“You do stats? For what company?”
“Just some company.” I shut my laptop. I try to look him in the eye, but his weird Rudolph tattoo stares back at me, and I have to avert my gaze.
“Oh, wow, are you like a spy, or something? Is that why you can’t talk about it?”
“I’d be a pretty terrible spy if I opened a secret document in a crowded airport.”
“But only a slightly less terrible statistician for opening a secret document in one?”
He has a point, and I already hate him a bit for it. I put my laptop away.
“Maybe you don’t travel much for work, but in general, there’s an unspoken traveler’s code where people don’t look at other people’s computer screens,” I say.
“You must travel a lot more than I do, because in my experience, almost everyone is paying attention to what other people are doing.”
“No one cares about other people. They care about themselves, just like you do.”
“Like me?”
“I mean in general,” I say. “Everyone’s too busy worrying about themselves to worry about other people.”
“I can think of a few exceptions,” he says darkly.
Okay, then.
Two TV screens hang near enough that I can turn my attention to either of them and away from Face Tattoo. One is showing a Hallmark Christmas movie, and the other is showing sports. I angle my face to the one showing sports.
Yes, it might be Christmas season, but more importantly, it’s “Hot Stove Season”—the time when no baseball is played, but every team is busy making trades and getting their roster ready for the upcoming season. The sportscasters are offering predictions about what different teams will do. My team—the Chicago Firebirds—is on everyone’s minds, because at the beginning of last season, we acquired the cockiest jerk in all of baseball for a monster contract. And he got injured during the last game of the league championship series.
I’m glad I don’t work directly with players, because I’d have given him so many pieces of my mind, I’d be brain-dead.
“You a fan?” he asks.
I keep looking at the TV. “I live in Chicago. Everyone’s a baseball fan.”
“No, I mean of Coop.”
“Cooper Kellogg? Not remotely. The guy is a classless, overpaid punk.”
“How do you really feel, though?”
I scoff. “He signed a ten year, five hundred million dollar contract! No way is he worth fifty million a year.”
“You know half of that’s deferred,” Face Tattoo says. “He won’t get the other half until he’s well into retirement.”
“Are you mansplaining baseball contracts to me?”
“I’m pointing out what most fans don’t realize.”
“I’m not most fans.”
“Ah, okay. Good for you.”
I’m so tired of men thinking they know baseball better than I do. I would look at him, but between the low hat and the beard, there’s nothing but Rudolph. “I know you probably think because you have an XY chromosome that a little ol’ girl could never know more than you, but I work in the sport. I grew up around it. I’ve forgotten more about baseball than you’ll ever know.”
“Sounds like you have a bad memory.”
THIS GUY.
