Dang. Time for a little trash talk of her own. “Hey, Martineau, is that a pumpkin on your shoulders or is that your vacuous head?”
He glanced at her. “Is that the best you can do?”
The rest of the Chinooks seemed equally unimpressed.
Darby leaned toward her and whispered, “That was kind of lame.”
“What the hell is vacuous?” Rob asked.
Darby answered for her. “It means empty or hollow.”
“Why didn’t you just say that, Sharky?”
“Yeah, you can’t trash-talk using words like that.”
Jane frowned and folded her arms across her chest. Vacuous was a perfectly good word. “You guys don’t like it because it doesn’t start with an F.”
Luc threw his third dart and scored a total of eighty points. Time to quit playing around and get serious. She walked to the line, raised her arm, and waited for the heckling to begin. But Luc remained silent, unnerving her more than his insults. She managed to shoot a triple twenty, but when she took aim again, Luc said, “Do you ever wear anything besides black and gray?”
“Of course,” she said without looking at him.
“That’s right.” Then, just as she was about to shoot again, he added, “Your cow pajamas are blue.”
“How do you know about her cow pajamas?” one of the guys asked.
Mr. Information failed to answer and she looked over at him, surrounded by his teammates, his hands on his hips and a smile on his lips.
“The other night I left my room to buy some M &M’s,” she told them. “I thought you guys would all be in bed, so I wore my PJs. Luc snuck up on me.”
“I didn’t sneak.”
“Sure.” She lined up her shot and threw a double ten. Then he waited until the exact moment she released her third dart to say, “She wears lesbian glasses.” She missed the board completely. That hadn’t happened in years.
“I don’t either!” Only after she denied it did she fear she may have objected a bit too vehemently.
Luc laughed. “They’re horrible little black squares like all those NOW girls wear.”
The rest of the Chinooks laughed too, and even Darby said, “Oh, yeah, lesbian, all right.”
Jane pulled the darts from the board. “They’re not. They’re perfectly heterosexual.” Geez, what was she talking about? Heterosexual eyeglasses? These guys were all making her crazy. She took a calming breath and handed the darts to Luc. She would not let these dumb jocks rattle her. “I am not gay. Although there is certainly nothing wrong with it. If I were gay, I’d be out and proud.”
“That would explain the shoes,” Rob joined in.
Jane looked down at her boots. “What’s wrong with my Docs?”
For the first time that night, the Stromster decided to speak. “Maahhn shuz,” he said.
“Man shoes?” She looked into his young face. “Since I defended your Mohawk earlier, I expected better of you, Daniel.” His gaze slid away and he took sudden interest in something across the room.
Luc moved to the line and scored forty-eight points. When it was her turn again, all the guys on the sidelines took turns heckling her. The conversation turned severely politically incorrect when they decided that the reason she wore dark colors had to be because she was depressed about being gay.
“I’m not gay,” she insisted. She was an only child and hadn’t been raised around boys, except her father, of course, but he didn’t count. Her father was a serious man who never joked at all. She had no experience with this sort of teasing.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Luc reassured her. “If I were a girl, I’d be a lesbian too.”
Jane figured she had two choices. Get upset and indignant, or relax. She was a journalist, a professional woman. She wasn’t traveling with the team to become buddies, and certainly not to be teased like they were all back in high school. But the professional approach hadn’t worked so far, and she had to admit that she liked the teasing better than being ignored. Besides, these guys probably razzed male reporters also. “Luc, you’re already a prima donna,” she said.
Luc chuckled and she finally got a laugh out of the others. For the rest of the game, she tried to give as good as she got, but these guys were much better at it than she and had had years of practice. In the end, she beat Luc by almost two hundred points, but she lost in the war of words.