Twitter Girl

by Nic Tatano

  Twitter Girl

  NIC TATANO

  A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  HarperImpulse an imprint of

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2014

  Copyright © Nic Tatano 2014

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com

  Nic Tatano asserts the moral right

  to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

  the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

  entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International

  and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted

  the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access

  and read the text of this e-book on screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,

  downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or

  stored in or introduced into any information storage and

  retrieval system, in any form or by any means,

  whether electronic or mechanical, now known or

  hereinafter invented, without the express

  written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © September 2014

  ISBN: 9780008113117

  Version 2014-09-01

  Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

  For Myra, who always sets my heart atwitter…

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Also by Nic Tatano…

  Also by Nic Tatano…

  Nic Tatano

  About HarperImpulse

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  @TwitterGirl

  Tornado whips through Mississippi trailer park, causes three million dollars worth of improvements.

  Yeah, that’s the tweet which got me fired. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that it made me America’s most polarizing figure overnight. I, Cassidy Shea, former network reporter (handle: @TwitterGirl) whose stories included a snarky attitude that attracted more than one million followers, let her 200 IQ ass do the talking once too often. Who knew that one hundred and fourteen characters could sink my career like a stone, but, then again, when something goes viral on the Internet… well, the thing whipped around the country faster than the tornado that inspired it.

  Oh, and before you think I’m some insensitive New York snob who makes fun of those less fortunate, let me remind you of the follow-up story that hardly anyone saw. That tornado only touched down for a minute and it wiped out an abandoned trailer park that was about to be bulldozed by the government for a pork barrel project. It actually saved the feds millions in demolition costs and enabled them to start construction early on the desperately needed Museum of American Macramé. (Slogan: ‘Got Knots?’) Not one person was injured by the tornado, nothing else was damaged, nobody was left homeless. It simply whooshed a bunch of ramshackle mobile homes outta there and was done. But nooooo, you didn’t pay attention to that story, did you? You had the same knee-jerk reaction as the network president, who was deluged by angry tweets from flyovers (a network term for people the airlines zip over between New York and Los Angeles.) So even though I got canned three days ago, Twitter Girl still gets bushels of nasty comments collected in one convenient location by a very genteel hashtag:

  #FireTheRedheadBitch

  Merry Christmas, Cassidy. Enjoy the pink slip in your stocking?

  Most of these tweets contain lovely terms of endearment and suggest I perform various impossible anatomical acts that I won’t share. Suffice it to say I will never be able to set foot in the State of Mississippi again, which won’t exactly break my heart. Or, more importantly, a television station. Which will.

  So for the first time in my professional career, I have absolutely no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

  “Hey, Caz, come look at this!”

  The voice you hear belongs to my twenty-five year old kid brother Sam, with whom I share a home here on Staten Island, often called the forgotten borough of New York City. He’s been a saint through all this, compiling all the nice tweets and direct messages of support so that the redhead bitch might cheer up during the holidays. Every night after dinner he cuts and pastes them into one document, prints it out and makes me read them aloud. But with three days to go before Christmas, I’m unemployed and not in the mood. I shuffle down the hall and find him rolling toward me in his wheelchair, iPad in his lap. “Sam, you don’t need to keep doing this. I’m okay, really.”

  He smiles, making the dimples in his lean face pop. His green eyes brighten as runs his fingers through his mop of black hair to get it out of his face and points at the screen. “Caz, you really need to read this.”

  I roll my eyes. “I just want to forget about it, Sam. Look, I appreciate what you’re doing—”

  “I think it’s a job offer.”

  His words make my jaw drop. For the past few days I’ve been radioactive, so much so that my agent dropped me right after she told me my television career was toast and I had not only burned every bridge but napalmed them down to the molecular level. “Some television station wants to hire me? You’re kidding.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not a station.” He hands me the tablet and I read a direct message sent to @TwitterGirl:

  Cassidy, your voice mailbox is full and need to talk. We have a position for you in the campaign. - Frank Delavan

  My eyes widen and I feel myself smile for the first time in days.

  Sam is wearing his eyebrows-up-I-told-you-so look, which I get a lot since he’s much smarter than I am. “So, Twitter Girl, still pissed at me for reading your mail?”

  I hand back his iPad, lean down and give him a hug, then muss up his hair like I did when he was little. “Hell, no. I owe you big time. You know who Frank Delavan is?”

  He nods. “Duh, my sister works in the news business. Of course I do. He’s Will Becker’s point man. And apparently he wants you to be a part of the team.”

  Me. Twitter Girl.

  Working for the Will Becker. And unless you’ve been living under that same neighborhood of rocks for a while, you know he’s America’s most eligible bachelor and odds-on favorite to be the next President of the United States.

  My euphoria is interrupted by the doorbel
l. I run across the living room to answer it, as I already know it’s my boyfriend Jamison back from a long trip to China. I’ve barely been able to get in touch with him since I got canned and now I can’t wait to share the good news. While Sam has been doing his best to comfort me, it’s brotherly love, and I really need a hug from my significant other. (Well, okay, more than just a hug.)

  When I open the door I see that he’s carrying something other than a Christmas gift. It’s a metaphorical box of relationship coal for my stocking as a peek inside tells me it’s my stuff from his apartment. My smile disappears.

  “Hi,” he says, looking at the box he’s holding instead of my face.

  “What’s this?” I ask, even though my romantic GPS has already told me.

  Your relationship has hit… a dead end.

  Recalculating…

  He walks inside, accompanied by a blast of frigid December air and I close the door. “I’m… uh…”

  I bite my lower lip and feel my emotions well up. He’s still not looking at me and I’ve been around the block enough times to know why. “You’re breaking up with me?”

  “I’m sorry, Cassidy.”

  “This why you didn’t get back to me?”

  No response.

  “Look at me, dammit.”

  He looks up and I see very little emotion in his eyes. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since… you know. The incident.”

  “And?”

  “I… don’t think I can be with someone who is disliked by so many people.”

  In a flash my emotions switch gears. Upset to pissed off. My blood pressure zips past elevated, leaves dangerous in the rear view mirror and goes directly to Irish-girl-wanna-hit-someone level. I see Sam wheel to the edge of the living room and peek around the wall as he’s obviously heard the conversation and is standing by in case I need him, which I will shortly. I slowly nod and fold my arms. “Wow. And here I thought you came over to support me. Alas, I incorrectly assumed you had a spine.”

  “The people at the firm today…” He shakes his head as his face tightens. “God, it was just brutal what I went through.”

  “What you went through? Excuse me, but are you actually playing the victim card here?”

  “Cassidy, my reputation is at stake. How many clients will want to hire me if I’m in a relationship with someone like you.”

  Like me? LIKE ME???

  His words push me over the edge and send Sam heading in my direction. I yank the box from his arms, put it on the floor, open the door and point out at the street. “Get out.”

  He reaches out and takes my shoulders but I twist away like his hands are on fire. “Cassidy, don’t take it personally—”

  “You heard my sister,” says Sam, rolling to a stop a few feet from Jamison and glaring at him. “Get the hell out of our house. Now.”

  My boyfriend looks at my brother, who was a six-foot-two black belt in karate before the accident and has tremendous upper body strength from life in the chair. Jamison knows Sam would have no qualms about kicking his ass. He nods and turns back to me. “Well, know that I wish you the best.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say, as he heads out the door. When he’s on the way to his car I turn to look at Sam who has a gleam in his eye. He cocks his head at the pile of snow on the porch.

  “Do it, Caz.”

  I know exactly what he’s thinking. I step outside, grab a handful of the white stuff which has almost turned to ice, pack it into a ball, rear back and fire. It nails Jamison in the head.

  “Ow!” He turns around. “What the hell was that for?”

  “That’s for the snowball’s chance you ever have of coming back to me!” I flip him the bird, throw in the Italian salute for good measure (that’s the hand slapped in the crook of the opposite elbow, for those not versed in Sicilian sign language), step back inside, slam the door and get a high five from Sam.

  “Feel better?” he asks.

  “A little.” I feel my eyes start to well up. “Not really.”

  Sam reaches his arms up, I lean down and accept his warm hug. When we break the embrace we start the rehab ritual, which, unfortunately, I have gone through too many times.

  Like I said, I’ve been around the block known as Breakup Square.

  He rolls into the kitchen, I follow him. He reaches into the freezer, grabs a pint of Haagen Dazs rum raisin and hands it to me, already sitting at the kitchen table with a spoon. He wheels his chair next to me and starts stroking my hair. I lean my head on his shoulder as I savor the rich ice cream.

  Sam kisses the top of my head. “Hey, wait till he finds out you got another job.”

  And wait till he finds out who I’ll be working with.

  ***

  “Yo, Twitter Girl!”

  The words from a young hardbodied bike messenger greet me as I emerge from the cab in Brooklyn. I smile and wave at him as he pedals by, slows down to check me out head to toe, and returns a sexy grin. (If I didn’t have an important meeting I’d grab a CitiBike and go after him.)

  I head into the seriously out of the way tavern and pause a minute so my eyes can adjust to the very dim light. I walk past the ancient oak bar, empty except for a burly bartender wheeling in a keg, and spot Frank Delavan at the last table near the kitchen door. He stands up, much shorter than he appears on television, maybe five-six, and extends a hand. “Cassidy, nice to meet you. Thank you for coming.”

  I return the handshake. “Thanks for inviting me.” I take a seat and adjust my chair as I take a look at the New York sports photos that cover every inch of paneled wall space. “This place is a little off the beaten path for you, huh?”

  “Well, I thought in light of the publicity you might want to keep a low profile.”

  “That’s not really possible when you’re a six foot tall redhead who’s been on network television for seven years, but I appreciate the thought.”

  He laughs a bit. Delavan has a nice smile which goes well with his short and portly look, but I know his reputation as a gunslinger. He may look like a bald, middle-aged lawn gnome, but every politician wants him in a foxhole. “Well, the food’s excellent here. I actually try to get by once a month. This is one of the city’s best kept secrets. I grew up down the block. Used to come here as a kid for the cheeseburgers and never stopped.”

  A young waiter arrives at our table, hands me a menu, and his eyes light up with recognition. “Hey, you’re Twitter Girl!”

  I put my palms up and shrug. “See what I mean?” I say to Frank.

  “Nice to have you in our restaurant,” says the waiter. “For what it’s worth, I thought you got a raw deal from the network. I sure miss those tweets. You’re funny as hell.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, I wish you’d start again. Anyway, I’ll give you guys a few minutes to decide.” He turns and heads back to the kitchen.

  “See,” says Frank, dark eyes gleaming. “Not everyone is mad at you.”

  “Nah, only about four hundred thousand people. And everyone in the state of Mississippi.”

  “Well, I’m not one of those people. And neither is my candidate. He’s a big fan.”

  “Really? Will Becker’s on Twitter?”

  “Yep.”

  “I thought politician’s accounts were actually managed by staffers.”

  “Most are, but he actually likes being in touch with real people. He feels it’s more accurate than an opinion poll and it’s instant. Anyway, he loved your television stories and your Internet sarcasm. That’s why I asked you here today. You have a unique talent the campaign needs.”

  “Not sure I understand.”

  “Cassidy, I don’t know where your political views lie…”

  “Well, I’m one of those old school journalists who actually keeps my opinions private, so I’m not gonna tell you. I know it’s fashionable to be biased, but that’s not me.”

  “That’s very admirable in this day and age and the Senator will respect that. But he’s hoping you
like him enough to join the campaign.”

  “Let’s just say that considering his views I wouldn’t mind working for you. But I’m not sure you need someone who’s toxic with half the general public for your press office.”

  Frank leans back in his chair and folds his hands in his lap. “That’s not the position we have in mind for you. And, as I said, it’s your unique talent we need. In fact, it’s a position that’s never existed in a campaign, and you’re the only person who could do the job. This new digital world offers interesting opportunities. If you don’t accept our offer for this position, one will not be made to anyone else.”

  Now I’m getting confused. “I’m not sure where you’re going, Frank. If you don’t want me for your press office, what would I do? Produce videos?”

  “We need Twitter Girl.”

  I furrow my brow. “Okayyyyyy…”

  “We need your unique brand of snark. Those wicked, sarcastic one liners that can cut people down to size and go viral. You may have lost four hundred thousand followers the first day after that tweet but you’ve picked up a quarter million new people since. Sarcasm is a valuable currency on social media. We want to hire you to do what you did for the network, only your targets will be the people we’re running against. We could spend millions on TV ads but 140 characters from you could be more effective, cheaper and a lot faster. And let’s face it, politicians are fair game. You couldn’t possibly offend anyone.”

  “And those targets you mentioned would eventually include the current President.”

  He nods. “Assuming the Senator wins the party primary. But until he does, there are a host of candidates challenging him who need to be taken down a notch by Twitter Girl. And of course, the President will need constant tweaks along the way while we’re going through primary season.”