Kulti(5)

“Where is he, anyway?” I asked.

Gardner actually looked around like the question surprised him. “You know, I have no clue. I guess they put him in a different room?”

We got our answer a second later when the same PR rep who had just made an appearance was back, the corners of her mouth twisted downward. “We have a problem.”





Chapter Two





“Sal, no.”

“Yes.”

“Sal, I’m not kidding. Not even a little bit. Please. Please. Tell me you’re joking.”

I laid my head back against the headboard and closed my eyes, giving myself a grim smile of defeat. All was lost. This afternoon had been real, and there was no escaping it. So I told Jenny the truth, “Oh, it happened.”

She groaned.

Jenny was a true friend, like one that felt the worst of your pain for you, suffering right along with you; she let out a groan that I could feel from over a thousand miles away. My humiliation was her humiliation. Jenny Milton and I had been friends from the moment we met each other at camp for the United States national team—the ‘best’ players in the country—five years ago. “No,” she groaned, she choked. “No.”

Oh, yes.

I sighed and relived the twenty minutes in front of the cameras that afternoon. I wanted to die. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, but it was definitely one of those few moments that I wished I could go back and redo differently. Or at least go all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and pretend they never happened. “I’m going to dye my hair, change my name and go live in Brazil,” I told her evenly.

What did she do? She laughed. She laughed and then snorted, and then laughed a little more.

The fact that she didn’t try to tell me everything was okay meant that I wasn’t overreacting to the events that had transpired hours before.

“What do you think my chances are that no one ever sees the entire thing?”

Jenny made a noise that gave the impression she was actually putting some thought behind the question. “I would say you’re out of luck. I’m sorry.”

My head hung and my chest puffed out in a suffering laugh-slash-dry cry. “On a scale of one to ten, how screwed?”

There wasn’t a response until there was, and it was sharp and tight. A high laugh that let me know Jenny was feeling it down to her toes. She was laughing like she did every other time I’d done something incredibly embarrassing. Like waving back at a stranger that I thought had been waving at me—he wasn’t, there’d been someone behind me. Or the time I skid across a freshly mopped floor and busted my ass.

I shouldn’t expect any different.

“Sal, did you really…?’

“Yes.”

“In front of everyone?”

I grunted. I could barely think about it without tossing my cookies and wanting to find myself a cave and hibernate forever. It was over and life would go on. Ten years from now no one would remember, but…

I would. I’d remember.

And Jenny, Jenny would remember especially if she ever found the footage. And she would, I knew she would. She was probably already trolling websites looking for Sal Casillas’s entry into those video compilations people did for Fail of the Week.

“Would you stop laughing?” I snapped into the receiver when she couldn’t stop cracking up.

She laughed even harder. “One day!”

“I’m hanging up on you now, bitch.”

There was a loud snicker, followed by another, and then one more piercing gut-laugh. “Give… me… a… minute,” she wheezed.

“You know, I called you because you’re the nicest person I know. I thought who isn’t going to give me shit? Jenny, Jenny won’t. Thanks a lot.”

She gasped, and then she laughed even more. There was no doubt in my mind she was reliving the events of my day in her head and finally enjoying the humor in them—the humor anyone could have when it wasn’t them that had embarrassed themselves in front of the media.

I pulled my phone away from my face and held my finger over the red button, imagining myself hanging up the call.

“Okay, okay. I’m fine now.” She did these weird breathing exercises to calm down before finally getting it together. “Okay, okay.” A weird wheezing noise came out of her nose, but it only lasted a split second. “Okay. So, he didn’t show up? Did they say why?”

Kulti. The entire afternoon had been his fault. All right, that was a lie. It’d been my fault. “No. They said he had some travelling issues or something. That’s why they made Gardner and I do the conference by ourselves.”