A lot of men had told Sloane to smile, but all they wanted was to exert some kind of power over her. Matt, though, was just trying to protect her. His own smile was a weapon against a gentler and more insidious form of racism, the kind that made people follow him through retail stores before realizing who he was or assume he had grown up in a rough neighborhood instead of on the Upper East Side or fixated on Sloane and Albie saving the world as if Matt, Esther, and Ines had nothing to do with it. It was in silence and hesitation, in careless jokes and fumbling.
There were harsher, more violent forms of it too, but smiles weren’t weapons against them.
He walked over to the crowd pressed up against the barrier, many of the people there holding photos of him, magazine articles, books. He took a black marker from his pocket and signed each of them with his quick MW, one letter an inversion of the other. Sloane watched him from a distance, distracted from the chaos for a moment. He leaned in for a picture with a middle-aged redhead who didn’t know how to work her phone; he took it from her to show her how to switch to the front camera. Everywhere he went, people gave him pieces of themselves, sometimes in the form of gratitude, sometimes in stories of people they had lost to the Dark One. He bore them all.
After a few minutes, Sloane walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Matt, but we should go.”
People were reaching for her, too, of course, waving copies of the Trilby article with her face plastered on one side of the magazine and Rick Lane’s sexist assholery on the other. Some of them shouted her name, and she ignored them, like she always did. Matt’s weapons were generosity, kindness, social grace. Sloane’s were detachment, a tall stature, and a relentlessly flat affect.
Matt looked down the line at a group of black teenagers in school uniforms. One of the girls wore her hair in tiny braids with beads at the ends. They clattered together as she bounced on her toes, excited. She had a clipboard in her hand; it looked like another petition.
“One second,” Matt said to Sloane, and he walked over to the group in the uniforms. She chafed a little at the brushoff, but the feeling disappeared when she saw the subtle shift in his posture, his shoulders relaxing.
“Hey,” he said to the girl with the braids, grinning.
Sloane felt a small ache in her chest. There were parts of him she would just never access, a language she would never hear him speak, because when she was present, the words were gone.
She decided to go on without him. It didn’t really matter if he got to the ceremony on time. Everyone would wait.
She walked down the narrow aisle the police had whittled into the crowd. She climbed the steps to the stage, which faced the metal box of the monument—about the size of an average bedroom, standing in the middle of nothing.
“Slo!” Esther stood on the stage in five-inch heels and black leather pants, waving. Her white blouse was just loose enough to be elegant, and from afar, her face looked almost the same as it had when they’d defeated the Dark One—but the closer Sloane got, the more she could see that the poreless glow was achieved by foundation and highlighter and bronzer and setting powder and God knew what else.
It was a relief to see her. Things hadn’t been the same for the five of them since she’d moved back home to take care of her mom. Sloane walked up the steps to the stage, shaking her head at the security guard who offered her an arm to help her up, and pulled Esther into a hug.
“Nice dress!” Esther said to her once they separated. “Did Matt pick it out?”
“I am capable of choosing my own clothes,” Sloane said. “How—”
She was about to ask how Esther’s mother was, but Esther was already taking out her cell phone and holding it out for a selfie.
“No,” Sloane said.
“Slo . . . come on, I want a picture of us!”
“No, you want to show a picture of us to a million other people on Insta!, and that’s much different.”
“I’m gonna get one whether you smile for it or not, so you might as well not fuel the rumors that you’re a turbo-bitch,” Esther pointed out.
Sloane rolled her eyes, bent a little at the knee, and leaned in for a picture. She even managed something like a smile. “That’s the only one, though, okay?” she said. “I’m not on social media for a reason.”
“I get it, you’re so alternative and authentic and whatever.” Esther flapped a hand at her, her head bent over her phone. “I’m going to draw a mustache on you.”
“How appropriate for the ten-year anniversary of a horrible battle.”
“Fine, I’ll just post it as is. You’re so boring.”
It was a familiar argument. She and Esther turned toward Ines and Albie, who were seated beside the podium wearing almost identical black suits. Ines’s lapels were a little wider, and Albie’s tie was more blue, but that was the only difference as far as Sloane could tell.
“Where’s Matt?” Ines asked.
“With his royal subjects,” Esther replied.
Sloane looked back. Matt was still talking to the teenage girl, his brow furrowed, nodding along to something she was saying.
“He’ll be a minute,” she said when she turned back to the others.
Albie looked bleary-eyed, but that could be because it was eight in the morning, and Albie didn’t usually get up until at least ten. When he looked at her, he seemed focused enough, just tired. He gave her a wave.
“Saved you a seat, Slo,” he said, patting the chair next to him. She sat down beside him, legs crossed at the ankle and tucked back, the way her grandmother had taught her. Do you really want to flash your underwear at strangers? Well, then, cross your goddamn legs, girl.
“All right?” she said to him.
“Nah,” he said with a half smile. “But what else is new?”
She gave a half smile back.
“Hey, kids.” A man was crossing the stage. He wore charcoal slacks and a blazer paired with a powder-blue shirt, and his salt-and-pepper hair was combed back neatly. He wasn’t just any man, but John Clayton, mayor of Chicago, elected on a campaign of “Not as corrupt as the other guy, probably,” which had been the motto of Chicago politics for a few years running. He was also possibly the blandest man alive.
“Thank you for coming out,” Mayor Clayton said, shaking Sloane’s hand, then Albie’s, Ines’s, and Esther’s. Matt climbed the steps to the stage just in time to take the mayor’s hand too. “I’m just going to say a few words, then you can all walk through the monument. Kind of like blessing it, eh? Then we’ll get you out of here. They’re going to want a picture of us all. Now? Yes, now.”
He was gesturing to the photographer, who positioned them so the monument was just visible behind them, and Matt was in the middle, his hand steady on Sloane’s lower back. Sloane wasn’t sure if she should smile for the ten-year anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat. The entire world would be celebrating today. Even the city of Chicago, which had lost so much—they would dye the river blue, and Wrigleyville would teem with beer, and the el would turn into a cattle car. The merriment was good, Sloane knew that, had even participated in it for the first few years after the event, but it was harder to do that now. She had been told that things got easier with time, but so far it hadn’t been true. The burst of joy and triumph that had come after the Dark One fell had faded, and what was left was this niggling sense of dissatisfaction and the awareness of everything lost on the way to victory.