor sharp. “Do you understand? You don’t get to do that.”

“I just,” Lenny starts, and then stops. When she first signed her contract she left Dom and Randy without a second thought. It’d taken her years to second-guess it, but even that wasn’t enough to stop her from doing it again, from doing it to Chorby. She’s still not sure that it was wrong, but she’s certainly not sure it was right either. “Okay,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m still mad at you.”

“That’s okay.”

“But I wanted to see you.”

Lenny tries to smile, even though her lips are trembling with the effort it’s taking not to burst into tears. “Here I am.”

“Here you are.” Chorby lets out a breath. “You changed your hair.”

“I’m trying something new.”

“Anything else new I should know about?”

Lenny rolls up the sleeve of her jacket and holds out her forearm. “New tattoo.”

Chorby takes a hesitant step forward and then seems to remember herself, walking over to Lenny easily. She takes Lenny’s hand in hers and holds her arm up to examine it. Her thumb brushes, just briefly, over the outline of the frog, directly over her pulse point. “You should really hire a professional next time,” she murmurs. “These all look terrible.”

“Townsend was having a bad day,” Lenny says. Now that Chorby’s up close Lenny can see that she’s a little more tan, probably from spending a year in a sunnier spot than Seattle. She smells earthier, and her fingernails are painted purple. And she’s wearing Lenny’s earrings, the black studs she left behind.

“Professionals don’t have bad days,” Chorby answers tartly. She drops Lenny’s hand, but her fingers skate along Lenny’s wrist, and she shivers without meaning to. “Before you ask, I got a hotel, so I’m not staying with you.”

“How long are you in town?”

“I leave tomorrow.”

“Let me buy you breakfast?” She holds up a hand before Chorby can even protest. “Please. I owe you at least that much.”

“You owe me more than that,” Chorby says in warning.

Lenny nods. “I’m not going to argue. I owe you a lot, for a lot of things. So let me start with breakfast tomorrow.”

Chorby stares at her a second and then nods. “I’ll text you my hotel, and you’ll pick me up at nine o’clock, you got it?”

“Got it,” Lenny says, and does not wince even though that’s early. It’ll be worth it. She already knows.

Chorby nods and walks past Lenny towards the exit. Lenny only has a second to miss being close to her before Chorby says, suddenly, “Did you ever come watch me play?”

Lenny smiles. “Yeah, Terrell and I went to your first series.”

“Oh.” Chorby pauses. “Wait, the one where I-”

“Where you got your first home run.” Lenny glances over her shoulder. “Good job, by the way.”

Chorby’s lips part in surprise. She looks stunned. “Really?”

“It was important,” Lenny says, and that doesn’t encompass any of what she felt about those games. But it’s a start. “Text me. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“In the morning,” Chorby echoes, and takes her leave.

Lenny watches her go, and waits a minute. And then she rolls the sleeve of her jacket up one more time and runs her fingers up her forearm, a pale imitation of Chorby’s hands on her.

If the days blurred together in the shadows, the weeks are blurring together now that Lenny’s an active player. It feels like she’s only been out of the shadows for a matter of days when the season kicks off, and then it’s game after game after game. Even when she’s only playing one out of every six it’s overwhelming.

But she’s playing actual professional games. It’s terrifying, and she loses her first two but wins the third, and then pitches a shutout for her fourth and it’s like she’s on top of the world. The pitchers all go out together to celebrate, and Mike keeps buying her beers, and she gets ecstatically drunk.

“Do you think they were watching?” she asks him at the end of the night.

Mike laughs. “Course they were,” he says.

Her list of shadow names made it with the rest of her things, but it makes her head pound to look at it. It’s like Chorby said: she knows Mcdowell and Goodwin’s names, because they received blessings, but she doesn’t know anything about them. She can’t imagine their faces.

On the worst days she hitches her shirt up and looks at the tattoos on her ribs and tries to imagine Dom and Randy there with her. Sometimes she remembers good things, inside jokes and fuzzy childhood memories. Sometimes she remembers that she’s never going to be able to go out to a bar with her brothers and she wants to throw up.

But it’s better. She has to assume it is, at least. The shadows are too fuzzy to recall.

The Garages already have a bass player, it turns out, but Lenny gets to play at concerts every now and again. She’s not sure what strings Mike pulls for her, but the first time she gets to play any concert as the lone bassist on stage incidentally lines up with when the Magic are in town for a series of home games. She doesn’t invite Chorby, but she can see her in the crowd, standing with a couple of her teammates. Lenny thinks she could find her anywhere.

And her social life gets bigger. She gets to be friends with Winnie for real now, and Winnie introduces her to Sandie and Nandy and Drac. She meets Tamara and Kathy on the Jazz Hands, Nerd and Miguel on the Sunbeams. She’s in group chats, for what she thinks is the first time ever.

It’s a blur. Lenny’s just excited that things are happening again.

Chorby only calls once, half a dozen weeks into the season. Lenny gets the call a couple hours after games end while she’s practicing bass. “Hello?”

“Annie got incinerated,” Chorby says, voice thick. “And I just- can you just talk to me, Lenny? Just talk like something’s normal.”

So Lenny talks about Townsend baking cookies and about Sparks evangelizing about coffee. She talks about Paula Turnip, who’s been showing her all the cool lesbian bars in Seattle, and she talks about the dumb things the team gets up to at band practice. She talks about Malik stealing her jackets. She talks about everything she can think of until she can hear Chorby’s breathing even out on the other end of the line. Fast asleep.

When she hangs up she walks to Big Garage, for no reason she can say. She’s not surprised to find Mike in the kitchen, washing his hands. “Hey.”

He glances at her. “Hey. You wanna make bread with me?”

“Sure,” Lenny says, because there’s nothing else to do. “Are you just here because the kitchens here are better?”

“Yeah, and my neighbors have started complaining about how I’m up at weird hours playing loud music.”

Lenny snorts. “You wanna play loud music now?”

“Nah, if you’re here we can talk.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t normally show up at two in the morning.” He gives her a pointed look.

She sighs. “Someone on the Magic got incinerated today,” she murmurs. “And I was thinking about it, and… I don’t think I ever said thank you for going to that game with me. So thank you.”

Mike smiles at her, a tiny little twist of his mouth. “It was fun going to the party yacht. I don’t think I would’ve done that without you.”

“Loser,” Lenny says amicably. “What kind of bread are we baking?”

“We can figure it out.”

They fall asleep on a couch together afterwards, with a tray of fresh-baked focaccia in front of them. When Lenny wakes up the tray is empty, because the Garages are bastards. But Mike doesn’t seem to mind. “That’s what’s supposed to happen when you bake for people,” he says, and Lenny thinks she understands.

They don’t make the playoffs. Which is fine, because Lenny needs a break. She spends basically all of the wildcard round sleeping, not because she doesn’t want to watch but because she hasn’t been sleeping through the night for most of the season.

She goes to all of the Sunbeams games until they lose to the Crabs, and then to all of the Millennials games until they lose to the Shoe Thieves. The Crabs and the Thieves don’t even seem excited to win, only grim. She understands. They all know what happened last time.

She’s going to watch the finals from home. Except on the day of the last game, she wakes up to a text she can’t read.

Lenny squints at her phone. It’s from Mcdowell; she can read their name because of the blessing. But the message itself makes her head pound when she looks at it, and she can’t bring herself to read it.

So she goes to her medicine cabinet and knocks back some migraine meds, same as she does any day she wants to look at the shadows list. She waits for a while for them to kick in, putters around her apartment, does the dishes. She even dusts the baseboards, just for something to do.

When she looks again, the text says, You should go to Baltimore.

So she buys a ticket and gets on a plane. She doesn’t tell anyone. Not even Teddy. Not even Mike. It takes her a full hour and some nausea meds, but she manages to text back Thank you.

By the time she gets to the Crabitat the game is in the sixth inning, but they still let her in. The stands are packed, people waiting to see ascension, people trying to get one last game in before the Shelled One descends again. It’s almost impossible to find a seat. Lenny cranes her neck, looking this way and that, until-

“Eleanor,” a voice says. When Lenny turns, Nagomi Nava lifts a hand. There’s a seat next to her, waiting.

Lenny slides into the seat. “Hi.”

“You’re late.”

“Maybe you were early.”

Nagomi raises her eyebrows. “Just me, both teams, and thousands of fans,” she says. There’s a sardonic lilt to it that reminds her of Mike. “We were all waiting for you.”

“The party can start now.”

“I’m sure it will.”

They don’t talk beyond that. Nagomi doesn’t cheer for much, but she smiles at any particularly good hits. It’s peaceful, or at least as peaceful as blaseball can be, especially considering there’s an impending disaster.

Then Tot Fox hits a single, and Nagomi suddenly doubles over in pain.

Lenny looks at her in surprise. “What’s wrong?”

“The sun,” Nagomi grits out, just a second before it goes black. The Crabitat goes silent. Lenny looks up.

There is a moment, a horrible moment, where there is no sun. Not even edges of sunlight hiding behind the moon, not even light behind clouds. Nothing but stadium lights and silence. And then the light is back but it’s wrong. Lenny couldn’t say what’s wrong about it, but she knows it’s wrong.

“Nagomi,” she whispers urgently. “Do you need to go to the Hellmouth?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

“This is important,” Nagomi says. Her face is ashen, but she meets Lenny’s eyes steadily. “We both need to be here for this.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I can just tell there’s something.”

Lenny nods and lifts Nagomi’s arm to drape around her shoulders. Nagomi leans into her, and they spend the rest of the game like that. Most of the fans are rushing out of the stadium. The few people who don’t so much as blink all look like other professional players, people who are here not as spectators but as witnesses.

The Crabs win. The Shoe Thieves all look relieved as they rush off the field, going to huddle in the stands together. The emergency sirens start blaring. The rest of the fans leave. Lenny reaches up and grabs Nagomi’s hand, still resting on her shoulder.

And then the Shelled One appears.

It’s the biggest thing she’s ever seen. It’s not in the sky, it is the sky, booming judgment down on all of them. Nobody says a word as the pods fall. Nobody says a word as Wyatt Quitter steps up to the plate. Nobody says a word when she hits a single and the Crabs collapse to the field.

“Is this it?” Lenny whispers.

Nagomi shakes her head. “Not yet.”

There’s an ungodly screech of feedback. Lenny doesn’t bother covering her ears, just looks up. She can almost hear words through the noise. “What is that?”

“Microphone,” Nagomi murmurs.

Lenny can’t make out most of it. She catches edges of words like “deal” and “best,” and then with sudden clarity, a voice says, “Rally.”

“Rally,” she repeats. “Rally?”

And then a burst of blue flame appears on second base, and Caligula Lotus appears, glowing and brilliant and alive.

Nagomi takes a breath next to her. “Oh.”

“This is it,” Lenny says. It’s not a question. “Is this… are they…”

“They must be.”

Lenny can’t say anything else. Because a burst of fire appears in right field, and then Dom is standing there, glove in hand, grinning like a madman.

Nagomi clutches at her hand. “The Hall.”

Lenny shakes her head and watches. Landry, Jaylen, Yazmin, one by one by one. Emmett appears, and she tangles her fingers in with Nagomi’s a little tighter, lets Nagomi bury her face against her shoulder for the briefest moment.

And then, at long last: a burst over first base, and Randy is there. He looks younger than she remembers. He was, she realizes with a start, about as old as she is now when he died.

It takes her a minute to realize that her phone is buzzing, but Nagomi nudges her gently. “You might want to get that.”

Lenny untangles their hands to grab her phone. Next to her she’s dimly aware of Nagomi answering a phone call of her own, and she bumps their shoulders together. She barely spares her caller ID a glance before she answers. “Mike?”

“Lenny,” he says, breathing hard. “You’re watching this, right? I’m coming over, we have to-”

“Don’t do that, I’m not home.”

“Yellowstone?”

She winces. “Uh. Baltimore, actually.”

“What?” Mike says sharply. She can hear Sparks say something in the background that she can’t quite catch. “Are you safe?”

“I mean, I’m in the stands.” She glances up to where the Shelled One is spinning. It doesn’t seem smaller, exactly, but it doesn’t seem like everything anymore. “But I think… I think it’s okay.”

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

“No promises,” Lenny murmurs. “I have to go.”

Mike lets out a breath. “Be safe.”

“Yeah. I love you. Tell Sparks that too.”

“Lenny says she loves you.” He pauses for a few seconds. “They love you too, and they say not to be an idiot.”

“No, they don’t.”

“No, they say if you need coffee in Baltimore they can recommend places. So it’s the same thing. And I love you too. I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah,” Lenny whispers, and hangs up. Within seconds her phone is ringing again, and she doesn’t have to look this time before she answers. “Bee, I can’t talk.”

“Don’t you do that,” Chorby says. She sounds like she’s crying again, and she sounds angry, and she sounds scared. “Lenny, don’t you dare shut me out right now.”

“I’m not shutting you out, Chorby, I’m at the game.”

“You’re- what?”

“I’m in Baltimore right now.”

“Oh, my god, Lenny.”

“It’s not dangerous.” She pauses. “I mean, not yet. And I don’t think any fans got hurt last time.”

“There wasn’t an undead team last time!” Chorby exclaims. “Come on, you have to go. You have to go home.”

Lenny looks out at the field. Dom is yelling something she can’t hear to Tyreek Olive in center field. Randy is more focused than she’s ever seen, eyes only on Peanut Bong as he steps up. “I can’t. It’s not over.”

“Eleanor-”

“I love you,” Lenny says abruptly. “I think I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen. And I’m not saying that because I think I’m about to die, I’m saying it because this is kind of making me have a crisis, and I want to make sure that you hear me say it once. And I’m sorry that I left you. And sometime after this we can have a real conversation about the future and whatever, okay? But after this.”

“Okay,” Chorby whispers. Lenny can picture the silent tears on her cheeks, wants more than anything to reach out and be able to wipe them away. “I love you too. I’m going to be in Seattle when you get back so we can talk, so you’d better not back out.”

“Never. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Talk to you later,” Chorby repeats, and Lenny hangs up. Next to her, Nagomi slips her phone into her pocket.

Lenny looks up again. “Do you think we’re going to win?”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Nagomi answers. This time it’s Lenny who leans against her shoulder. “I know we haven’t spoken much until now, but thank you for sitting with me.”

“I was happy to see a friendly face. And you seem nice.”

“I’m cursed. Pretty badly.”

“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. The shadows were kind of like a curse, and I dealt with that for a long time.”

“You sound like Randy,” Nagomi says, and Lenny has to stop and take a deep breath through her nose. “Not your voice, just the way you say things.”

“Are you scared?”

“Not of this. Are you?”

“No,” Lenny says. And she’s surprised to realize that it’s true.

It’s a blur of a game. Everything is happening in slow motion and hyperspeed at the same time. Sebastian Telephone gets incinerated and she feels more than hears the Hall Stars all shout in anguish. Landry Violence eats fire and Lenny screams with the rest of them, full of righteous joy. Even Nagomi is yelling for that, hoarse and vicious and proud.

Time is loose and nebulous here, but Lenny can tell when they get to the top of the ninth. She can tell it’s close. “Nagomi,” she says, “what do we do if-”

“Let’s go closer,” Nagomi says. She seems a little stronger, even with the not-quite-sun still in the sky. She doesn’t need Lenny’s help to stand up.

They miss some of the game, but they end up clustered with the Shoe Thieves. Nagomi exchanges nods with someone. Lenny stands next to Stu. They’ve only talked once, but it was about brothers, and that’s enough that Stu is her first choice.

“Hey,” Stu murmurs. Her hands are shaking. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Lenny admits. It’s the bottom of the ninth now. Jaylen is still pitching for the Pods; Axel is in the dugout with Randy. “I don’t know what we’ll do.”

Workman hits a home run and the Pods all stumble. Stu sucks in a breath. “I just want to see him again, you know?”

“I know,” Lenny says. Tyreek hits a ground out, but doesn’t waver. It’s the bottom of the ninth, and that means something. That has to mean something. “Do you think we could go onto the field?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Do you think you can stop me if I do it without you?”

Stu snorts. “I wouldn’t try,” she says. “Sure, why not? Let’s do it.”

Dom is at home plate. Lenny goes quiet as she watches him: foul ball after foul ball after foul ball. She swallows and whispers, only for herself: “Come on.”

And, like he heard her, Dom hits a home run.

Actually, to call it a home run doesn’t do it justice. Jaylen throws a pitch, a softball of a thing that Lenny knows beyond a shadow of a doubt must’ve been soft on purpose. And Dom grins, she can see it, triumphant and furious, as he reels back and swings and hits the ball with a crack so loud that Lenny feels it in her bones. He doesn’t even run the bases, just stumbles backwards and looks up. He watches — they all watch — as the ball soars up into the Shelled One and splits it open.

“Cool,” Stu breathes.

The Shelled One spins back into the sky. Lenny thinks she can see something reaching for it, something squiddish. When she looks back at the field, all of the Pods are staring ahead vacantly. And then they disappear, one by one, stepping forward into nothing. Jaylen is the last to go, the only one with her head held high, blood dripping out of her nose. She closes her eyes, just a second before she vanishes.

Lenny holds her breath. The Hall Stars don’t go away.

There’s a roaring cheer that it takes her a minute to place, because it’s coming from all around her. The Hall Stars are all gathering together on the field, rushing out of the dugout towards Dom. The Shoe Thieves are screaming, and the Crabs are too from across the field. All around the stadium people are shouting in celebration.

She looks at Stu. “You wanna?”

“Count of three?”

Lenny nods. “One, two-”

They hop over the wall at the same time. A couple of Shoe Thieves shout something in warning, but Lenny doesn’t care. The Pods are gone, and this could be her only chance. Her last chance.

Running next to her, Stu laughs out loud. “Axel!” she shouts, and it’s enough to get heads to turn. “It’s me, Axel!”

Lenny opens her mouth to yell for one of her brothers, but Randy spots her first. She can tell because he grabs Dom’s elbows and yanks him out of the gaggle, pointing towards her. His jaw drops, and they both take staggering steps towards her.

“God,” she whispers, and then runs like she’s never run before.

It’s not a surprise when she tackles both of them to the ground. She could never slow down, could never stop in time. But she’s also not surprised when they catch her, each of them with an arm around her shoulders.

They’re both talking at the same time, and Lenny can’t make out what either of them are saying. She’s too busy gasping for air, trying to wind arms around both of their necks.

“Okay,” Dom says after a second, “Len, wait, sit up a second, this is stupid, we don’t have to be on the ground.”

“I am not moving,” Lenny announces. “Absolutely not.”

“Lenny, c’mon-”

“We’re old men, Eleanor-”

“Oh my god, quit being gross,” she huffs, like she’s thirteen and not twenty-two, and scrambles to kneel. “Is that better?”

“Yeah, dummy,” Randy says fondly, and then sits up and gives her a bone-crushing hug. Dom shifts behind her, wrapping his arms around both of them so she’s trapped in the middle. “How did you even get here?”

“I took a plane, don’t be stupid.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to too many active players, how do you know Stu?”

Lenny’s breath catches. “I’m on the team now.”

Randy pulls back just slightly, eyes wide. “You are?”

She nods frantically. “I’ve been there for about a year. I’m out.”

Dom’s arms tighten around her ribs. She can hear his breath stuttering against the back of her neck, like he’s trying not to cry. “Is it fun?”

“It’s so much fun,” she laughs. “It’s… it’s unbelievable. I pitched a shutout. Last time we played the Tigers, I struck out Aldon Cashmoney twice.”

“Twice!” Randy echoes. He’s crying, but he’s still beaming at her before he lunges back in to hug her even tighter, somehow. “Lenny. Lenny, Lenny, you did it.”

“Everyone’s going to know you’re the coolest one of us,” Dom murmurs.

Lenny snorts. “Uh, I’m not the one who just killed god, thanks.”

“Yeah, but look at you.”

“Yeah, she’s got tattoos,” Randy adds.

Dom immediately sits up straighter. “What? Where?”

Lenny holds her arm out behind her so he can look at it. “For the shadows.”

His fingers trail along. She can feel him pressing into each little symbol, like that’ll help him understand it. He presses against the pulse point on her wrist and she forces herself to take a deep breath.

“Guys,” she says, voice quavering, “I’m so sorry. I was so scared of you not recognizing me that I ran away for years, and I didn’t understand that that hurt you too. I was a stupid kid, and I-”

“Hey, stop that,” Randy says firmly. “You were a scared kid. You did your best.”

“I did something horrible.”

“And now you know not to do it again.”

Dom lets her arm go and then props his chin up on her shoulder so he’s talking straight in her ear. “Lenny, everyone does stupid things. It’s a question of how you deal with the stupid after.”

Lenny laughs, because she’s about to start crying. “I can’t believe I missed out on years of advice from you guys.”

“We’ll cram years into the next couple hours,” Randy promises. “I don’t know how long we have, and I don’t know how long you can stay, but we’ll take whatever time we have.”

Forever, Lenny wants to say. I’ll figure out how to go wherever’s next with you. I’ll stay here for days if that’s how long you’re here. I’ll never go again.

Except they’re both glowing blue, and their hair looks like squid tentacles, and they’re both not quite solid around the edges if she looks too long. They’ve already gone somewhere she can’t follow, somewhere they wouldn’t want her to follow. And somewhere in Seattle is Mike Townsend, and Goodwin Morin, and more people that love her. Somewhere, on a plane, is Chorby.

Maybe she shouldn’t leave again. Maybe it’s a mistake. But she’s sure about it. Somehow, bone-deep, she’s sure about it.

“I have to get back tonight,” she says. She can feel their surprise. “I would stay forever, but… but I think I actually have a life? Something real to get back to.”

“Congrats on being the first one of us to get a life,” Randy says, so sarcastic she thinks it might be sincere.

“We’ll have you as long as you can stay,” Dom promises. “We want to hear everything.”

“I want to tell you everything,” Lenny says. It’s the best goodbye gift she could possibly give them: making sure they know that she’s doing okay.

The redeye flight lands in Seattle at 6:17 in the morning, which means that Lenny stumbles into her apartment a little after 7.

She met Emmett and the rest of the Hall Stars, and made sure that Nagomi got to come on the field too. She talked to Stu, and the Thieves, and the Crabs, and called Mike, and spent time with people.

And she talked to Dom and Randy. She squeezed everything she could out of them: advice and childhood memories and compliments and anything else she thought of. Both of them kept laughing, but not at her. More like out of disbelief, or joy, or love.

“I could stay,” she admitted, a matter of minutes before she meant to leave for the airport. “If you wanted, I could be here as long as you were. I don’t want to leave again.”

But Dom shook his head. “Why did you leave the first time?”

“I was scared.”

Randy smiled. “And why are you leaving now?”

“Because…” she swallowed. “Because there’s something after this.”

“So go find it,” Randy said, like it was easy. “We know you love us. Go love other people too.”

So she gets to her apartment at seven in the morning, and she’s exhausted in every way possible, physical and emotional and probably even spiritual. She’s going to brush her teeth and then pass out for fifteen hours, and then she’s going to get roaring drunk with Mike, and things are going to be completely fine after that. She’s looking forward to it.

And then she unlocks the door and stumbles in and sees Chorby, fast asleep on the futon.

Lenny closes the door as carefully as she can. She doesn’t remember telling Chorby that she keeps the spare key taped under her doormat, but it’s probably not hard to figure out. And besides, Chorby’s here. It’s hard to ask questions about that.

Slowly, cautiously, Lenny unlaces her boots and kicks them off. She wanders into her bedroom just long enough to pull off her jacket and change into sleep clothes, scrubs off most of her makeup, then steps back out to stare at Chorby. Lenny’s seen her asleep before, but the last time she didn’t let herself… watch. Didn’t really let herself look.

But she has time. She finally has time.

She bends down and brushes some of Chorby’s hair back from her face. Chorby hums, a low noise from deep inside her chest, and one eye cracks open. “Len?”

“Hey,” Lenny whispers. “I’m about to go pass the hell out, but I wanted to let you know that I got home.”

“Oh.” Chorby’s eye closes again, then both her eyes fly open as she wakes up. “Oh. Hi.”

Lenny smiles. Her heart is aching with fondness. “Hi.”

“I’m coming to bed with you.” She swings her legs over the edge of the futon, and it’s clumsy enough that one of her hands lands on Lenny’s knee for balance. “What time is it?”

“It’s about seven, so it’s pretty late.”

“Or pretty early.”

“Kind of all the same.”

Chorby nods as she stands up. She doesn’t say anything as she trails behind Lenny into the bedroom. Lenny’s bed is pretty small, but they’ve dealt with this before, so it’s easy: Chorby lies down, and Lenny lies on top of her.

“Your brothers,” Chorby says quietly. “You got to see them?”

“Yeah.” Lenny leans down till her forehead is against Chorby’s collarbone. “And we can definitely, like, talk about that at some point, but I actually have a speech memorized for you, and if I don’t do it now I’m not going to remember it.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I mean, I took notes but I was on a plane so all the notes are on a barf bag. And I’d rather not read to you off a barf bag if I can avoid it.”

Chorby laughs softly, breath going through Lenny’s hair. “Okay, let me hear it.”

“I’m not gonna sit up, though, I’m tired.”

“Go for it.”

Lenny takes a deep breath. “Chorby Short. You are one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and I think the fact that you’re in my apartment to help me out even though I did a really bad thing to you is proof of that.”

“That was part of the speech?”

“I’m editorializing, let me have this. Where was I?”

“I’m one of the kindest people you’ve ever met.”

“Right. And what I did to you was wrong, because I was so busy wrapped up in what I thought would be good that I didn’t stop to think if it was right, or if it was what you wanted. I left you in a bad place, and I’m sorry. And I also know I really freaked you out, because you called me Eleanor, and you don’t do that unless you’re really pissed off or really upset. And I’m sorry about that too.”

Chorby hums. One of her arms wraps around Lenny’s waist, fingers skating up her lower back. “But you’re not sorry you went.”

“I could never be sorry I went,” Lenny admits. “But I am sorry I didn’t call you first. I’m going to keep making bad decisions, or at least snap judgments. That’s just who I am. But it’s only fair that you’re a part of those decisions. Because I trust you, and I value your safety and happiness.”

“And?”

Lenny grins. “And I love you?” she says hopefully.

Chorby laughs. “I love you too,” she answers, soft and sweet. “Very much.”

And that’s enough to get Lenny to finally lift her head. She’s exhausted, and the world spins in front of her for a second, but she forces herself to focus on Chorby. “Really?”

“You’re ridiculous,” Chorby says fondly. “Go to sleep. We can have a real conversation when you’re not dead on your feet.”

Lenny immediately buries her face back in Chorby’s neck. “If you wake up first can you get pancakes? Pancakes would be good.”

“I can get pancakes.”

“That’s why you’re the best. Did you like my speech?”

She’s already drifting off, eyes too heavy to stay open. But she can still feel Chorby’s lips in her hair, pressing a feather light kiss. The last thing she hears is Chorby whispering, “It was perfect.”

Things aren’t easy. But they are good. Lenny’s beginning to learn the difference.

She and Chorby set up a schedule for the off-season, taking turns visiting one another. There’s also time for Lenny to go to New York and the Hellmouth and spend actual time there. She visits Stu a lot, talking about their brothers, talking about an experience nobody else will ever understand.

She goes to team practice, and band practice. She starts learning how to play bass solos. She goes out more with the team, learns what kind of pizza toppings everyone likes, learns the arguments they have every time they order takeout. It feels like she’s part of something.

She finally reads the letters that Dom and Randy left her. They’re both from the siesta when she visited, written while she was asleep, written just in case. They’re effusive and emotional goodbyes, but not quite as good as getting to see them one last time. She still keeps them in the jewelry box, though. It’s good to have something to hold onto.

She still goes to Big Garage when she can’t sleep. Most nights Mike is there, baking something, and she doesn’t ask about his music and he doesn’t ask about why she’s awake.

The day before election results come out, she goes to the kitchen on purpose. Mike is mixing a giant bowl of cookie dough. He doesn’t look up. “I need to tell you something.”

“Shoot.” She leans forward and reaches a finger towards the bowl of dough.

Mike swats her hand away, a well-practiced gesture. “I think I’m going back to the shadows tomorrow.”

Lenny stands up a little straighter. “What?”

“I’m not sure, but-”

“Mike,” Lenny says urgently. “What did you just say?”

He sighs and turns to her. “Do you remember the day before we got here? How we were both so sure that the blessing was coming to us? Nobody else felt that way.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Are we getting the blessing that gives us a pitcher tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Lenny says instinctively, and then frowns. “Does that mean it could be me too?”

Mike shakes his head. “It’s the worst pitcher. Every time, it’s the worst pitcher that goes.”

“But we’re both one star.”

“I’ll make sure it’s me.”

“Mike.”

“I love this team,” Mike says, with an intensity that makes Lenny stand a little straighter. “I know a lot of people don’t get it and they’re probably right to be confused, but… I love this team. They were the only people I trusted for six years. When I left they did everything they could to try and get me back. They love me too.”

“But?” Lenny says, because there’s always a but.

He smiles wanly. “But I’m tired. And I watched one of my best friends fight a god. And you're younger, and angrier, and cooler than I ever was. And you’re happy.”

“I am happy,” she admits. “I don’t think I know what I’m doing anymore, but I’m happy.”

Mike whistles. “I’ll be damned.”

“What?”

“You’re finally a real adult.”

Lenny swats him on the arm, and he ducks out of the way, grinning. She’s not going to get sappy. This is about what he needs. “Are these cookies for the Garages or the shadows?”

“I was thinking the shadows. Give them a present as soon as I’m back.”

“Do you want to make them edibles? I’ve got weed butter stashed in the fridge.”

Mike throws his head back and laughs. “Yeah, you know what? Why not, let’s do it.”

This is the last thing that Lenny and Mike do together: they bake. They tell each other jokes and insult each other, sure, but the thing that Lenny knows she’s going to remember is the smell of cookies and the way he smiled at her. Even when everything else slips away, she wants to hold onto that.

It’s Lenny’s first time getting election results as an active player, and the team all meets in Big Garage. It’s incredibly strange. It feels… too official, having an actual meeting place to congregate, even though there’s nothing official about it.

Mike has a backpack with him. There’s a couple plastic bags of cookies in it. A couple people make jokes about him looking like he’s going to hitchhike somewhere after this, and he keeps laughing, and he doesn’t look at Lenny.

She stays off to one side of the room. Not because she doesn’t want to be around people, just because she knows.

Sure enough, election results start coming in, and everyone goes to gather around the TV. Lenny waits in her corner till Mike comes over. She reaches up and hugs him, only for a second, before stepping back. “Tell everyone I love them. Sparks would probably say the same, if they knew.”

“Course. And-” Mike unties the flannel from around his waist. It’s hideous, easily her least favorite of his, all grey and oversized. “Something for you to remember me by.”

“Yuck,” Lenny says, and slides it on immediately. “I’m gonna miss you. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Yeah, you too. I can tell them about you and Chorby, right?”

“Oh, go for it. They’d want to know.”

Mike nods and then makes a pained noise. She remembers, however briefly, the feeling of being in the shadows, the feeling of being pulled away to the light. She wonders how the reverse feels, if it hurts less or more. But Mike takes a deep breath and then smiles at her, small and wry and warm. “Goodbye, Eleanor.”

She grins. “Farewell, Michael.”

He flips her off as he leaves the room. Nobody turns around, so Lenny goes to watch the TV too. She’s not sure who she should expect to come through the door — probably nobody, she barely remembers who’s there. Although there was the woman with the hands. Doesn’t the blessing give them the best pitcher from the shadows? That’ll probably be her.

It’s only because she’s listening for it that she hears the door creak. Not being kicked in, the way she’d done it. Just a normal person opening a door.

Somehow, that’s enough for Lenny to know. She turns around, heart in her throat.

“Oh,” Goodwin says. “Oh, wow.”

And just like that, Lenny remembers. Nine years in what was supposed to be a spare bedroom. Dusting baseboards and eating popcorn. The way that Goodwin showed her, on her first day in the house, that she always kept the spare key taped under the doormat in case Lenny lost hers. The closest she had to a parent for a decade. And now she’s here.

The rest of the team starts to turn, but Lenny’s already on the move. She all but leaps into Goodwin’s arms, and Goodwin catches her, holding her tight. Someone’s laughing; it takes Lenny a minute to realize that it’s her.

“Hello, Goodwin,” Sparks says from behind her. Goodwin lets Lenny go long enough to shake Sparks’s hand with one of her shadow hands. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to be here,” Goodwin says breathlessly. She waves with a shadow hand at the rest of the Garages, who are all staring. “Hello, I’ll be happy to introduce myself, but we need a second for a reunion.”

Teddy waves her off. “Take your time. Welcome to the team.”

“Thanks,” Goodwin says, and immediately sweeps Lenny off the ground and spins her in a circle. “Lenny!”

“Goodwin!” she laughs. There are tears in her eyes. She’s not even sure what there is to say. She’s ecstatic. It’s one more missing piece, back in her life. “Goodwin, you’re here! I have so much to tell you.”

Goodwin settles her on the ground, still holding onto her shoulders and beaming. “It seems like you had quite the season. Did you see your brothers play? Have you seen Chorby at all?”

“Lenny has seen Chorby,” Sparks says, so deliberately nonchalant that Lenny whacks their arm on principle.

Goodwin’s eyes widen. She looks delighted. “Oh, have you now?”

“I’ll tell you about it in private,” Lenny says, punctuating the last two words with a glare at Sparks. “For now can we just like… hug a little while longer? I missed you and you’re here.”

“Of course,” Goodwin says, and she pulls Lenny in and holds her tight.

Lenny closes her eyes. Not for any reason. Just to bask in the simplicity of a good hug from someone she loves. Just to live in this moment, a little while longer.

At last, she opens her eyes and squeezes Goodwin’s shoulder. “Let me introduce you to the team. You’re gonna love them.”

Goodwin grins broadly at her. “I’d be delighted.”

She’s proud, Lenny can tell. Hell, Lenny is proud of herself.

She takes Goodwin’s hand and starts dragging her over. “Team meeting,” she yells, and Paula and Betsy are first over, then Malik, and then everyone. It’s messy and loud and it’s the best greeting she can give Goodwin, the best beginning that she has to offer.

they say there's good grief
but how can you tell it from the bad
maybe it's only in the fact
good grief's the one that's in your past

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