Page 29 of Cuts like a Knife
As I work and the plane makes its way to our destination, I fall into more and more of a funk. Doing my job has a tendency to do that to me these days, but I can’t very well just wait for the axe to fall. I have to try.
Luckily, once we land, my spirits lift automatically. The airport is tiny and the ground crew brings over one of those big rolling staircases so we can disembark100.
The warm, sea-salt air and bright sunshine hit me at exactly the same time, and as I watch the tops of the scrubby palms swaying in the breeze, I take a deep, cleansing breath and feel a bit of my terror and tension fall away.
This is a free trip. To the Bahamas!
Maybe this job isn’t all bad.
Too bad I’ll be losing it soon101.
Chapter Eight
Surprisingly, Callum is waiting for me just inside the airport doors.
“You waited?”
“We’re obviously traveling together,” he replies. “Not my fault you couldn’t secure a decent seat. You might want to work on planning ahead, kiddo.”
“Actually, it was your fault,” I mutter, just under my breath. Callum seems to have forgotten that he made me pick up his stupid passport for him. I would have been on time otherwise. But he pretends not to have heard me. “It’s not like Lars is going to approval separate cabs to the hotel, anyway. Don’t flatter yourself, Madison, you’re not that important.”
“Why did you want me on this trip, anyway?” I ask.
“So you could do a little work, frankly. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you slacking. Why don’t you tell me your pitches? We’re here for five days, so I’m expecting you to bring in at least … twenty five solid stories.”
“Twenty five stories? In less than a week?”
“Aim for five a day. You know the drill. It’s not a lot, Madison.”
The thing is, twenty five stories in five days is a lot. It’s way more than I have ever had to produce for Citidaze, which is a monthly publication. I used to have to produce five stories a day at at Flash, which was a daily, but we all know how that turned out…
As if he’s read my mind, Callum says, “Five stories a day is what you did at Flash, isn’t it? Pretty sure I remember hearing that from Lars when he hired you. He was very impressed. You didn’t make that up now, did you?”
“No, Callum, I didn’t make it up.”
“It’s CJ. And great, so it shouldn’t be a problem. What have you got so far?”
As we make our way through the blessedly short security line and back out into the sunshine to wait for a cab, I start walking him through the pitches I came up with on the plane.
My performance anxiety comes in handy. I’ve produced way more than fifteen total ideas already. The problem is, they’re not very good ideas. In fact, they’re mostly filler. Luckily, that’s what Citidaze is, and besides, Callum barely seems to be listening. He’s probably just putting me though my paces as some sort of power trip anyway.
The fact that he brought up my old gig has me shaken. No one knows. No one knows that Flash fired me.
I met Lars at a networking party right before I was let-go and he tried to recruit me and gave me his card. I’d planned to throw it away. Then I was sacked, and after a little window of drinking wine and crying, I panicked, had a brain wave, and called him. I let him think he’d successfully poached me, so he never even bothered to check my references. Had he, he would have found out that I had none102.
And just like that, I was saved.
I was fired, dejected, ashamed, and would probably have to live the rest of my life in a state of heightened anxiety, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for people to find out the truth about what happened, but … I had a new job.
I would still have paycheck coming in. Maybe, I thought, the utter shame of what happened could stay buried? Maybe, just maybe, I could skate by, relatively unnoticed, and be saved from utter ruin?
And that’s sort of what happened. For the past couple of years, everything’s been fine. I fell from grace, but not too far. And slowly, the threat of anyone finding out lessened and I stopped being afraid all the time. For the first six months or so, I was crazed103 but the terror went away for the most part. It helped that I never saw anyone from my old life.
The people I used to work with at Flash — people I considered friends — shunned me once I got fired. Even my work bestie, who’d initially defended me, disappeared into the ether like so much smoke. Like what happened to me might be catching. I had exactly one coffee date with Adele104— someone I really thought was a pal, not just a professional connection — and she was cold and noncommittal. She could barely look at me, and when she did, I could see exactly what she was thinking in her eyes, like a flashing headline:
Up-and-coming journalistic ingenue Lex Madison crashes and burns
Alexis Madison: Damaged Goods
