//------------------------------// // Sugarcube Corner // Story: The Final Game of the Season // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// The Final Game of the Season Admiral Biscuit Meet me at Sugarcube Corner at noon. Sunset looked at the text and tried to pick up her phone, once again forgetting that with her left wrist in a splint, that just wasn’t possible. She settled instead for setting it on the bed and tapped out a reply. Don’t you mean BEHIND Sugarcube Corner? They were more evenly matched, now. Although Sunset could just run away if it came to that. Very funny. 😛 I’ll be there. What were the right clothes to wear to a fight? Not that it was going to come to that, Kerfuffle was too nice.  Sunset slid out of bed, remembering too late that she shouldn’t try and support her weight with her splinted wrist, and then made her way to the bathroom. A nice little touch of karma, really. She hadn’t realized how much she used her left hand until she was without it.  If she was lucky, she’d get hit by a car on her way to meet Kerfuffle. ••••• High noon, when the duel took place in every Western. All that was missing was a tumbleweed rolling across the street as she and Kerfuffle confronted each other. There was a plastic bag dancing on the wind, but that was a poor substitute. She pushed open the door, wincing at the sound of the bell jingling.  As soon as she stepped inside, against her will, the smell of fresh-baked pastries and donuts and the warm air instantly improved her mood. Kerfuffle was sitting in a booth towards the back, her crutches leaned up against the couch. Sunset hesitated. Kerfuffle hadn’t turned, it was her last chance to bail. She wanted to so badly, but she couldn’t. She made her way through the shop, sliding in across from her. “So how’d the game end?” Sunset asked, regretting it an instant later. How had the last game against Crystal Prep ended? Why, with the best player being carried off in an ambulance to get her leg amputated. “As if you didn’t know we’re going on to finals,” Kerfuffle said. She slid a box of donuts across the table and opened the lid. “Go on, take one.” “The rest of the team is.” “You probably can, too, if you don’t mind a little pain and some hard work. But do you want to?” “Not really,” Sunset admitted. “I don’t deserve it, not after—” “Oh, don’t start with your pity party,” Kerfuffle said. “I should have seen it sooner, but it wasn’t until Rarity said something that I started putting the pieces together. You blame yourself for my accident.” “Well, yeah.” “I blamed you, too. I blamed everyone.” Kerfuffle held up her hand before Sunset could speak. “Had a lot of time to myself to reflect, think about things.” “If I hadn’t kept you after that game, just chatting, you would have already been past before that car lost control—you wouldn’t have been there.” “Sure.” Kerfuffle took a bite out of her donut and chased it with some hot chocolate. “And if I’d decided to stop by my locker so I could return that library book that was due the next day, I wouldn’t have, either. Figured I’d do it first thing in the morning.” She laughed. “Real nice of the librarian to forgive the overdue fines. “If I hadn’t decided to play on the volleyball team, I wouldn’t have gotten hit by that car. Or if Cloudy Kicks hadn’t missed that block in the first set, the game might have been over sooner, or I could have walked home instead of riding my bike. So many things could have been just a little bit different and it wouldn’t have happened. Or it might have been worse, or something else might have happened. “Heck, if everything had played out exactly the same except I’d been riding in a different gear, or decided to wait when the crosswalk sign was flashing instead of going for it. “My PT said that it was better to focus the anger towards getting better, rather than moping around and wishing that the world was more fair, or blaming anyone for what had happened, and it took me a while to figure out that she was right. It’s real easy to listen to the voices in your head while you’re sitting in a hospital bed in the dark, or trying to re-learn how to approach a toilet.” “You’re taking it a lot better than I would,” Sunset admitted. Kerfuffle shrugged. “Well, what else was I going to do? I can’t change the past, only the future.” “A lot better than I did. I thought—well, I did blame myself, if I hadn’t kept you after the game, or if I’d insisted on giving you a ride, it wouldn’t have happened. And then it was even worse when I saw you in the hospital, I just couldn’t bring myself to visit again because I was sure you wouldn’t want to see me. “And then when you were back in school, I started to get jealous of all the attention you were getting, and I’d feel even worse for thinking that.” “Trust me, every time I see someone running or jumping or even walking around, I can’t help but feel a flash of anger, like they don’t appreciate how easy they’ve got it, they don’t remember what it’s like to have to learn to walk. “And it isn’t always easy to take the concern, even when I know it comes from a good place. Honestly, for a while it was easier to take your aloofness . . . that was another thing I’d lost, and it was easier for it to stay gone.” “No. You can—” What, work out for the rest of the year and be the spiker you used to be? “Plenty of amputees are as active as they want to be,” Kerfuffle said. “I’ve talked with Coach Big Bell, the league allows players with prosthetics to play. It’s maybe not how I want it to go, but we can’t always get what we want. Like, I was never going to make it on the soccer team, I just wasn’t that good with my feet.” Kerfuffle giggled and then tilted her head down. “Never was that good at dancing either, so I’m gonna wear two left shoes at prom, that way I’ll have an excuse. My fake foot can’t feel pain, so the wrong shoe won’t hurt . . . honestly, you don’t appreciate how many opportunities this opens up; next Nightmare Night I’m gonna have the best pirate costume you’ve ever seen.” “You’re serious about playing next year?” Kerfuffle nodded. “Yeah. I . . . well, I was a decent player, and—” “You were—you are great.” A blush crept across her cheeks. “I couldn’t have done it without you, you always set the ball just right for me. But I wasn’t ever good enough to get a college scholarship, and besides the school I’m interested in doesn’t have a volleyball team anyway.” “Then why do you even want to play next year?” “To prove to myself that I can,” she said. “If I didn’t think I was going to hold the team back, I’d have tried to get in on last night’s game, at least for some of it.” “Coach would have put you in.” “I know. Even if it would cost us the win. That’s why I didn’t ask.” Kerfuffle leaned across the table. “Listen, you gotta stop blaming yourself for something you didn’t do. It was an accident, plain and simple, that’s all it was, and I can’t stand you blaming yourself for it. You weren’t driving that car, and you couldn’t have known what was going to happen.” Sunset frowned; Kerfuffle reached across the table and took her hand, brought it down to the cool Formica. “You have to let it go, it’s in the past and you can’t change it, but it can change you. “Whether it changes you for better or worse, that’s for you to choose.” Sunset dropped the donut on her plate. “Every time I play through it in my mind, I can see it happening. I can see the car coming, it’s a red sports car and—” “It was white,” Kerfuffle said. “I didn’t see it until after it happened, I was just riding along and then I wasn’t any more, and I was trying to figure out what had happened. Tried to stand up but I couldn’t, my bike was all tangled around me, and I was wondering how I could be so clumsy as to have tipped over. I could see my bike was hopelessly bent and wondered how I was going to explain to my parents that I needed a new one.” “And you’re just lying there, unable to move.” “Shock and adrenaline is a powerful combination. I crawled away and leaned up against a wall,” she said. “That was when I figured out something was really wrong with my leg, and things started to be both really clear and really blurry. Someone got my cell phone, I don’t know how it survived the crash. And then the ambulance came and the police and I first started to be afraid when I couldn’t figure out where they were taking me—I knew where I was and where the hospital was, but it didn’t make sense as I was riding in the back . . . some of it’s probably from shock and some from the pain meds, they gave me some really good stuff.” ••••• Neither of them had been paying any attention to the time—they’d had a lot to discuss, and there would be more in the future. They couldn’t stay there forever; eventually the donuts were gone and the hot chocolate cold. One final hug and then Kerfuffle walked out the door. She was still limping; she was still slow. Sunset could have caught her, passed her, but she didn’t; she sat back down at the booth and watched as her teammate made her way across the bakery, occasionally bracing herself on the back of a booth. With jeans on her missing leg wasn’t as obvious, there could have been two normal legs under there, and Sunset could imagine a day where Kerfuffle was as comfortable with her prosthetic leg as she’d been with the two legs she’d been born with, but on the heels of that she could imagine the fight to get there, the pain and setbacks . . . and the constant reminders every time someone offered her help when she didn’t want it, or when she needed to ask for a hand, when she needed something to lean on. Sunset scratched at the splint on her wrist and then set her hand back on the table. It didn’t want to stay still; she brushed some crumbs onto the floor, erasing the evidence that they’d been there. The chime over the door jingled, and then the door swept shut. Sunset picked up her mug and took one sip of the bitter dregs, cold and syrupy. She caught one last glimpse of Kerfuffle before she rounded the corner.