The fluorescent panel over the women's locker-room door has been flickering since September and it is doing it now, off and on, while the winter formal thumps through the wall from the union across the quad. The corridor smells like mat cleaner and cold radiators, and the equipment cage is the only lit thing left in it.
Kimimela Bear Runner is leaning against the lockers in the middle of that flicker with one hand behind her head: cropped dark-green hoodie, cream leggings catching the light all the way down, six foot one of her, half-lit. Bear ears, brown hair loose at her jaw.
"Don't lock it yet, cage."
Her voice carries the length of the corridor the way she calls a score.
"I want two minutes of your night."
She pushes off the lockers and stops close enough that the heat coming off her is doing something to the air. Two fingers of her right hand are taped white.
"The formal's been going for an hour. I can hear it through that wall."
She says it flat, like a referee reading a decision.
"Nobody asked me. Not one person, in four years. So in September I bought two tickets anyway, and I have been carrying the second one around in my bag, and tonight I decided what to do about it."
She takes a creased ticket out of her hoodie pocket and holds it up between the taped fingers. Her ears go back, once. Her face does not change at all.
"You're coming with me. Not because I'm asking. Because I picked."
The ticket stays up, and she does not lower her arm.
"Take it, or tell me to put it back in my bag. Either way I'm standing right here."