Page 109 of Power Play

Eli had studied the wings, and then me, and said, “Where’d that come from?”

“The internet,” I’d said.

“Delaney.”

“It’s an answer to a different question than the one you asked.”

He’d looked at me for a while. He knew. He let it be the internet.

The preschool gym had been decorated by people who loved children more than they loved the fire code, paper snowflakes on fishing line at a density that made the ceiling shimmer when the door opened. The chairs for the families were the regular folding kind. The chairs that had been set out in the front row, for reasons I’d understand shortly, were the small ones, built for four-year-olds, plastic and primary-colored and eleven inches off the ground.

Theo was already in one.

He’d gotten there before me, before anyone, and he was sitting in a chair built for a person who weighed thirty-one pounds with his knees up near his ears and his hands folded and his face doing absolutely nothing, a professional hockey player at parade rest in a toddler chair, dead center, like he’d been assigned the seat by a court. He didn’t seem uncomfortable. He gave the impression he’d decided discomfort was for people with weaker constitutions.

“Theo,” I said.

“Delaney.” He inclined his head a precise half inch. He didn’t offer to explain why he was so early to a preschool recital for a child who wasn’t his. I’d learned not to ask Theo questions. The answer came back as a sentence of French and an expression that said I should have known.

The others came in a clot at ten of. Griffin had a cup of tea. Ryan had Maren, and Maren had the face of a woman filming in her mind. Kasperi had his phone up before he was through the door, horizontal, recording, narrating under his breath in a mix of English and Finnish that I was fairly sure was a running commentary on the snowflake situation. Every time Iris moved he said voi että, soft, which he told me afterward was what Finns said when anything was almost too cute to stand.

Cole was crying.

He was crying before the lights even went down. He was standing at the end of the small-chair row holding a program that was one photocopied page, reading the list of names, and his eyes had gone glassy and his jaw had set hard against what his face wanted to do.

“I’m not,” he said, to no one.

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

“It’s the paper.” He waved the program. “It’s a cheap paper. It does something to my eyes.”

“Okay.”

“There are eleven names,” he said, in a voice wrecked enough for a casualty list, and sat down hard in a chair the size of a shoebox, and put his face in the one photocopied page.

Eli came in last with Iris’s spare water bottle and her backup socks and the removable tail folded over his arm, because she’d gone backstage in the wings but the tail couldn’t survive the holding pen, and he took the small chair next to mine without a word and without a visible thought about how he was going to get back out of it, six-foot-three of defenseman folding down into a preschool chair as if it were a tactical decision, and his knee came up against mine and stayed there.

Charlotte Pham was a few rows back in a real chair, where the smart parents sat. She caught my eye and smiled the smile she had, the one with a question folded inside it, and leaned toward the mother beside her and whispered behind her hand, and their eyes cut to the front row, to six of the most recognizable men in the state of Arizona wedged into furniture designed for people who still napped, all of them there for one small dragon, and then at me, sitting in the middle of them in a scarf, in December, in Phoenix.

I organized my face. I’d been organizing my face since the Arizona state line in July. I was getting good at it, and I hated how good I was getting, because being good at it meant I was doing it a lot.

Then the lights went down and the teacher pressed play on a song about mittens, and eleven four-year-olds filed out onto the taped X’s on the floor, and the front row of the Phoenix Sidewinders went silent at once.

Iris was third from the left and she was a dragon.

She came out in the wings with the hood up and the orange spines down her back and she found her father in the dark in under a second, as she always did, and she didn’t wave, because she was a professional. She set her feet on her X. She put her hands at her sides. She waited for her word.

The song had parts. Each child had a line about winter, which they’d practiced, which the teacher mouthed along to from the side with the devotion of air traffic control. The boy on the end said his line about snow. A girl said hers about hot chocolate. Iris’s turn came and the room went still, because six enormous men were trying not to breathe loudly, and Iris opened her mouth and delivered, at full preschool volume, pitched for a yard, all eleven of her words.

“In winter the dragon is warm because he has fire inside.”

Then she roared. It wasn’t in the song. It had never been in the song. It was a short, committed, extremely loud roar, delivered directly at the front row, and she held the wings out to their full orange span while she did it, and the felt caught the gym lights, and I’d spent my four-in-the-mornings cutting those scallops by hand, and right then I’d have cut them again with my teeth.

Kasperi’s phone didn’t waver. He was a steady hand. Theo made a sound I didn’t know Theo could make, a short exhale through the nose that in another man would have been a laugh. Griffin set his tea on the floor so he could put both hands flat over his own mouth, and Cole, beside Eli, gave up entirely and wept openly at a dragon, and the mother behind us said “aw,” and I was nearly certain she meant Cole.

Eli didn’t make a sound. I looked, because I always looked, and he was sitting in his ridiculous small chair with his forearms on his ridiculous high knees and his eyes on his daughter and his face open, which it never was in a building with cameras, and his hand had come off his own knee and onto mine, flat, warm, without any plan to it, and I put mine over the top of it and neither of us turned toward the other, and the dragon roared again, encore, uninvited, and brought the house down.

The group chat was a crime scene by the time we got to the car.