Chapter 116: Getting Started Is Never The Easiest Part

The Corolla chirped open, and Adrian studied the trunk like a man reading a contract written by someone who hated him.

The microphone box. Jenna’s lighting stands in a cardboard sleeve the length of a canoe. Four shopping bags, one of them carrying a $145 jacket that had developed opinions. The trunk was the size of a modest bathtub.

"It’ll fit," Jenna said, laying the sleeve across the opening like a barricade.

"It’ll fit if the lights go on the bottom."

"The lights are fine where they are."

"They’re sitting on the mic."

"The mic’s in a box."

"The box is a loaf of bread with a metal heart." He lifted the sleeve an inch. "If this slides on a turn, we’re buying a second one."

Rose appeared at his elbow in the indigo jacket, a bag in each hand. She looked at the heap, then at the jacket bag wedged beneath a stand, and her face did what it did to cheap zippers.

"Not under a light stand."

"It’s in tissue."

"It’s wool with hand stitching." She pulled it free and hugged it to her chest like something rescued from a river. "It rides with me."

That left the trunk to Adrian. He emptied it, stood the lights on their sides along the wheel well, swaddled the mic in three T-shirts, and threaded a bag handle through the stand sleeve like a seat belt. Halfway through, he understood what he was doing: three people had spent a respectable amount of money, and the only thing between them and the road was geometry.

Rose watched from the curb with her chin tilted, in the posture of a woman billing for supervision. "You’re handling those like laboratory equipment," she said.

"Laboratory equipment costs less to replace."

Jenna snorted. "He’s right. The mic costs more than my first car."

"Your first car was a bicycle."

"It had a very good bell."

He shut the trunk on the third try. It sounded like a gunshot, and nothing inside it died.

Two red lights into the drive, Jenna spoke from the back seat in the voice she used when something had been bothering her for a block.

"So we’ve got a mic. Lights. Clothes." The notebook came open on her knees to a page that was mostly crossed out. "We still don’t know what the first stream is."

"We’ll figure it out," Rose said.

"I don’t want to spend a week prepping and then sit down in front of a camera with nothing to say. That’s how you get an intro. ’Hi, I’m Jenna, I like music and long walks.’"

"We’re getting ahead of ourselves." Rose smoothed the jacket in her lap. "We should try things before we decide what the channel is. It doesn’t exist yet."

Both were right, which was the problem. Adrian kept his eyes on the road and let the silence run. Rushing a decision between two correct women was how he’d ended up in a rust overshirt.

"What do you think it should be?" he asked Jenna.

"Something with personality." She didn’t hesitate. "Not the one where everyone explains their interests like a dating profile. Something people see and go, ’oh, that’s them.’"

"Not desperate," Rose said. "I don’t want us doing stunts."

"Nobody’s eating a ghost pepper."

"Good."

"Unless it’s a milestone."

Rose turned in her seat.

"Kidding," Jenna said, in the tone of someone with a spreadsheet of ghost-pepper statistics.

Adrian gave it a block. Then, to Rose: "What would you actually enjoy doing on camera? Not what looks good. What you’d like."

He’d expected a joke. Instead she went quiet and reached for the thought slowly, thumb tracing the stitching on her cuff.

"Painting," she said. "I could paint. But I don’t want every stream to be me painting while you two watch."

"We’d bring snacks," Jenna said.

"You’d be spectators. That’s the problem."

"Then we build it together." Jenna leaned between the seats. "Not one person’s show with two helpers."

Rose’s fingers stopped. It had landed somewhere she hadn’t braced. "I’d like that more than I thought I would," she said, then, quicker, "but everyone has to do something. Not decoration."

They threw ideas into the car like bags into a trunk: a cooking stream, vetoed by Rose because the apartment had one pan; a drawing duel, vetoed by Jenna because she drew stick figures with confidence; a blind taste test; a mural painted live.

"A sing-along," Jenna offered.

"No," Adrian said.

"One volunteer—"

"I’ll leave the car."

Adrian listened and, once in a while, laid a practical stone in the road.

"Cooking needs a second camera angle."

"A live mural only works with an audience."

"That one leaves Rose doing all the work."

"Is that a no or a hobby?" Jenna asked after the fifth stone.

"He thinks everything’s a hobby until it has a budget," Rose said.

Which was unfair, and uncomfortably close. He took the next light to think. They’d been picking a concept the way you pick a house without seeing the street, and a concept was just a guess dressed up as a plan. He thought of the call that afternoon, how the whole plan had started with someone refusing to sing at a lamp. Nobody had picked a format then either. It had picked them.

"Don’t pick one yet," he said. "Test something small with what we’ve got. Record twenty minutes, watch it back, see what’s natural."

"With what camera?" Jenna asked.

"My phone. The camera’s next, once the mic proves it’s worth one."

"I like that." Jenna sat back, then tapped his headrest. "But we still need a rough plan. I’m not improvising my way through the whole thing."

"It’s a trial, not a launch," Rose said. "And we don’t treat the first recording as final."

"Both conditions," Adrian said. "Accepted."

It was a small decision. It also moved the channel out of the air and onto something they could point at, which was where he preferred most things. It was also the first time all day that nobody had asked him to try something on.

The city slid by in long gold stripes. Beside him, Rose had gone quiet in the way that meant she was building something in her head, and he drove a block without disturbing it.

"When?" Jenna asked.

He pulled up his week without looking. Two lectures, a lab section, a problem set he’d been avoiding for a reason he wouldn’t examine. He wasn’t promising a full afternoon he’d end up cutting short. "Saturday morning’s clear. Two hours, tops. Not a whole day."

"You have a problem set," Rose said.

"I always have a problem set."

"That’s not a schedule. That’s a lifestyle."

"Two hours is a day in streaming," Jenna said.

"It’s a trial."

"Fine. Saturday, ten." She wrote it down and underlined it twice, a habit she’d never lose.

"I can start on the backdrop board before then," Rose offered.

"Use what we have first." He kept it gentle. "The bare wall. If the trial shows we need the board, then we buy the board."

"The trial should show us what we’re missing," Jenna agreed. "Not give us an excuse to shop again."

Rose looked at him sideways. "You’re saying no to paint."

"I’m saying not yet."

"That’s what he says about everything," Jenna said.

"The wall’s not going anywhere," he added.

"You rent."

"It’s very committed."

By the time the Corolla coasted into his building’s lot, they hadn’t solved a single question about the channel. They had a time, a rule, and a phone. He parked and killed the engine. The lot smelled like wet pavement and someone’s fried onions, which was oddly comforting. He ran the numbers the way he always did. $289 for the mic and $205.40 for the clothes made $494.40 out of his own pocket, and it still sat in his stomach like an unpaid bill. Jenna’s lights and Rose’s jacket weren’t his to count, which was a relief and a small insult.

But the discomfort had changed shape. A week ago it would have felt like waste. Now he could see what each thing was for. The mic wasn’t the channel. The lights weren’t the channel, and neither was the overshirt. They were tools, and tools only mattered when somebody picked them up. The hard part would be getting three different people to make something worth watching together.

Jenna unbuckled and leaned between the seats. "What if it’s bad?"

"Then we find out what went wrong and try again."

"You say that like a repair order," Rose said.

He looked at the mic box wedged between the T-shirts, then at the bags crowding the back, and didn’t pretend to have a better answer. "At the moment, routine maintenance is a lot cheaper than buying more equipment."

Jenna laughed, short and warm, and then pointed at him. "You agreed to be on camera, you know. You can’t spend the whole recording behind the equipment."

"I’ll be behind the mic."

"You’ll be in front of it."

He opened the door and the evening air came in. Buying the microphone had been the easy part.