Kirsten stares at the pins collected in the right corner of the lane like they’ve personally wronged her. It wouldn’t even be that big of a deal if she hadn’t been leaving up the same goddamn pins all practice. Not even all of them — just that one, in the very corner, staying up every time she thinks she has a strike like it’s mocking her.

She groans, trekking over to the ball return like a walk of shame. Behind her, Jenny sucks in a breath through her teeth.

“Ten pin getting you?” she asks, suddenly very close to Kirsten.

Kirsten turns around, stares dumbly at her for a moment. “Um. Sure?”

Jenny tilts her head, then laughs, covering her mouth as she shakes her head. “Sorry, sorry, I forgot you’re new. It’s the one in the very corner back there.”

She comes up behind Kirsten, rests a hand on her shoulder and points the other down at the pins. It’s probably very informative. Unfortunately, Kirsten’s brain has left her body and ascended to heaven, so she’ll never know.

“Oh,” Kirsten says. “Yeah. Fuck that one.”

Jenny laughs again, more of a squawk this time, and Kirsten flushes at the realization of what she said until it occurs to her that Jenny’s genuinely laughing, and she grins.

“Okay,” Jenny says. “So. What you’re gonna want to do is— well, what you’d ideally do is use a spare ball, but you don’t have one of those, which is fine because you throw a house ball anyway, so. All good.”

These are words, surely. Kirsten’s heard most of them before, even. She blinks.

Something in her eyes must show she’s buffering, because Jenny sighs, but more in a way that’s exasperated with herself than Kirsten. “A spare ball is designed to throw straight, rather than curve like mine or Vanessa’s. A house ball will throw straight regardless, because of the material it’s made out of. So right now, you don’t need to worry about that.”

She takes Kirsten’s shoulders, shimmies her to the left like she’s a Mii in Wii Bowling. “Have you heard the pencil analogy?” Kirsten shakes her head — it’s only been a week. Jenny nods thoughtfully. “Okay. So. Imagine a pencil. If you tilt it, it’ll be at an angle, with the front and back in opposite directions. So if you want the ball to go to the right, you move to the left, and vice versa. So for the ten pin, you want to hit all the way to the right, so you want to move all the way to the left.”

Eagerly, she taps her foot at the gutter, then gestures to the lane. “Ideally, you want to aim for the middle arrow when you throw, to make a straight diagonal line to the pins.”

“…Right,” Kirsten says, definitely sure she can do that.

Jenny steps back, a bright grin on her face. “No one nails it the first time, I promise. You’re all good.”

Kirsten tucks away the thought that Jenny — team captain Jenny, fifth spot anchor Jenny, bowled a 200 in the second game of the season Jenny — probably nailed it the first time. It means more if she hadn’t, if Kirsten isn’t the only one to fuck up around here.

She takes a breath. Holds the ball up. Steps forward — one, two, three, four, five — and throws.

The ball falls on the lane with a thud, rolling and rolling, and it’s not a straight line, but it is a line. Slowly, eventually, it reaches the corner — without even falling into the gutter! — knocking over two of the three pins with an anticlimactic sound. It’s not all of them, but her dearly detested ten pin has fallen, and she beams.

She watches the pinsetter reset the lane, steps back and blinks up at the scoreboard, only to find that it’s her turn again. When she looks down at Jenny, the other girl just shrugs, steps forward.

“Figured we could work on your strike ball,” she says, a glint in her eye.

Kirsten’s down for that, of course — anything to stop bowling straight 70s. The repercussions don’t hit her until Jenny’s breath is hitting her ear, her hands covering Kirsten’s as she explains ball rotation and oil patterns and then backtracks all of it because Kirsten’s been bowling for a week and still uses a house ball. She almost says it like an insult, but she seems to have a distaste for the ball more than Kirsten herself. Kirsten resolves to figure out how to get a new ball, a proper ball, if only to wipe that look off Jenny’s face.

It takes a few tries, but she manages to stop throwing into the corners, centering her shot and narrowing in on the pocket, whatever that means. Kirsten isn’t entirely sure she retains the entire lesson, but she gets it enough for the moment. Enough to hit a strike, eventually, a moment shocking enough that she just stares at it for a while, processing as her brain reboots entirely.

“You wanna check out my room?” Jenny asks, an eager twinkle in her eyes, deep brown lit up by the blues and pinks of the hotel’s lobby.

Kirsten blinks, mouth suddenly going dry at the words, the implications. She’s not the shy outcast she was at the beginning of high school, but sometimes Jenny says things she doesn’t entirely know how to process, and it turns her brain to chewed up bubblegum.

“Um,” she says eloquently.

Jenny’s eyes go wide suddenly, like she’s processed the words coming out of her mouth. “I mean— I haven’t seen it either, I just— you’re here, I figured we might be able to get something useful there, we don’t have to, like. Y’know.”

God, she has no idea how much her words affect Kirsten, does she?

Kirsten resists the urge to pull her hood up, instead choosing to tug at her hoodie strings like she’s gotten so used to doing. “Yeah, sure,” she agrees, hoping her voice doesn’t sound as stupid as she feels. “Anything to help us here, right?”

It seems to be the right thing to say, because Jenny grins, and even on a face that isn’t hers, it’s still beautiful. Kirsten might be in a little too deep. Too late to go back now, though. All she can do is hope she doesn’t drown.

Jenny holds out her hand. Kirsten takes it. It’s slightly calloused, probably from Cara’s archaeology adventures. It’s absolutely wonderful.

She has no idea what’s next for them. Lord’s is absolutely baffling, Never Stop Blowing Up as a whole even more so. With Jenny’s hand in hers, though, she thinks she can do anything.