Crush

by Crystal Hubbard

  “You’re damn right about that,” Miranda snapped. “If Bernard hadn’t dragged me to that concert, I wouldn’t have nearly been squished to death at Lucas Fletcher’s feet.”

  “You’re only focusing on the negatives here, Miranda,” Meg said, sounding every bit like the bossy older sibling Miranda never had. “We have a chance here to give the public something they don’t ordinarily see. It’s a real-life Cinderella story.”

  “Only because you’re trying to turn it into something it isn’t,” Miranda charged, frustration strengthening her reluctance to cooperate. “I was being crushed and he saved me. He did what any normal, caring person would have done. I saw the television footage of the crush. Lucas pulled five other people out of that wild crowd.” She took a deep breath and really launched into attack mode. “Do you know how hard it is for me to be taken seriously as a sports reporter in this town? This is Boston! It’s an old-boy, all-boy town. This fairy tale princess crap will undermine my credibility. I take enough heat if I dare to wear a skirt on the job, and I can’t have Lucas Fletcher hanging around my neck. Can’t you find some other sucker to manipulate?”

  Rex spent a moment tapping his tented fingertips on his desk. Behind him, a dizzying view of Boston Harbor featured the colorful yachts and boats enjoying a pretty October day on the dark blue water. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but clouds aplenty formed in Rex’s sixty-five-year-old face.

  “Quite simply, Miranda, Mr. Fletcher wants you,” Rex said. “I must say that I’m sorely disappointed in your unwillingness to be a team player for the Herald-Star. As the sole woman on my sports writing staff, I’ve always taken great pride in your ability to adapt to trying circumstances, both in-house and out in the field. I always thought you were made of tougher stuff than most.”

  Miranda’s lips pulled into an icy smile. “Don’t make this personal, Rex.”

  “Then let’s keep it professional.” He leaned forward, his palms flat on his desk. “Consider this engagement with Lucas Fletcher an assignment. If you don’t take it, then you won’t be fulfilling your end of your employment contract and I’ll be well within my rights as publisher to demote you, or even terminate you.” His ace in the hole played, Rex sat back in his leather swivel chair.

  Miranda seethed. Seven years ago she had become the Herald-Star’s first full-time female sportswriter, and was still the only female member of the department. She had fought with managers and athletes in just about every sport, and waged full battles with an all-male editorial board that lived, ate and breathed all things sports…and therefore believed that they knew more than she did.

  Ironically, the one person who had been her staunchest supporter was Jed “Hodge” Hodgekins, the head of the sports department. He had treated her the same as any of his other writers, perhaps even better in that he gave her a bit more leeway in pursuing stories. Miranda was a crackerjack writer and reporter, and she knew it. Fortunately, so did Jed. But even his support might not be enough to counter Rex’s threat. No matter how capable she was, or how much Jed admired and valued her, Rex Wrentham had supreme power. As owner and publisher of the Herald-Star, he could fire her in a heartbeat and no one could do a thing to stop him.

  Meg broke the uncomfortable silence. “Most women would die for a chance to have dinner with Lucas Fletcher.”

  “I almost did,” Miranda reminded her.

  “It’s just one dinner, Miranda,” Dee piped in from the far corner of the room.

  Just one dinner, Miranda thought. One dinner that I’m being forced into. One night of my life, which suddenly seems very much out of my control.

  “Do I absolutely have to have a Herald-Star reporter with me?” Miranda asked.

  “Of course.” Rex’s expression brightened, his thin lips vanishing altogether in his satisfied smile. “That’s the whole point of the arrangement. To share your experience with our readers.”

  “Could I pick the reporter?” Miranda peeped over her shoulder at Dee.

  Rex exchanged a meaningful glance with Meg, who winked at him as if to say, “I can handle Dee.”

  “Okay,” Rex agreed. “You choose your reporter.” His knuckles tapped a merry beat on his desk blotter. “We have a deal, then? Dinner with Lucas Fletcher on Friday?”

  “Sure,” Miranda said dispassionately. “Dinner. Friday. And I choose my reporter.”

  * * *

  “Hey, Penney, you’re alive!” called Joe “Sully” Sullivan, the head of the sports copy desk. “I thought you were a gone goose. Told you not to go to that fruity concert.”

  “Yes, Sully, I was forewarned.” Miranda walked past his cluttered desk to a wall of cubbyholes and retrieved her mail. She stood at a horseshoe-shaped configuration of desks that comprised the sports editorial department and sorted through her mail.

  “Lookin’ good, Penney.” Oren “Krakow” Piekarski, one of the copy editors, sidled up to Miranda. At six-foot-seven and one hundred fifty five pounds, Krakow was built like a stilt. Almost a full foot taller than Miranda, he loomed over her shoulder to nose into her mail. “Any promotional freebies for your ol’ pal, Krakie?”

  Miranda handed him the wallet-sized Boston Bruins game schedule included in her press packet. Krakow looked like he’d been genetically engineered for basketball, but he loved hockey, and gifting him with the meager offering would save him the trouble of stealing it later. Pleased with his token, Krakow retreated to his desk.

  “Hodge has been eyeing the halls for you,” warned a voice over Miranda’s right shoulder. The voice belonged to Paul O’Shea, the department’s Methuselah. Paulie had been hired fresh out of Boston University to cover the baseball beat. Twenty-two years later, he was the senior member of the sports editorial staff, having given up the reporting gig—and the travel that came with it—upon the birth of his twins. With a mortgage and ten-year-old daughters in private school, Paulie was serving a life sentence at the Herald-Star.

  “How are you, chica?” Paulie asked in the one moment of seriousness Miranda was likely to get from him.

  “Good. Considering.” She tucked her mail into her kidskin backpack, which she slung over her shoulder.

  “There was a good story on the Brazilian national soccer team on the Associated Press newswire yesterday. I forwarded it to you by e-mail. Thought you’d like to catch up on the ol’ home team once you finished your convalescence.”

  Miranda giggled in spite of her sour mood. “I was only in the hospital for half a day, Paulie. I’m back now, good as new, so Rex and Meg can get on with embarrassing me to death.”

  “Hang in there, kid.” Paulie gave her shoulder a warm squeeze. “They can only kill you once.”

  Miranda smiled and started for her desk. Most of the copy editors in place along the rim paid her no mind, other than to glance at the front of her shirt as she approached or the back of her jeans once she had passed. She was accustomed to the crude behavior, but it bothered her no less now than it had on the first day she walked into the sports department.

  Sports wasn’t like the other departments in the newsroom. The entire building was a virtual shambles, with water-stained ceiling panels and decades-old newspapers piled shoulder high in just about every corner. The News, Sunday Features and Arts & Entertainment departments had a nice mix of male and female employees, but overall, the Herald-Star remained overwhelmingly white. The one black female news writer had left the paper two years ago, to marry some doctor in her hometown of St. Louis. There had been a black man in the Financial section, but he’d left after getting an offer to write for the Wall Street Journal.

  The Sports department was the most homogeneous. Miranda was the only female employee and the only person of color. Sports had a long history of testosterone overload, and Miranda had volunteered to be the only woman in a world of Archie Bunkers and Peter Pans when she accepted the sports writing position Hodge had offered her. Her fellow reporters and editors had been brutal. Some of them had been convinced that she’d been hired because
of her father’s fame as a former major leaguer. Clayton Penney hadn’t set any big records on any of the teams he’d played for, but he’d always been a reliable, all-purpose player whose skill thrilled male fans and whose dark good looks excited the women.

  Others on the rim had arrived at another conclusion about Miranda’s hiring as evidenced by the nickname “Double D,” which had sprung up by her second day on the job. She’d first assumed that calling her Double D was a cruel reference to her extremely small bust size, like calling a chubby guy Slim. But then Bernie had emerged from Arts & Entertainment to introduce himself. He explained that Double D meant Double Duty. Miranda, being half African American and half Brazilian, gave Human Resources the opportunity to check off two boxes on its minority employee census with a single hiring.

  The nickname eventually lost its luster, and the boys in sports resorted to schoolyard tactics, teasing her about her clothes (“What’s with the bandannas, Double D? You ridin’ with the gauchos today?”), her hairstyle (“Another ponytail, Double D? I thought you people liked big hair!”), her taste in sports (“Soccer is queer, Double D!”), her ethnic heritage (“If you’re black and Hispanic, how come you don’t have an ass? You should have twice as much!”) and her writing (“You write like a girl, Double D.”)

  Once her three-month trial period had ended, she had spoken to Hodge about their flagrantly inappropriate comments and he had severely upbraided the entire rim. The guys had given her the cold shoulder from then on, and completely butchered her copy…that is, until she’d threatened to tell Hodge about their late-night video club.

  Miranda, making an unexpected visit to the office after a Red Sox game that had run into extra innings, had caught the guys hooting and hollering at a videotape…Forrest Hump, Shakespeare In Lust, or something of that nature. The guys were so accustomed to ignoring her, Miranda witnessed their debauchery for a full ten minutes before Krakow had noticed her and rushed to eject the tape.

  Sure that she would rat them out, the guys suddenly began treating her with a nauseating level of courtesy. Over the years, some of the guys—Paulie, Krakow and Sully—had come to genuinely like and respect her. The rest of them either quietly envied her position as a reporter or lived in fear that she would expose their down time good time.

  Miranda kept her eyes forward as she passed her co-workers, friends and adversaries. The Herald-Star was just a job. It wasn’t her life. The past two days had shown her that. She made a mental note to remind herself of it often as she dropped her backpack beside her cluttered desk.

  “Penney!”

  What now? Miranda sighed and turned toward the corner office, where Hodge stood in the doorway. Hodge, a former college baseball standout and major leaguer, still had the athletic build and cool demeanor that had made him one of the most intimidating switch hitters in the American League. Hodge could have been a great big league manager, but Miranda thanked her small and distant lucky star that he had chosen to manage the Herald-Star Bad News Bears instead of a major league club.

  “What’s up, Hodge?” she asked.

  Unsmiling, he raised a hand and beckoned her into his office. His gruff expression melted the instant she entered. He closed his door, but a couple of the horse racing editors stared through the glass walls as if they could read lips.

  Hodge didn’t sit at his desk. Instead, he took one of the office chairs, his back to the door. His wide body blocked Miranda from the inquiring eyes that passed back and forth in front of the office. “If you need a few more days, you got ’em, Randy.”

  He was the only person who called her that. She had applied for the reporter’s job under her University of Maryland byline of Randy Penney, to increase her odds of a callback. Hodge had called her back, hired her, and had insisted that she use her given name at the Herald-Star.

  “I’m fine. Really.” A strand of her dark hair had escaped her bandanna, and she tucked it behind her ear. Hodge had practically met her ambulance at the Metro Medical Center emergency room, and his concern for her still shone in his gentle brown eyes.

  “I’m behind you,” Hodge said firmly. “Two hundred percent. If you don’t want to do this thing on Friday, I’ll go to bat for you. Rex will have me and the communications workers union to go through if he tries to fire you.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me.” She took a deep breath and sat up straighter, a tense weight suddenly lifted from her shoulders.

  Hodge was a man of his word, and he’d always supported her, even when they both knew she was in the wrong or teetered on the edge of fine lines better left uncrossed to get a story. He was totally loyal to his family, his friends and his employees, and had become the father Miranda never had.

  “I know you’re perfectly capable of handling this yourself.” Hodge’s heavy black eyebrows met in a serious scowl. “But I’ll speak to Rex, if you want to cancel this fraudulent date thing.”

  Miranda pensively scratched at the right knee of her jeans. It would be so easy to let Hodge handle everything and go on with her life as it had been before the concert. Of course, she probably wouldn’t still have a life if Lucas hadn’t saved her. The least he deserved was a thank you. In person.

  “I can go through with it.” She lifted her gaze to meet Hodge’s. “Rex will sell his papers, Meg and Dee will get their big scoop and I’ll get a free meal.”

  Hodge stood and patted Miranda’s shoulder. “Watch yourself, Randy. I’m sure this rock star is used to getting what he wants, and you’re a very pretty girl.”

  “I’m not a girl at all,” Miranda said, Hodge’s compliment so inconceivable that it didn’t even register. “I’m a grown woman who can take care of herself. Besides, a Herald-Star reporter will be with me.”

  “Meg LaParosa.” Hodge shuddered. “That’s supposed to give me a sense of relief?”

  “Sure.” Miranda stood to leave. “Meg will hog every speck of his attention. Lucas Fletcher will forget that I’m even in the room.”

  * * *

  Friday arrived before Miranda was ready for it. Even worse, it arrived before Bernie was ready. He took a sick day to help Miranda make the most important decision of all regarding her dinner with Lucas: what to wear.

  Having awakened her at seven a.m. with a cell phone call from right outside her front door, he now stood at the sliding doors of her closet, his hands on the tiny brass knobs. Miranda tugged a pillow over her head, closing out Bernie’s endless prattle and the bright light filtering through the giant circle of stained glass forming the east wall of her bedroom.

  Bernie threw open the doors and shrieked in horror.

  “What?” Miranda cried, bolting upright in her bed. “Did you see a spider?”

  Bernie placed a palm over his pounding heart. “For what you pay for this place, there had better not be a bug within six blocks. But I would have preferred seeing ticks, fleas and bumblebees to this.” He pinched the skirt of the one dressy dress she owned and lifted it. “Please, explain this to me.”

  She squinted against the blinding morning light. “Um…it’s a dress, Bernie. I wore it to the Baseball Writers dinner last year, remember?”

  Bernie harrumphed. “How could I forget? You were the only female writer there who looked like my Grandma Tillie.”

  “You don’t have a Grandma Tillie.” Miranda swung her long legs over the side of her bed. She stood and stretched while Bernie inspected and insulted the garments hanging in her closet.

  “Miranda, this just won’t work. T-shirts and jeans won’t cut it tonight.”

  She glanced at the Starbucks cup on her bedside table. She lifted it, to find it empty. “Thanks for bringing me coffee.”

  Bernie inhaled deeply and gazed at the ceiling. “I just love the smell of sarcasm in the morning.” He pulled out a long-sleeved dress made of black jersey. “This looks like something Morticia Addams would donate to Goodwill.” He clucked his tongue. “This is pathetic. It’s a shame, the way you dress that body of yours. You’ve got the best
legs I’ve ever seen, and I’m the only one who’s ever seen them.”

  “My knees are too knobby.” She shuffled in her socks over to the closet.

  “Your skin is prettier than Christina Milian’s,” Bernie said.

  “Just yesterday you said I was ashy.” She closed her closet and steered Bernie toward the stairs. “I have to pee.”

  “You might want to swig a little Listerine while you’re in there.” Bernie went back down to the main section of her apartment.

  Her upstairs bathroom was separated from the bedroom by a dark green velvet curtain rather than a door, so she heard him clearly when he hollered up at her as he started breakfast in her kitchen. “Who’s that Jamaican sprinter you interviewed last month? The one with the great abs?”

  “They all have great abs,” she answered.

  “Your belly is just as nice. A few million more sit-ups, honey, and you’ll have a six-pack, too.”

  “The only six-packs I want come in cans,” Miranda called down as she placed a line of toothpaste on her toothbrush. “I can’t help but notice that you’ve failed to comment on my upper deck.”

  “I’ve never been much of a breast man, which is probably why you and I get along so well.”

  “When God handed out the ‘B’s I opted for brains,” Miranda said over a mouthful of toothpaste foam.

  “And beauty,” Bernie hollered up.

  Even though she was alone in the bathroom, Miranda blushed. She spat out the toothpaste, rinsed her mouth, then splashed her face with cool water. She studied her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She had never thought of herself as beautiful. Or pretty. Or even cute. The best assessment she could give herself was that she wasn’t ugly. Her legs were too gangly, her hair too straight and plainly brown, her eyes too tiny and close together, Seabiscuit’s nostrils were smaller than hers, she barely had breasts, her feet were like ping pong paddles, and as she brought her face closer to the mirror and squinted, she could have sworn that she actually had a mustache.

  Unlike her younger sister, Calista, she had inherited none of the distinctive and beautiful physical traits of her Brazilian mother and African-American father.