“Me!” Morgan chirped, trying to project cheer and great ability at marketing, whatever that looked like.
“Hi,” said Luke. She was pleased because it would be good to have someone on her team who was actually on her side. That was the only reason.
“And I’m the last,” Hayley declared with satisfaction. Morgan was proud that her own cheer didn’t falter.
“All right, Zabloomers! Let’s kick some shuffleboard butt!” Brad clapped.
Morgan had never played shuffleboard before. Her high school had had the triangles painted on the blacktop, but no one had been interested in giving teenagers unsupervised access to sticks and the gym teacher clearly though it was beneath him, so everyone ignored it except as a landmark to help figure out where to find the smokers. She’d spent most of her time in gym class trying not to be noticed. She’d grown up failing to play skirmedge and broomstick racing and underwater polo and other mage athletics, and had had no idea how to fail to play basketball and field hockey.
Fortunately, most of her coworkers seemed equally clueless. The nice equipment manager who worked at the bar came out to try to explain. Since at least half the attendees were more interested in comparing drink orders and gossiping to listen, Morgan anticipated that no onewould be breaking any records today. There were two triangles across from each other on a polished wood floor, with point values written in the different sections of the triangle. The tiny bit at the top of the triangle was worth ten points, the lower sections worth less, but then the broad base at the bottom was apparently worth negative ten points. The goal was to use your stick—no, your tang—to slide your pucks—except they were called biscuits for no reason Morgan could explain except pretentiousness—into the highest point value sections of the triangle on the far side of the court, without hitting the negative section.
“What if you hit someone else’s biscuit?” Kelly asked. “Do we put it back?”
“Biscuits are left in place and aren’t scored until all biscuits have been played,” the equipment manager started to say.
“Enough with the mansplaining,” Brad declared.
“That’s not what mansplaining means,” Kelly said under her breath.
“What’s mansplaining?” Luke whispered to Morgan.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Yes, you’re allowed to hit other people’s biscuits,” the manager finished to Kelly, more quietly.
“This is going to turn into a free-for-all of ignoring scoring yourself while focusing on knocking the other team’s pucks all over the place,” Morgan whispered to Luke.
Luke had that listening look on his face he got when he was checking other people’s desires. “I bet someone loses a tooth by the end,” he predicted.
“The pucks aren’t ever supposed to leave the floor,” Morgan pointed out. Then she looked at Brad, who was happily trash-talking Kelly. “No bet.”
“Uh… do human teeth grow back?” Luke asked.
“No.”
“Oh. Well. This could be bad, then.”
She took another sip of her drink. She was going to enjoy this. Somehow. She’d wanted shuffleboard and a fruity drink and meaningful work and absolutely nothing else. She had the first two and a shot at the second. This was her, enjoying the things she wanted.
“How did the investor conversations go?” Hayley asked as they took their places next to Team Four, which included Ronaldo, Vijay, and two more of the developers Morgan barely knew.
“Great, great,” Brad said. “People are really vibing with our concept, you know? It’s going to be a whole new paradigm.”
Luke’s eyebrows creased. Hayley handed them each a tang.
“Normally this is played by single people or teams of two,” Brad was lecturing, as if the facility employee hadn’t given them a whole spiel a moment ago. “But since there’s four of us on each team, and four biscuits per side, we’ll each do one biscuit per round, and we’ll play one direction and then the other as a game.”
“That’smansplaining,” Morgan couldn’t help whispering to Luke.
“What did you say?” Hayley asked, looking confused. Her drink, which looked like a kombucha that a more potent alcohol or three had been added to, was also already more than half empty.
“Don’t worry about it,” Morgan told her. Stay focused. Impress Brad. Enjoy drink.
“Let’s make this interesting,” Brad declared. Her stomach dropped. It was already too interesting. She didn’t know howmuch a CEO of a mid-stage startup made, but it surely had at least one more zero than the salary of an interim marketing head who hadn’t gotten a raise from her SDR salary. “One extra day of PTO for whichever team scores the highest!”
She let out a silent sigh of relief. An extra day of vacation would be nice, and at least there was nothing to lose.
Luke’s entire focus was on Brad. She drifted next to him while Brad strode confidently to the head of the court and lined up his shot. “What’s up?” she asked softly.
