VEX

ii.

Danielle van de Donk knows something was different the moment she stepped into is London Colney. Nothing is physically different, but something feels different. She has no explanation, and she doesn't want to worry her girlfriend, so she says nothing.

This feeling, the sense of something has changed, continues the entire week. And she does find something different, eventually: a media company in North London has a new spray paint decoration on the wall. A call for the Arsenal Gunners. That alone is odd, but the new media campaign Joe has been talking about is working with a freelance designer from said media company. This can't a coincidence.

Three days later, Friday mid-morning after a morning training session, Danielle and a few teammates go out for a coffee run. They happen to pass the building with the Gunners chant painted on it, only this time Danielle sees it, it is crossed out, and in blue spray paint, 'COME ON YOU SPURS' is painted under it in crude letters, as opposed to the clearly skilled font of the original line.

This isn't common. Yes, the North London Derby is this weekend, but this has never happened before. No spray paint wars on the sides of innocent buildings before. No ominous feelings of change or that something is wrong.

Maybe, she thinks, maybe I'm being paranoid. Nothing's different, everything is just fine. The top of the table in the Premire League is pretty close and teams need points. Maybe that's it.

She knew this foreboding feeling is absurd for what is playing out to be a normal week of preparation before the game against the Spurs.

(The FA just so happens to schedule both North London Derbies on the same day. Kind of a dick move.)

It's a bit cheeky, Danielle thinks, pulling revenue from the women's game because people will be busy going to the men's game.

Maybe this foreboding feeling is about the game; that something will go wrong. It sits low in her gut, leaving Danielle on edge all week.

(If Danielle or any of the other ladies had taken a closer look, they'd have noticed the work was tagged by the notorious Vex twice.)

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Vex works quickly in the dressing room at Meadow Park. Vex had done their research, and found that Arsenal isn't the only team to play there, and Boreham Wood FC doesn't have the same colours as Arsenal. They assume that if Arsenal reached out, it is fine with the Boreham Wood staff. But just to be safe, they use black in the linear design, using bands of red, white, gold, and black. Arsenal's iconic 'COME ON YOU GUNNERS' is scrawled in a different font than the one on the wall of the media building.

(Once news of Vex's football support went around, they received an email from the Tottenham media crew, with a commission to deface their previous commission, not that the Spurs knew it was one. The price was high, and they went to work on it after they had finished that day's work on the Arsenal Women's facilities. How these people were getting Vex's email was unknown: they had no website and the email was not connected to their Instagram profile. Why Vex even had an email address was unknown because before Arsenal reached out, they didn't take commissions. )

Vex knows the security guard is trying to figure them out. But they keep the hood of the plain black pullover hoodie up and the brim of the black hat turned down. The jeans are loose, so no one could figure out Vex's gender from what they wear. To fix the stereotypical classification by the pitch of their voice, Vex doesn't talk. They write everything down in a slim black notebook that had no defining features. They wear latex gloves and a bandana around the lower half of their face so the guard had no clue who it is. Not that this outfit was special; it was kind of Vex's thing that no one knew who they are.