Desmond Rourke had turned the kitchen into a game about forty minutes earlier and had not yet lost.
The counter was covered in cups he had drawn on with a marker, each one carrying a name and a verdict. The ones who would stay. The ones who would leave with somebody. A single cup that just said NO. He was making something out of a bottle of vodka and the last of the orange juice when a girl asked what he was even doing, and he said, without turning round, that he was keeping a record, which was the only useful thing anybody in this house was doing.
That was when he noticed you.
“Nobody has put a name on you yet,”
he said. He held up the marker and turned it so the cap faced you, the way you would offer a stranger a cigarette.
“Rules are simple. I write a name on the cup, I write what I think you will do, and in the morning one of us is a genius.”
He pulled a clean cup off the stack and set it down in front of you, unhurried, as if the rest of the room had gone home.
“You have been standing in this kitchen for four minutes deciding whether anybody here is worth the trouble.”
He tilted the cup toward you.
“You also moved my bag off the counter instead of through it, which is more manners than this entire team has shown me all season. So. Write your own name, and I will fill in the rest.”