Читать книгу Transit Girl - Jamie Shupak - Страница 16

CHAPTER EIGHT

I click the bright orange button next to the door that says OPEN and it does just that, sliding to the left like something out of Back to the Future, revealing a space as bright as an operating room. I might just need the Ray-Ban sunglasses that are holding my hair back like a headband to do their actual job and shield my sensitive, hungover eyes from all this light.

“Yes?”

The young hipster girl behind the receptionist desk blows her wispy, side-swept bangs out of her eyes and watches me take in the vast newsroom. She reminds me of Courtney—they both have those long, ridiculous bangs. Gross. Behind her are floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides of the room. The remaining wall is covered with giant, flashy flat-screen monitors, all tuned to various news outlets. CNN, ABC, NBC. I see the faces of my competitors. But what’s on that one in the middle? I squint to try and decipher the cascade of text, scrolling down the main monitor. Oh. My. God. It’s the Twitter feed of every newscaster in New York City. It’s like TMZ, but the stars are people like … me. Are they freakin’ serious? I think as I take it all in.

Just past reception, there’s a central pod of desks that looks more like a trading floor than a blog office. Occupying the pod are several pairs of black-rimmed glasses buried into Mac keyboards, all typing furiously. Above them, screens monitor Banter’s top stories. I’d heard about this—Maryann brought it up at a meeting a couple months ago. That as a post gets more clicks, it moves to the top of the list. It was a way to make their writers more competitive, she told us, like the endless favorites they get on their tweets aren’t enough motivation.

“Um, excuse me. Can I help you?”

I realize I haven’t said anything to Courtney’s clone yet. Actually, I’m not sure what to say—I’d planned on practicing something in the cab ride over here, but I’d been too busy replying to texts and emails to even make a real plan. Now, under the bright lights, storming into Banter’s office and wielding demands didn’t seem like the best idea. I scan the room, hoping something will come to me quickly. A group of guys is in the far corner of the room, surrounding something that I can’t quite make out from here. Oh, but wait.

“Is that a Ping-Pong table?”

“Yes.” Fake Courtney looks annoyed. “Excuse me, who are you here to see?”

I am about to say Bantering Ben, but I realize that’s not his real name. I fumble with my phone to find what is.

“I … one sec.” I flash her a smile and she blows her bangs out of her eyes again in response. I open the post again to get Ben’s last name and automatically, the damn video starts playing again. I fumble with the volume on the side of my phone to turn down Robin Thicke’s sensual voice, but not before I see the lightbulb go off in the homewrecker lookalike’s head.

“Aaaahhhh … you’re Guiliana. I should’ve recognized you.” She leans forward conspiratorially. “You’re famous around here.”

Before she has a chance to elaborate on her sass, I blurt out, “Abrams! Ben Abrams. I’m here to see Ben, please.”

She spins around in her white chair and looks across the room, to the crowd of guys around the Ping-Pong table. She motions me to come closer and points him out. His back is toward me and the first thing I notice is his hair, or lack thereof. He’s got a clean crew cut around the sides, but not much on top. Of course it’d be some dirty, old, balding man writing about a girl taking her top off.

No one notices as I walk across the room. Fake Courtney didn’t announce my presence, and they all seem overly engrossed in the monitor hanging above the Ping-Pong table. God, these guys are so competitive—it’s pathetic, watching their stories like that.

I slip into the group without anyone even acknowledging me. What are they looking at?

And then I hear it. The song. My voice. They’re looking at me.

Unce, unce, unce.

It’s amazing that after almost eight years in the news business filled with countless tape reviews, appearances, and mic checks, I still can’t stand the sound of my own voice. But there I am, accompanying T.I. with my now famous rap skills:

“One thing I ask of you/Let me be the one you back that ass to/Go, from Malibu, to Paris, boo …”

And there is my bra, in all its neon glory. It’s a good-looking bra, I think to myself. But only JR was supposed to be looking.

“I knew she had a nice rack,” one of the bloggers says.

“You should have said that in the blog post,” I interject. The music literally comes to a screeching halt and all heads turn my way. At least the shirtless Guiliana-fest is over. Silence. So they do have some shame.

“Guiliana, wow—hi.” Ben is the first one to turn around and say something. “You’re so much … shorter … than I imagined.”

And you’re so much younger than I imagined from that hairline, but I don’t say it out loud. The blue of his eyes is so striking that I almost forget that I hate him. I look down so he doesn’t see my reaction and notice that his brown shoelaces are double-knotted. So he’s not totally reckless. I look back up, unsure of how to greet this creep who is trying to sabotage my career, grateful when he extends his hand.

“… and not as drunk, right?” I can’t even believe I’m being funny right now.

He gives me what looks like a patronizing smile, and I hate him again.

I smile back anyway, because the longer I can perpetuate his horny-man thought process—the easier I can lead him to believe that he has me—the more likely I am to get him to take this post down. Eyes on the prize, Guiliana. You can’t lose your job and fiancé within forty-eight hours.

“So, what do I and the Banter team here owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“I wanted to see if you would please take the post down.”

Scoffing and laughter erupt behind him.

“No waaaaaay, dude,” says a guy in a red plaid button-down shirt. “That video made me want to chug YouTube straight.” A second guy in black skinny jeans nods along vigorously, his eyes never leaving my chest.

Ben looks at me with sad eyes and I can’t tell if he’s being a total dick or there’s some sort of feeling behind the eye contact. I haven’t had much of that with the opposite sex lately; JR must’ve been lying to me for some time now, because his eyes, his hands—his whole manner really—have avoided mine for the last few months. Especially with his smoking, we had become like ships passing in a mood-altered murk. He regarded me through the lens of pharmacology, and I through increasing skepticism. Bantering Ben, on the other hand, is looking at me square in the pupils.

“I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Layne, but that’s not going to happen. And besides, I don’t have the authority to do that kind of thing anyway.”

“Your name is on it, and you can’t just take it down?”

Again the peanut gallery erupts with laughter. I look at Ben, then around the crowd of snarky bloggers, and know I have to come up with something. Images of the video, of Maryann, of JR, of going home to Connecticut in shame all flash through my brain in rapid succession and I know I have to come up with something else.

“What if we play Ping-Pong for it?”

The frat party behind him just won’t let up, so he has to shout over them. “Let’s hear her out,” Bantering Ben says, putting an end to the chaos.

He turns from crowd control to attentive listener so fast you’d think he’s a high school guidance counselor, instead of a blogger of smut. Something about the way he looks at me makes me think he wants me to prove them wrong, like he wants me to shut them up. He wants me to stand up for myself. I haven’t gotten that much encouragement from one look in a long time, and it throws me for a loop. I grab one of the Ping-Pong paddles that’s been abandoned on the table and reposition my sunglasses to push back even more of my hair. Everyone’s looking at me but I’ve got my eyes trained on Bantering Ben.

“One game to twenty-one. If you win, post stays up. When I win, post comes down.” I’m looking at him dead in the eye.

“You’re on, traffic girl.” Bantering Ben picks up a paddle from the other side of the table. “Just know that when I make you look worse than the George Washington Bridge at rush hour, I’m still gonna have to run this gamble by the big boss-man, Jake.”

I go over all the rules up front to make sure no loopholes crop up—I’m pretty sure all these guys play “Brooklyn rules” or some hipster shit like that. He agrees to my terms: We’ll volley for serve, then rotate every five points. Winner’s got to take the game by two. Despite my hangover, I’m confident. JR and I used to play all the time at UCLA, and though I haven’t played in years, I was killer back in the day. JR would always challenge couples at the bar to doubles for drinks. He’d try to game them, saying things like, “Oh, don’t worry, she’s not that good, just look at her.” He really was awfully good at making mean sound funny.

“You ready?” Ben’s confident smile melts into competitive glare.

Back and forth. I’m up.

Three to one.

Back and forth.

Seven to three.

The guys form a barricade around the table. I get up to a fast nine-to-four lead. But even faster are the one-liners these guys are throwing at me: “New York Lose Now,” “Expressway to Playboy,” “Put it in her Lincoln Tunnel.” I’m still up, eighteen-thirteen now, when I bend down for a ball that Ben somehow aced past me. A searing hot pain replaces my confidence and shoots from my lower back, right up my spine to the middle of my back. I cover my mouth so I don’t scream, but that does little to hide my agony. I grab the ball with one hand and move my other from my mouth to my back.

“You okay?” Ben looks concerned.

He should—I’m standing there like an old grandmother, crouched over like she needs a hip replacement. I’m too embarrassed to make eye contact—not like he hasn’t seen me in my bra already—but still, I can’t bear being the weak one anymore. I give him a plastered-on smile. The familiar inner dialogue that I used to recite when JR would do something to upset me but I didn’t want him to know, sputters up in my head: Don’t let him see you sweat.

“Are you sure, Guils?” I shoot Ben a withering look and he’s savvy enough to decode its meaning.

“Sorry, Guiliana. It’s just, well, I hear Eric call you that on air sometimes, and I think it’s …”

I cut him off midsentence. “I’m fine, it’s fine. I just hurt my back really bad the other night at the Boom Boom Room.”

“Yeah, I … “

“Of course, you know—that was the money shot, wasn’t it, me falling off that table?”

He gives me the slightest smile. “I’ve never seen anyone fall off a table so masterfully.”

“Well, get ready for my second feat of mastery.” I shoo him back to his side, acting like nothing ever happened. “Three more points,” I announce to the Banter crowd, “and that post is history.”

Silence falls over the table. I can hear fake Courtney answer the phone in a bored voice over at the reception desk. You can tell there’s more than just a win riding on this game. Ben is fighting for the principle Banter is based on: bringing the media elite back down to earth. I’m not kidding myself that I’m part of that elite, but I did hand him a goldmine: a young, hot newscaster getting sloppy drunk and making horrible decisions at one of the most exclusive clubs in town. Bonus points for dancing, lyric-making, and of course, the strip show. If they have to take down my post, the backlash will be fast, widely reported, and full of schadenfreude. But I can’t worry about that right now. I’m fighting for my job, my dignity, my independence—I literally feel like my life is on the line. How fitting, I think to myself, that my future is about to be decided by a Ping-Pong game.

I hunker down. All my focus has to be on this game—winning this game. He’s hot on my trail now, twenty to eighteen, and the tension is at an all-time high. Game point. I feel like the kicker coming onto the field in the last seconds of the Super Bowl, the weight of the game and the whole season on his shoulders, as he’s about to kick the winning field goal.

“Ready?”

Ben nods and I let loose with my best Serena Williams impersonation. As we volley back and forth, you can hear every breath, every hit of the paddle, every bounce on the table. In my head, I hear Courtney’s text over and over: No matter what I love you. I lean left and knock a ball back to Ben’s side. I see JR holding me as we slow dance to “Stand by Me” and Zelda nips at our legs. I knock the ball back to his side with killer topspin. Zelda. I miss Zelda. What if I lose my job and I have to move home with my parents and I never see Zelda again? Just then, Ben lobs a ball high over the low-slung net and I swing down at it with all my might. I watch—victoriously—as it blows past his outstretched paddle.

“YESSSSSSSSSSSS! YES YES YES!”

Hootin’ and hollerin’, I throw my hands up in the air to further exclaim victory. The second I do, the searing white pain rushes back and shoots all the way up to my head. And then all the light from the bright room—shining through the windows and glaring off each laptop and TV monitor—goes dark. The last thing I see, before I hit the ground, are Ben’s double-knotted shoelaces.