Page 72 of The Summer Show
“Kathleen! Kaloste!” Dora Makri said, rising to plant kisses on my cheeks. After the kisses, she pinched a chunk of cheek meat between her thick fingers and gave them a little shake. “That means welcome in Greek, the language of the gods. Okay, maybe not the gods because they spoke Ancient Greek, but close enough, yes?”
In that moment I knew what it felt like to be a dog. One of the big ones. A Newfoundland or a Saint Bernard. Wasn’t so bad, actually. I felt as though she genuinely liked me. My inner people-pleaser was giddy.
“Kathleen! Good to see you!” Memo said. He went to kiss my cheeks. Dora shooed him away.
Paris, the effervescent host of Greece’s Top Hoplite, was kissing his dog on the lips. Effie was quietly flipping through what appeared to be a teen magazine while the other judges bickered.
Or maybe they were engaged in a regular conversation. Hard to tell with Greeks.
“Did I come at a bad time?” I asked, finding an empty seat.
The conversation died. They all stared at me for several long, silent moments while Effie flipped to the next page of her teen magazine, ignoring everything.
“There is a problem, and the problem is you and Nick,” Mairi, the show’s director said.
Me and Nick? There was no me and Nick outside of my romantic fantasies. “He’s my best friend’s brother, and he’s my friend, too. That’s a problem how?”
“Ever since Greece’s Top Hoplite started, the contestants listened to us,” Mairi said. “We say who has a romance and who does not—and nobody has a romance. Did we say you and Nick could have a romance? No.”
I looked over at Memo, then Dora, and then the others. Funny thing, they were all busy making eyes at inanimate objects. Well, except Dora, who took my hand in hers and patted it.
“We’re having a romance?” This was news to me. The only romance here was between Paris and his dog. Their kissing was getting weird.
“Everybody knows it,” Mairi said. “Look at social media.”
“Half of social media also thinks the earth is flat and that lizard people are real. I wouldn’t call social media an authority on anything, least of all my friendship with Nick Merrick.”
Her smugness dimmed for a split second. “Have you seen what they are saying?”
I stared her in the eye. “Yes, but only because people keep showing me.” And because I’d performed my own searches out of morbid curiosity. But she didn’t need to know that.
“Now the audience will want romantic moments between the two of you, and this is not a kissing show. Fighting, yes. Kissing, no. This is the show for when you divorce or we are manufacturing the romance. Do you see this?” She swiped several times on her phone then held it up. “This is not manufactured romance. You like each other. I cannot do anything with that.”
The pictures were of me and Nick earlier today when he was comforting me after my Mom revelations and asthma attack. Yes, from the way Nick was holding me like I was something precious to him, it did appear as if we were more than friends. But people who worked in television should know better than anybody that how things looked didn’t speak to their authenticity.
“He was comforting me after I told him things about my past.”
Her whole demeanor shifted. “What things?”
“Things that are nobody’s business.”
“You are about to be on television. Everything about you is about to become everybody’s business.”
“Not this,” I said. “This is mine.”
She exchanged looks with the judges—looks that left me feeling uneasy. Surely they wouldn’t go digging. There wasn’t much to find, because I never talked to anyone about what happened with my mother. But these were people with deep pockets, and those deep pockets were filled with money.
Somehow, secret messages were transmitted.
Maybe lizard people were real.
“Okay.” Mairi rubbed her manicured bird of prey hands together. “Here is what we want you to do. Fall in love with Nick. Sleep with him. Keep flirting in public. Make lots of drama, yes? This was not what we planned … but we can exploit it. Now that I think about it, this will boost ratings, although it is hard to believe anything could boost our ratings because we are always at the top.”
Was she crazy? High? Suffering from a traumatic brain injury? “I’m not going to have sex with Nick!”
She shrugged. “Why not? It would be good for your career.”
“As a school librarian?”