Like We Care (3 page)

“Let me just—”

There was a tug at his sleeve. Annie, more determined than he had ever seen her, needed a moment.

“Not now!” Hutch hissed.

She was not going to be denied; he was bright enough to see that. He put up a finger, requesting a brief time-out. The rest of the room, having already been subjected to Hutch’s pitch for going on half an hour, welcomed the chance to stretch their legs, grab another bottle of water from the communal fridge, and make more pirate noises.

“This is your icon,” she said with a sexy forcefulness that he would’ve admired if it had come from him. As it was, he was deeply annoyed.

“Annie. . .”

“You are losing them. If they leave the room on this note, you’re dead anyway.”

Dammit. She was right. He took the sketch pad from her.

Like all brilliant logos, it attacked with a narcotic efficacy. No matter how great the resistance—and Hutch’s couldn’t have been greater—it instantly fused itself to that pleasure receptor that made the beholder believe he was in the presence of corporate benevolence and only the most well-intentioned strain of mass consumerism.

It was that good.

He tried to fight it: “It’s not three letters!”

“Hutch. It works.”

Yes it did.

In that instant, he ran all the angles: The network was still
his
idea. Annie had merely come up with a label to stick on it. She would make her contribution known, and probably become a more legitimate part of the team than he would’ve envisioned, but everyone would still know he was in the lead chair on this one.

And besides, if she were promoted in rank, it would look more appropriate if he wanted to hook up with her, which is something he wanted to do more and more lately. If this thing flew, she’d be working around the clock, way too busy to devote any time to that rock star wannabe she’d been sleeping with.

The long, crushing hours, the aphrodisiac that comes from fighting the same battles side-by-side, the occasional words of insincere praise when she really needed a boost, her grateful smile in return. This could all break nicely, nookie-wise.

In, like, four seconds, he worked all this out.

And above all else: He could not let Viceroy out of this room.

The rest of the team was resettling in their seats. When the final ass was planted, new business would commence. Hutch strapped himself in mentally for the play of his life—unless this idea flopped, and he’d have to come up with more of this bullshit for next week’s meeting.

Instinctively knowing that some theatrics were in order to reenergize his pitch, he took the art pad and slowly stood on his chair. He was recalling that movie
Norma Rae
, the scene that made Hutch and his Poli-Sci classmates giggle because they were sure they could see Sally Field’s nipples under her sweaty T-shirt.

As his colleagues and superiors looked at him curiously, Hutch looked down upon them like Moses cradling the commandments.

“Gentlemen, I give you the next generation in music television.”

He displayed Annie’s work, her heart about to burst from her chest. Those gathered there beheld what she had brought forth, what she would not be credited with for nearly six months.

There was a respectful silence, maybe an impressed gasp or two. It worked. It simply worked.

R
²
Rev
.

Rap. Rock. Revolution. Perfectly good words bastardized and rendered totally unintelligible, anchored by what would soon be commonly referred to by the creative team as “that little floaty two thing.”
Adweek
would eventually proclaim it the new Nike swoosh.

The precise font would be subjected to months of focus testing. The debate over whether it should be “
Rap, Rock
, Revolution” or “
Rock, Rap
, Revolution” would trigger ferocious battles, which would ultimately be resolved when black staffers—led by that bastard Jeff Bradley—threatened to call in the NAACP and Al Sharpton unless “Rap” got top billing.

But still. . .

It looked cool. It sounded cool. Like a hot new drug.

R
²
Rev
.

Hutch Posner climbed down from his chair into a whole new world.

He avoided Annie McCullough’s eyes.

T
hey kept Joel in the hospital for three days, because the bash to the skull had doctors concerned about the severity of the concussion. Every physician Joel saw seemed to delight in telling him that had he crouched three inches lower, the ball would’ve caught him right in the temple and, well, he could be dead.

Joel, who got hip to irony in ninth grade English, saw the irony here: if he had lowered his stance, done what every coach since age seven had tried to get him to do, despite the fact that the way he stood in the box—rod straight, coiled for action—worked just fine, thank you very much, he’d be just another dead teen. He’d be consigned to the “Lest We Forget” page of the yearbook, like poor old Dennis Stark, who accidentally sliced open his wrist with a box-cutter and bled to death in a dumpster behind Target, trying to save up for a used Toyota.

There in the hospital bed, Joel snuggled up with his irony, pleased with himself for having ferreted it out on his own, proud—as he was more and more these days—that despite his jock swagger and his hard-partying rep, he was actually getting smarter.

He wished there was someone in his vast clique with whom to share this wry observation on the capriciousness of life, but the fact was that his entire gang had to rally merely to be defined as something other than retarded. Any mention of the word “irony” to the likes of Wad Wendell would no doubt lead straight into a discussion of Wheaties, as in “I don’t need no iron-y foods like Wheaties since I started bootin’ the andro, dude!”

But the fact was he wasn’t going to be sharing much with anyone for a long time, anyway. Maybe three months.

His jaw had been wired shut.

In addition to losing two permanent lower teeth, the bone and hinge that drove his mouth had been shattered practically to dust. The only way for the mechanics to heal properly—and the doctors had some doubts even then—was to clamp the thing shut and hope for the best. With any luck, he’d get his mouth back in full working order, although athletics were most definitely out of the question at least until next spring.

Joel had not taken the news well.

No more tongue, he realized, administered to or received from Molly DeVry. (Just moments away from being told that he had nearly been killed, and this was the first thought that crossed his mind. She was hot and fresh and eager; he was seventeen and sporting a pulse. One understands.)

Beer through a straw.
Food
through a straw! Christ, how was he going to keep his weight up, sipping soup for three months? How was he going to live without his Taco Bell #3s, hold the onions, extra cheese? Entire fast food empires might crumble now that he had been taken out of action.

And
shit!
how was he going to smoke? It had been killing him already, just the first day and a half he spent in the hospital, separated from his cigarettes.

He’d been lighting up since he was fourteen, since the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, when he realized that his acolytes were looking to him to lead the way into that illicit new world of disobedience and parent fucking.

He remembered that first purchase at the Happy Snack with the clarity reserved only for life’s most meaningful events. He still felt the racing of his heart as he walked into the store, his minions—pubes freshly blossomed in their pants—lying low behind a dumpster, should the guy at the counter push the button and dispatch a SWAT team that would rappel down from a sleek black helicopter and whisk Joel Kasten away to a life of hard labor at a youth camp somewhere.

Joel had kind of resented it going in, having to put his ass on the line this way, particularly when
he
didn’t want to smoke, didn’t want to pollute the athletic body that was already taking him to heights of glory.

And even more, he was faintly aware of a distant call that wanted him to defy the cliché that led all teenagers to misbehave in such predictable fashion. His older sister smoked; his
parents
did at his age.

Surely there was some other way for a teenager to act up, thought a nervous Joel way back then as he broke the beam of the Happy Snack’s electric eye. Surely there was a better way than to robotically indulge in the misbehavior so expected of him.

But like all outlaws and Christ figures worth a damn, he was a hero for delivering the goods. The only question asked of him by the Happy Snack guy was “Need matches?” (This was not, for the record, the grouchy swami guy who currently ran the Happy Snack; Joel Kasten was launched on his way toward excess phlegm production and a possible lingering cancer death by a “real” American.)

They hunkered down there behind the dumpster—Wad Wendell, Bobby Slopes, Zach Foley, poor, dead Dennis Stark—lighting up and sipping small, taking the first horrid taste of the smoke that would soon be their prop and best friend. Joel intended to fake it, particularly after that bitter inaugural puff, but he found almost immediately that he stood cooler, walked tougher, snarled fiercer with a butt in his mouth. It made complete the persona he was trying to carve for himself.

So what if he was betraying the few codes he had so far established? Here behind the trash bin, with his friends and their divvied-up Marlboros, they were
Bad-Asses: The Next Generation
.

Lying in his hospital bed, Joel took a soda straw from his dinner tray and tried to simulate smoking, realizing instantly that while he would still be able to clamp his lips around a filter tip and force the smoke back through his clenched teeth, it was going to be about as satisfying as dry humping.

“Fuck,” he cried, although, through his bolted-down jaw, it just sounded like a flush of angry air:

“
Fuuhhh. . .
”

“Hello?”

Peering through the door was Joel’s Social Studies teacher, Mr. Kolak.

Joel immediately felt vulnerable, child-like. He had invested so much of himself forging an identity at school—superior, self-assured,
cool
—that it was a completely alien experience to find himself laid prostrate before a mere teacher.

Even Mr. Kolak, whom Joel liked.

The teenager pulled the flimsy hospital sheets up to his chest and tried to look manly. The purple-black bruise on the side of his face helped.

“Wow, did you get the number of the truck that hit you?”

Joel smiled weakly. When he was past forty, would every damned thing out of his mouth be a cliché, too?

Mr. Kolak squirmed self-consciously, taking Joel’s silence to be typical teen sullenness, even though this was not a trait he tended to see in Joel.

He liked this kid, admired him even. He had smarter students, that was for sure, but he appreciated Joel for the fact that while he possessed that most sacred teenage tender—a handsome body, an athlete’s grace, an effortless ability to lead—he nevertheless came to class willing, if not always quite able, to learn.

To a teacher, that was gold.

Frank had been teaching long enough to know the usual academic indifference and numbskulled omnipotence of the hallowed Jock King, getting by purely on his arrogance and the implicit school-wide imperative that such charmed boys were not to be trifled with.

Frank used to challenge such boys, routinely attempted to flunk them, maybe because he didn’t want to pass them on to the next grade stupid—or maybe because it simply galled him that these loathsome young things were so inappropriately blessed with lives of hedonism and privilege.

But every year, the ruling powers—always led by a coach of some kind— told him to knock it off. His satisfaction would have to come later, at the reunions, which Mr. Kolak never failed to attend for the chance to see last year’s Big Man on Campus, now doomed deliciously to fumble through life as a purposeless oaf, wondering where the worship went.

Frank would never wish this on Joel, nor did he worry that such was his fate. Joel was a good one—even as he stared a hole into his Social Studies teacher from his hospital bed.

“Um, I didn’t know how long they were going to keep you, but they just told me you’re being released Monday, so. . .” He awkwardly held up the manila folder he had brought with him. “I just thought you might like to see your grade on last week’s take-home. That extra time you put in really made the difference.”

The kid took the folder, still saying nothing. Mr. Kolak often cursed how a glowering teenager could make him feel so small.

“Well, I’ll leave you alone. Sorry to. . .”

As his teacher turned to leave, Joel suddenly realized that he was hurting this man. Then figured out why.

“Nuuuu,” he garbled through his clenched teeth. “Mah jahs wahred shuud. Ah cand tahk.”

He pointed to his jaw and bared his teeth, cemented into a permanent smile.

“Doan go. Sid-dow.”

He gestured to the chair beside the bed. Mr. Kolak, grateful to be welcome, sat.