It’s a tense week for you as you prepare for the SqabBall. You start pressing in practice and Coach yells at you in front of the whole team after you accidentally wallop Mugs Sneatly during a routine point-and-wag.
“Nincompoop!” he screams. “This is my captain? I tell you what you’re the captain of… nincompoopery!”
Moods seems strangely serene. He does not seem affected at all by the events of the last few days and every time you bring it up he tells you to chill. You don’t understand how he can’t be feeling the pressure.
The day of the SquabBall, you and Moods get into your finest detached sleeves and pile into a car with Marcus “Mummy” Lintongh, the best junior half-shriek in the conference. “Mummy” was a new nickname, one that he was trying out after accidentally enrolling in a fraudulent Egyptology course taught by a rogue teaching assistant who somehow hacked the class catalog and did nothing but show mummy movies and give lectures about his own deranged theories about ancient Egypt that had no bearing on reality before he was finally caught by campus authorities after he leapt through a window and eluded capture for eighteen days. It was Lintongh’s favorite class, and he decided he would call himself “mummy” and tried to invent a new squabbling technique where he lumbered at opponents with his arms jutting straight out until Coach screamed at him so vigorously that he strained a jowl and had to wear a protective collar. He had also called that “nincompoopery.”
You hobnob as little as you can get away with. Every conversation feels excruciating because you just have one thing on your mind: Wump. But you can’t find him. Every minute that you don’t see him feels like an hour of quaggling drills.
Moods on the other hand seems to be having the time of his life. He’s dragging people on the dancefloor. He’s exchanging a complicated five-step handshake with Nub. He’s intercepting “Wolfman” Eddie Tutufretti before he can make the DJ play a novelty song about werewolves so that he can debut his new signature dance “The Wolfman Strut.”
You’re mildly infuriated with Moods, but also sort of impressed at his cool under the circumstances, when your stomach leaps up into your throat. Wump is here. He’s upstairs sort of casually scanning the dancefloor, but you’d know that haircut anywhere, even if it’s a little grayer and sparser than in your photo.
You try not to sprint down the stairs and find Moods leading a cackling group in an impression of Lintongh’s mummy technique when you catch his eye with a series of eyebrow movements and then sort of nod upstairs. Moods glances up, clocks Wump, and gives a little eyebrow back. It’s on.
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