Chapter 5 #2
When it was over, when they’d completed the loop and he’d climbed into his old but well-maintained ute, she’d driven home as quickly as she could without getting a ticket, played back the audio, and threw everything she had onto a page.
The result was almost 800 words about the man who’d barely been willing to give her eight earlier in the week.
It wasn’t going to win a Walkley, but it was good enough—and better than she could have done had she not spent most of her afternoon getting sunburnt and sore out in the bush.
“What do you think?” she asked Connie nervously.
“Give me more than ten seconds to read it and I’ll tell you.” Connie smiled over her monitor.
“Give it to me, I’m a speed reader,” Oliver said, standing up and striding over to stand behind Connie’s chair. Oliver adjusted their tie and cleared their throat officiously, and Ivy shot them a quick, nervous smile.
“You are not, stop telling people that.” Connie shook her head up at them, her long ponytail swishing over her slender shoulders.
“I took a quiz! It said I’m a moderate speed reader!”
“I took a quiz that said the Disney princess I’m most like is Mulan, which is a) probably the answer they give all the Asian girls and b) not true because I’m a pacifist,” Connie replied. “Those quizzes just tell you what they think you want to hear.”
“No one is reading!” Ivy exclaimed, before she could stop herself.
She’d been up half the night last night rewriting the middle, then flipping it back, then re-rewriting it, and she was a little wired this morning.
The monthly subscriber newsletter was scheduled to go out later in the day, and her story would be in it, along with some professional photos of Justin and some candids she’d snapped with her phone on their bushwalk.
The company was leaving in ten days, and Peter would be making his decision about tour casting any day now.
If this didn’t work, if it didn’t satisfy Peter and the suits, she didn’t have much time to figure out something that would.
“Relax, I’m sure it’s fine,” Oliver said. “But now we will read it to be absolutely definitely sure.”
“Bet I can read it faster,” Connie said in a sing-song voice.
“You’re on,” Oliver said, and they both focused their attention on Connie’s screen.
A few minutes later, Oliver looked up with a gasp. “I won, because I’m a speed reader, and you did fine. Better than fine, actually. This is really good.”
Connie poked her tongue out at Oliver, then gave Ivy another smile and nodded encouragingly. “I’ve got a few small suggestions, but I agree. It’s really good.”
“You’re sure?” Ivy asked, tucking her hair behind her ears nervously.
“I’m sure.”
“It captures the clean cut, well-behaved side of him, which is exactly what you need,” Oliver confirmed. “Just a country boy, out in nature, eating his veggies, not punching anyone.”
“Right,” Ivy said faintly. She wished she weren’t so nervous about this.
It wasn’t a real article, it was just a puff piece for the company’s subscribers.
Like Oliver said, there was nothing in it that the company didn’t want people to know—and there was no mention of all the things the company didn’t want readers thinking about. It was just PR.
As she made the few changes Connie had suggested and prepared the text and the photos in the newsletter software, she tried to muster the feeling that used to pulse through her right before she published a story she’d worked hard on.
A thrumming excitement, a sense of power knowing that her words would soon be out in the world.
But as she proofed the copy one last time and made sure all the captions were free of typos, she couldn’t summon any kind of thrum.
Just a dull, nervous ache in the pit of her stomach, which she supposed was the knowledge that once she hit “send” on this newsletter, she’d have officially crossed over the line between journalism and PR—and that if this didn’t work, she’d have crossed it for nothing.
Justin usually spent five or ten minutes after company class messing around with Ricky and Matty, taking turns filming each other attempting the biggest and hardest leaps they could pull off.
Ricky said it made for good social media content.
Matty claimed he didn’t care about “all that Instacrap,” but he usually ended up posting the videos anyway, albeit with an ironic, self-effacing caption.
Today, though, Justin made a beeline for his bag as soon as Peter dismissed them after reverence, and shook his head when Ricky looked over at him, eyebrows raised in invitation.
Justin hastily dug around in the bag until he found his phone.
Ivy’s story was going out today, and he wanted to know if it had been sent while they were in class.
He found an email from her at the top of his inbox, sent about an hour ago.
Hello, Justin – I hope you like how this turned out. I think it should get you where you want to go.
Regards, Ivy.
He stared for a few seconds at the sign-off.
Regards, Ivy. He supposed it accurately reflected the fragile, mutually necessary truce they’d arrived at a few days ago.
But it looked chilly on the screen. And she hadn’t been chilly on their walk.
Well, neither of them had been chilly, it had been thirty degrees and they’d been out in the bush for two hours, with the trees providing only patchy shade from the February sun.
Still, once she’d gotten over her surprise that this was how he liked to spend his precious afternoons off, they’d settled into an easy rhythm, walking beside each other on the uneven track he knew so well.
She’d come with a long list of questions, and he’d tried to remember that it was in his best interest to answer them in as much detail as he could, even when her follow-up questions had follow-up questions.
But it had felt more like a conversation than their previous attempts at an interview.
She’d smiled when he’d joked about broccoli, and had laughed when he lamented how unfair it was that foam rolling worked as well as it did.
Her suggestion of a neutral territory had been a stroke of genius, even if the place he’d suggested was somewhere she’d never been before.
Being out in the bush always made him feel calmer, and so did moving his body.
Plus, Ivy was a lot easier to talk to when she wasn’t jotting down everything he said and did on that bloody notepad.
At one point, the track had narrowed so much that there wasn’t quite enough room for the two of them to walk without their bodies touching.
Her arm had bumped into his a few times, and the third time it happened, she’d glanced up at him with wide eyes.
Her cheeks were pink with the heat and the exertion, and sweat had glued a few strands of her hair to her temples.
In the dappled light, her eyes looked moss-green, and they were full of surprise, or alarm, or something, as she looked up at him.
Justin was struck, not for the first time since they’d met years ago, by how pretty she was, even when she looked like she was desperate for a cool shower and an ice-cold beer.
“I’ll just walk behind you,” she’d muttered, and before he could object she’d stepped behind him and cleared her throat. Then she resumed her questions, and they kept walking.
Regards, Ivy. Chilly. Or just professional. Which was appropriate, given she’d sent it from her work email address. He pulled his eyes away from her signature and scrolled down, then read the newsletter article she’d forwarded him.
She’d done a very good job, he thought. He sounded like himself, but also like the person they both knew the company needed him to be right now.
Upstanding. At peace in nature. In a complicated committed relationship with his foam roller.
It helped that he was all those things, but Ivy had made him sound like the best version of himself, and she’d leaned heavily on what he’d told her about why he liked dancing “If Love.” The subtext in her writing was clear: it would be an awful shame if he didn’t get to perform it in New York after all.
Great job, Justin typed in the reply field.
Then he erased it. Good job. No. Nice job.
Or how about—he hit send, unwilling to agonize any further over an email to a colleague, hoping he had matched her tone.
And hoping that the hours they’d spent together would pay off. He needed this to work. They both did.