by Alina Adams
Gil, himself, had perfect teeth. And perfect hair. And the most stylish, dapper clothes. And a perpetual tan. Having started his career as a radio announcer, his diction was also perfect. In fact, Bex might have been tempted to pronounce Gil Cahill the most perfect human being ever assembled inside the human being factory. Except that, in addition to his teeth, hair, clothes, tan and diction, he was also ... well... Gil.
"What is it, Bex?" he asked. "I'm very busy."
She never knew whether or not she could sit. Gil never asked her to sit, and yet, she felt awkward standing for the duration of her entire presentation. So, Bex compromised. She reached for the chair that was facing his desk, ran her hand tentatively along it's back, and, when he didn't bark for her to unhand his furniture, kind of casually leaned against it, so that she no longer looked reverential or awkward. Just stupid.
Of course, once she realized that her posture was stupid, it was already too late for Bex to modify it. And so, half standing, half leaning there, Bex at least tried to look casual as she shifted her weight forward, hoping not to topple over while she handed Gil the video tape of Jeremy, and, in as few words as possible, summarized his story.
"So the kid is good, so what?" Gil shrugged. "If the old man isn't letting him go off to Nationals, why do we care?"
“Toni thinks if we can convince Craig Hunt of how good Jeremy really is and what a shot he has at doing really well at Nationals, then he'll let him go."
"Is this our job, now? I don't think convincing parents to send their kids to Nationals is our job, Bex."
"But telling the best stories at Nationals is." Bex wondered where the fine line between informative and condescending was drawn, and how many times she'd already crossed it. "It's a great story, Gil, you have to admit that. I mean, this kid's come out of nowhere, he's going to be the youngest boy in the field, he's landing jumps skaters twice his age are still struggling with, and he might very, very well win."
"I am not spending a thousand dollars to send a crew and a producer down to Connecticut to waste film on a kid with a big old question mark stamped across his behind."
"Okay," Bex conceded, "that's fair."
"Then why are we still having this conversation?"
"Because. Gil. I—I have a thought."
"Oh, this should be good."
"I thought... I thought, what if I go down there?"
He looked at her as if IQ points were falling out of Bex's ears like leaves in a storm. "You go with the producer? Explain to me how that's saving me money."
"I—See, I thought—I thought that I, maybe, I could produce it."
"Wonderful." Whenever Gil said "wonderful," he never really meant "wonderful." So Bex patiently waited for the other shoe to drop. "Except we've got one minor problem." Ah, here came the high-heeled sandal now—aimed, as usual, at Bex's head. "You're not a producer, Bex."
Thanks, Gil. She already kind of knew that.
"I—I could be."
"Oh. Did I promote you and forget?"
"No. But, I've worked with the producers. I know what they do, I know how they do it, and the stories are mine to begin with. I write the story and they just sort of put pictures to it."
"It's harder than it looks," Gil said dryly.
"Oh, I'm sure it is. That's why—that's why I thought, we could kind of do it like this: I'll go down and shoot Jeremy and his dad and everything with just a Beta camera."
"You have a Beta camera?"
"I thought I could borrow one. From the network..." When Gil didn't respond one way or the other, Bex pressed on, figuring if she couldn't convince him with her words, maybe she could simply bury him in a blurted pile of them. "Then, I'll come back and I'll screen what I've got to a producer—a real producer—and he and you and everybody can see if it's any good and if we can use it. By then, we'll know if Craig is letting Jeremy go to Nationals or not, and, if you decide the story is worth doing, you can send a real producer down again to get shots I've missed."
Bex had to stop now. Not because she was out of words. Because she was out of breath.
"Oh, good idea, Bex. This way it will cost me twice as much."
"No. It won't. I mean, you don't have to pay me a producer's fee or anything."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Right."
"But what about the double travel fee? The double hotel fee? The extra edit time, and the tape-stock and the missed days of you doing your real job? What about that?"
"I'll pay for all that," Bex blurted out, before she'd even thought it through. Obviously, if she'd thought it through, she wouldn't have blurted it out
Gil cocked his head to one side. "Did I also give you a raise along with your promotion?"
"What I mean is," Bex was still babbling, but at least now she had a better idea of what she was trying to say. "I'll pay all my travel expenses up front. You only have to reimburse me if you like the footage I bring back and if you end up using the story."
Gil stared at her, eyes narrowed, for what felt to Bex like an eternity. She imagined that if the drapes were actually open, she could watch day slowly turn to dusk then dark then dawn, and Gil would still be staring at her.
Finally, he snapped, "Fine," and reached to pick up his phone even though Bex could see that it wasn't ringing or even blinking.
Obviously, this was a symbolic, dismissive phone call. "Just don't come back with crap, you got that?"
"Right" Bex said, trying her best to barrel out of the office without looking as if she were trying to barrel out of the office. In other words, she was attempting to barrel... casually. "No crap. I'll write that down."
Bex drove her own car down to Hartford. She figured she could have taken the train or rented a vehicle that didn't begin coughing like the third reel of Camille whenever she so much as thought of raising the speed limit to seventy. But, considering that the cost for this entire quest might end up coming out of Bex's own pocket, she figured it was in her best interest to keep all expenses down to a minimum.
That was why she didn't so much pull in, as shudder into the Connecticut Olympic Training Center's parking lot, wrestling her ancient wheels into the only free spot left, right between an SUV boasting the bumper stickers, "Skaters have the best figures" and "I used to be rich— then my child took up figure skating," and a Honda with the vanity license plate, "GLDCOACH." Bex guessed they weren't talking about the carriage Cinderella arrived at the ball in.
She unlocked her (well, 24/7's) Beta-Cam from the trunk of her car, swung the carrying case over one shoulder, and after a few quick steps across the parking lot, stepped through the two swinging doors and into the snack bar just outside the OTC's main ice surface.
She was immediately assaulted on two fronts by two equally formidable sensations: the wet, dank smell of freon, and the nearly unbearable brightness of being. The rink was painted white. The ice was, obviously, white. The girls' skates were white, and so they wore equally white practice dresses to match. Add to all that a ceiling full of fluorescent lights radiant enough to illuminate a hairpin dropped onto the ice, and the bridge of Bex's nose went into a Gremlins-worthy "bright light, bright light!" spasm. She gasped and winced, looking instinctively down at the floor, and covering her eyes with one hand for good measure. Pressing on and bracing herself for the gust of cold to come, Bex bravely stepped out through the swinging snack bar doors leading to the ice surface. She paused by the rink's waist-high barrier. The bracing did a limited amount of good. Within a minute, Bex was freezing. But, hey, at least she'd been prepared for it.
Bex spotted Toni right away. Dressed in dark gray leggings and a knee-length padded coat with matching wool hat, she stood out easily among the sea of tiny white, pink, yellow, and other pastel outfits. Bex raised her hand to wave, and Toni enthusiastically waved back. Grabbing the hand of a boy Bex recognized from the video as Jeremy Hunt, she gestured that Bex should stay where she was, and they would both skate over to where she was standing.
"Jeremy,
this is Ms. Levy from 24/7 Sports, I told you about her yesterday," Toni rested her hand protectively on the boy's arm. "She's here to film you skating."
"How do you do?" Jeremy pulled his hand out of the jet black glove he was wearing and offered it to Bex for a shake. "It's nice to meet you. Thank you for coming to see me.”
Quadruple jumps, and manners, too. The perfect young man. It should have been impressive. Instead, it kind of creeped Bex out. A little too Stepford Wives for her taste.
She told Jeremy, "Toni's told me a lot about you. She thinks you've got a lot of potential."
“Toni's a good coach. Real encouraging." He smiled the same eager smile Bex had first glimpsed on the videotape, and she felt a bit of her reserve melting. Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Maybe the charm was natural, after all.
Bex asked, "Are you in the middle of a lesson? I was hoping we could talk a little bit before I started shooting."
"We just finished," Toni said. She told Jeremy, "Why don't you take a break, kiddo, and then we can do a run-through of your long program for Ms. Levy and her camera."
"Okay. Thanks for the lesson, Toni." Jeremy rested his hand on the barrier and clanked—as gracefully as one could while wearing knives strapped to one's feet—off the ice. He plopped himself down on a nearby bleacher and asked, "What do you want to talk about?"
"Um," Bex rubbed her goose-pimpled upper arms with her hands, teeth chattering, "You think we could do this inside?"
"Sure." He stood up, still waddling awkwardly on his skates as he attempted to walk on the threadbare carpeting. "Let's go."
Once back in the snack bar, Jeremy hopped onto a nearby bench, settling next to a green duffle bag with Jeremy stitched on the side. He reached inside to pull out a dingy, gray square cloth, and, raising his foot to rest on his knee, began carefully wiping the accumulated sludge off his skate-blade. Bex took the empty seat next to Jeremy. She looked around and asked, "Is your dad here today?"
"He's at work. He'll be by to pick me up at the end of this session and take me to school."
"You go to school full-time?" A rarity in the skating world. Most kids were either home-schooled or did correspondence classes.
"Yeah. I get first period off because of the skating, that counts as my gym class. But, I do everything else."
"Sounds like a full schedule."
"It's fun. When I don't have anything to do, I get a little crazy, you know?"
"What about your mom? What does she think of all this?"
Jeremy lowered his foot back onto the floor. He looked down at the cloth, kneading it between his fingers. Softly, he said, "She's dead. She died a long time ago. When I was a little kid. Before we moved to Connecticut." Still not looking at Bex, he bent over, untying the skate he'd just dried. "It was an accident. Like in a car. She died. It was before we moved here."
"So it's just you and your dad, then? No brothers, sisters?"
"Just us." Jeremy finished unlacing and took off his boot, dropping it on the floor with a thump. "We don't need anyone else. My dad and I, we're each other's best friends."
Newly unsheathed from the cumbersome leather, Jeremy stretched out his foot and flexed his toes, rotating his ankle this way and that, then letting out a satisfied "ahhh….” Noting Bex watching his ritual, he grinned and mischievously explained, "It's skating's big secret, you know. The only reason we go through the torture of learning to jump and spin is because it feels so great to take the boots off!”
Bex laughed. His deadpan delivery really did make the joke. A regular Jerry Seinfeld, this kid. She said, "You know, if this skating thing doesn't work out for you, you could always get into stand-up comedy."
"That's what my dad says. He says it's important to have a fall-back plan."
"Your dad really doesn't like your skating, does he?"
"Oh, no. No, that's not it," Jeremy said, unlacing his other boot and repeating his ecstatic stretch. "My dad doesn't mind my skating. He says, as long as it makes me happy and I like it, I should be allowed to do it as much as I want. He doesn't even mind the money. What my dad doesn't like is my competing."
"He let you compete at Sectionals."
"That was kind of an accident. I begged him and begged him to let me skate in Regionals. I've been wanting to for such a long time and he always said no. He said just skating for enjoyment and to pass all my tests would be enough. But, I passed my Senior Freestyle and my Moves in the Field test two years ago. I've got no more tests to take. I got bored."
"And you hate being bored, right?"
"Right. So I begged and I begged, and since Regionals were happening right here at the OTC and we wouldn't have to travel or anything, he finally said okay. But, it was supposed to be just Regionals. He didn't think I'd win it and qualify for Sectionals."
"But, you did. And he let you skate in them, too."
"More begging, Ms. Levy." Again with the deadpan delivery. "I'm very good at it."
"So it seems." Bex rested her elbow on the bench, leaning her head on her palm so that she and Jeremy were eye-to-eye. "So how come a master beggar like you can't break his dad's resolve when it comes to skating at Nationals?"
"My dad doesn't believe in competition. He doesn't like what it turns people into. He says it makes them crazy. Like really sick in the head. He doesn't want that for me."
"And you don't mind?"
"I mind it a whole lot. I like competing. I especially like winning. I mean, skating a clean and perfect program is great and all, and I like skating and everything. But, I can skate well on a practice session, you know? When I come to a competition, I like to win."
"Spoken like a true champion."
"Well, that's the plan. Someday. But, see, the problem is, my dad thinks that to be really good in skating, you have to go crazy. He thinks I'm not good enough to win Nationals, and, since he knows I really want to win, he thinks that if I go and see how much better everyone else is than me, then I'll go crazy trying to become as good as they are. Does that make any sense?"
"Actually it does." If Craig Hunt was a lunatic, he was a very reasonable, logical one.
"That's why Toni and I decided you could change his mind."
"Yes, so Toni tells me. I'm not exactly sure how you two expect me to do that, though."
“Toni says you're an expert. Figure skating expert, that's your job. You know who's good enough to be at Nationals and who isn't. So, all I need is for you to tell my dad that I'm just as good as any other guy who's going to be there, and that seeing them, it won't make me crazy. I'll just keep training the way I always have. Going to Nationals won't make me nuts, even if I don't win. 'Cause, you know, I'm not expecting to win my first year and everything. I just want to get out there and, well, I just want to show off a little. That's not so bad, is it?"
Bex smiled. "Actually, Jeremy, the truth is, you're not as good as any other guy who's going to Nationals."
"I'm not?" His previously chipper voice sunk to a whisper, complete with adolescent crack on the word not. He did his best to fight it but Bex thought she saw tears springing to the edges of his lashes. "Oh."
"Jeremy." Bex lowered her head to make sure he could see her face. "You're better."
"I am?" In a split second, the tears were gone, and his eyes beamed a combination of relief and cockiness.
Oh, Bex, thought, to be a bipolar teen again. She wouldn't relive those days for all the ice-chips in the Zamboni.
"Yes, you are. That's why I'm here. I think it would be a crime if you didn't get to skate at Nationals. And, if I want to keep my job, it would be a crime if 24/7 didn't have exclusive rights to your story."
"You can have them!" Jeremy shouted, even though Bex was pretty sure the boy had no idea what that meant. "You can do anything you want with me!"
"As long as your dad approves," Bex reminded.
"Well, yeah, but, you'll convince him, right?"
"We'll see...."
Jeremy didn't seem to have heard her. As soon as s
he uttered the word Nationals, he was a whirling dervish, riffling through his bag, looking for his skates and yanking them back on.
"Come on," he jumped up, pulling Bex by the hand, leading her back towards the arena. "I want you to see my long program."
CHAPTER FOUR
While Jeremy warmed up on the ice and Toni stood by the tape player, waiting for his turn with the music, Bex leaned against the barrier, fiddling with her Beta-Cam to make sure everything would be working perfectly as soon as Jeremy was ready to skate.
As she cleaned the fragile lens with the sleeve of her sweatshirt (very professional, Bex, very producer-like), a heavy set, forty-something woman in a red and white OTC official jacket inched her way down the multiple bleachers until she had moseyed up practically to Bex's elbow. She didn't say a word, and Bex wasn't sure if she was supposed to notice her or not, so she stayed quiet, waiting for her new lurker friend to make the first move. It came soon enough.
"It's Bex, isn't it? Bex Levy? Do you remember me from last season? I'm Amanda Reilly. Lian Reilly's mother."
Lian Reilly was last season's U.S. Ladies' Bronze Medallist. Bex had met them briefly at both the Nationals and the World Championships the previous year.
"Hello, Mrs. Reilly." Bex tried to convey both genuine sincerity and subtle dismissal in the same breath. "Nice to see you again."
"Are you here shooting b-roll for Nationals?" Mrs. Reilly asked.
Shooting b-roll? This woman sure knew her TV jargon, just like Toni. Did everybody in skating these days? Was it as much a part of the program now as learning backward crossovers or a camel spin?
"Yes, for Nationals, and for other events, too."
"Oh, that's wonderful. I'll let Lian know you're here."
"Actually, Mrs. Reilly—"
"Please call me Amanda."
