AFTER MOMMA GOMEZ DECLARED me too thin and loaded me up on roasted chicken and rice, she let me leave. Elise had forgotten her lunch, so she sent me over to the Video and Repair to bring it to her.
The bell above the door dinged, and Lance Harrington walked in behind me. His light brown hair turned sandy in the summer and he already had a deep tan from helping out at his parents’ farm. He was only a few inches taller than me, but Harrington boys managed to fill out just fine. Elise pinched his cheeks like she used to when I was dating him—he really did have the most pinchable cheeks—and went to let Midnight know she had a customer.
“I’m not here to rent a movie,” he said. “I was hoping you’d be working.”
“I’m not actually working.” On a scale of one to ten, how sad did hanging out at work off the clock make me look? “I’m running errands. And stopped in to say hi.”
“Okay.” He didn’t look like he cared either way. Coincidently, the same look he’d had when I’d told him I wanted to break up. “I just wanted to let you know I’ve been contacted by a couple of reporters and bloggers.”
“What?” I swayed a bit to the side, and Lance put a hand on my arm to steady me. “Why? What did they want?”
“I think …” He bit his lip and looked at the ground. “I think they saw pictures of us on your Instagram before you went private. They wanted to know if we were still together, if you broke my heart, if I knew Baseball Babe.”
“Oh God. I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what’s happening.” First Gram and now Lance. How far into my personal life would this poison spread?
“It’s so bizarre. Momma had a fit when she found out you were Fly Ball Girl. She was following the story, all into it, and then, well …”
I could only imagine what Lance’s good Christian momma thought about that bathroom picture. The chicken and rice I had for lunch threatened to make an appearance all over his shoes. “So, should I change my identity now or …?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He waved my question away, even though I was dying of humiliation all over again. “She thought for a second that one shot of you going into the bathroom was pretty bad, but I told her to think real hard about that. She knows you.”
I didn’t know which made me feel worse, the fact that Lance’s mom so easily believed I’d have a quickie in public with a guy I’d just met, or that it was only because of Lance that she no longer believed it. How many people in town had seen those pictures? How many of them knew me from a distance, but not the way the Harringtons did? If Lance’s mom could buy into Jessica’s lie, I had no doubt most of the town thought I’d done it. Why wouldn’t they? Weren’t pictures supposed to be worth a thousand words? And even if I had, wouldn’t that have been my business? How was this any different from Peeping Toms who ran through towns at night, looking in people’s windows to see if they were getting it on or not?
“Anyway.” Lance scratched his shoulder blade. “I didn’t tell anyone who called about you or us, and I won’t either. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. They’re sniffing around.”
Lance was a good one, and that was why I wouldn’t ever regret him being my first. I hugged him. “Thank you. I mean it.”
Elise gave me a catlike grin when he left. “I forgot to ask you earlier how it went last night with Pax … ton?” She drew out his name as if it were two words, and the look she gave me had me backing up a step. As if she knew what I’d debated doing before I came to my senses and flung myself into the lake.
“It went fine.” I shrugged. “We went swimming.”
“Really?” Her grin stretched wider.
“Yes, really. Why are you looking at me like that?”
Elise wound the end of her long braid around her finger. “I asked him about last night, and you should’ve seen his smile.”
“Is he here? Did he say anything about the bloggers?”
“He’s out on call, and why would I bring that up when I wanted to get the goods on the lake date?”
He and Elise took turns being on call, where one of them would stay at the shop and fix the smaller items that could be brought in, and the other would head out to fix larger things, like appliances. Since Paxton didn’t drive, Elise took more of the appliances, but on the days when it was his turn, Gigi would drive him where he needed to go.
“It wasn’t a date. Nothing happened.” Or would ever happen. I’d just gotten carried away by the romance novel setting and my steady diet of rom-com movies. “And speaking of which, where were you?” The words I could’ve used a buffer last night hung unspoken between us.
She blushed, actually blushed. Oh no. “Me and Midnight …”
“Seriously? Again?”
Things had been tense when they broke up, or stopped hooking up or whatever they were, and had just started getting back to normal. Another reminder of why I needed to stick to the No Coworkers Rule. Elise had almost quit last time, and if she hadn’t been able to go fully on call for that first month, she would’ve. I couldn’t afford that kind of a breakup.
Elise glanced at the storage room, where Midnight was holed up doing paperwork. Or more likely, pressing her ear against the door to listen in on this conversation. “Don’t say anything. I’m not sure where this is going to go, but I want to keep it quiet for now.”
“I’ll tell you where this should go.” I pointed to the garbage can by the door. I hadn’t forgotten how thoroughly my best friend had been shredded the last time. No way would I let that tiny gothic terror hurt her again.
“It’s different this time.” Elise pressed her lips together. “Don’t mother hen me, okay? There’s a lot going on with her that isn’t my place to share, and just trust me. It’s different.”
I held her gaze. “Fine.” It was her life. “But she’s on probation.”
Elise snorted. “So nothing will change.”
I left and went back out to Peg’s car. My shift started in a few hours. I’d be working with Midnight and Paxton, who both had double shifts with two breaks in between. Would Paxton be as curt with me tonight as he’d been in his texts? Ugh. That moment I’d almost kissed him hung over me like a wet wool blanket. Maybe he’d told Elise. Probably, judging from the way she’d circled me like a vulture over a corpse. I didn’t have time to think about it though. I had to run peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes from our garden over to the Brewster farm in exchange for milk, the Neilson farm in exchange for honey, and the Jackson farm in exchange for a chicken, help Gram get dinner in the oven, and get back here for my shift.
Because I still needed to do my part to keep our home running. I still needed the paychecks I got from the Video and Repair. Going viral didn’t do anything to help me get dinner prepared. And rumors whispered about me in town wouldn’t deliver the vegetables waiting for me in Peg’s car.
After I finished up our barters, and a wily chicken at the Jackson farm nearly pecked off my big toe when I got too close to her eggs, I had a few hours before I had to get to work. While my current videos were still doing well, I needed to build on this momentum. Thanks to my deal with Eric, I had the kind of spotlight I’d been working toward for over a year, and I didn’t intend to waste even a second of my fifteen minutes.
I’d planned on uploading a baseball video next, but with Gram in full fair mode, she wouldn’t have time to help me with the costumes. Plus, a romance would’ve been better. Something I could suggestively tag Eric in. The feel of Paxton’s hands around my waist in the lake floated through my mind, and I rummaged around in my closet until I found a white button-down I could tie into a knot above my stomach. It wasn’t Jennifer Grey’s wispy pink lift dress, but I had to improvise on short notice.
Dirty Dancing was right up there with Say Anything as a most watched movie in our house. Mom could (and often did) quote every line. The aftermath of the abortion scene was where I’d learned about reproductive rights, Baby standing up to her father was where I learned how some will stop seeing you as a person once you shatter the illusions of who they want you to be, and the way her father treated Johnny didn’t give me my first lesson in classism (life had done that), but it was an easy way for Mom and Gram to segue into the discussion. I had enough talking points to fill three videos. I didn’t touch any of them. Not when I didn’t have time for my usual routine of handwritten cue cards and hours of research.
Instead I burned one of my favorite movies on hashtag clickbait.
I’d always planned to have my Dirty Dancing video dig into the topics that had shaped my entire worldview, making me a baby feminist at the age of nine. Instead I took ten minutes to wax poetic about the romance between Baby and Johnny. The romance was great, no doubt, but that wasn’t what set Dirty Dancing apart. That wasn’t what made it magic to me. But that was the angle I needed to work Eric into the video.
As I added the graphics to the background, an invisible hand pressed down on my chest. That pressure grew when I uploaded the video. And when I tweeted the link with this one’s for you #BaseballBabe, my palms sweat and the pressure on my chest became heavy enough to make me light-headed. But this was what I wanted. This would get me the views and clicks and a big enough paycheck at the end of the month to leave it all behind.
And if I had to leave pieces of myself behind too, so be it.