"Wait."
"Wait, wait, wait. Mateo??"
"Grandpa's saying? In Barcelona? No way. It can't be. Is it really him? As in King?"
On the bench in the amusement park, Carlos had started moving. His head was going up and down, side to side, his eyes scanning the crowd, searching for the person he had just been talking to a few seconds ago.
A smile broke across his face as it all came together.
"That's why he was wearing the mask."
He said it smiling, everything finally clicking into place. He stood up, looking around harder now, trying to locate him. The place was rowdy, people moving in every direction, mascots, families, the constant churn of a theme park at full capacity. He kept turning, kept scanning.
"No freaking way."
He scoffed and dropped back down onto the bench. The cotton candy in his hand touched the seat and stuck there a little and he did not care. He just sat, mouth open in a wide grin, not quite able to believe who he thought he had just met.
Brrrriiiing! Brrrriiiing!
His phone went off while he was sitting there. Still grinning, he pulled it out and checked the screen. His agent. He picked up fast.
"Albert. Albert, you won't believe who I just ran into—"
Albert Molina was in a hurry, talking over him.
"Carlos, you need to come back now. They moved up the tournament draw."
Then the agent slowed, and the next part landed with weight.
"Nadal has arrived too. You need to start heading back. Fast."
Carlos's face changed.
"Wait, really? Why would they do that? I'm coming, I'm coming."
He was already up and moving, the words tumbling out, leaving the cotton candy sitting there on the bench as he rushed toward the exit.
"Wow. This shit's huge."
Meanwhile, unaware that the stranger he had just met had figured out exactly who he was, Mateo had a situation of his own.
Aina came to stand beside him. She looked up at the thing in front of them. She said, flat:
"You can tell me about it."
Olivia and Pedri came over too. Olivia tilted her head all the way back, taking it in. Pedri just muttered:
"Yeah."
Because finally, after everything, the group had found themselves standing in front of the huge, the enormous, the impossible Red Force.
One hundred and twelve metres into the sky. Zero to 180 kilometres an hour in five seconds. Climbing to a vantage point that made you feel like you could put your hand through the clouds, a giant prancing horse mounted at the peak in case anyone had forgotten who the sponsors were. Ferrari Land. The Red Force was the tallest roller coaster in all of Europe and one of the top three in the world.
Screams came down from above.
People were coming off the ride, and the screams had not stopped just because the ride had. Two women stumbled out still clutching each other, still shrieking, "Noooo, noooo," long after their feet were back on solid ground. Workers were everywhere, six of them at least, rushing to release passengers from the harnesses, saying things like "Ma'am, we're back on the ground now, you can let go."
They released one man and his legs went straight out from under him. He hit the floor and grabbed it.
"Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord."
He was hugging the ground.
Another came out swaying badly.
"Sir? Sir, are you alright?"
The man waved a hand. "I'm allarghh—"
And then he was throwing up.
"Sir! We have a designated area for that!" The worker spun, shouting. "Someone bring the bag! Bring the bag!"
A second passenger started up somewhere down the line, and a female worker shouted across:
"Here too! We've got one here too!"
Aina and Olivia watched the whole scene unfold.
They were already having second thoughts. They had enjoyed their day. They had enjoyed it a great deal. They did not feel any pressing need to add this to it.
"Ehm. I don't think this is a good idea," Olivia muttered.
Aina jumped on it.
"Yeah, I mean, maybe we should just go get something to eat. Then the show."
"Ooh, yeah, that's true," Olivia said. "The show. We can go for that."
Olivia and Aina were already smiling at their own plan, pleased with themselves, looking at each other with the satisfied look of two people who had successfully talked their way out of something.
Aina glanced to her side.
"You guys are quiet."
Olivia looked around too.
"Yeah, what do you guys think—"
A pause.
"Guys?"
Another pause.
"Where are they?"
They both turned in place, scanning. No Mateo. No Pedri.
"Ehm. Excuse me."
Chinedu, the guide, called out to them. He pointed.
Aina and Olivia followed the point.
"Can I stay in the front?"
"Yeah, yeah, me too."
"Is the drop sudden?"
"Yeah, does it wait a bit, then BOOM?"
Mateo and Pedri were at the very front of the queue, talking to the workers about getting the front row, bouncing on the spot, the excitement coming off both of them in waves, visible even through the masks.
"Okay, make sure your seatbelts are fastened and your feet stay inside the car at all times—" One of the workers was running through the instructions. Chinedu added something from the side, his own version of the safety briefing. Mateo and Pedri just nodded along, grinning, not absorbing a single word.
"Okay then," the worker said. He keyed the microphone. "Everyone, enjoy the ride."
"Ohh. What am I doing."
Aina, in the second row.
"Hahah."
Mateo looked back from the front, laughing at her.
"What. You scared?"
Aina grumbled. "Get out."
"Hahaha."
Mateo laughed at her, then turned to Olivia beside her.
"You look calm."
Olivia was staring dead ahead, eyes wide open, not saying anything at all.
Mateo looked at her funny.
"Wait. Are you frozen?"
"Dude, this is going to be insane."
Pedri tapped him. Mateo turned back, all smiles.
"Dude, it's gonna be insane."
Pedri laughed. He looked back at Aina.
"You okay?"
Aina was holding the harness tight. She sighed, took a deep breath in, then another, then nodded.
"Yeah. I'm getting better."
"Good," Pedri said, laughing. He turned to Olivia and asked the same thing.
"You good?"
"No."
"What?"
Pedri was thrown by the answer.
Olivia was looking straight ahead.
"What am I doing. Why did I let these crazy people convince me."
She was starting to freak out.
"Olivia?" Aina said.
Olivia turned her head slowly toward her.
"Begone, you devil."
"Hahaha." Mateo was laughing hard now.
Aina hit the back of his seat. "It's not funny."
Olivia turned toward the side of the car, talking to the workers.
"Hello. Hello, please, can I—" She was stammering. "Can I just—"
The announcement started up over the speakers. The car lurched into motion.
"No, no, no, I don't want to anymore."
Olivia was properly freaking out now, the comedic kind, gripping everything she could reach as the ride began to move.
"Olivia, deep breaths," Aina was saying, trying to calm her even as her own knuckles went white. "Deep breaths."
Olivia did them.
Pedri tried to help from the front.
"Don't look down. Don't look down."
"What?" Olivia said.
Aina shot him a look. "Why would you say that?"
"What?" Pedri said. "I told her not to look down."
And of course Olivia's eyes went straight down. She saw how high they already were, the ground shrinking away below them.
"No. No, I don't want to do this. I want to get down."
It was not just her. All down the car, four other people were already deeply regretting their life choices.
"Hahah."
Mateo was laughing.
"Stop," Aina said.
"Dude, not cool," Pedri added.
Mateo ignored both of them. He looked at Olivia, who was still spiralling, still gripping the harness like it was the only thing keeping the planet attached to her.
The car was climbing. Seventy metres in the air now.
Mateo smiled.
"So you're scared."
"Mateo," Aina warned.
Olivia ignored him completely, staring rigidly forward, her grip somehow getting tighter.
Mateo kept smiling. Then he softened it.
"Hey. Look over here. You're fine."
Olivia turned her head to look at him.
She started to glance back down.
"No. Look at me."
He said it easy, smiling, holding her eyes. She looked at him. The breeze was moving over his face, the low cut giving it nothing to lift, and his hazel eyes had gone bright and prominent against the blue of the skyline behind him.
"That's right. Just keep looking at me."
He held the look, talking her down.
"Yeah. That's good. That's good."
Olivia took a breath. Then another. The panic in her face started to come down a degree.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, that's not so bad."
"Yeah. Okay. Okay," Mateo said, steady, keeping her there.
She breathed more. The fear drained out of her face and something else came up to replace it, and then she was laughing, a few tears sitting at the corners of her eyes, half from the wind and half from everything else.
"Okay. Okay."
She looked over at Aina. The two of them laughed at each other.
"This isn't that bad," Olivia said.
Right then, the car came to a stop at the top.
"It stopped."
She looked at Mateo, full of laughter, lit up with it.
"See? See? I'm doing it. Ah, ah, I'm doing it—"
Then.
"AaaaaaahhhEeeeeek!"
it dropped.
...
"Here they come."
"Are you okay?"
"Come get them, they're here."
The workers got active as the ride came down, the car decelerating into the station. Chinedu moved forward as it finally reached the platform.
He put out a hand to Mateo. Mateo took it, laughing as he climbed out.
"Ah, ah, that's the best shit ever. When it came down and then the jelly roll—"
He was hyped, buzzing, fully alive.
Chinedu turned to help Pedri next.
"Are you okay?"
Pedri came out a little ditzy, his balance not quite where he'd left it.
"Yeah, yeah, I just need to sit down a bit, hahha."
He was laughing through it.
Olivia came out next, and her legs betrayed her immediately, her foot slipping out from under her so that she went straight down onto the floor.
"Ma'am! Let me help you up—"
The workers rushed over, but Olivia was already laughing.
"I'm down, haha. I'm down."
She was flat on the platform, spreading her arms out across the solid ground, relief pouring off her.
"Haha. I'm alive. I'm alive."
Mateo reached her, laughing.
"You're crazy."
Olivia just kept laughing.
Someone helped Aina out. She came down grinning, eyes bright.
"That was insane. Can we do another?"
She was as ecstatic as Mateo. As she stepped clear she caught sight of Pedri, who was looking distinctly queasy. She nudged him.
"Don't go soft on me now."
Pedri laughed. "No, I'm goo— bleghh—"
He didn't finish before his throat did something and his hand went to his mouth.
Chinedu was there fast, rubbing his back.
"Let's go to the designated area. Calm down, calm down."
He started leading him off. "Let me follow you," Aina said, then glanced back to where Mateo was helping Olivia up off the floor, and went after Pedri toward the recovery area.
"Arghhh. I'm never doing that again," Pedri said as he walked.
"I support that decision," Olivia said, groaning.
"You two are just lightweights," Mateo said.
Aina fell in beside him. "Yeah, that thing was great. I say we do another."
Mateo looked at her. "Yeah. Let's do that."
The two of them were beaming.
Pedri and Olivia stood off to the side watching the cousins egg each other on. Pedri said, flat:
"Look at them."
Olivia responded in the exact same tone. "Maybe it's a family blood thing."
"Okay, okay," Mateo said, once Pedri and Olivia had firmly ruled out a second ride. "Since we're not doing it again, what should we do?"
"What about the show?" Olivia said.
"That's true," Aina said. "Almost forgot."
She turned to Chinedu, standing to the side.
"Chinedu, please, what time's the show?"
Chinedu checked his watch.
"Let's see, it's, ehm." He thought. "Another session should start in about half an hour."
Pedri groaned, his stomach still settling.
"So thirty minutes."
"What are we going to do for those thirty minutes then?" Mateo said.
"I'm going to go sit down for a bit," Pedri said, already waving them off. He spotted a bench a little way off. "I'm heading there."
"Oh, come on," Mateo groaned.
Pedri waved him off again and moved toward the bench.
"I'm feeling kind of famished," Olivia said.
Mateo sighed. "Yeah, me too. Let's go."
Aina looked at him. "Wasn't your stomach just turning you?"
Mateo shrugged.
Aina just rolled her eyes. "Forget it. Just bring me back a pretzel or something."
Mateo gave her a thumbs up. "Got it."
He and Olivia started off.
Aina turned to Chinedu. "Well, I guess that's—"
He cut her off. "I'll come and inform you all when it's time for the show."
Aina smiled. "Thank you." She pointed at the bench. "We'll be over there."
He nodded.
"Can I get three pretzels, three donuts—"
Olivia was at the counter ordering. Mateo leaned in.
"Yeah, tell them that one in the middle. With the glaze."
She nodded and pointed it out to the server. "That one, please." Then she looked back at Mateo. "What about Pedri?"
"I'm not sure," Mateo said. "But you can buy for him too, I guess."
She nodded and turned back to the server. "Sorry, can I get one more of everything?"
The server nodded.
After buying everything and paying, Mateo found himself walking back beside Olivia, both their hands full.
"Ooh, I needed a day like today," Mateo said, taking a gulp of his drink.
"Yeah, it was pretty fun," Olivia said.
Mateo looked at her. "Yeah."
"Yeah," she said back.
She looked back at him. The two of them held the look, the mood going soft and warm as they walked, the silence between them comfortable in a way that was getting slightly less comfortable the longer it held.
Mateo coughed, breaking it.
"You know, I wanted to—"
She looked up at him as he spoke.
"What?"
Mateo coughed again. "Well, it's, ehm." He gathered himself. "Well. I wanted to see if you're free—"
Brrrriiiing! Brrrriiiing!
Her phone went off.
"Ooh, I'm so sorry."
"It's okay," Mateo said.
She was apologising and he was waving it off, but her hands were full and the snacks were making it impossible to dig out her phone.
"Ohh, let me help you," Mateo said.
"Thank you."
She handed him some of the snacks and pulled her phone out. She looked at the screen and her face changed, a flicker of surprise.
"Aleen," she muttered.
She looked at Mateo. "It's my agent." Then, lower: "She doesn't call."
She picked up.
"Hello, Aleen."
A beat.
"I'm good." A pause. "Yeah, Spain is great."
She looked at Mateo and mouthed sorry. He shook his head, no problem.
"Yeah, it's still next month." A pause. "Yeah."
She was answering questions, and Mateo just stood off to the side holding the snacks.
"No way."
She said it suddenly, loud enough that people walking past turned to look. Her tone did not adjust for them in the slightest.
"Are you serious? Wait, it's true? For real? Ahhh. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah. Okay."
Her excitement was climbing with every word. A few people had slowed to watch. Mateo stood there holding the snacks, glancing around, laughing awkwardly as the small crowd registered the scene.
"Okay, thank you, okay, bye. Yeah, okay. Yes, yes, you can send it."
She ended the call, still talking into it as it dropped.
"Bye, thank you, ahh—"
She lowered the phone and started jumping in place, hands going up and down, lit up with whatever she had just heard.
"Haha," Mateo laughed. He looked at her. "Seems it was good news."
"Eeehhhkkk!"
The scream came out of her louder than anything the roller coaster had pulled out of her.
Mateo laughed, looking around at the heads turning.
"Everyone's staring."
She just laughed and jumped at him, and he had to twist to keep the snacks from going everywhere.
"Ooh, ohh, ohh—"
She kept bouncing, all smiles.
"Oh God, I can't believe that just happened. Wait, I need to tell Aina. Let's go."
She grabbed Mateo's hand and dragged him.
"Wait, wa—"
And they were off.
EEEEEKKKKHHH!!!
In the bench area the scream exploded and everyone turned to look, two girls jumping around and hugging each other in the middle of it.
"Arghh."
Pedri groaned and held his head. Being that close to them, he had caught the full volume of it. He looked to the side, where Mateo was sitting with his hands over his eyes.
Pedri swatted his hand away.
"Dude, you could have warned me." He rubbed his ears. "I think I'm deaf now."
Mateo just laughed.
The girls finally finished their first round of screaming. Aina grabbed Olivia's hands.
"Wait."
Olivia was still laughing, still glowing.
Aina held her hands and looked at her dead serious.
"I need everything."
"Okay," Olivia said. "So when I was coming back with the snacks, that's when I got the call from Aleen."
"Okay, okay," Aina said, nodding.
Olivia smiled. "And that's when she told me that I get to—" She stopped. She did the thing where the sentence does not need finishing.
Aina's eyes went huge. "Wait. Her?"
"Her."
"The one that you—"
"Yes. That one."
"Before it even—"
"Before anyone."
"Olivia." Aina's voice dropped into something reverent. "You're playing."
"I know."
"You're actually—"
"I know."
They screamed again.
Mateo and Pedri both clamped their hands over their ears.
"Okay, okay," Pedri said. "Can you two please tell us what's happening?"
"In English, please," Mateo added.
After they explained the phone call to Mateo and Pedri, the two boys were just looking at them.
Pedri looked at Mateo. "Well. I guess congrats are in order."
Mateo smiled too. "Yeah, let's—"
"Don't lie," Aina said. "You guys have no idea what we just said."
Pedri and Mateo both fake-laughed. "No."
Then Mateo saved it.
"We know it's an incredible opportunity for you, Olivia. And we know how happy we are for you. Congrats."
He said it warm, all of it landing soft.
Olivia looked at him, smiling.
"Thank you."
Aina grinned. "Okay, but girl, we really need to celebrate this."
Olivia looked at her, smiling. "Should we?"
"Are you joking?"
"Yeah, we should," Mateo said.
"Yeah, but don't we have the show to attend right now?" Olivia said.
"Yeah, I guess it's just five minutes away," Aina said.
Pedri stood up too. "Okay then. Let's watch the show first, then afterwards we can go celebrate the news somewhere else."
He pulled out his phone. "Let me see. Let me ask my brother if there's anywhere fun around here for after this."
Mateo pulled his out too. "Let me search the map."
Both of them were looking down at their phones when—
Ding.
A message landed on both their screens at the same time, fronted with big red exclamation marks.
Both of them frowned. Both of them opened it.
It was the official team group chat. The one the president himself was in.
"Mateo, are you—" Pedri started.
"Yeah," Mateo said. "I'm reading it too."
They both frowned harder.
"What's wrong?" Olivia asked. The smile had slid off her face, pulled down by the sudden drop in the boys' mood. Aina looked worried too.
Pedri started.
"It's the club. They sent a message."
Mateo finished.
"Apparently it's urgent. And they want all of us present at the main stadium. Right away."
...
Joan Gamper Stadium. Inside the executive centre, away from the dorms and the training pitches, in the upper offices where the running of the academy actually happened, the executives were in a meeting. They were led by Patrick Kluivert, the head of La Masia, and the subject was the intra-high match. Now that the Under squad had beaten the B team for the first time in the history of the fixture, the executives had suddenly found themselves with more work than they had bargained for.
"So. Have you been able to talk to the Femení team? Have you scheduled a time for the match?"
With the Under squad beating the B team, tradition entitled them to a match against the Barça women's side. But unlike the B team, which sat technically within half their control, the women's team was a different matter entirely. They were all under the same crest, the same "Club," and it was still difficult to get them to the table.
The executive who had been handed the job of fixing the schedule shifted in his seat. There was sweat at his hairline.
"Well, ehm, sir, the women's team aren't really—"
"Just get it out, Joan," Patrick said.
"Well. They aren't agreeing."
Talks with the women's team were not progressing. Unlike the B squad, the women were dealing with the closing weeks of their own season. And just like the first team, they had reached a Champions League final. Funnily enough, they had drawn the same opponent, the two women's powerhouses set to square off in a matter of weeks. But unlike the men's side, this was the women's team's first ever Champions League final, and the people in charge of them were not going to allow anything to distract their players.
"Arghh."
Patrick groaned and brought a hand up to his temple, massaging it. He opened his eyes after a moment.
"Wait. Haven't they already won the league?"
Despite being two games out from the end, the dominant Barcelona women's team had wrapped up the title two matches ago.
"Try them again. Frame it properly." He started building the pitch as he spoke. "They'll be rotating and resting players in the dead rubbers anyway. Can they not spare us a few of the girls for sixty minutes? Tell them what it does for team spirit. Cross-club bonding, the senior women sharing a pitch with the next generation, the whole story. Sell them the value, not the favour."
Joan nodded along, writing.
"Okay. Okay."
"That's our main priority right now," Patrick said. "Get it done."
The executives rose and filed out, each of them offering a goodbye, Patrick waving them off without looking up.
When the room was empty he sat back in his chair.
"Must I do everything myself."
His office phone rang. He picked it up.
"Go."
His assistant's voice came through.
"Sir. The sporting director, Mr Deco, is here. He says he'd like to meet with you."
Patrick paused. The file in his hand paused with him.
"Let him in."
He set the file down, faintly puzzled. He knew the new sporting director. He had seen him at the last executive meeting. But he had never had any real contact with the man, and there was no obvious reason for him to be standing outside the office. Still, as the sporting director, he was not someone Patrick could turn away.
Plus it would be good to widen my connections, he thought. Especially with one of Laporta's men.
The door opened and Deco came in.
The pleasantries went the way they always go. Patrick stood, the handshake, the apologies for the intrusion from Deco, the no-no-not-at-all from Patrick, the small laughs that fill the first thirty seconds of any meeting between two men who do not yet know each other.
"How are things over at the headquarters?" Patrick asked.
Deco shook his head, laughing.
"Chaos. You should see it."
"Hope everything's alright?"
"It's the fans. They're throwing some kind of festival outside. The whole street." He laughed again. "I forgot how tangled up the fans are with this club. How close they sit to everything."
"Ha. That's just Barcelona," Patrick said. "Més que un club."
Deco smiled. "Yeah. It really is one of a kind."
He let the moment settle, then leaned in slightly.
"Okay. I won't dance around it. I came for something."
"Ooh. What is it?"
"During the intra-high match, there were some players who, I won't lie, caught my eye." He looked at Patrick. "You lot run a very fine programme here. A lot of those boys, I'm telling you, they could already be playing professional football in plenty of leagues. Plenty of teams."
Patrick frowned slightly.
"I appreciate the thought. But, ehm, this might be tricky. Koeman has already contacted us. There are players he wants to introduce to the first team."
"Ooh, I know about that," Deco said. He raised a hand. "I knew about it before I came here. I've already spoken to the head coach. I won't touch the players he likes. Those are his."
He moved forward.
"But even setting those ones aside, there are players in that squad who, if we just leave them sitting, other teams will poach. For sure. As the sporting director, it is my job to make sure that does not happen. We should not be wasting talent. It's better that we get proactive. Loan deals instead of letting them stagnate in Barça B. Send them out, let them get real minutes, real experience. We add buy-back clauses. We get them on proper contracts first, tie them down, then build the pathway."
He spread his hands.
"La Masia is a golden tube. I mean, look at that kid Mateo. We cannot afford to just let the others slip away while we're watching one boy."
Patrick smiled.
"I'm very happy you think of the academy like that. To have the sporting director hold these kids in such high regard." He sat back. "Well. It tells me my work here hasn't been for nothing."
Deco laughed.
Patrick let the smile sit for a moment. Then he leaned forward.
"Okay. Which players would you be referring to?"
...
In the back of the car, Olivia was singing.
She had the verse going, the one about getting out of town and driving away from the crowds, and she turned to Aina as she sang it, handing the line over. Aina caught it without missing a beat, singing the next part straight back at her, the one about heaven and nothing lasting forever. They volleyed it back and forth, line for line, each of them taking a piece and throwing the next to the other, grinning the whole way through.
Then they hit the chorus together, the part about him being tall and handsome and bad and doing it so well, and they grabbed each other, both of them belting it into each other's faces.
"Eeeeekk!!!"
They dissolved into a screaming, laughing hug as the song kept going on the radio.
In the front, Pedri was driving. Mateo turned around in the passenger seat.
"Okay. We are not about to do this again."
Pedri just shook his head.
The girls kept laughing.
After the text from the official group chat, they had all decided to head straight there to find out what was going on. The boys had told the girls they could stay and watch the show, but they had decided to come along, and all four of them had left the amusement park together, but only after tracking down Chinedu so Pedri could slide him fifty euros for his help.
"So let me get this straight," Mateo said from the front. "This, ehm, singer—"
"Taylor Swift," Aina supplied from the back.
Mateo nodded. "Yeah. Taylor Swift."
Pedri tilted his head. "I think that name is familiar."
Olivia shook her head, the laugh still in her voice. "I can't believe you guys don't know who Taylor Swift is."
"Boys," Aina said.
Mateo shook his head. "We're getting off point now."
He pressed on.
"So she contacted you people."
"The label," Olivia said. "And it's more like they contacted her."
"Ohh. Okay." Mateo nodded and kept going. "So, ehm, basically she'd send you new songs."
"Well, technically not new songs," Olivia corrected. "It's a re-recording of her old songs."
Pedri, listening, frowned. "Wait. I'm confused."
"Me too," Mateo said.
Olivia took a breath to explain. "Okay. It's like this. The songs are songs she recorded years ago. But then someone bought the rights to them. Basically took them from her. So now she's re-recording all of them herself, the exact same songs, so that the versions sitting in those people's hands become worthless."
Pedri's face opened into a slow "Ohhh" of understanding, nodding along.
"Okay, okay," Mateo said. "I get it." He kept going. "So she'd send you these old 'new' songs."
Olivia nodded. "Yeah. Me and another artist."
"Do you know who?" Aina asked.
"I think they said Conan Gray."
Aina gasped. "Wait, really? I love him."
"Tell me about it."
"So," Mateo said, "you and this Conan guy get the song, and they want you to react to it?"
Olivia explained it. "Yeah, basically. And it would be around the same time as my album release, so everything lines up together. It's great publicity for it. All of it landing at once."
Aina leaned over and hugged her. "I'm so proud of you."
Olivia smiled. "Yeah. The shoot for the reaction is set for the day after we get back to the States."
There was a small change in the front seat. Mateo's face dropped a degree.
"Back to the US," he muttered.
Olivia caught it. She looked at him.
"Yeah," she said, softer now. "It should be in a few weeks."
She said it gently.
Mateo gathered the smile back onto his face. The two of them held the look for a moment.
"I'm very happy for you," he said.
"We're reaching now," Pedri said.
Everyone looked ahead.
And every one of them opened their mouths as the car came around the corner.
"Wow," Mateo muttered.
The whole place was packed. More than the stadium had been for the match yesterday, somehow, the crowds spilling out in every direction, a mass of people moving in the evening light.
"Is that a stage?" Aina asked.
In the middle of it all stood a set of makeshift stands, scaffolding and a raised platform, the whole setup looking less like a football ground on a Sunday evening and more like the grounds of a concert about to begin.
"Hello, ma."
Sarah Salahpour, FC Barcelona's digital content creator, had a microphone in one hand and a grin on her face. She was working the crowd, moving through the festival with a camera operator trailing her, pulling fans in front of the lens one at a time.
"So. Tell me. How are we feeling about the season?"
The fan she had stopped was calm at first. Measured. Then he started talking, and the calm did not last.
"Honestly? We are winning everything. Everything. The league. The Champions League. All of it. This is our year. I can feel it."
Sarah laughed.
"Okay, okay. And the next game?"
The calm vanished entirely.
"Death. Ooh, that is nothing. There is nothing to even think about. It is straight death. We are going to murder Real Madrid. Murder them."
He was bouncing now, fully hyped, the certainty of a man who had decided the result before the match.
Sarah was laughing properly.
"So I guess we are winning it."
"One thousand percent."
She was still laughing when a cluster of other fans bundled into frame behind the interview, all of them shouting at once.
"WE ARE BRINGING THE UCL HOME!"
The guy being interviewed threw both arms up and joined them.
"LA SEXTA! LA SEXTA! NÚMERO SEIS!"
The whole group was screaming it, the chant for the sixth European Cup, the one the club had been chasing.
Sarah let it run, laughing, then signalled.
The camera operator lowered the camera.
"Cut."
He looked at her, half-bewildered.
"I didn't know we'd planned an event like this."
Sarah laughed.
"We didn't. The fans did this."
She turned in a slow circle, taking it in, something warm sitting in her eyes. The festival had spread across the whole area outside the stadium. Games being played in one corner, a knot of children kicking a ball against a fence. Food trucks that had, by some miracle of supporter logistics, simply appeared overnight. Music. Laughter. Colour. A parade of people who had decided the celebration from two nights ago was not finished.
"Isn't it beautiful?"
"Nico, this is insane. How did you pull it off?"
A short distance from the cameras, Marc Puig and Jordi Ferrer, the two Boixos Nois representatives who had gone to Mateo's uncle's house weeks ago, were standing on either side of a man in his late forties, both of them grinning, both of them praising him.
Nico Barrera, the president of the Boixos Nois, just laughed.
"I came up with the idea. That is all. It was the Almogàvers who organised everything. Once I told them it was for the players, and once I explained how a thing like this lets us get our wants across without anybody having to make a single phone call, they were more than eager to throw it together."
The three of them were still talking when the screaming started somewhere off to the side.
They turned.
"Isn't that Mateo?" Marc said.
Jordi followed his eyes.
"Yeah. Him and Pedri. Guess they came down too."
Nico's head came around.
"Mateo?"
Marc and Jordi looked at each other.
"Ehm. I don't think this is a good idea," Marc said.
"Yeah. Oriol already said we shouldn't involve him at all," Jordi added. "He said we shouldn't even talk to him."
Nico laughed.
"I am a fan of this club. Can a fan not go and say hello to one of the best players on the team?" He waved a hand at them. "Calm down, both of you. I am just going to introduce myself. And as for Oriol." He smiled. "Well. He is not exactly a member anymore. So."
He started walking.
"MATEO! MATEO!"
"Mateo, please, score a hat-trick next game!"
"VISCA BARÇA!"
"Pedri! Pedri, over here!"
Mateo was in the centre of it, hemmed in on all sides, waving, the noise coming at him from every direction. Smaller pockets of the crowd were chanting Pedri's name beside him. People were pushing pieces of paper at them, phones, shirts.
Pedri leaned in and pointed toward the front.
"Hey. Seems they're over there."
Mateo looked. Some of their teammates were sitting near the stage at the front of the festival, a row of familiar faces by the platform.
He turned back to Pedri.
"Let's go over there."
They both turned to the girls.
"We're going up to the stage," Pedri said. "The players are there."
Aina and Olivia nodded.
"What about you two?" Mateo asked.
"I saw Uncle Hugo's food truck around there," Aina said. "Me and Olivia will go wait there."
Mateo and Pedri nodded.
"Okay, okay."
"Excuse me. Please, let me pass."
Mateo and Pedri pushed into the crowd, laughing, the bodies closing around them the moment they moved.
"Mateo, please, help me sign this!"
"Mateo! Who were the girls with you?"
"Pedri! Pedri, this way!"
The questions came faster than either of them could answer, the crowd thickening with every step.
"Excuse. Excuse. Excuse."
A group of male fans had moved in front of them, clearing a path, opening a lane through the bodies. One of them turned back to Mateo.
"Come. This way."
Mateo and Pedri followed the gap, the fans holding the crowd back on either side as they moved through.
They reached the front.
The man who had cleared the road turned to them.
"Okay. You can head up there now. Sorry about the crowd."
Mateo laughed.
"What? That was incredible. I love seeing the fans like that."
The man laughed too.
"I like that."
He held out a hand.
"Nico Barrera."
Mateo took it.
"Mateo King."
"I know," the man said.
Mateo laughed. "Ha. That's true."
Nico held the handshake a moment longer, looking at him, something fond moving across his face.
"I cannot believe little Mateo grew up to be one of the best players on this team." He shook his head. "If only Guillem could see you now."
Mateo froze.
"Wait." His voice changed. "You knew my grandfather?"
Nico smiled.
"Ha. I did. Your grandfather and I were in the same group. Your uncle too."
"Ooh," Mateo said.
Pedri tapped his arm.
"Mateo. Seems it's about to start."
Mateo glanced toward the stage.
"Ooh. Okay. I'm coming." He turned back to Nico. "Sorry."
"No, no," Nico said, waving it off. "Go. We can catch up another time."
"Yeah," Mateo said.
He went.
It took less than two minutes after Mateo and Pedri joined their teammates for the whole thing to blow up.
What had started as a supporter celebration two days after the Real Sociedad win had, over the course of the day, organised itself into something far bigger. A fan rally. A send-off for the team before the run-in. The Almogàvers had built the stage, the supporters' groups had pulled in the food and the music, and by the time word reached the club's offices about the scale of what was happening outside their own stadium, the decision more or less made itself.
The club approved it. They turned it into an official event.
The event continued.
Thirty minutes passed. Local singers came out and performed, the kind of Catalan acts that had grown up on this club the same as everyone in the crowd. The atmosphere built. The seats that had been set out near the stage filled with the entire first team, the coaching staff among them, Koeman seated with his arms folded and the faint expression of a man who had not expected his evening to go this way. Even Laporta was there. A few agents had drifted into the periphery and found themselves part of it.
Then came the fan talk segment.
This was the part where supporters came up onto the stage and spoke to the team. Said their piece. Told the players what they wanted, what they hoped for, what the club meant to them. It moved the way these things move. We love this team. We want the double. We have supported you our whole lives. The standard things, said with real feeling, the team nodding along from their seats.
Then an old woman stepped out onto the stage.
She looked to be in her seventies, maybe her eighties. She moved slowly to the microphone. She tapped it once.
"Hello. Can you hear me?"
The crowd quieted for her.
"Normally," she began, "this is where I would tell you that I am the biggest FC Barcelona fan there is."
She gave a small smile.
"But I have walked around here today. And I have met people who love this club as much as I do. Some of them more. So it would be a lie. It would be me being pretentious."
A soft ripple of warmth through the crowd.
"I might not be the biggest fan." She paused. "But my late husband was."
The festival went quiet.
"He loved it. He loved every part of it. The walk to the ground. The seats we had. The games we watched together, year after year, decade after decade. It was our life. It was the thing we did."
She shook her head slowly.
"He is not here anymore. But I still do all of it. The walk. The seat. The games. I do all the things we used to do together. Because they were ours."
She drew a breath.
"But I will not bore you with an old woman's stories. I would bore you with the other one." a small laugh moved through the crowd
She steadied herself on the microphone stand.
"In 2004, I was in the middle of chemotherapy."
The crowd stilled completely.
"And then a boy came onto the television. Lionel Andrés Messi."
A murmur moved through the festival. Heads turned. Near the front, the players shifted in their seats, and the camera, somewhere, found Messi, and the people around him reached over and touched his shoulder, his arm, the small involuntary gestures of people sitting next to someone who has just been named.
The old woman kept going.
"A skinny little boy. Came onto the scene. Fearless. Determined. Like nothing in the world could touch him."
Her voice had begun to break.
"Watching you play that season gave me hope."
The tears came now, sitting on her face, her hands trembling on the microphone.
"It gave me something extra to look forward to. Week in and week out. A reason to get to the next treatment. A reason to get to the next week to see the next day."
She wiped at her eyes and did not stop.
"I found strength in that. And that strength. That strength got me through my treatment."
The crowd was silent. People had their hands over their mouths. Somewhere in the seated rows a player had his head bowed.
She paused for a long moment.
Then she said it.
"I just heard the cancer has come back."
A low sound moved through the festival, a collective intake, hundreds of people making the same small involuntary noise at once.
She smiled through the tears.
"I don't know what is ahead for me."
She let that sit. Her shoulders rose and fell.
"But if you fight."
Her voice cracked and held.
"I will fight."
She looked out at them, at the players, at the team in the front rows.
"The Champions League. The league. Real Madrid. All of it. You go out there. And you win."
The whole festival was crying with her now. The players. The coaching staff. The thousands packed into the open ground. The old woman stood at the centre of it, tears running freely down a face that was smiling, her hands shaking on the stand, and she lifted her head toward the crowd and the cameras and she pulled in every last bit of air her body had and she shouted it with everything she had left.
"VISCA BARÇA!"
And an even more rousing one met her, rising up from every corner of the ground, from the players and the staff and the supporters and the food trucks and the children and the singers and the whole festival at once.
"VISCA BARÇA!"
...
A home in Madrid. The middle of the night.
The house was dark. One lamp on in a far room. A man stood by the window with a phone pressed to his ear, his voice low, waiting through the rings until the line picked up.
"Sam. Yes. It's me. Luis."
A pause.
"I know what time it is. I'm sorry."
He looked out at the quiet street.
"The match. Yes. The Clásico. Madrid against Barça."
A breath.
"Help me get tickets. Please."
A/N
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