Chapter 44 - 43 : Famous

Chapter 44: Chapter 43 : Famous

"My name’s Kim Ostrander. Partner development," the woman on the other end said. "The department’s three weeks old, so you probably haven’t heard of it."

Rhett had heard of it.

He remembered the list. Years later, a business magazine had run it as a full page: the first creators YouTube ever paid. Smosh was on it. lonelygirl15 was on it. MrPelican wasn’t, because back then there was no MrPelican.

"We’re working on something we haven’t announced yet." Kim’s keyboard stopped for a second. "We’d like you to come out to San Bruno a week from Thursday. Our new owners would like to meet you, too."

The new owners. Google had signed the deal less than three weeks ago.

"Thursday works," Rhett said. "But let me ask you one thing first. This thing you haven’t announced yet. Does it have anything to do with money?"

Kim didn’t answer right away.

"See you Thursday, Rhett." There was a smile in her voice. "Don’t tell anybody I called."

He hung up and wrote one small line in the corner of the whiteboard. San Bruno, Thursday. Then he rubbed it out with his thumb. Nobody else needed to see it yet.

Monday morning, he didn’t even make it out of Hollis before he got stuck at the basement door.

Thirty-some high school kids and their parents were bunched up at the door, led by a student tour guide walking backward with a little flag.

"On your left, the Hollis basement, room B14," the guide said. "Every MrPelican video gets cut right here. Admissions only added this stop to the tour on Friday—"

The door opened. Rhett walked out with his coffee.

Thirty-some heads turned at once.

One second of silence. Then a kid in a high school basketball jacket yelled it. "PAGE SEVEN!"

That was the end of the tour. The parents were worse than the kids. One dad pulled out a pen and an admissions brochure and had Rhett sign the cover, right next to the SCU crest. His daughter had listed SCU as her seventh choice, he said, and after the video she’d moved it to first.

"She made me promise to tell you," the dad said. "She read page seven."

The guide stood outside the crowd holding up her little flag, looking hopeless. Somewhere around the eleventh brochure, Rhett thought that if Whitman could see this, he’d probably put it in next year’s brochure.

Crossing the central lawn, he stopped at the bulletin board. A party flyer, printed in full color. Saturday night, Kappa Sigma, theme: GREEN LIGHT NIGHT. And along the bottom in small type: MrPelican himself may stop by.

Kappa Sigma was Trent’s frat.

Two months ago, Trent had called him a clown. Now Trent’s own frat was using the clown’s name to sell party tickets.

Rhett took a pen out of his bag and added a reply under "may stop by." He won’t. Then, after a second, he drew a little pelican next to it.

By that afternoon, a photo of the flyer had gone all the way around Facebook. By that night, there wasn’t a single Kappa Sigma flyer left anywhere on campus.

Rhett got to Intro to Mass Communication with five minutes to spare. He’d said front row. He’d sat there last week, and he’d sit there this week too. Whitman’s line about the coolest college in America losing its most famous freshman was still in his ears.

The front row was already full.

Not just the front row. The lecture hall held two hundred, and after midterms it usually dropped to a hundred-some. Today people were sitting in the aisles. When he walked in, the guy dead center in the front row stood up, gave him the seat, and went to sit on the steps.

The professor walked up to the podium and plugged his laptop into the projector. The first slide that came up on the screen was the frame of Sierra standing in the headlights.

He pushed up his glasses and found Rhett in the front row.

"Today was supposed to be agenda-setting theory," he said. "Then it occurred to me that instead of having you read a case from the sixties, I could have you read one from last Wednesday. Mr. Delaney, on your feet, please."

Two hundred pairs of eyes turned to the front row. Rhett stood, set his pen down, and let his hands hang at his sides. This was a class, he reminded himself, not a pitch meeting. Come off too smooth, and his GPA wasn’t going to thank him for it.

"Both parts went up at the same time," the professor said. "If the audience wants part two, it’s one click away on the right. Since nobody has to wait, why end part one on ’page seven’ at all?"

"Because one click still needs a reason," Rhett said. "Not everybody who opens part one plans to watch part two. Some of them heard about it from a roommate. Some of them clicked on it at work, killing five minutes."

He paused and caught a few people in the front rows nodding.

"If part one ends on the flip, everybody knows who flipped what. Those people have their answer, so they close the window and go back to their day."

"End it on ’page seven,’ and they know the answer’s about to change, but not into what. That click isn’t something they decide to do anymore." He didn’t lean on it. He just slowed down a little for the last part. "It’s something they can’t stop themselves from doing."

"How many couldn’t stop themselves?"

Rhett hesitated. He could have just said a lot. But the professor had asked for a number, and he happened to have one.

"Eighty-two percent," he said. "Out of every hundred people who finished part one, eighty-two opened part two. Our site’s player logs it."

The lecture hall filled with the sound of notebooks flipping open.

"And if it had ended on the flip?" the professor went on.

"My guess is it drops by half," Rhett said. "That one I don’t have a number for. It’s a guess. If you’d like me to prove it, I could end the next one in the wrong place on purpose."

This time the whole room laughed.

Standing in the middle of two hundred people, what flashed through Rhett’s head was another room altogether. A conference room, a long wooden table, twelve clients looking down at their phones. He’d said this same thing in rooms like that a hundred times, and nobody had ever written it down.

The professor nodded, turned, and wrote on the whiteboard. The Zeigarnik effect. Then he looked back.

"In 1927, a Russian psychologist named Zeigarnik noticed that the waiters in a Berlin restaurant could remember every unpaid order, and forgot each one the moment it was paid," he said. "Next week starts from there. Thank you, Mr. Delaney, have a seat. And for what it’s worth, your notes are better than last week."

Two hundred people applauded.

Rhett sat down, picked up his pen, and dutifully wrote Zeigarnik down on paper. He’d used that trick for ten years at a multi-channel network, back in his other life, and never once known it had a name.

The dining hall at lunch was even busier than the lecture.

The line at the grill was longer than it had ever been, and half the people in it weren’t there for burgers. They held up point-and-shoots, got to the front, and asked Owen one thing. Could you say it?

Owen said it every time.

"Mm."

A flash, and the line moved up one. On the range hood above the grill, a dozen-some notes were already taped up, all of them handed over the counter. One said, Did your mom’s car get fixed? Another said, That was a share mm, right?

The dining hall manager stuck his head out of the back, looked at the line, and disappeared again. The next day, a hand-lettered sign went up next to the grill. Photos with the Mm Guy require the purchase of one order of fries.

Fry sales tripled that week.

Mac’s news, he brought in himself.

Tuesday night, he came into B14, shut the door behind him, pulled an envelope folded in thirds out of his tracksuit pocket, and set it down on Rhett’s desk with both hands.

Inside was a contract. Iron Pit, the gym outside the main gate, wanted him to wear their tank top in three short videos. Five hundred bucks.

"Their owner cornered me outside the gym on Saturday," Mac said. "Said sign today, get paid today. He had the pen in my hand."

"You signed it?" Dom asked.

Mac flipped the contract to the last page. The signature line was blank.

"I told him," Mac said, and cleared his throat, "that I’d have to check with my manager first."

He tapped the contract with one finger. "Page two of my own contract says anybody who comes calling goes through you first. I read it." He paused. "Unlike some people, who can’t even be bothered with page seven."

Rhett went through the contract front to back. "Three videos, a channel with a hundred thousand subscribers behind them, for five hundred? He’s robbing you. Go tell him two thousand, on a company contract, and you keep eighty-five percent."

"Two grand?" Mac’s eyes went round. "He’ll laugh in my face."

"Then let him laugh and walk out. He’ll call you back before you hit the door."

The next afternoon, Mac was back. This time he didn’t bother shutting the door. He kicked it open.

"He said fifteen hundred."

"And?" Rhett asked.

"I said two."

"And?"

Mac slapped the signed contract down on the desk. "Eighteen hundred. Plus a free membership. For life."

Dom leaned over to Sam and lowered his voice. "A lifetime membership. How many times do you think he actually goes?"

Sam thought about it. "Once to pick up the card. Three times for the shoot."

"And then he’s a walking ad for them for the rest of his life and never even uses the showers."

"HEY!!"

Mac spun around and jabbed a finger at the two of them. "I can HEAR you! I’m going tonight—no, tomorrow!"

The money came in on Wednesday.

Sony’s sponsorship fee. The first round of tracksuit money. A week’s worth of ads on the site. Claire put every number on one spreadsheet and set it on Rhett’s desk. The bottom line was the company’s balance.

Fifty-three thousand.

Two months ago, everything this company owned came down to a thousand dollars in cash and a borrowed camera.

That afternoon, Rhett came back from the bank with four envelopes. He handed the first one to Dom.

Dom opened it. Inside was a check. He looked at the amount, looked again, then turned the check over to check the back, as if the back might say it was a joke.

Twenty-five hundred dollars. The memo line said: Switcher.

"I..." Dom opened his mouth. "I’ve never had more than three hundred bucks in my account."

"Now you will," Rhett said. "This is just the first one."

Dom didn’t laugh. He took the check out into the hall, pushed the door shut behind him, and made a call. Rhett could hear him out there talking low. The first word was "Mom." After that he couldn’t make it out.

The second and third envelopes each held a printed sheet along with the check.

Sam’s said Head of Post-Production. Kevin’s said Head of Campus and Community Relations.

"As of today, you’re both on the company payroll," Rhett said. "Not helping out. Not interns. You’re with us."

Sam read his sheet top to bottom, folded it, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and patted it. "Deal," he said. "First thing I’m doing is replacing that MrPelican LLC sign on the door. Dom set it in Times New Roman, and I’ve put up with it for two months."

Kevin read his title out loud twice, then announced that every cent was going into his run for next year’s student government. Sam said that was called buying votes. Kevin said that was called democracy.

The last envelope was Claire’s, the same amount as Dom’s.

She opened it, glanced at the number, and her brain started doing the math on its own. Twenty-five hundred. A 750-gig drive ran a little over three hundred, so that was eight. No, seven, she’d need to save some for an enclosure—

"The company pays for hardware," Rhett said.

Claire looked up. How did he know what she was adding up?

"Drives, RAM, servers, you give me the list and the company buys it. Don’t spend a cent of this on any of that." He looked at her, and his voice came down a notch. "Every day, you’re in this room making everything better. Just once, it should be you that gets better."

He paused.

"I’d like to see that."

Claire’s brain crashed.

I’d like to see.

What he meant was simple. It wasn’t that she never changed clothes. It was that she rotated through the same few. Gray hoodie, black hoodie, darker gray hoodie. She poured everything she had into code and servers, and all he wanted was for her to take a little of that drive and spend it on her own life.

But in Claire’s compiler, that sentence returned something else entirely.

The red started at her ears and went all the way down her neck. She crushed the envelope in her fist, stood up, sat down, and stood up again.

"I’m... I’m going to go buy an enclosure." Then she caught herself. "No. I’m going to class."

She grabbed her bag and walked out, clipped her shoulder on the doorframe, and kept going without looking back.

Rhett nodded at her back. Moved, probably. Somebody who wrote code until she forgot she was a person, suddenly getting told to take care of herself. A big reaction made sense. It made him a little happy, too. Two months ago, every person in this room had been worrying about grocery money. Now, one by one, they were all getting better.

Kevin sat up slowly in his chair by the wall and looked at Rhett with brand-new eyes.

"Dude," he said. "That was... smooth. Is that just how you operate?"

"People can tell when you mean it." Rhett put the checkbook away in the drawer, in a very good mood. "Take notes."

Kevin’s mouth hung open. He looked at Rhett, then at the doorframe Claire had just bounced off, and in the end said nothing at all.

Behind the switcher, Dom had his face buried in his hands, and his shoulders were shaking.

That evening, Sierra came to B14.

She didn’t sit. She set three envelopes on Rhett’s desk and kept her gauze-wrapped hand flat on top of them. Three management companies, and all three wanted to sign her.

"I want to hear what you think."

Rhett went through them one at a time.

"The first one’s in Beverly Hills. They book ad work for sitcom supporting actors. Real connections." He flipped to the attachment at the back, a client list packed onto two full pages. "But they sign a hundred people a year and live on volume. You’d be number eighty-nine on their list."

He set it down and picked up the second.

"This one’s the smallest. The owner wrote this himself, which is a good sign. But they want five years at twenty percent. In five years you’re twenty-six."

The third, he barely glanced at.

"This one’s the most honest. One year, that’s it. But all they do is sports brands. You’d do one round of sneaker and sports drink ads, and by next year nobody would remember your name."

Sierra heard him out and didn’t move.

"What about you?" Rhett asked. "What kind of stuff do you actually want to make?"

She started to answer, then stopped. After a moment, she looked down at her hands.

"I don’t know," she said. "I ran track for four years in high school. The four hundred. The day of the tug of war, with that rope around my waist, I kept thinking about the last turn on the track. When your legs are gone and you still have to run." She stopped. "I want to film that. Not me winning. The part where your legs are gone. Does that sound stupid?"

"No."

She looked up at him.

"I know Mac’s signed with you guys," she said. "I..."

She didn’t finish.

Rhett sat up in his chair.

"Sierra, I can sign you on the same terms as Mac," he said. "But before you say yes, there are some things I need to be straight with you about."

"Right now the whole country knows you because somebody stabbed you in the back in a gym. People felt for you, got mad for you, and then watched you win. It’s a great story, but it only gets told once. Remember the kid in his bedroom lip-syncing to Numa Numa? Everybody remembers him. Nobody can name his second video."

Sierra’s jaw tightened.

"That last turn you told me about, it’s good. But there’s only one person in it. People watch your legs give out while you keep running, they’re moved once, and then they go watch something else."

He picked up a pen and drew ten little circles across a piece of scrap paper, left to right. Next to the first one he drew one small flame. Next to the second, two. By the tenth, the flames were piled up in a little heap.

"Wings," he said. "Ten of them. Each one hotter than the last. The first one’s basically ketchup. The sauce on the last one has the word death in its name."

Across from the circles he drew two little stick figures, a table between them.

"You sit here. The guest sits there. He eats a wing, you ask a question. The questions get harder and the wings get hotter. By wing seven he’s crying, he’s sweating, he’s begging for milk, and he’s telling you things he’s never told anybody in his life."

He tapped the pen on the stick figure on her side of the table.

"And you’re eating off the same plate. He eats one, you eat one. He falls apart across the table, and nothing shows on your face. You just ask the next question."

Sierra was staring at the ten circles.

"The whole country saw you stand perfectly still in the headlights," Rhett said. "Now they’re going to watch you sit perfectly still in front of a plate of wings. Same 218, different battlefield. I’ve already got the first guest. Mac. I’ll bet you he doesn’t make it to wing four."

Sierra still didn’t say anything, but something in her eyes had changed.

"But that means you have to change." Rhett set the pen down. "At the finish line, what everybody remembers is that you didn’t talk. On this show, you never stop. Before every guest, you know his life better than his mother does. You crack jokes, you riff, and when he’s too wrecked to get a sentence out, you pick it up and finish it for him. You have to make him want to stay in that chair at the worst moment of his life."

He paused.

"And wherever you go, somebody’s going to ask about Dylan. You’ll have to learn to smile and change the subject. Can you live with all that?"

Sierra looked down at the paper. Ten circles, a pile of flames.

"I hate spicy food," she said.

"Even better," Rhett said. "Nobody’ll think you’re faking it."

Sierra picked up the three envelopes, squared them, and slid them into the back pocket of her bag. Then she folded the scrap paper with the ten circles on it and tucked it carefully into her textbook.

"The first one’s ketchup?" she asked.

"Ketchup."

"...I might need to start practicing on that one."

After Sierra left, Dom poked his head out from behind the switcher. "She gets wings, Mac gets a gym. What about us? What’s our next big one?"

Rhett didn’t answer right away. He went to the whiteboard, picked up a marker and wrote two words across it in big letters. BATTLE ROYALE.

The next night, his mom called.

"Did you send us three thousand dollars?" she said. "Your dad’s been standing in the kitchen holding that money order, and he won’t put it down."

That had been the last of this round of money. He hadn’t put it in an envelope. He’d gone to the post office instead, bought a money order for three thousand dollars and sent it home overnight.

They knew what he was doing. After the first video made the TV news, a neighbor had dropped the tape off on their doorstep. Ever since, his mom had asked him the same question on the phone every week. Are you eating?

"I’ll tell you something, but you didn’t hear it from me." Her voice dropped, and the TV in the background got farther away. She’d probably stepped into the kitchen. "Your dad watches your videos every night. On that whatever-it-is site, your cousin showed him how."

"He only watches the parts with you in them. That bit in the gym where you read page seven, he’s watched that at least twenty times. He made me promise not to tell you."

Something caught in Rhett’s throat.

His dad. A man who needed his mom to open his email for him.

"Keep the money," his mom went on. "We’re fine here. You’re famous now, sure, but we know money doesn’t come that easy. It’s here today and maybe not tomorrow. You’re still in school. Take care of yourself first. Things at home—"

She stopped for half a second.

"Things at home, you don’t need to worry about."

Rhett heard that half second.

He’d heard that exact pause before. At a Thanksgiving table, a long time ago and a long time from now. That time, there’d been nothing he could do.

He pressed the phone closer to his ear, his fingers tight around it.

"Mom," he said. "I mean it. If anything happens at home, big or small, I want to be the first to know. Not after you two already handled it. First. Okay?"

His mom didn’t say anything at first, and then she laughed.

"Okay, okay," she said. "Listen to you. When did you get so grown up?"

After he hung up, he sat at his desk in the dorm without bothering to turn on the lamp. Then the phone rang again. A number he’d already saved.

"Kid." Big Bob’s voice was loud enough that he didn’t need the speaker. "Come by the lot tomorrow. I’ve got something for you."