Chapter 31 : Am I dreaming?

Chapter 31: Chapter 31 : Am I dreaming?

The morning the Bay Chronicle hit the newsstands across the South Bay, Chuck Ross’s column ran in the bottom right corner of page three. The headline was one line long. The Pelican Didn’t Lie.

"Two weeks ago, in this same spot, I wrote that a college kid throwing money around on the internet was nothing but a stunt," the column began. "On Saturday I stood in the service bay at Big Bob’s for an entire afternoon. Today, I have to take that back."

"I have been in this business twenty years, and I have watched more young people than I can count ride a gimmick up, then get buried by it. Back then, I filed Ethan Cole under that heading. I was wrong."

"That afternoon, he was accused of fraud in front of several hundred people while the insults piled up online. Most kids his age would have leapt to argue. He did not. He stood his ground, took the accusations apart one at a time, and then waited, calmly, for the truth to step forward on its own."

"A dealer with thirty years in the trade crouched at the windshield and read out the first three letters of the VIN. WBS: the signature of BMW’s M division. On the car brought in to accuse him, the letters read WBA."

"Then a mother in a diner uniform took the driver’s seat and stepped on the gas. The roar struck the sheet-metal roof of the service bay and came back down into every ear in the room. Standing at the back of the crowd, I felt, for the first time in years, that my pen had fallen half a step behind."

"Some will call it an internet sideshow. What I saw was a college freshman who, with a handful of cameras and thirty strangers, kept half of Los Angeles glued to their screens for three days and two nights. In my line of work, we have a word for that. News."

Nowhere in the column did Preston’s name appear. In one place, it mentioned "a party who disputed the result." That was all.

While the paper was still being passed from table to table in coffee shops across the South Bay, episode two went up on YouTube. Maya opened the fraud thread, scrolled to the very bottom, and posted one reply. No explanation. No emoticon. Just a link.

The thread sat quiet for over an hour. Then all at once it came alive.

i take back every word

WBA vs WBS. never forgetting those six letters as long as i live

cried when the mom hit the gas dont laugh

so who was the guy in the BMW who stormed in??

Preston had read that last one three times now.

He’d watched episode two start to finish, all ten minutes of it, his finger hovering over the trackpad the whole way, his stomach lurching with every cut. The inspection. Ray crouching to read the VIN. The hood coming up. Every second, he expected his own face to fill the next shot.

It never did, not even after the credits finished rolling.

The cut went straight from Ray saying "This is a genuine M3" to Owen’s mother gripping the wheel. The fifteen minutes in between, the fifteen minutes he’d spent red-faced in the middle of that crowd, had been cut clean. Not a single frame was left.

Preston sank back in his chair and let out a long breath. The kid had kept his word.

But down in the comments, somebody always asked.

where’s the BMW guy?? i was there he got booed out lol

heard hes some real estate guys son

honestly glad they cut it. the secondhand embarrassment would’ve killed me

Not many. A handful, scattered through hundreds of comments. But every one of them dragged him back to that afternoon. The booing rolling forward from the back of the crowd in waves while he shoved his way out with his head down, somebody whistling, somebody laughing. And that A camera, red light on, aimed square at his face.

He could still repeat, word for word, what the kid had murmured in his ear.

"I know this trick too. Relax. I won’t put you in the cut."

Relax.

Preston slammed the laptop shut. He didn’t need anybody’s pity. The kid was holding on to those tapes, holding on to his face, so that every night when Preston lay down, he’d have to wonder when it was all going to come out.

His phone buzzed on the desk. The guy who ran his errands.

"Kyle got in touch again," came the low voice on the other end, the second the call connected. "Third time this week."

"What does he want?"

"Same ten grand. Says Bob threw him out of the office, his wife took the kids to her mom’s, and he’s got nothing left." A pause. "He says if you don’t pay, he’s going to the papers with the whole thing, start to finish. That you paid him to swap the car. That you lined up the reporter."

Preston’s grip on the phone tightened.

"He wouldn’t dare." His voice dropped, the words squeezed out one at a time. "A sales manager who skimmed fifteen grand off a customer and got thrown out on his ass by his own father-in-law, walking into a newspaper with that? Who’s going to believe him?"

"That’s what I told him. But he’s lost it, man. He doesn’t care anymore."

Preston got up and paced a couple of steps across the room. He wasn’t in episode two. He wasn’t in Chuck’s column. He’d only just let out that breath, and now some sales manager whose face he’d half forgotten had him by the throat.

"Tell him I’ll pay." He stopped pacing. "Friday night. He can come get it himself."

"...You’re actually paying him?"

Preston didn’t answer. He hung up, scrolled down through his contacts, and stopped on a name.

Time to clean this up.

Preston wasn’t the only one whose face darkened over that video. That same afternoon, on the second floor of Carrington Hall, the door to the Office of Student Affairs stood half open. Brenda was typing in the outer office. Inside, Associate Dean Sterling had the same video up on his screen.

He didn’t make a sound or touch the mouse, just watched it through. When the whiteboard crowded with names came up, and then the teaser announcing that all the raw footage would go live on the site tonight, he tapped two fingers lightly on the desk.

On screen, Owen laid the key in his mother’s palm and folded her fingers over it one by one. She pressed the hand holding the key to her chest and reached up with the other to touch her son’s face.

Sterling let out a short laugh through his nose.

"Cheap."

He said it quietly. Out front, the typing didn’t stop.

A broke kid and his mother with the bad leg. The TV stations ran a story like that every Thanksgiving. People had a good cry, and by the next morning they’d forgotten. He couldn’t see what about it was worth a few hundred thousand people passing it around.

He closed the video, opened the student records system, and typed in a name.

Ethan Cole. Freshman. Communications. Presidential Scholarship. Renewal condition: minimum 3.5 GPA each semester.

He flipped the calendar on his screen forward two pages. Midterms were two weeks out.

Sterling leaned back in his chair. Four years was a long time. He wasn’t going to miss a single day of it.

?

Ethan knew none of this. At that moment, he and Noah were standing at the counter of a pro video shop in Burbank.

The first round of orders had been trickling in all week. Six HDV cameras sat stacked in a corner of Hollis B14, the sixteen security cameras were still in their boxes, and the two editing workstations were already plugged in. Today they were here for the rest.

The clerk lined up eight wireless lav mic kits on the glass counter and named a price. Noah sucked in a breath and leaned toward Ethan’s ear. "Five hundred and something for one? Are these things gold-plated?"

"People will put up with a fuzzy picture," Ethan said, picking up one of the mics and turning it over. "If they can’t make out what anybody’s saying, they’re gone in three seconds."

He set the mic down and smiled at the clerk. "Two of the Sennheisers. Swap the other six for Azdens. Ten tripods, twenty batteries, and tape by the case. Since we’re taking all of that at once, what kind of price can you do for us?"

The clerk had probably never had a college kid haggle with him like that. He blinked a couple of times and said he’d go ask his manager in the back.

While they waited, Noah’s phone rang. The print shop. Had they looked at the sample tracksuits yet? A hundred of them, ready next week.

"Make it a thousand," Ethan said.

Noah covered the mouthpiece. "...How many?"

"A thousand. A hundred for the people playing. The other nine hundred for everybody who watches and wants one too."

"Who’s going to pay money for a tracksuit—" Noah stopped halfway. He was remembering the long string of comments under episode one, a whole bunch of people asking where they could buy the T-shirts the volunteers had on. He took his hand off the mouthpiece. "A thousand. Yeah. One thousand."

Once he’d hung up, he came at it from another angle. "We really have the money?"

"Bob moved two more cars this morning."

In the week since the promo code went live, Big Bob’s had sold fourteen cars. Bob called every afternoon to report the count, then spent the rest of the call griping. Griping about Ray across the street, who’d had the nerve to come ask about a partnership. Griping about the old-timers in the dealers’ association lining up to get the number of "that pelican kid." Once he’d gotten it out of his system, he’d add, "So when are you coming by for your damn check?"

Something else came back to Noah. "Oh, and Maya says the raw footage goes up this afternoon. All three days and two nights, cut off right where Owen wins."

"And the Preston part?"

"Not one second."

The manager came out from the back with a price sheet in his hand. Ethan was about to speak when the phone in his pocket buzzed first. An unfamiliar number. Area code 212.

He tipped his chin at Noah to keep going and smiled at the manager. "Sorry, I need to take this."

He walked over by the shelves. Noah listened to the manager’s numbers with one ear and kept the other on Ethan.

"This is Ethan."

Then a pause. A long one.

"...Yes, we’d certainly be interested." Ethan’s voice was steady. "Next week works for us. Thank you for reaching out."

When he came back, Noah had already knocked ten percent off and was waiting for his pat on the back. When he looked up, though, something was off about Ethan. He still had the phone clutched in his hand, and his eyes were unusually bright.

"Who was that?"

"Sony," Ethan said. "They want to sponsor us!"

Noah’s mouth hung open. "Sony? Like, Sony Sony? Am I dreaming?"

"You’re not dreaming." Ethan slid the phone back into his pocket. "Next week, I’m flying to New York to sit down with them."

Noah still hadn’t come back down to earth when Ethan’s phone rang again. Maya this time.

He picked up. A few words in, the smile drained off his face bit by bit.

"Okay. I’m on my way."

He hung up and turned to Noah. "I have to head back. The server’s down."