Riot Street
Page 21
“Unless you’re volunteering to take your salary in good thoughts and wishes, we have to turn a profit. A little publicity can double our ad revenue and—”
“So now we’re whoring out our reporters for—”
“Okay,” I say, putting my hands up. “I think I’m drawing the line at being called a whore.”
“Avery, no.” Ethan turns to me, a genuine look of panic draining the color from his face. “That’s not what I—”
“I know. I get it. But all the same…” I say to Ed, who figured out before this argument began how it would end. “I don’t do interviews. Period. I just want to do good work.”
“That’s all I needed to hear,” he says.
“But Cara’s right,” I tell Ethan. “Doing some press helps the magazine. And it helps you, too. So you should do the interviews.”
The damage is done. I knew it the minute Carter said my father’s name. Before I ever walked into that truck and picked up the phone. If I’m honest with myself, Ethan was right when he said this thing has been clawing its way to the surface for a long time. Writing that first essay opened this door, and there’s no going back now. So I can’t act all surprised or indignant when the natural course of it unfolds.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” He steps toward me and leans in as if this could be a private conversation. “We can keep our heads down, let it blow over. If I do this, they’re not just going to ask about the standoff and Patrick. People have been itching for a glimpse of you for years. Your name is out there now. Fuck the book or anything else, I’m not going on camera if it makes you uncomfortable.”
He promised I wouldn’t have to do this alone. The night he convinced me to take this job. Ethan made me believe in a life where I didn’t have to hide or feel ashamed of who I am. There is no career in which I remain anonymous and succeed. I realize that now. So while mugging for the camera or enduring melodramatic sit-downs might be a step too far, it isn’t realistic to think I can keep a lid on everyone and everything around me. People can’t live in hermetically sealed cases. There’s only so much oxygen in tight, confined spaces. And while we’re hiding, safe and secure in our protected containers, the whole world is happening around us. I didn’t escape Massasauga just to build a new fence somewhere else.
“I’m sure.”
17
The Extraordinary Machine
I’m breaking all my rules now. Sitting in the Slaughterhouse, waiting for the pitch meeting Wednesday morning as the other online writers file in, I watch the clips of Ethan’s interviews. Seven appearances in all, regurgitating the same generic version of the story. The camera loves him. On the bright living room sets of the morning shows, behind the shiny glass desks on cable news panels, he eats the audience. Ethan has that charisma you can’t teach. Even when the anchor pivots to a question about me, digging for some of that juicy tabloid gossip, Ethan is unflappable.
“Leave it to your boyfriend to make it all about him,” Cyle says, two seats down.
Cyle shovels chips into his mouth, licking the salt from his fingers, and I remind myself not to touch the door handle after him.
Ethan and I haven’t gotten much time alone over the last two days. He had to give me a rain check on dinner Monday night. Between taping his interviews and working twelve-hour days at the office, we haven’t spent more than a couple of hours together without witnesses. I admit, there’s a building sexual tension clouding my head. I keep thinking about Monday morning on the couch. His hands and his voice tearing down my hesitation. I’m a little edgy.
“Okay.” Cara walks in, cream silk shirt and a neutral pencil skirt. Every day in her life is a page out of Vogue. She opens her laptop and takes a seat at the head of the table. “Let’s get started. Avery, you’re up first.”
I’ve been itching for this. The last two days, reading the nonsense trotted out to prop up Phelps’s agenda. Totally ignoring the fact that he takes his philosophy from a convicted murderer who didn’t even believe his own dogma.
“Have you looked at the crowdfunding campaigns set up for Robert Phelps’s defense fund?” I begin. “The first one started five hours into the standoff. It raised nine thousand dollars before he’d even been arrested. As of this morning there are four more set up for Phelps and his accomplices. A combined seven hundred thousand dollars and counting. I can’t help wondering if, after the men who seized the bison range in Montana were acquitted, this supposed call to arms isn’t just a dangerous scheme to bilk gullible saps out of their money.”
“Isn’t everyone entitled to a defense?” Cyle says, chip dust in his beard. “What kind of representation is an anti-government activist going to get with a public defender?”
“That’s a pretty loose application of the term activist, but okay,” I say.
We go back and forth, the arrogant prick doing his best to shoot me down. I’m not sure where the fervor comes from; I can’t make myself shut up. Something about his face inspires rage.
“Cara, come on.” Cyle leans over the table to look past me. Around us, the other Cave dwellers stare down at their notes or laptops. He’s got them so whipped into submission they can’t even bare to look at him. “She shouldn’t have been on this story in the first place. We can’t let her use our magazine as her bully pulpit to sort out her daddy issues.”
“Shove it up your ass, Cyle.” I slap my laptop shut. “It is exactly this magazine’s job to aim a big bright spotlight on a con artist like Phelps and call bullshit. That is the chief purpose of the press. Not only to report what’s happening but to put it into context. Strip back every layer until only the naked facts are left. To stand by and let people like Phelps, people who want to follow in Patrick Turner Murphy’s footsteps, write their own undisputed narrative—it isn’t just negligent; it’s fucking criminal.”
Cyle stands from the table and pushes his chair in. “Cara, you need to send her home. Then we should have a talk about whether or not this experiment is working.”
Her icy blue eyes cut to me. For a moment, I hold my breath, ready to turn in my badge and walk out should she say the word. If this is the hill I have to die on, so be it. But I couldn’t live with myself if I sat back, watched this happen, and stayed silent.
“This is your next essay?” she asks me.
“Yes.”
“Fifteen hundred words on my desk by five.”
Suck it, Cyle.
* * *
When lunch rolls around, Ethan is out of the office and most everyone is up to their eyeballs in crunch time, so Addison and I pop over to the deli next door to grab a couple of to-go orders.
“I need to start going to these pitch meetings,” Addison says when I tell him about my not-so-private contretemps with Cyle.
“Not sure I’ll get away with too many more of those. But he had it coming.”
It felt pretty damn good to shut him down. Even better that it didn’t result in my being escorted from the premises with a restraining order. While we wait for our orders to come up, I check my phone and see I have a missed text from Ethan.
Ethan Ash
12:21 PM
How’d it go?
Avery Avalon
12:44 PM
Nailed it.
Ethan Ash
12:44 PM
That’s my girl.
Avery Avalon
12:44 PM
And Cyle tried to have me fired.
Ethan Ash
12:45 PM
Want me to kick his teeth in?
Avery Avalon
12:45 PM
I handled it.
Ethan Ash
12:46 PM
Tell him to suck your dick?
Avery Avalon
12:46 PM
No, that’s our special thing.
I put him in his place, though.
Ethan Ash
12:47 PM
Wish I’d been there to see it.
Avery Avalon
12:47 PM
It was pretty hot.
Ethan Ash
12:48 PM
You can’t say things like that.
Avery Avalon
12:48 PM
Why not?
Ethan Ash
12:49 PM
Because I’m sitting in Carter’s office trying not to get a hard-on.
And now he’s looking at me funny.
Avery Avalon
12:49 PM
On that note…
Ethan Ash
12:50 PM
Too much?
Avery Avalon
12:50
You’ve got to warn a girl before you decide we’ve reached the conspicuous public boner phase of the relationship.
Ethan Ash
12:51 PM
Noted.
“Care to share with the class?” Addison says.
I look up to see him staring at me much the way I suspect Carter is looking at Ethan.
“Sorry,” I say, sliding my phone back in my pocket. “Checking in with Ethan. He’s meeting with his FBI source to gather some more background for the article.”
“Mm-hmm.” Addison’s lips screw to one side of his face as he turns to watch the men in aprons behind the counter build our orders.
“What?”
A dramatic sigh escapes Addison as he crosses his arms, pointedly giving me the cold shoulder. “I couldn’t help overhearing that you two ran off to Montauk for the weekend.”
“It was sort of a spontaneous road trip. We weren’t sipping cocktails on the beach or anything.”
“So you two are a thing now.”
“What constitutes a thing?”
Honestly, I don’t know what we are. Ethan and I haven’t had much time to discuss what this is or where it’s going. If it’s anything at all. For the moment, what I know is I prefer being around him more than not. And when we’re in the same room, it’s difficult not to touch him. To not think about how it feels when he touches me.
“Are you sleeping with him?”
No. But also technically yes.
“We like each other,” I say. “What’s so awful about that?”
“Hey, I get it. I warned you it’d be like this. Getting involved with Ethan is like a Jurassic Park movie. Like the man said: it’s all ooh and ahh, then comes the running and screaming.”
“What do you have against him? What could Ethan possibly have done to make you want to sabotage him every chance you get?”
“Oh, all right.” Addison takes a step back. “That was uncalled for.”
I’m not sure what sets me off. Whether the residual angst of going another round with Cyle or the fact that Addison won’t let me have this, but it gets me riled. I’m already fending off daily phone calls from my mother asking me to quit and move in with her. I’m so sick of everyone pulling me in different directions.
“Look, I didn’t ask for your advice,” I say, grabbing my salad from the counter. “From now on, keep it to yourself.”
“Sure, girl. You do you.”
I leave Addison behind and take my food to my desk to bury myself in work. I’ve got to finish this essay for Cara, Ethan and I still have the print article to revise, plus I’ve got IAQ emails to sift through. That’s all on top of Cyle sending me bullshit fact-checking and research every fifteen minutes with URGENT in the subject line. Passive-aggressive little prick.
It’s not until I hit Send, emailing my essay to Cara at 4:55, that I realize I never touched my salad. That tends to happen when I go back on my meds. A sudden influx of chemicals soaking my bloodstream like mainlining the drugs. Getting snapped back on a bungee cord. They’re non-narcotic, but I still get the subtle rush of using. That artificial clarity and focus I’ve become addicted to. A gentle lift. Some find it in chocolate or cheese. But mine can send me into a four-hour trance, after which I barely remember what I’ve done.
“Hey there, gorgeous.” Ethan comes up behind me and rests two warm, firm hands on my shoulders. “You ready for a break?”
The clock on my screen now reads 5:17. Where the hell did twenty-two minutes go?
“Yeah.”
We grab some coffee from the snack room then go up to the roof. The smokers have put together a nice little patio with mismatched chairs lifted from the office and maybe Dumpster dives. A piece of artificial turf laid out like a rug and a metal bucket in the center where they dump their cigarette butts. There’s probably a month’s worth in there.
Ethan and I go to the side overlooking Liberty Street. It really isn’t much of a view; we’re surrounded and shadowed on all sides by taller buildings. But if you lean out over the northeast corner, you can glimpse the Federal Reserve building. The police tape is gone now. The barricades removed. Like it never happened. This city gets bored easily.
From the southeast corner, we peer into the windows of a high-rise apartment building. The kind where junior executives and new stockbrokers start inching their way up toward the penthouse suite.
“I don’t think I’ve said this since…everything”—Ethan catches my hair flying across my face and tucks it behind my ear—“but I am so proud of you.”
“Do you ever notice how you can’t say those words without sounding like someone’s parent after a grade school recital?”
“No, not until now. That makes me feel kind of creepy when you put it that way.”
“Right?”
Ethan looks good on a Manhattan rooftop. A magazine ad of a handsome, fashionable male contemplating his empire with the breeze blowing through his hair. If he were wearing a scarf and a camel coat, I might get the sudden urge to buy a Rolex or something.
“Attend a lot of grade school recitals, did you?” he asks with a smirk.
“Only on TV.”
“I can’t even imagine.” Shaking his head, he gazes out at the walls of glass, steel, and stone. “So many things the rest of us take for granted. All those stupid coming-of-age moments, and where you were when Ross and Rachel kissed.”
“Weren’t you like five years old?”
“Yeah, but I saw the reruns.”
He shouldn’t make me laugh when I’m standing at the edge of a building five stories up.
“But you did imagine it,” I say. “You wrote the book about it.”
“It’s not the same thing. Enderly walks off the page before she must grapple with the true, devastating reality of entering a world she doesn’t recognize. And she’s an adult by then. You were just a kid, shoved out into society, no idea what’s been going on around you.”
“I have to tell you, space travel came as a real shock.”
He freezes, eyes wide until he catches on.
“Ah, I see. That was a joke. I deserve that.”
“We did have books. I did have what you’d consider homeschooling, to a certain extent. It wasn’t that I was kept completely ignorant of the outside world, just taught that it was awful and corrupt and not a place that I should ever want to go.”
“Well, maybe Patrick wasn’t entirely wrong.”
In the apartment across the street, a woman is undressing a man in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. She pulls his tie from his neck, tugs his shirttails from his waistband. Apparently with no concern that anyone might be watching.
“There are times I miss it. The simplicity. My father built a beautiful world. But he was made of poison, and he tainted everything he touched.”
She pushes his shirt down his arms and lets it drop to the floor. Next, his belt is ripped from its loops. Then her fingers pull at the button on his pants while he stands there, watching, breathless with anticipation.
We put so much trust in each other. All of us. Trust that the guy standing next to you on the subway platform isn’t going to shove you in front of the train. Trust that the driver of the car in the next lane isn’t going to suddenly yank the wheel to the left and run you off the road. That when you order a plate of spaghetti, it isn’t laced with arsenic. What is that intangible quality? How are we born
so trusting? Even when someone is crushed on the tracks, is sent careening into oncoming traffic, or chokes on the blood filling their lungs, we go on. We keep trusting.
“I want to take you on a real date,” he says. “Tonight. Dinner and a show. Give you the authentic Manhattan night-on-the-town experience.”
“You know, I’ve heard rumors there are cheaper ways to get me into bed.”
“Sue me. I’m a romantic.”
* * *
Kumi meets me at the apartment that night after work to help me get ready for Ethan’s version of a real date. Once she deems my entire wardrobe hopeless, she lends me a dress and spends the next half hour speeding through my hair and makeup. Right on time, Ethan knocks on our door. My lips tingle as I slide on a pair of Kumi’s shoes and she fusses with my hair. A knot forms in my gut. It’s not anxiety, exactly, but the rush of peering out over a very long drop. That nervous, mortal fear you get watching that guy jump out of the capsule in Earth’s stratosphere, freefalling toward certain death until the big, brilliant plume of a parachute jerks him upright and slows his fall.
“Remember…” Kumi hands me a clutch purse and wipes a lipstick smudge from my mouth. “Don’t get anything on the dress.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
When I open the door, the trepidation evaporates. Electricity and want, his soft lips and gentle hands—it all comes rushing back. The sight of Ethan now, with his hair swept back like he’s just hopped off a boat, ocean eyes peering at me from under thick, dark lashes—I start to forget why I ever thought we were a bad idea, or why I agreed to it at all.
“You clean up nice,” I tell him as I step into the hall to close the door because I’m pretty sure Kumi’s behind me making lewd hand gestures.
Ethan smiles, sort of. Regarding me, his hand goes to his jaw and fingers rub across his mouth. “You look incredible.”