the dare (the mighty ducks)

chapter seven

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chapter seven: the fickle and confusing nature of one's feelings

a/n:

this chapter kinda made me nauseous?

so ik that, in canon, at the ducks' first game, they get a tie, and rick and friends pull that prank, but I'm trying to drag things out a bit. that'll come later.

tw(s) - lou goes through it, like oh boy, really awkward situations, a lot of overthinking, and guy x jesse and guy x connie angst.

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Feelings, she decides, are a fickle, confusing thing.

For the whole school day, she'd felt irrevocably giddy.

Kenny had shown up to pick her up at her dorm, a small smile gracing his features as he casually reached out and grabbed her hand before starting to walk. Louise Riley has never given hand holding much of her attention. It's not that she doesn't like to hold hands with people. After all, she holds Ali's hands all the time. It's more that, once she got older than five and outgrew kindergarten, nobody wanted to touch her until she got to high school and met her current best friend. But he reached out to hold her hand, and it was literally all she could think about for six whole hours.

He gripped her a bit too tight when people in the halls pointed and stared more than usual, and when Charlie Conway approached them in the hall ("You're coming to the game tonight, right?" He'd asked her, voice full of hope. "Yeah." She'd responded casually, as if the boy next to her wasn't absolutely crushing her delicate hand.) Louise couldn't find it in herself to care, though- about the whispering or the loss of circulation in her fingers. She was too happy to. Like a shot of espresso, the fact that he was willing to be seen with her in public bubbled through her, and served as a distraction. Her mind kept wandering in all of her classes, her starved brain wanting nothing more than to commit the way Kenny made her feel to memory. She was scolded around three or four times total for daydreaming so hard that it was obvious, to which she apologized every time and cast her eyes down to her notebooks- only to get lost in her own mind all over again.

People noticed her odd behavior.

"Did you bathe in sunshine and rainbows this morning or something?" Scott asked, bumping into her on the one occasion the figure-skater-turned-hockey-player isn't using her hand like a lifeline.

"Hi, Scooter. Only the normal amount." She mimicked his tone, unwilling to tell him anything. He'd have mocked her- and not in the painful and annoying way that most people mock her, but in the way that older brothers do- and would've most likely told Rick, if Rick hadn't already known, that his little sister was absolutely smitten with a boy. The response would've been, no doubt, catastrophic. Apocalyptic even.

Dwayne had noticed, too, but only because she let him handle the phenolphthalein during their lab. Normally- and well within reason because not even his parents, who rely on him to help them with the animals on their ranch, would trust him with chemicals- she does everything and lets him handle the lab report, but the indicator reaction wasn't likely to hurt anybody, so she figured she'd give him an out.

And then she felt special and important right after that.

Hockey, as it turns out, is much more interesting when she isn't forced to go. With the help of the fact that Ali's got Scott wrapped around her little finger, Louise snuck out of whatever arrangement Rick had roped her into (surely to keep her busy) and scored herself a seat down by the ice. She nearly froze- missing the scarf she'd loaned Kenny that he still hadn't returned desperately- but he'd made up for his thievery soon enough. After scanning the crowd for her, the hockey player had pointed at her with his stick; she'd flushed bright red, especially as the freshman who announced for the games started to talk about them. Whilst embarrassed, she didn't notice anybody else receiving the same treatment.