Monochrome

A-Four

Ingrid couldn't make herself let go of her phone.

She was supposed to be handing it over to this fruitcake of a high school counselor, but her fingers wouldn't relinquish their grip on her lifeline to the outside world. They clung to the cool plastic as if the phone could keep her anchored to sanity, while the counselor, a hipster librarian type, squinted at Ingrid from behind the thick frames of her glasses.

"You'll get your phone back between semesters," said the counselor. "And you can use our landline to call your family in the meantime-"

"I don't care about that," said Ingrid. "I'm in the last year of a three-year dynasty league and I can't afford to abandon it. I've been second place to the Yellow Raiders two years in a row, and I've got a huge bet going with the whole league that I can beat him this year. We're talking a thousand bucks, and Yellow sends me his terrible towel so I can light it on fire and flush the ashes during a livestream."

The counselor blinked. "If you need Internet access, you can sign up for half-hour increments in the digital art lab. I think they're open to non-DA students from three to six-"

"Half an hour? That's impossible. I need total access. I have to know when a player gets put on injury reserve so I can attack the waiver wire before his replacement gets picked up. Hell, it takes longer than half an hour just to set my roster on Thursday. And how am I supposed to keep up with the games?"

"Ingrid . . ." From the look on this counselor's face, it was clear she didn't know much about reserve lists or waivers or rosters. Ingrid was wasting her time explaining all this to a geek, even a theoretically mature and unbiased one, but she couldn't help but try to talk sense in the only language she knew: the language of reality. Not just for her own sake, but for the sake of her brother, Lukas, who hadn't even bothered to take his own phone out of his pocket yet.

As usual, Big Sis blazed the trail. Lukas would let her do the fighting and then make his decisions based on how far she got and how thorny her path had been. Still, that didn't mean he wouldn't assist when assistance was needed.

"She's talking about football, Ms. . . ." Lukas glanced down at the plate on the desk. "Parker."

"Ah."

"Let me put things in perspective for you, Ms. Parker," Ingrid said. "Tomorrow evening, my fantasy football league meets online to draft our teams. That means we pick our players for the season."

"Uh-huh."

"Now, I already agreed to the time slot we picked for our draft. So if I don't show up, my team goes into auto-draft. Do you know what auto-draft is?"

"I can only imagine."

"It means the computer picks my players for me. And, look, I don't care how good the game mechanics are in the Madden series, computers are not intelligent enough to draft a stellar fantasy football team. How's a computer supposed to know when there's a run on quarterbacks? I've been in leagues where they didn't draft quarterbacks until rounds four and five, and I've been in leagues where people panicked and took all the good ones in the first round. I can't---I can't leave all that to chance, do you understand? We're talking about a thousand dollars and the destruction of precious Steelers memorabilia, here."

"I understand that this league is important to you," said Ms. Parker. Ingrid could tell she was trying not to sound patronizing, but it wasn't really working. "When students come to A-Four, they all have things that are important to them. Things they're sure they can't live without. A girlfriend, a boyfriend, vapes, marijuana, alcohol, social media, a television series, video games, frequent access to shopping, Internet pornography . . ."