Chapter Nine
JUNIE
I want it entered into the record that I scheduled the kiss cam myself, six weeks in advance, on a Tuesday, of sound mind, with a latte, and that at the time it had seemed like such a good idea I’d put a little star next to it in the content calendar.
Six weeks ago that woman had never fallen asleep on his shoulder on a team bus. I’d like to go back and take her latte away.
Hazel: big day. remember your training. it’s a work kiss. like CPR Junie: it is exactly like CPR, thank you, clinical and scheduled Hazel: june. i’ve seen CPR. nobody checks the other person’s pulse for six weeks first
I put the phone in a drawer. An actual drawer. The booth has a drawer and I used it.
We’d rehearsed the logistics, because of course we had, at Marge’s that week, both of us briefing it like a penalty kill while Dot refilled coffee and signed “ceiling” at us.
Second intermission, 14:40 on the clock, Saint out of his gear because backup goalies exist and intermission Saint in a hoodie was, per my own analytics, its own economy.
Seats in section 104, comped, camera-blocked, sightlines checked.
The board op, Marcus, had the cue sheet.
Eight seconds of cam time. I’d initiate per rule 3’s precedent, he’d cooperate per rule 4, the crowd would lose its mind per the business model, and we’d both go back to work per the terms.
“Questions?” I’d said, at the diner, wrapping the briefing.
“One.” He’d turned his coffee mug a quarter turn, which I’d learned was Saint for choosing words. “Eight seconds is long.”
“Eight seconds is optimal. Under five reads as a peck, over ten the internet starts a betting pool on tongue. I have DATA, Saint, I ran the numbers on forty kiss cams across four leagues, I have a spreadsheet called SMOOCHONOMICS and I’ll thank you not to make it weird.”
“You made a spreadsheet called Smoochonomics and I’m the one making it weird.”
“Correct,” I’d said, and he’d done the two-degree thaw into his mug, and we’d moved on to logistics of hand placement like adults, which is to say I’d volleyed increasingly unhinged jokes about it until he said, deadpan, “I’ll hold your face like it forgives me,” and I had to go stand by the pie case for a minute for reasons I attributed to the pie.
The game cooperated, which never happens.
2 to 1 Chupacabras after two, Saint stopping everything with an address, the barn full, actually full, eighteen thousand and change, a number that would have made October me cry into her dashboard.
The kid in the SUNSHINE 00 jersey was on the glass during warmups.
Rich was in his box wearing the tie with the little cacti, his ceremonial tie, the one he cried in.
Second intermission. 14:40 on the clock. I came down from the booth and took my comped seat next to Saint in 104, in the hoodie economy, and the T-shirt cannon did its work, and the peewee skaters did their little race, and my whole body was so calm and professional that I dropped my phone twice.
“You’re weird,” Saint observed, to the ice.
“I’m CLINICAL. This is my clinical face. It’s like CPR.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing. Hazel. Forget it.”
The board went to the smooch cam graphic, hearts, the works, Marcus running my cue sheet like a professional.
It found an elderly couple who’d been married since before the zamboni was invented, sixty years of technique, the crowd roared.
It found two guys who held up a QUESO IS A SOUP sign instead of kissing, the crowd roared differently.
And then, per the calendar, per the star, per six weeks of sound logic, it found us.
Eighteen thousand people made a sound I will hear on my deathbed.
Here is what eight seconds is, for scale: an entire shift in overtime.
A commercial. The time it takes to say “no kissing except where cameras are” out loud, twice.
I know exactly what eight seconds is because I had counted it against a stopwatch in my kitchen while Hazel ate cereal and called me unwell.
I initiated, per precedent. I turned, and he was already turned, and the last thing I saw before the math stopped was his face doing none of the things his face does, no thaw, no deposition, no border dispute, just looking at me like a man who had also, possibly, run some private numbers, and I put my hand on the front of that hoodie and kissed him with the whole arena watching, and my professional brain got out its clipboard and began the count.
One. His hand came up and held my face like it forgave him.
Two. The crowd sound went somewhere above weather, and I stopped being able to hear it, which was inconvenient, as it was my only clock.
Three, or possibly five. The clipboard fell down somewhere.
He kissed the way he did everything, unhurried and completely, like a man with no interest in the rebound because he intended to hold on to the first shot, and one of my hands had developed independent politics and gotten into the hair at the back of his neck.
Somewhere in there, eight seconds ended.
I know it ended because Marcus, God bless him and his cue sheet, cut away on schedule.
The board moved on. The hearts graphic found strangers.
The camera, per the terms, per rule 4, was no longer on us in any way that mattered, and the entire legal basis for what our mouths were doing expired like a parking meter, and neither of us stopped.
That’s the whole scandal. That’s the thing I have to live with as a documentation professional.
The cameras left, and the kiss stayed, one second, two, three, unlicensed, unscheduled, off the books entirely, in front of eighteen thousand witnesses who had already been told to look elsewhere.
He broke it, in the end, or I did, the depositions differ, and we sat there in section 104 with the peewee skaters wobbling below us and the crowd already onto the next graphic, breathing like two people who’d been penalty-killing, not looking at each other with tremendous discipline.
“So,” I said, finally, to the ice, in a voice I did not recognize from any of my content. “Good execution. Clean. Very. Per the sheet.”
“Per the sheet,” he said, to the ice.
“Marcus cut on eight exactly. Professional of him.”
“Very professional.”
“Neither of us is going to mention the part after eight.”
“What part,” said Saint, which was the correct answer, the only answer, the answer I’d have coached him to give, and it hung there between us being obeyed by absolutely no one, because his thumb was still, at that moment, at the hinge of my jaw, like a man finishing a sentence in a language I had nine facts about and no dictionary for.
The team won 4 to 1. The kiss cam clip, the sanctioned eight seconds of it, did eleven million views in eighteen hours and is, to this day, the highest-performing post in franchise history, and I watched it exactly once, clinically, and confirmed what I already knew: the cameras got the good part and missed the true part, which had been the whole design, which made me feel like a genius the way a bruise feels like a color.
Rich cried in his box. There’s footage. He’d deny it, but he was wearing the cactus tie, and the man knows what the cactus tie means.
I stayed late that night, alone in the media room, doing the post-game package on autopilot while the building emptied around me and Gus resurfaced the ice for nobody, which he says is when the ice is most honest. And when the package was queued and there were no more legitimate tasks between me and thinking, I did what a systems person does when the system has an incident: I opened the shared document to file the report.
The cursor blinked at rule 4 for a long time. No kissing except where cameras are. Six weeks old. Load-bearing in ways its author, a woman with a latte and a star sticker, had failed to model.
I typed the amendment slowly, both hands, on the record, where he’d see it, because read receipts, on, since 2023, everything he does is on purpose, and God help me, so is this:
Rule 4, amended: Kissing where cameras are. Definition of “where cameras are” pending.