Free Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines Page B

It hits the sand and that’s a chicken wing dropped into flour.
    I don’t have any memory of seeing the fight that day. In fact, I don’t remember what it was like to see the fights before the age of nine or ten, and by that point matches were something we attended regularly, like church.
    My family was heavily filmed. So Allison taught me how to look and what my face should and shouldn’t give away to the cameras, as if she were designing a will and the public was one of her beneficiaries. And sometimes we experienced a personal loss and those were the dark times when Allison seemed to disappear entirely, as if she had only been an overlay on a screen. Someone would go to the grocery store and buy us canned goods to last a month, or they’d arrive with casseroles and other soggy dishes, and we wouldn’t leave the house for anything.
    If I have a girl someday, Allison has often told me, I will be expected to bring her to the amphitheater for the first time when she’s five. It’s four for a boy. A couple of weeks ago, I stopped hedging and just said, —That’s never going to happen.
    Watching her face fall, I might as well have said:  Thad’s run away  or  The house is on fire.
    *
    I wake with a start. Allison says I’m such a sound sleeper I’ll make it all the way through Armageddon in a deep slumber. But some random brain synapse lets me know I’m about to roll off the bench in the amphitheater. It’s the middle of the night and there’s a stadium blanket covering me, and a towel under my sore head. I can feel the official GSA embroidery at one corner of the blanket, so I figure this has to be Uber’s.
    I’m relieved to see he’s not around, though it’s a little creepy being alone in the stadium this late. When I sit up, I feel like I’ve been in a hard fight. The arm I was sleeping on is basically dead, my hips numb.
    Sucking the last juice out of the phone, I call Allison.
    —Are you all right? she asks, her voice raspy and urgent and I know she’s been crying and chain smoking all night. I explain about falling asleep but not about caging—she’d go insane if she knew I had shrouded Uber. I’d go insane if I let myself. She wants me to crash at Mark’s so I’m not out in the middle of the night any more than I have to be.
    —How’s Thad? I ask.
    —He ate a big dinner.
    —Did he say anything on the way home?
    —I don’t know. Probably, yes. He said something. It doesn’t matter right now, does it? she asks.
    That’s how I know Thad has made a new prediction that Allison is worried about.
    —Tell him I’ll be home in the morning and that I miss him.
    I explain that Uber wouldn’t give me the bracelet back, that there’s this new rule and as far as he knows, it’s our family’s bracelet. Of course she and I know, but neither of us wants to say, that technically I’m supposed to be his fiancée now—if he wants to pursue it or if Caesar’s Inc. finds out.
    I tell her to go back to sleep.
    —I can’t sleep.
    —Drink some of that tea.
    —If it worked I would.
    I tell her she’s going to be all right, that we’re all going to be all right. The way Tommy would have said it.
    The phone goes dead. I hoist myself up and grab the knife I tucked away and slip it back into my bag. Then I make my way down the stairs, and go past the covered concessions and locked vendor booths. I wind my way out of the turnstile.
    The streets are jammed, the lights blue, and some people double take when they see me but they don’t ask for autographs. I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders and up around my head and make my way toward the subway. This used to be a neo-Glad neighborhood, so there are plenty of leftover gladiator sports bars. Then all the rich folks moved in because they thought that was a cool thing to do and now a lot of the Glads can’t afford to live in the area. So it’s strictly pseudo culture and I can’t wait to get out of here.
    Replays of the American Title match