Far From Normal

by Becky Wallace

  He lifts the little boy off his shoulders and hands the child to his very grateful mom, then he strides over to where I’m standing.

  “Madeline. A word, please?” His expression is closed, jaw clenched.

  I’m guessing that whatever he has to say isn’t for everyone to hear. I sort of expect him to whisk me outside, but instead he steps close, using his body as a barrier to separate us from the crowd. Eyes widen in our direction, and I’m sure people speculate as to why he’s close-talking.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” I loop my fingers through the lanyard around my neck, hoping that onlookers will realize it’s an official badge.

  He bends toward me, hand low on my back, urging me closer so that he can whisper in my ear, and my mind blanks with his proximity.

  “Don’t take any more pictures.”

  “What?” I lean away, needing to watch his lips move so I can process what he’s saying.

  “No pictures of me and the children.”

  My face crinkles in confusion. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Just …” He pauses and runs a hand through his hair. “Just let it be about the kids today, okay?”

  “The rest of the team is taking pictures. And my aunt expects—”

  “Please.” He shoots a look over his shoulder where a half circle of children with a soccer ball is forming near us. Their mothers watch us with interest. “I’ll make it up to you—get you something even better.”

  Seb’s words from the tunnel combine with what Aunt Em said earlier. I’ve got to build a relationship with Gabe, and that’s never going to happen if I do exactly the opposite of what he asks.

  “Okay.” I lick my lips, already nervous about how I’m going to explain this to Emma.

  A real smile, not the too-cheesy one he puts on for the children, breaks across his face. “I’ll text you details tonight.”

  And then he’s off. He swipes the ball and starts to juggle it with Cirque du Soleil skill, rolling it across his shoulders to catch it with the outside of the foot, bouncing it from knee to knee before flicking it up to stall on his head.

  “Show off!” Seb yells from across the room.

  Everyone, including Gabe, laughs. He slows the ball’s roll and drops it at the feet of a frail-looking boy who bursts into applause.

  It’s all so golden—everything Emma wanted to capture—but I didn’t get any of it. Nerves curl into a tight bundle beneath my skin, tingling with anxiety. Did I make a huge mistake?

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  BY THE TIME I ARRIVE AT THE OFFICE BUILDING, MY BRAIN is full of possibilities for ways I can edit the footage, what music would set off Gabe’s speed, hashtags Emma might not have considered. Basically, anything that would make her forget the photos I didn’t get.

  All of the interns are huddled around the front desk, talking to Katie, purses and laptop bags slung over shoulders like they’re about to leave for the day.

  “Maddie!” Katie pushes through the crowd and throws her arms around me. She’s at least seven inches shorter than I am, but it’s a hug that’s as pleasant as it is surprising. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

  “Why? So I can manage the desk tomorrow?”

  She nods like a bobblehead. “Yes!”

  Katie’s laugh is contagious. The yuk-yuk-yuk sound is so unexpected from someone so dainty. Everyone laughs, which feels great considering how awful things were yesterday.

  “I’m totally kidding. I missed having you around today. And it’s my birthday!” She grabs a different grocery tote. This one is a little fancier, with multicolored quilted pockets on the outside. “We were going to head down to an early dinner at Aster Hall to celebrate. Come with us!”

  She practically sticks a pin in the other interns’ bubble of happiness. Mara deflates, face going dead, no smile whatsoever. Javi’s a little slower to follow, as if remembering he’s on Team Mara. Arman’s head whips to check his friends’ expressions and then back to me in a painfully obvious way. His mouth quirks apologetically.

  “You know, I actually have to upload all this video to the server.” I try to pretend I’m oblivious to the uncomfortable haze floating around us, but it’s like one of my brothers’ farts—invisible but impossible to ignore. “If it goes really fast, then I’ll meet you guys. But happy birthday!”

  I have no intention of meeting any of them, and they all know it.

  “Do you want me to order something for you?” Katie asks.

  I’m already edging toward the secret door. “I’m good. Thanks, though.” Once it clicks shut after me, I can only imagine what they’re saying. It’s clear that Mara and her minion, Javi, consider me an enemy. Arman seems cautiously neutral, but everything about him is understated. He’s one of those giant guys with a really soft voice. The few times we’ve spoken, I felt like I needed to lean in to hear him better. Javi is completely opposite, extra loud to make up for his smaller stature.

  Dropping into my desk chair, I try to sort through every interaction, every conversation, anything that might have made them dislike me. I know Mara was upset that I got to work on the Fortunato account, but it wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter. She can’t possibly blame me for being in the wrong place at the right time.

  Or maybe she’s just evil.

  “Hey,” a voice says behind me.

  I spin my chair around and find Katie hovering in my cubicle’s doorway. She’s taken off her giant cardigan, showing her super-toned Iron Woman arms, and she’s pulled her hair out of her bun so it’s all messy beach waves. She made the office-to-evening transition effortlessly.

  “I’m sad they made you feel unwelcome. This is my birthday celebration, and I want you to come.”

  “I honestly have so much that I need to get done. Maybe we can go out tomorrow or another day? We should celebrate your birthday for a whole week!” My smile feels more like the expression you’d make after biting a lemon instead of something your face does naturally.

  Katie reads it, her eyes filling with pity. “Listen.” She stops and goes up onto her tiptoes to scan the rest of the floor. There are a few lights on in the junior executives’ offices, but the cubes around us are empty. “I know why Mara’s mad.”

  “Because I’m working on Gabe’s account.”

  “No. It’s not that.” She hurries to add, “It’s not just that. This is her third year as an intern, and she’s pissed that you got onto a huge, high-profile account so fast. She’s never gotten to work on anything with this much visibility, and she feels like you took away something she earned.”

  “But she’s already got way more responsibility than we do. I know she pulled together all the information from the surveys for the ticket-pricing account.”

  Katie’s nose squishes up. “Ticket-pricing research versus daily interaction with a hot professional athlete?” She makes a balancing scale with her hands and lets one side drop to her leg. “Mara thinks you got the Fortunato account because your aunt is giving you preferential treatment.”

  “No way.” But then the words bite and hold on. “I mean … my aunt thinks he’ll work better with someone he already knows. It could have been you. It could have been Mara. It just happened that I met him my first weekend in the city.”

  I think about my bike crash, the humiliation I felt. I can’t bear to give someone who already hates me—for sort of a good reason—any more ammunition.

  “You’ve got this weird look on your face.” Katie walks the rest of the way into my cubicle and hops up onto the desktop. “Girl, spill.”

  “Aren’t people waiting for you?”

  “They can wait for a minute.”

  “It’s honestly so embarrassing.” I swallow over the lump in the back of my throat and push on. “On the way home from work on Friday, Watford escaped from me, and Gabe and his friends captured him on the beach. Anyway, Gabe was … nice. Even after Watford ate their soccer ball. Then in the breakfast meeting yesterday, I knocked ove
r a big stack of cups, and Gabe realized who I was.”

  Katie sits silent for a few seconds, mulling over this information. “This almost makes me want to get a dog.”

  She’s a little like Max, always finding a silver lining in the dark cloud of my day, and it makes me feel better. “You can borrow Watford anytime.”

  “I will take you up on that. Don’t tease.” She hops off the desk, realizing that the other interns are probably waiting for her. “Also, is it okay if I tell Mara about you and Fortunato? How you met?”

  “Yeah, of course. Please do, if you think it will help.”

  “It might. She’ll just realize you’re the luckiest girl alive.”

  “I totally classify losing my aunt’s dog at the beach and dropping cups in a meeting as evidence of good luck.”

  Katie half pirouettes out my door. “Good things come in unlikely packages.”

  And even though she leaves to go to a party where I wasn’t welcome, I think maybe she’s right.

  THERE’S A DETAILED SET OF DIRECTIONS ABOUT HOW TO LOAD VIDEOS to Velocity’s secure server, make shared versus private folders, and create a password to access them when you’re out of the office. All the safety steps make sense because Velocity keeps a file on every one of their clients, and I know Gabriel’s issues are a pimple compared to the plague that infects some of the other celebrities. That kind of muck should be kept in a dragon-protected vault. Sexual harassment charges. Fraud. Tax violations. You name it, Emma’s got clients who have done it.

  Once everything is loaded, I play with the editing system for so long that I lose track of time. Em pops her head in my cubicle at six, pride on her face. “You’re still here?”

  “Just teaching myself how to edit.” I’m a little nervous to show her what I’ve done, but I pull up the video of Gabe’s feet. Some track star pinned a commercial he did for a shoe company to his timeline, and I figured I could follow that example. I’ve set the video to an electronica song that matches the natural rhythm of his body.

  “That’s perfect.” She squeezes my shoulder. “Here’s how you can take it to the next level: get him talking about the years of work that he’s put into moving that fast. People love hearing a professional athlete’s ability wasn’t a gift from God.”

  I don’t contradict her even though I’m positive Gabe’s talent is a genetic fluke.

  “Find a time to interview him. Get simple answers for now, and then we can rephrase whatever he says and feed it back to him for video.”

  “Great.” My enthusiasm is fake, but I’m not going to get an excellent letter of recommendation by whining about assignments.

  Emma reaches into her purse and pulls out some big gold hoop earrings and takes off her diamond studs. “I’m grabbing dinner with an agent tonight. Do you mind walking Watty? He’s been trapped inside so much lately.”

  “No problem. I’ll take him now.” I disconnect my phone from the computer and delete all the videos.

  “Thanks, Mads. We’ll have dinner together later this week. Anything you want.”

  “Mon Ami Gabi?” The steak frites is my absolute favorite. Emma probably has it all the time, since it’s the restaurant in her building, but I don’t mind repeating the meal.

  “Steak frites again?” Her exasperation is fake. I know she loves them as much as I do. “I guess I can make the sacrifice.”

  She waits while I shut down my computer and grab my bag, and we walk out together. There’s no one in the lobby now, and as we wait outside the elevator doors she says, “I saw your fire again today.”

  “My fire?” Like the fire of embarrassment in my face?

  “I saw the moment you had an epiphany and lay down on the field, totally ignoring the fact that you were in a dress, so you could get that video of his feet. Then you came straight back here and put your idea into action.” She grabs my hand, just like she used to when I was little, and gives it a hard squeeze. “I never doubted that you’d be good at this, Mads. But today you proved you could be great.”

  As the elevator doors slide shut, I check my phone. There’s no message from Gabe. If he blows me off, what am I going to do?

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  EMMA’S WORDS ARE NOT AN EGO BOOST. THEY LAND LIKE A PIANO across my shoulders. The weight of wanting to prove her right and everyone else wrong is crushing. I have to keep reminding myself that I can do this job. I have fire. Emma saw it. I just need William, the other interns, and my family to see it, too.

  I should have talked to her as we left the office about not getting any footage of Gabe with the kids from the children’s hospital. Later, I promise myself. After he texts me tonight and I have something concrete to offer Emma as an alternative.

  A walk with Watford and a carb-heavy dinner will help me figure everything out. I head north toward the lily pond by the conservatory instead of toward the beach. Watford is so grateful to be out of the apartment that there’s a bounce to his step, and his stubby little tail is extra waggly. Emma has a professional dog walker who comes in Monday through Thursday to let him go potty and take a turn around Lincoln Park, but it’s really not enough exercise for an eighty-five-pound monster dog.

  He bounds toward a bush sniffing happily, dribbling three drops of pee onto it, and then trots away. I wish his joy were contagious, that a good mood were a thing you could catch. Wouldn’t it be amazing if something as simple as a walk in the park, a nap in the sun, and a cuddle with someone you love would be enough to alter your perception of a day? This trip to the pond needs to shake my thoughts around, so that maybe the good ones can surface.

  What I really need is someone to help me see this whole situation clearly. And I have a person in mind who owes me a million hours of listening, since I’ve nodded my head and mm-hmm’d for every plot and character problem for as long as I understood those words.

  My mom picks up on the first ring. “Maddie! Hi, honey! I sure miss your face. How is everything going?”

  I smile at the real pleasure in her voice. Despite our different ideas for my future, I know she loves me. “I have a nemesis.”

  “You?” She sounds a little echoey, and when I hear something clicking in the background, I realize it’s the overloud blinker in our ancient Camry. “I don’t believe it. What could you have possibly done in such a short period of time to earn someone’s ire?”

  Ire. Only my mom.

  I give her a very brief rundown of what happened with Mara and a very edited version of how I met Gabe. “And now,” I say as I force Watford onto the path that heads past the Lincoln Park Zoo instead of toward Lake Michigan—he seems a little confused, but he plods on, still happy to be outside—“she’s turned into the villain of my summer internship.”

  “Oh, sweetie. The best villains have justifiable reasons for being awful. You have to remember that this Mara person is the hero of her own life.”

  “It’s hard to do that when she’s such a—”

  “Shh!” she hisses before I can even get the first letter past my lips. “Milo’s in the car.”

  “Sorry.” Then it’s my turn to laugh. “What’s up, Cube?”

  My little brother literally growls like a rabid animal. “I told you not to call me that anymore!”

  Max came up with the nickname “Cube” because our little brother’s real name is Milo Matthew McPherson, and he’s the third McPherson with an M name. It was really cute when Cube was a toddler because he was supper chubby; the name just sorta fit. He’s gotten taller and leaner the last few years, looking more like a Mini Max than anything else, but he’ll always be Cube in my head.

  “You did tell me,” I say, as Watford leaps into a bush. I see the white tail of a rabbit disappear into the distance. Watford whines for a second as I hold him back. “Wish you were here to help me with Watty.”

  “I wish I was too, because that would mean no more math camp.” His voice gets really loud at the end of the sentence, and I can imagine him leaning between the seats to yell i
nto the phone.

  “Hush and sit back,” my mom reprimands. “And put your seat belt back on.”

  I give myself a mental high five because I know my family so well. “Is someone being mean to you?”

  “No,” he mumbles. “It’s just boring.”

  This moody thing he’s doing is almost funny because I know it’s an act. There are days when Milo forgets he’s trying to behave like his older siblings and totally gives in to being a kid. I like him better when he’s all pew-pew sound effects and Lego battles, but I can’t hold on to baby Cube forever.

  “I know, but math camp is good for you.”

  “How would you know?” He sounds farther away now, probably having been smacked in the chest so he’d obey. “Mom never made you go.”

  “Everyone has different gifts, Milo. Maddie’s might not be in math, but she’s amazing at other things. Like … teaching dance to toddlers.”

  I try not to let that sting. “Yeah. Well, Cube, just try to make it fun.”

  “Whatever.”

  My mom and I sigh at the same time, then we both giggle.

  “We’re headed into the store. Call me later if you want to talk more.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Love you guys.”

  There’s a weird, guttural noise in the background, but I don’t know what it is until I hear Mom yell, “Milo! How many times have I told you belching is not appropriate?”

  “I was telling Maddie that I love her in burp language.”

  “Back atcha, Cube.”

  We hang up as I reach the gates of the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool. It isn’t one of Chicago’s most famous locations, but it’s certainly one of my favorites. As much as I love Lincoln Park, Lake Michigan, the energy of the Magnificent Mile, and all the urban offerings, I find my way to this quiet, secluded oasis at least once on every visit to the city. My dad introduced me to it, sharing his reverence for the arching trees and slow-moving water. If I equated all the adults in my life to a particular location, Emma would be Chicago—all flashy and bright and busy. My mom would obviously be Normal—constant, predictable, and the place I’ll always go home to. And Dad would be the Lily Pool—quiet, unshakable, a little rugged.