The queen and the gremlin
Here is a thing nobody tells you about Jadwin Gymnasium: it has a sound system that could remove a man's spine, and it is operated by a twenty-year-old junior called Priya who owes me one entire career.
I did her first campaign for free. Two rowers, a juice bar and a Tuesday. She now runs the arena AV desk on game nights and has a portfolio, and when I sat down across from her nine days ago and slid a USB across the table, she looked at it for exactly two seconds before she said, "Is this legal?"
“It's approved.”
“Maddy.”
“It is approved, Priya. I have an email.”
I did have an email. That is the part I want on the record, because I have spent four months being told by this campus that I get things by being blonde and adjacent to athletes, and this — this — I pitched.
I sat in an office in the athletic department in a leather skirt and a blazer I bought specifically to be taken seriously in and I did not enjoy owning, and I presented a one-minute sponsor spot for the senior night video package. Deck. Numbers. Reach figures across five sports.
A slide about student-athlete brand development that I am genuinely proud of.
The Assistant Director looked at the deck for eleven minutes and said, “This is more professional than what the department produces.”
“I know.”
“Can we use it after?”
So no. Nobody did me a favour. I bought sixty seconds in the senior-night package at a rate I negotiated down by letting the department use the campaign assets afterward, with a signed release for every athlete featured.
The discount was strategic.
The USB has two files on it. One of them is the spot they approved.
The other one is forty seconds longer.
Jenny finds me under the tunnel at 7:40 with two hair ties in her mouth and a look of unhinged serenity. “We're going to get arrested.”
“We're going to get escorted. There's a difference and it involves paperwork.” I assure her.
“I'm French. They'll deport me.”
“They'll deport you to Paris, Jenny.”
She considers this. “Okay, I'm in.”
Princeton is up eleven at the break. Will has fourteen points and an assist so pretty that Nate screamed a word I will not be repeating to Lizzie.
The buzzer goes.
The teams come off. The band stops. There is that specific arena lull where six thousand people all decide simultaneously to look at their phones.
Then the lights go out. All of them.
There is a noise from the crowd, the confused delighted rising kind, and I am standing in the dark at the mouth of the tunnel with Jenny's hand crushing mine, and over the PA comes the voice of a very serious junior called Priya, who is having the night of her life.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. PLEASE WELCOME TO THE FLOOR—”
Madonna, give me strength.
“—THE QUEEN. AND THE GREMLIN.”
And then the organ hits.
You know the one. Pirates of the Caribbean. The villain's theme, the one that opens like a cathedral collapsing, except Priya has laid a kick drum underneath it at a volume I can feel behind my teeth, and Jadwin Gymnasium loses its mind before we have even stepped onto the wood.
We come out running.
I would love to tell you what the next ninety seconds look like from the outside. I genuinely do not know. I want that established before anyone describes it in a group chat.
I know the floor is very shiny and much larger than it looks from the stands.
Here is what Jenny and I are not. We are not cheerleaders. We do not have a formation, we cannot do the thing with the arms, and if either of us attempted a lift there would be a stretcher.
Here is what Jenny and I are. We are two girls who have closed out approximately two hundred house parties between us, and we know exactly what to do with a hip, a hair flick and a bass line.
So we do that.
On a Division I basketball court. To a pirate soundtrack. In front of six thousand people.
Jenny gets the first eight counts because Jenny is the Queen and it is her right, and she takes the middle of that floor like the entire building has been rented in her name.
I come in on the drop. I have my hair down for exactly this reason and it is the single best decision I have made all season.
Somewhere in the second phrase I catch one frame of Will.
One.
He is standing at the end of the bench with a towel in his hand that he is no longer using, and his mouth is slightly open, and he looks like a man watching a building come down.
Then the chorus arrives and the actual cheerleaders come out — because they are professionals, and they knew, and they have been extraordinarily gracious — and they slot in around us in perfect formation and do the real choreography, while Jenny and I continue doing whatever it is we are doing in the middle of it.
The contrast is the best part. I did not plan the contrast.
I am going to take credit for the contrast.
I have won things. I have hosted parties for two hundred people in my parents' house and closed a deal at eighteen and had a photograph of a rower's torso become a person's mother's phone background.
None of it is this.
The music cuts.
The lights stay down.
And the big LED goes white, then black, then— FAIRFAX & LAURENT
Our logo. Which Jenny designed at two in the morning while eating cold noodles and swearing at a laptop in two languages.
Then the campaigns.
247 Gym, the first one, Mike mid-lift with the light coming in sideways.
The track guys with their stupid strong legs.
The women's rowing eight on the water at 5:40 in the morning, which nearly killed me and which is the single most beautiful thing I have ever shot. Volleyball. Soccer. Cross country.
Twenty-one athletes. Five sports. Four months.
I cut them like they’ve been assembled to save the fucking world—oars slicing through black water, spikes tearing up track, bodies flying above hardwood, every athlete looking absurdly powerful and far too cool to be real.
I know it is good. I have watched this cut two hundred times and it is good, and the arena is making the noise a crowd makes when it recognises itself.
Then, at twenty-two seconds, the music drops out and the first testimonial comes up.
Here is what I told the athletes when we filmed them: talk about what it's like working with us. Two minutes. Whatever comes into your head.
Here is what I did not tell them: where it was going, or that I would be doing the edit myself, or that I had absolutely no intention of using the sensible parts.
LEON, in a doorway, dripping wet: “Maddy made me stand in a river in January.”
A ROWER, entirely sincere: “She told me my left side needed work. I've been thinking about it every day since. I don't know what she meant.”
MIKE, football, arms folded: “She said my stomach looked shy.”
RORY, to camera, deadly serious: “I have never been more scared of anyone in my life. I'd do anything she asked. She has my mother's phone number.”
A TRACK GIRL, delighted: “I asked her if I could bring my own outfit and she said, and I quote, leave fashion to me.”
MASON, sitting on a bench, sighing: “She made me do fifty push-ups in a car park. In February. And then she used the second photo.”
JENNY, off-camera voice, unmistakably French: “He cried.”
MASON: “I did not cry.”
JENNY: “He cried a little.”
And Jadwin goes feral.
Six thousand people. And underneath it Priya has brought in the big one — the sea monster music, the Kraken, the part where the whole orchestra decides it has had enough — playing under a montage of Division I athletes confessing on camera that they are afraid of an eighteen-year-old with a shot list.
The sound in that building is a sound I would like to keep in a jar.
Half the basketball team is on the bench with their heads in their hands.
Leon is on his feet pointing at the screen shouting THAT WASN'T FOR THIS.
It absolutely was for this. I have a release form.
Then everything stops.
Black screen. White text.
CAPTAIN HAS HOME-COURT ADVANTAGE.
And it sits there.
Four seconds. Which is a very long time in a one-minute cut and an unsurvivable amount of time in an arena, and I don't breathe for any of it.
Because a version of that sentence went around this campus in a screenshot. It went around in a chat I never fully read and it arrived on my phone at a party in somebody else's kitchen.
And it said that everything I built I got on my knees, and I answered a client's email about it in forty seconds and left out the joke.
I did not correct it. I have never corrected anything in my life.
I'm correcting this one. In white letters. Four feet high. In the building where he plays.
Because it's funny. Because there is nothing to be ashamed of. Because I do have home-court advantage. So does he. And the entire student body can sit with that.
The screen changes.
GO PRINCETON.
The lights come up.
The arena detonates.
I have never heard anything like it and I have been to a lot of loud rooms. It goes on and on, and the band starts up over the top of it, and somebody four rows behind the bench is chanting GREM-LIN then QUEEN which I will be dealing with later for the rest of my natural life.
Jenny grabs my face with both hands and screams something in French directly into my mouth.
And then I look for Will.
He has not moved.
He is standing exactly where he was, at the end of the bench, and the towel has fallen out of his hand and he has made no attempt to retrieve it.
Nate is shouting into the side of his head. DJ is saying something with one hand on his shoulder. Coach has come down the line and appears to be asking him a direct question.
Will Mercer is not receiving any of it.
He looks, and I want to be precise, because this is a face I intend to remember when I am ninety. He looks mildly concussed. Like a man who has been struck by something at close range and has not yet established what.
Then his legs come back online.
He comes across that floor with a walk I've never seen on him. Not the captain walk. Not the lazy one that I love. Something faster and much less organised, straight past Coach and past Nate and past two officials and a man with a camera.