Every time I tried to get more comfortable and somebody looked at me out of the corner of their eye I was swamped with the terrible thought that, somehow, everybody knew that Jace Barlow had taken me hard and bareback the previous night. They knew that I’d been a virgin yesterday and I wasn’t today. They knew.
“So, overall, it couldn’t have gone better,” said Lucile. “The Mayor was only too happy to talk at length about how his ‘Police in your Neighborhood’ initiative has reduced crime by sixty percent in the last few years, lots of great soundbites.”
“Did you ask about the rumors that the Picolli Crime Family hasn’t been disbanded, it’s just got better at hiding its tracks lately under that new boss… what was the name?” asked Mr. Kinsley from the front of the room near the interactive whiteboard.
Please let them talk about this for the rest of the meeting, I pleaded silently as I looked down with a wince at my woefully inadequate interview notes. How was I supposed to spin an entire article out of the fact that he liked baseball? I couldn’t write a couple thousand words about how having sex with him for your first time would leave your most intimate places feeling sore for at least a day. Maybe more.
I gulped.
“Sure. He laughed it off, said it was just wishful thinking from people who have seen too many gangster movies and have romanticized the past. He said the hardworking people in law enforcement gained the upper hand in the nineties, and the majority of the Mafia family members and associates, the Picollis included, packed their bags and headed for greener pastures a decade ago. There’s no evidence whatsoever of any new boss in the family named Velenodi Picolli. End quote,” said Lucile.
“Well, the crime figures seem to back that up. Go over it with a fine-toothed comb though, because he’s right in a way. The Mafia angle would sell more copies. Anything else?”
“I interviewed Will Norris too, you remember that beat cop from last year? The one who got into some trouble trying to break up a domestic disturbance and the inner-city youths stepped in and saved his life?”
Mr. Kinsley, his hands on the back of his chair as he stood behind it, nodded.
“He had a few new things to say about the night, and he told me a great story about when he got out of hospital and he was able to visit those people. Really inspirational stuff,” said Lucile.
“When will the article be ready for review?” asked Mr. Kinsley.
“Tomorrow morning. I’m just waiting on the research department to fact check it and give me some official statistics to match up with some key points.”
“OK, great. Well, I know why so many of you turned up for this meeting today, so I think we should just get right to it and see what we’ve got to work with on the Barlow story. Kendall? The floor is yours.”
This was worse than those dreams where you think you’re at school and suddenly realize you forgot to wear clothes that day. I forced myself to sit still despite the discomfort, and flicked through my notes as if I was deciding from multiple excellent points to start at.
“Well… um, Jace Barlow is a... uh… very driven man. He’s used his winnings to invest in a number of businesses in various industries. Uh…” I stammered my way through common knowledge for almost a full minute.
“Yeah, but where did he come from?” said Mr. Kinsley. “Who is he? How did he know what businesses to invest in when so many people back the wrong horses? What’s he doing next? What do you have that we can’t get from the Wikipedia page?”
“Um… he… likes baseball…”
Mr. Kinsley let go of his chair and circled the table towards me. “Let me see that.”
He grabbed my notes and flicked through them. It didn’t take long, and when he looked up at me I thought he would probably have the same expression if all I had on those pages were dirty stories about his mother.
“I’m sorry… I… he just kept…”
“What’s ‘art, arrow, OK’?”
“He… I’m really sorry… he thinks art is… OK.”
There must have been twenty people in that room, but for a few seconds you could have heard a pin drop on to a feather pillow. I was so embarrassed, and Mr. Kinsley looked like he was wavering between anger and resignation.
“Art… is OK?” He paused for a moment and then threw up his hands, scattering my notes in the process. “You heard it here first, folks. The first interview Jace Barlow ever gives, it lands in our lap, and art is A-freakin’-OK. Holy crap, Kendall! What happened to the questions we fed you?”
Mr. Kinsley had returned to his spot at the front of the room and was gesturing wildly with his hands as he really got going. Some people in the room seemed to share his anger at the missed opportunity, others were holding back laughter as he tore me a new one.
“He just kept dodging the questions,” I said.
“What happened to the girl that showed up at the doorstep here determined to show me what she could do? Is this it?”
“I-”
“I thought you said he was flirting with you? What happened to that? Lucile. What happened when Renny Ramone flirted with you?”
“I got him to admit that he’d been taking performance enhancing drugs for years, and that all the important matches in the Champ League had been fixed for almost a decade. People went to jail,” said Lucile smugly. “But I can’t imagine Jace Barlow was flirting with… her. I mean… come on, right? Let’s be serious. She’s not exactly his type.”
I’d managed to keep my head held up for this long, but I couldn’t show my face anymore. I looked sadly at my hands in my lap as I concentrated more on trying to fight back tears than the words flying around me.
“Oh, sweetie,” said Lucile. “Don’t feel bad, it’s just different here in the big city. Not everyone can cut it. The boys where you’re from just flirt differently. Probably.”
I wanted to shout from the rooftops that Jace Barlow had fucked me halfway through a wall last night, but knew that would sound even stupider in real life than it did in my head. He did more than flirt with me.
He even… liked me, I thought. He saw something in me worth standing up for, worth defending. He saw something sexy. When I was with him, I had let myself believe it too.
I realized that last night was the first time I’d felt really good about myself for a long time. All my life, when somebody noticed me at all, I usually saw indifference or disappointment. Last night, I looked up at Jace and saw that I was the center of the universe for a moment. What a feeling.
That fleeting illusion had come at a price though. The way Mr. Kinsley was talking, I might be looking for a new job or moving home to my parents once he had the paperwork in order.
The thought of doing either made my heart sink, the latter far more than the former. If I went home, it would be humble pie for dinner for the rest of my life. I was given a golden opportunity and all I had to show for it now was a sore pussy, and even that would fade with time.
The sound of scraping chairs startled me out of my day-mare and I saw that the meeting had apparently come to a close. Without making eye contact with anybody, I crawled around retrieving my notes for reasons I couldn’t have explained, useless as they were.
As I grabbed one piece, I saw the note “group home from 6 years old” and had a flashback to the momentary crack in his expression when I had asked him about that over dinner. My breath caught in my throat as I felt a ray of hope shining through the clouds.
This was the first thread of a story. This was where he came from. All I had to do was get another meeting with him and I would at least know where to start. I’d already, technically, had two meetings with him, so I was already ahead of anybody else in the journalism world, so I had a better chance than anybody. How hard could it be?