Chapter 11 : Signed

Chapter 11: Chapter 11 : Signed

Ethan printed five talent releases at the library, one page each. A line at the bottom for a signature. A line above it for payment: one dollar.

The dollar wasn’t a joke. A contract only holds if both sides get something. TV crews had been using forms like this for decades. Sign it, and the footage belonged to whoever shot it. Don’t, and anybody who’d so much as wandered through the frame could come back and sue.

On Sunday he’d been racing the clock, and this was the one step he’d skipped.

Now he had to go back and collect them one at a time. Mac was first. Ethan found him in the dining hall at the end of a long table, three trays in front of him and four girls around him.

"My manager’s here!" Mac threw his arms wide. "Ladies, this is the dude. The one throwing money at people."

Ethan set the form next to his tray and explained it in two sentences. Mac got to the payment line and looked up.

"A dollar? Bro, I sign lunch trays now."

"The trays were free. This one pays." Ethan laid a dollar bill on top of the form. "First paycheck of your career. Get it framed."

Mac cracked up and signed, his name twice the size of the box. He folded the dollar into his shirt pocket and patted it twice.

"Hypothetically," Ethan said, picking up the form, "if there were more gigs like this, you in?"

"You mean the kind where I almost pee myself in front of five hundred people?" Mac actually thought about it. "Depends on the bread, feel me?"

Dylan and Sierra were next. They were on the steps outside their dorm, sharing a pair of earbuds. Back together, apparently.

Dylan saw Ethan coming and went red. "Dude. That part... can you cut it? The water part."

"That part is the most famous thirty seconds on the internet right now."

Sierra didn’t wait for the rest. She took the pen, signed, and held it out to Dylan. "Sign."

"But babe—"

"You took two hundred dollars. I poured one bottle of water. We’re even, and the whole country knows it." She put her earbud back in. "Sign."

Dylan signed. Ethan gave them a dollar each. Dylan turned his dollar over in his fingers, probably working out how much he’d lost on this one.

Tyler was fourth, and the one Ethan was least sure of.

In that video, Mac was a joke and Dylan was a joke, but both of them knew they were playing it. Tyler was different. The whole internet had watched the exact second he truly believed he’d won. A pitcher could lose. He couldn’t be called soft, and he really couldn’t be called dumb.

Behind the chain-link at the baseball field, Tyler was playing catch with Brodie. When he spotted Ethan, he snapped the ball into his glove and walked over.

Ethan had three pitches ready. One about money, one about pride, one about how good that strike looked on tape.

Tyler took the form, skimmed half of it, and held out his hand for the pen.

"You’re not going to read it?"

"Read what?" Tyler signed. "That was a strike. Nobody can edit that out." He slapped the form back against Ethan’s chest. "My mom showed it to her whole church. Says it’s the best pitch I ever threw."

From across the fence, Brodie yelled, "Your mom’s right! Wrong hand, though!"

Tyler flipped him off over his shoulder without turning around. Then he pushed the dollar back into Ethan’s hand. "Keep it. Next time you’re shooting something, call me. I’m not letting go this time."

The fifth form meant Brennan Hall.

It was getting dark. Ethan hadn’t eaten since breakfast. One side of his collar had folded under, and the wind had done something to his hair. He stood on the front steps and texted Maya that he was downstairs.

The door opened. It wasn’t Maya.

"Well, look who it is. Mr. Busy." Chloe leaned in the doorframe, arms folded. "What brings you all the way over here? You bring my card?"

No ponytail tonight. Her hair was down around her shoulders, the ends still damp from a shower. She had on an oversized gray SCU sweatshirt that swallowed whatever shorts were under it, then long tan legs, flip-flops, and toenails painted cherry red.

Ethan patted his pocket and came up with a stack of release forms. The memory card was still sitting in his desk drawer. He’d said Thursday. It was Thursday.

"I forgot," he said. "I’m sorry. I’ve been running since ten this morning and it went straight out of my head. I’ll bring it first thing tomorrow. With coffee. A big one."

Whatever Chloe had lined up to say, she let it go. She took a look at his face, and her voice softened. "Who’s chasing you?"

"Long story."

"Look at you..." She didn’t finish. She reached up, flipped his collar out and smoothed it flat, then pushed down the piece of hair sticking up over his forehead. "There. I’ll count that as the nicer outfit. Barely."

Her hand was still on his collar when the door opened again.

Maya stood in the doorway in the same old flannel, a pen already in her hand. She looked at Chloe’s hand. Then at Ethan.

Chloe took her hand back, in no hurry at all. "You two have business. I’ll get out of your way." She raised an eyebrow at Ethan. "Tomorrow. Coffee. Don’t forget again."

She went upstairs.

Maya didn’t say a word. She pulled a form out of his hand, pressed it against the wall and signed, quick and neat.

"First week of college." She handed it back. "That was fast."

Ethan heard what she meant. He could explain. Chloe was the girl who’d given him the ending for free. Her card was in his drawer, and he owed her a promise he hadn’t kept. Each sentence sounded more like an excuse than the one before it, and right now the only thing his head had room for was five o’clock tomorrow.

"I’ll finish cutting the reveal tonight and send it to you before midnight," he said. "Saturday, nine a.m., you put it up on the site."

"Got it."

She turned and went in. The door shut behind her a little harder than it needed to.

Ethan looked down at the form. On the payment line, one dollar had been crossed out with a single stroke. Next to it, she’d written a 0.

Before he was off the steps, Ethan had Pelican Pizza on the phone.

Pans were clanging in the background. Sal yelled at somebody to watch the oven before he came back on. "Talk. I got four larges going out in five minutes."

"I’ve got a good one for you," Ethan said. "Tomorrow night at seven, Student Government’s running Welcome Week bingo, and the prize table’s empty. You put up ten larges and ten twenty-dollar gift certificates, and every time somebody yells bingo, the host yells Pelican Pizza."

"For free?"

"A room full of freshmen who haven’t picked their pizza place yet. The certificates only work in your store, and nobody goes out for pizza alone."

A few seconds of nothing but the hum of the ovens. "...Ten larges. I’ll print the certificates myself."

"One more thing," Ethan said. "The WHOWON notebook. Every mark, make it a dollar."

"A DOLLAR?!" Sal came through so loud Ethan held the phone away from his ear. "Yesterday it was fifty cents! You walk out of here with five hundred of my bucks, and now you’re jacking up the price? Let me tell you something, kid, if you think for one second—"

Ethan waited until Sal stopped for air. Then he said two sentences.

The line went quiet.

The clanging had stopped too. Only the ovens were still humming. Finally, Sal cleared his throat.

"...You’re serious."

"Dead serious."

Another silence. Then Sal muttered something in Italian. Ethan didn’t catch a word of it, but he could tell it wasn’t aimed at him.

"I can’t think of a reason to say no," Sal said. "Fine. You really are a strange kid."

He hung up.

Down in the media building basement, Sam saw him walk in and dropped his magazine over his face.

"You again."

"Ninety seconds of footage. One hour."

One finger came out from under the magazine and pointed at the G5 in the back.

Noah was already there, loading the phone footage they’d copied off the two memory cards. Under two minutes of it all together, so grainy you could count the pixels, and the audio was nothing but screaming. But everything that mattered was there. Mac jumping off the stage. Maya letting go. Hendricks’s arm going up.

Half an hour later, Kevin came in hugging a manila envelope and banged his knee on the table leg sitting down.

"It’s all here." He laid the papers out one at a time. "The original Welcome Week sheet. My suspension notice. And this."

The last one was a photocopy of Hendricks’s duty log from Sunday, in careful block capitals. Kevin had his finger pressed under one line.

15:52. CALLED IN TO STUDENT AFFAIRS. VP D. WHITFIELD (ENROLLMENT) ON LINE. INSTRUCTION: "LET THEM PLAY." EVENT CONTINUED.

"Didn’t ask me a single question. Pulled it out of the cabinet and walked it to the copier himself," Kevin said. "On my way out he goes, ’Tell the kid to get a permit next time.’"

Ethan slid the log into his folder. "Tell him thanks for me."

"But..." Kevin looked from Maya, frozen on the screen, back to Ethan. "Sterling said take it down by five tomorrow. And you’re in here cutting a new one."

Noah’s hand stopped on the mouse. He hadn’t said much all afternoon.

"Schools move slow," Ethan said. "A hearing needs a date, a board, a stack of paperwork. Sterling gave us five o’clock tomorrow. All we need is for nothing to happen before nine on Saturday. I’ve got that part covered."

"Even so," Noah said. "Say the reveal blows up. Bigger than the first one. Then what? What if the school still thinks we made it look bad? More views just means more people watching it look bad."

Kevin nodded hard.

That was Noah all over. Hours without a word, and then he’d put his finger right on the sore spot.

"Good question." He pulled his chair up to the keyboard. "So we make sure it can’t."

He didn’t explain. He opened a new track on the timeline.

For the next forty minutes, all Noah and Kevin could see was the back of his head. He looked some things up online. He typed out a few lines of titles with Hendricks’s log open beside the keyboard. Halfway through, he stepped out to make a phone call, then came back and kept cutting. Sam leaned in the doorway twice and didn’t say a word.

Finally he hit the space bar and leaned back. "Okay. Watch."

Ninety seconds.

The first minute was the part they already knew. Mac’s leap off the stage. Maya letting go. Hendricks’s arm going up. Kevin still laughed at the jump.

Then came the ending.

Kevin’s laugh stopped halfway. Noah’s hand slid off the mouse. Neither of them made a sound until the screen went black.

Kevin turned toward Ethan. Whatever he’d meant to say didn’t make it out.

Noah sat back, let out a breath and shook his head. He’d known Ethan for less than a week, and he’d thought he’d already seen every trick the guy had.

A chair creaked. At some point Sam had come up behind them, glasses pushed up on his forehead.

"Kid," he said, "you’re a genius."