Chapter 6 #2
“Yes?” Caleb asks when the call connects. He grips the steering wheel, fingers tight around sun-warmed leather. It’s never good news with Prichard. Rumor has it he once complimented an employee and got admitted to a hospital for chest pains that same night.
“You were fucking shit.”
“I know,” Caleb says tightly. He scowls at the cars ahead.
The ESPN reporter’s question wasn’t hard at all. Being doubted in the entertainment industry is par for the course. Everyone thinks they can do his job better than he can. He should have gotten used to being hated by now, right?
“What was that?”
“Sorry,” Caleb mutters.
“What’s gotten into you lately? Even the fans can see that your head isn’t in the game. Your moves are sloppy and your promos are lackluster. Your stock is falling.” Prichard pauses. In the background, a shuffle of papers. “That means my stock is falling.”
Caleb clenches his jaw. “I said I’m sorry.”
He knows what Prichard is like. Money makes his world go round. If Caleb isn’t beefing up Prichard’s wallet, then he’s as good as useless. And in the old man’s eyes, uselessness belongs in the trash.
Something must be wrong with him. He doesn’t know what.
Aside from an incredible Duolingo streak, it’s not as though he has much going on for him outside of work.
Maybe Ross was right that it’s hard sitting atop a division, constantly held to an increasingly unattainable standard.
Eternally reinventing the wheel to run himself over.
Maybe he’s the prince of a falling empire.
Or maybe he’s just given up on himself. Fans may be hard on him, but he’s even harder on himself.
That’s his cool party trick: no matter how much people hate him, he will always hate himself more.
Prichard mumbles beneath his breath, something about vacationing in Mykonos instead of babying a grown-ass man.
“Okay. New plan,” Prichard says after a couple minutes filled with markers squeaking against a board.
His voice is sharp, conniving. “Come Fyter Fiesta, you’re going to do something massive, something that will make headlines and send shockwaves through the business.
I’ll draft a script and text it to you.”
“But—”
“No buts,” Prichard barks. “I have a lot of money riding on you, Knight. Do it or I’ll strip you of your title.”
Caleb snaps his mouth shut, teeth rattling under the impact. He could say no. Some part of him, the part that’s sick of being held under the chairman’s thumb and constantly treading on eggshells, wants to say no.
“I made you a somebody,” Prichard reminds Caleb, as though reading his mind. “Test me, and I won’t hesitate to take it all away.”
And that’s just it. If Caleb fights back, Prichard will destroy him.
With money comes power and an unfairly influential tongue.
It works in his favor when he’s in Prichard’s good graces, untouchable as the chairman’s golden boy.
But it always comes with a catch: subservience.
Step out of line, and Prichard will shut all doors on him.
Caleb sighs and thunks his head back against the leather headrest “Fine.”
“And remember, as always, this stays between us. Or else.”
Prichard ends the call and Caleb hurls his phone onto the passenger seat. It tumbles onto the mat with a dull thud.
Rolling his neck, Caleb turns to look over at the vacant passenger seat. He’s already preemptively dreading the grueling drive ahead of him tomorrow. Nothing but his brain against the I-95. Eleven hours of sweet misery through North and South Carolina, all the way to Florida.
Being forced to tolerate long drives on his lonesome is nothing new to Caleb.
He’s trained himself into submission, taken the voice that begs for someone—anyone, please—and locked it away.
It would only be a liability. Now, he doesn’t fear the silence bouncing around the car, the one that skitters up his skin.
His body can go hours behind the wheel, because it knows no one is around to take over.
But sometimes, especially when Caleb begins to feel like a too-full cup on the verge of spilling over, he talks to ghosts in his car.
His mom appears when he’s at his weakest, gauzy like a day at the beach, like being young and still innocent.
He tells her he misses her. She vanishes before she ever responds.
It’s often Bailey, though. She’s more concrete, a thunderous splash of color.
He imagines sharing this weight with her, a buoy as he drowns in a sea of poor choices and wrong turns.
He would never actually do it though. That would be unfair, wanting someone to carry him when they have enough as it is going on.
Someone new visits today: it’s Asher. He’s sweaty and flushed with indignant wide brown eyes. His tongue sticks out between his lips. His stupid mouth that never seems to shut up, running dizzying circles around Caleb. Asher, who somehow pokes holes right through him.
Caleb wills him away. It’s dangerous. He can’t afford to go there.
But he thinks, maybe, there’s nothing he wouldn’t trade for that: friendship, connection, someplace to belong, a hand to hold. An empire for all of it.
He sobers up on instinct. There is no point thinking about something that can never be. It’s nothing more than a daydream. A foolish wish. It’s not that simple. He’s made his bed and now he has to sleep in it. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Caleb pulls up at a red light and sighs, a loud and shaky exhale. He drops his forehead against the steering wheel, jumps as the car punches out a startlingly loud honk.
When he glances out the window, the driver to his left flips him off.
Caleb is beginning to think that phones have a vendetta against him.
He sits on the edge of the Holiday Inn’s itchy bed scowling down at the phone gripped in his hand. Perhaps if he glares hard enough, the phone will disintegrate, the same way he’d like to.
Chewing on his lower lip, he unlocks the phone, fingers flying across the keypad as he enters a number memorized by heart.
The phone rings.
It rings and rings and rings until an automated voice pours out of the speaker.
“The person you are calling is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Beep.
“Uh,” Caleb says.
A short pause, he climbs to his feet, the beginning of what has the potential to become an hour-long pace around the room.
Caleb hisses out a long breath. “Hey, Mom.”
He crosses the room and squats down in front of the minibar, reaching for and cracking open a can of old overpriced beer.
“I don’t know if you or Dad have been receiving my voicemails.
Maybe this isn’t even your number anymore.
” He huffs out a laugh. Like the beer, it falls flat.
“I just wanted to let you know that my next title defense will be in two weeks at Fyter Fiesta. As usual, I’ve reserved two tickets under your name. ”
He tries to speak slowly, deliberately. “It’d be nice if you and Dad came to watch the show. Or just you. Or him.”
The last decade of Caleb’s life swims into focus—the way he would walk out onto the ramp, squinting past the harsh glare of the spotlights and combing through the crowd for two familiar faces. After some time, he began settling for one. He never stopped looking.
He pauses, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “Or not.”
Another pause. A long one.
“I miss you.”
Out the window, the sun dips lazily over the bay. Caleb crosses the length of the room and rests his forehead against the cool glass pane.
“Anyway, I’ll let you go now. I hope you’ve been well, Mom.”
He swipes at the phone screen and the click of the lock resonates around the empty room.
The hotel’s recreation area is on the ground floor below, and Caleb can hear the roster splashing around in the pool, swimming laps, and dunking one another under the water.
Peals of laughter swirl around them. Caleb feels as separate from it as he did the day he joined the company.
Taking another swig, Caleb turns his back against the window. The fragile cloak of his on-screen persona slips off slowly, incrementally, but the boy hidden beneath hardly seems any different.