“Holy crapola!” he shouts. “I gotta try that. Who’s with me?”
* * *
That’s how I find myself in the bucket of a cherry picker at eight the next night, twenty five feet into the air over the Long Island rink the team uses for training camp.
A cherry picker! It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of heights.
“Why does a hockey rink have a cherry picker?” I ask Wilson, who’s in the basket with me. He’s my self-appointed PR assistant, even if I can’t figure out why he’d bother.
“To hang jerseys and banners from the ceiling!” he says, as if that should be obvious to me. “Hey Jimbo!” he shouts to the equipment manager, who’s down on the ice. “The two ball is outa whack.”
“On it!” Jimbo yells back. He adjusts the ball, tucking it back into formation. I had to drive around Long Island today looking for billiard balls, because Wilson said that the pucks wouldn’t have the right mass to pull off combination shots on ice.
I spent a hundred bucks, too, before Georgia offered to reimburse me. “There’s a budget for this foolishness,” she’d said cheerfully. “Just save your receipts.”
Did I mention this is a strange job?
“Who’s going to break?” Wilson calls down to his teammates.
“Me!” Castro says, skating into view with the cue ball in his hand. He sets it down on the ice.
I’ve got my phone clamped to the bucket, and now I press record. “Hold still,” I say to Wilson, who’s so heavy that the cherry picker shakes a little whenever he moves.
“Roger dodger.” He gives me a grin, like he’s never had so much fun.
And as soon as Castro hits the cue ball with his stick, I’m having fun, too. The break works perfectly, cracking into the number one ball with a satisfying smack, and scattering the balls in every direction.
Tankiewicz actually has to jump over one that’s heading his way on the ice.
“Stripes!” Castro yells as the number thirteen crosses through one of the corner “pockets” on our makeshift pool table. The so-called table is about thirty feet long, with wooden four-by-fours for bumpers. Those set us back eight dollars each, and Wilson bought them at Home Depot an hour ago, cutting them with a hand saw he picked up for thirty bucks. Then I painted them dark green for another fourteen bucks.
The pockets are just gaps in the table’s outline. Since Castro only sank a single ball, now he’s circling the table on skates, trying to find his second shot.
“Betcha can’t pull off a combination on the number ten,” Tank taunts him.
Castro does a little spin move and takes the bait, lining up his shot and firing.
“This is genius,” Wilson says as the balls clack into one another. “I play winner!”
* * *
It’s midnight by the time we arrive back at the hotel. The game was such a hit with the players that everyone wanted a turn. I’ll get several videos out of this footage—three cutthroat games that will be super fun for fans to watch, plus a couple of other silly antics I captured from my perch above the action.
“Thanks for all your help,” I say to Wilson as we walk down the carpeted hallway at the hotel. “That was really fun.”
“Yah, the funnest,” he agrees, smiling at me.
I pull out my key card and stop in front of my door. “Can’t wait to see this footage.”
“Hey, I could pour you a beer and we can celebrate.”
“Oh, no thanks. I’m not really into beer. And I have a million hours of editing ahead of me.”
“Kay,” he says with a shrug. “Night, Stacey.”
“Night!”
He strides down the hallway on those long legs, and I swipe my card past the sensor.
“Wow,” another voice says, and I whirl around to find a woman standing there in the hallway, her own key card in hand. “You said you’re not into beer?” She shakes her head. “Girl, that wasn’t about the beer.”
My mouth hinges open in surprise. “What?”
“That hockey player totally hit on you.” She shakes her head again, like I’m completely obtuse. “I’d be into anything that man wanted from me. Such a waste.” Then she goes into her room and shuts the door with a loud click.
He was hitting on me?
That couldn’t possibly be true.
Could it?
Oh my God.
I stand there like a dummy for a beat too long, and end up having to unlock my door a second time. I push inside, disgusted with myself.
Why am I so slow on the uptake? Was he really hitting on me? I’d assumed he was just a fun guy taking pity on the hapless intern. And maybe he was. How does anybody know the difference?
I march over to my bed and flop my body onto it. I’m going to be single my whole life, apparently. Flirting is just as confusing to me as social media. I’ll never learn the tricks. I’ll never understand the little codes and hashtags that other people seem to soak with no apparent effort.
I’m doomed.
And I still have several hours of editing ahead of me.
3
It takes me three hours to edit the first two videos. I label one of them as Match One and the other as Match Two, and when I show them to Georgia in the morning, she claps her hands in delight.
“These are adorable. And did you see how many new followers we got after the cake check video?”
“No, how many?”
She barks out a laugh. “That was a rhetorical question, because I thought for sure you’d be checking every hour. That’s what obsessive publicists do.”
“I guess we both know now that I’ll never understand this job.”
Smiling, she shakes her head. “You’re adorable. But you also got a hundred thousand new followers yesterday.”
I blink. “Did you say a hundred thousand? Because of butts?”
“Because of competition and charm,” she corrects. “And—fine—also butts. This pool table thing is going to impress people, too. So what do you have planned next?”
“Uh…” I rub my tired eyes. “Coffee.”
“Good plan. But you don’t have another idea?”
“Not yet,” I admit.
“Well, now that our audience is on the rise, we need to feed them something new today. What if you did a video featuring yourself?” she asks.
“No!” I yelp. “That’ll never work. I’m not very interesting.”
“So what?” Georgia says. “Think of all those viewers who follow the team—they’d like to be you, right? Not every girl gets a week at training camp to see it all firsthand. They’d like to meet a hockey player and get a fist bump, you know?”
“Sure,” I say, because now that I’ve gotten to know a few hockey players, I totally see her point. Except that every time I remember turning down Wilson’s offer to share a beer last night, I feel a cold shiver of embarrassment. What was I thinking?
“Exactly. So just…show that. Show how much fun it is to be here. Keep it simple, and have something new this afternoon, okay?”