“So, I’m to play ‘Simon says’ with this idiot?”
“Think of him as a prissy drill sergeant. He doesn’t want coffee, he wants obedience. You’re his soldier. Do what he tells you.”
“Yes, sir.”
She fetched coffee, scripts, light reflectors, and various other odd little bits while keeping an eye on Hal. After babysitting six younger siblings all her life, it was actually an easy thing to do. When Hal produced the flamethrower to finish out the segment, she quietly fetched the fire extinguisher. Thus, Hal and said producer’s script only burned for a minute before being put out. (The petty little man was wise enough to dodge when the flamethrower swept the column of flame at him.)
While the producer went off to complain to Dmitri, Jane took Hal to the hospital for treatment. Afterward, she took him home.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Hal said as she made sure he got to his apartment. “I can deal with burns. I have a doctorate in biology. I can bandage my own wounds.”
Jane was at the end of her patience. She considered ripping off the bandages and letting him reapply them like he wanted.
Hal unlocked his apartment door, swung it open. “Shit! I’ve been robbed. No. No. Not robbed. Cleaned! I’ve been cleaned! What the hell? Where did this love seat come from? I have a bed! A real bed with clean sheets! Oh! Oh! You’re an angel!”
“The station manager…”
“Dmitri.”
She realized that she had never gotten her boss’s name. “Yes, Dmitri, the station manager, he told me to take care of you. You seem to really need someone on your side. I mean, you’re all alone here, aren’t you?”
His eyes widened and then some pure emotion filled his face. Sorrow. Regret. She didn’t know the man enough to read it but she could tell it was raw and powerful. Then he banished it away with, “Yes, I wanted a fresh new start on a new world. It’s — it’s been harder than I thought it would be. God, I need a drink.”
“I think you’ve had enough to drink.” She blocked his move toward the bottles of alcohol that Rachel had collected together on a side counter as if it were some kind of minibar. “Look, as far as I can tell, Dmitri has given you a lot of rope. All you’ve done is hang yourself with it. Why don’t you actually do something useful with all that freedom?”
“Like what?”
“People don’t use flamethrowers on weeds here. They use them on steel spinners. You can’t get a clear shot at the spiders because of their webbing, so you’ve got to burn your way through the nests. People like you — the people who are new to Elfhome — don’t know that. A lot of them just ignore the nests, thinking that the spiders never leave them. They don’t realize one spinner egg sack contains a thousand babies that scatter on the wind. If more people burned out nests when they found them, there’d be fewer spiders all over the city. We could get ahead of the problem if everyone was focused on it.”
He was nodding. “Yes! Yes! That’s what I wanted to do when I came here!” He surprised her and flung his arms around her in a tight hug. Unfortunately, it landed his face in her chest. “Oh, sorry.”
He drifted away from her, embarrassed and uncertain. “So, you’re eighteen, huh? You seem a lot older. I guess part of it is that you’re tall and…umm…not starry-eyed. But yes, I want to do something important. Something that changes lives. Not distributing horticultural morsels to the unwashed masses.”
Jane nodded as she parsed the last bit. She’d never actually heard anyone use those words aloud. “I figure that we wrap up this week’s show, get it on the air, and then do the next show on steel spinners.”
“Yes!” Hal rubbed his hands together. “We have the flamethrower. We just need a nest and a script.”
“We can write the script.” Jane figured that it couldn’t be too hard. She had gotten an A-minus in AP English. “We just need to walk people through the basics. How to recognize nests before you walk into them. How to clean them out. Yadayadayada.”
She sifted through the boxes until she found a box marked Kitchen. She took out her knife and cut it open. There was a large, mysterious, paper-wrapped bundle in the box that smelled horrible. She unwrapped it to find a trash can still holding rotting garage. “What the hell?”
Hal shook his head and began to tear packing tape off the other boxes. “I had the movers pack up my place in Los Angeles. Faster. Less painful. At least in theory. The station footed the bill. The movers were weirdly inefficient; I suspect because they were paid by the box.”
“Okay.” She put down the trash can and filled the empty box with bottles of alcohol.
“What are you doing?” Hal asked.
“Today is the first day of your new life,” she said. “I have nothing against drinking. My family were moonshiners during the Prohibition. But when you show up at work, drunk and waving a gun, it’s time to go cold turkey.”
“No, no, no, no.” He started to reach for the bottles.
She stopped him with a cold look. “You will listen to me or I will hurt you.”
He flinched back. “Do you know how expensive a good bottle of scotch is?”
She eyed the bottle that he tried to take out of the box. “Old Crow?”
“That’s a whiskey and it’s not expensive, but some of my scotches are a hundred dollars a bottle.”
“I might be eighteen but there’s very little about alcohol that I don’t know. It’s part of my family business to know. If you had anything worth that much, you’d have drunk it all. You can have this.” She pulled out what she judged the best of the scotch that he owned. It was also the bottle with the least amount of liquid still left in it. “I’ll give it back a bottle at a time.”
“You are not in charge of me.”
“Yes, I am.”
“That’s not how all this works.”
“It is now.”
They stared at each other in silence. She wasn’t sure what his life was like up to this moment, but she had had staring contests like this with her brothers since she was four. You drew the line in the sand and stood your ground until the other person caved.
His anger slowly gave way to bewilderment and then something like hope. “You’re really going to take care of me?”
“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow at the station. I’ve made a key to your apartment. If you don’t show up, I’ll come get you. I will not be gentle. If I were you, I’d be at the station at eight-thirty.”
“Right,” he said slowly and then smiled.
“Good night, Hal.”
“Good night, Jane.”
It had taken a year to dry Hal out, as any little setback had him crawling back into any bottle he managed to hide from Jane. It had taken another year of chewing through Earth-trained producers until Jane learned how to do their job. It was a crazy two years total. Between her first day and the following seven hundred days of fighting with Hal, producers, and Dmitri, she hadn’t left the best impression on her coworkers.
The next six years after that rocky start had repaired her image a little. Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden became the station’s top show. Hal had gone from unknown to local icon. Jane learned the names of all the other coworkers and was friendly with them, but none of them were, strictly speaking, friends.
Nor was Jane particularly close to any of them. For example, she had totally missed the fact that Ginnilee Berger, who normally handled housing for new hires and interns, had gotten pregnant and returned to Earth in June due to the pregnancy being high-risk. As far as Jane was concerned, the woman had suddenly vanished without explanation — at least, until someone explained her disappearance to Jane in July. Jane couldn’t say that she knew any employee any better than she had known Ginnilee.