Chapter 1 #2
That meant that Missy had been there for all the teasing and ostracism—and worse—that had followed.
She’d been there when the bullying had made his life miserable, and when ballet had been the rare place he could go to escape the misery, to express his feelings by dancing instead of by, say, punching people.
Missy remembered all that, and he’d tried to forget it. He wanted that can of worms shut tight forever. Just his luck that fate—and the bouncer at the Stoned Crow—had decided to re-open it for him.
“I’m not proud of it,” he said. “And my hand hurts like hell.” He flexed his fingers and winced, studying the movement of the bones and tendons.
Nothing felt broken, but the dull ache across the top of his hand was going to make barre work uncomfortable for the next few days, and he’d have to find a way to avoid partnering and lifting.
Missy pushed her chair back and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a moment later and handing him a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel. He pressed it gratefully to the top of his hand and muttered his thanks.
“We both know that guy got what he deserved, and you landed a hell of a punch. But, shit. You could be in real trouble here. What are you gonna do?”
What was he going to do? Try to get the video taken down?
That seemed impossible. Wait for the guy to press charges?
The thought made that ugly, rotten thing stir under his ribs again.
If the guy tried that, maybe Ricky and Matty would tell the cops how long he’d spent talking shit, provoking them before Justin finally snapped.
And they didn’t even know the half of it.
Justin sighed and shook his head. “Wait and see, I guess. With any luck, it’ll blow over and he’ll be too embarrassed to file charges.” He should be embarrassed, getting laid out on the tiles like that by a fancy little freak.
Missy glanced at her phone. “What about your boss?”
Justin groaned. He hadn’t even thought about what Peter would say if he saw the video.
If there was one thing the artistic director of Australian National Ballet hated, it was negative publicity, and footage of one of his principal dancers socking someone in the jaw in a crowded bar as two other dancers tried to hold him back was pretty bloody negative.
“Let’s just hope he doesn’t see it,” he said to Missy, standing and pushing his chair back, suddenly needing to move, the way he always did when he was antsy. “Let’s hope no one else sees it.”
The video was really good. Like, explosively good. What was it Alan liked to say? “If it bleeds it leads, and with video it succeeds?” There wasn’t much bleeding on the arts beat, but this story was an exception. And it had one hell of a video.
Ivy absentmindedly reached up and pressed the STOP button as the bus lurched in the morning traffic, then hit PLAY on her phone for the fourth time.
She already had her lede half-written in her head.
On stage, Justin Winters floats like a butterfly.
Off stage, the 33-year-old principal dancer at the Australian National Ballet apparently stings like a bee.
A few minutes later the bus doors whooshed open, and Ivy shouldered her way around the remaining passengers, her gaze half on her phone and half on the footpath as she hustled to work as fast as her short legs would carry her.
At the cafe in the lobby, she tapped the toe of her block-heeled pump impatiently, tapping out copy on her phone until the barista called her name.
Coffee in hand, she couldn’t write any more, but she pulled up the number for ANB and called the company’s press department.
By the time the lift doors opened on the 9th floor, she had a clipped “no comment” and most of her story drafted.
A few hundred words, plus that video, and they had a hit on their hands.
Ivy marched through the newsroom, threw herself into her chair, and tapped on her keyboard to wake up her computer.
“Good one for you this morning,” she said breathlessly to her boss as she dumped her shoulder bag on her desk, not bothering with pleasantries.
At the other end of their long shared desk, Alan didn’t reply.
He usually didn’t fully wake up until after his third coffee anyway.
“I’ll file in a few minutes, and we can get it up fast.”
More silence from the other end of the desk, but the Sydney Morning Sun’s open-plan newsroom was already fairly busy, with the familiar sounds of phones ringing and reporters chatting playing in the background. Eventually, Alan spoke.
“I’ve got a meeting with the boss in twenty,” he said gruffly. Ivy glanced over at him, typing as she watched him run a distracted hand through his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. He didn’t even look like he’d had his second coffee yet.
“Can you look at this before you go? It’s a big one.
A principal at Australian National Ballet got in a fistfight at a pub last night and there’s video.
He knocked the guy out cold. We can put a big hed on it, something like…
‘Ballet Dancer Caught on Video Starting Bar Brawl.’ Give me five minutes, okay?
I’ll file it clean.” Alan merely grunted in reply.
“Okay, that’s live,” he grumbled a short while later. Ivy glanced at the time in the corner of her screen, tossed her golden-brown hair over her shoulder, and gave the lapels of her black blazer a triumphant little tug.
“And with two minutes to spare.” She grinned, pulling up the link to the story and preparing to share it on all the arts section’s social media channels. “Good luck with the big boss.”
Another grunt as Alan stood, his shoulders hunched even higher than usual, and trudged away.
Alan was a bit of a curmudgeon, and an absolute stickler about dangling participles, but Ivy liked him.
In the seven years she’d worked for him at the Morning Sun, he’d taught her a lot (including that a dangling participle was a cardinal sin on par with kitten murder).
He pushed her, too, to make her stories as clickable as possible, part of his mission—their shared mission, really—to make the arts as relevant and accessible to readers in a city obsessed with rugby and real estate.
Sometimes that meant taking an edgy angle, but Ivy didn’t mind.
Better that people talk about dance and opera, and jazz and theater, than forget they existed.
People didn’t need to love her stories, but the opposite of love wasn’t hate, it was indifference—and in this day and age, that was something no journalist could afford.
On the other side of the newsroom, Alan stopped in front of the frosted glass office where the editor-in-chief ensconced himself, the only person on the masthead who enjoyed the luxury of a door.
Ivy watched with a frown as Alan heaved a sigh, and then he pulled the door open and disappeared inside.
A familiar foreboding prickled the back of Ivy’s shoulders, and she shrugged, trying to dispel it.
They’d just had a round of layoffs a few months ago.
It was too soon for another one. Hopefully this morning’s meeting with the EIC was nothing major, and when Alan got back she could pitch him a few more ideas.
In the meantime, she watched engagement on the bar brawl article climb steadily, as people weighed in on the video.
With any luck this would take care of her traffic quota for the month, and she could spend the next few days working on the story Alan had okayed a few weeks ago, about the country’s first soprano to perform in a wheelchair.
When that was done, she wanted to write about a sketch comedy troupe that put on performances and workshops for kids at the children’s hospital.
Then, a deep dive into how the cost of living crisis was affecting the demographics of theater, opera, and ballet attendance.
She smiled, allowing herself a few minutes to relish the satisfaction of seeing yet another story go up before she closed the document and moved on to the next article.
Journalism wasn’t Ivy’s first idea of a dream job, but after her first dream had died, she’d built herself a career that she loved.
Half an hour later, the bar brawl story was the second most-clicked story on the site, behind an exclusive about a prominent property developer who’d been arrested for fraud.
The comments section was on fire, and Ivy’s tweet about it had racked up a few hundred retweets.
She was about to grab her wallet and go downstairs for another cappuccino when she saw the EIC’s door swing open.
Alan reappeared, looking even more dejected than he had when he’d gone in.
Ivy watched as he ran his hand through his hair again and looked around the newsroom with a grimace, and her stomach flipped over.
She swallowed hard as Alan approached, walking like he was heading back to another four-hour performance by that Dutch experimental theater troupe that had visited Sydney last year.
“What did the big boss want?” she asked, trying and failing to inject a little brightness into her voice. The look on his face was more than merely curmudgeonly. It was grim and resigned, and the sight of it made dread simmer in Ivy’s chest.
Alan lowered himself into his chair and swiveled it slowly towards her. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough, and the simmer rose to a churning boil.
“He’s letting us go. Effective today. As part of ‘prudent cost-cutting measures to keep the paper profitable.’ I’m sorry.”