Noelle August - Boomerang

“The point, Curls, is that it’s not over yet,” I told her.

She forced a smile but the reality was unavoidable: we didn’t have much time.

And now, as we flash our badges at the security guards by the door, we have even less time. In only six hours, thousands of people will flood into this hall—along with Adam Blackwood and his cadre of top-tier investors.

“Oh, God,” Mia says as our booth comes into view.

My side is lit up, the bright green playing field beneath a blue sky. I can’t see who’s using the game, but the boomerang whizzes across the sky and smashes into a heart, which explodes in a shower of probably red sparks.

It looks badass even from a distance, but I can’t appreciate it. The walls on Mia’s side are plain white—and they shouldn’t be.

When we get to the booth, Mia is swarmed by Paolo, Sadie, and Pippa. They all talk at once, and it’s like the chaos at my apartment this morning, except frantic and stressed.

“We were up all night,” Pippa says. “We kept going over everything and coming up with nothing.”

Sadie holds up a USB drive. “We got new files with your images, but they aren’t compatible with this system.”

“Is your grandma okay?” Paolo says.

I want to tell everyone to shut the hell up, but this is Mia’s gig.

Her silence eventually gets through to them, and they stand down, looking guilty for having bombarded her.

“Thanks,” she says. “Thanks for . . . doing all of this.”

All of this looks like nothing to my eyes, though I’m sure they spent the past twenty-four hours trying.

Mia looks up at me. I notice she’s gone a little pale, but her voice is calm when she says, “We’ll use your side, Ethan. We’ll just send everyone that way. The game is great, and—”

“No,” I say. “No way.”

“It’s too late.”

“No, it’s not. You worked too hard for this.” I won’t let her fail. Physically, I can’t let that happen. I step closer and brush a curl away from her eyes. “We’ll fix it, Mia. Together.”

I can tell she wants to believe me, but she says, “In six hours?”

“Hell, yeah.” I pop a kiss on her forehead, then I pull my suit jacket off and toss it on a café table. “Enough of this competition bullshit. Let’s do this.”

Mia

Q: Happy behind the scenes, or strictly limelight?

Fifteen minutes before the doors to the convention officially open, I’m hunched over a toilet bowl, trying to keep down the chicken quesadilla I split with Sadie and not ruin the dress or expensive Gucci belt provided by my team of stylists back in LA. As it is, they’d be mortified by the condition of my hair. We’re at Defcon Five, and the needle’s tipping toward red.

But flop sweat will do that to a person, as will hauling equipment around on a humid convention floor, made even sultrier by the hyperventilations of hundreds of anxious vendors. Luckily, we have a small forest of neon-draped palms to suck up all the extra CO2.

I take a few deep breaths, get up, and stagger over to the sink. Next to me stands a girl in a felt rocket ship costume, festooned with hearts and the words “Love Launcher” scrolling by on an LCD belt cinching her waist.

“What do you think?” she asks, smirking at me in the mirror as she dabs on bronze gloss. “Too subtle?”

“Oh, I think our audience is sophisticated enough to appreciate it.”

I blot the sweat from my upper lip and run my hands through my hair, which makes things roughly a trillion times worse. One side is half curled, half straightened. The other side is mashed flat on top but curls out on the bottom. I’ve got Jekyll and Hyde hair, but I smile, thinking back on my night and morning with Ethan.

“Which is yours?” the girl asks me, and it takes me a second to realize she’s asking about the booth.

“Boomerang.”

“Oh, I’ve heard that’s the one to beat,” she says.

“If that’s true, it’s a miracle.” We’ve spent six hours—Ethan, Paolo, Sadie, Pippa, and me—hatching a plan and then putting it into effect. We split apart the booths, reorienting them to push their walls to the outside, making a kind of heart out of the two boomerangs. Then we pushed my café tables together and slid Ethan’s sleek black benches up to them. It looks fantastic, and Pippa’s suggestion that people might prefer sitting in groups rather than at tables for two made a ton of sense.

But will it work, really? Does it only look good to us because our time is up and we’re out of options? I don’t know. I just know how grateful I am to everyone for working so hard. And I know I’ll be buying us all very large drinks at the end of this night.

My belly still roiling, I tell Rocket Girl “good luck.”

“Wait a sec,” she says, and hands me a heart-patterned scrunchie from around her wrist. “For your hair.”

It must be bad for perfect strangers to surrender hair accessories to me.

“Thanks.” I exit the bathroom, tucking my ridiculous mane into the scrunchie with only the vaguest hope that it will help and hurry toward the Boomerang display. From a distance, it looks awesome. The glossy black and dreamy whites play off each other, creating a space that feels harmonious but sexy and inviting.

I take a second to text my mom for a status report. Apparently, Nana woke up a few times and even managed to have some broth.

Better than she has any right to be, her text says.

And I smile, feeling exactly the same.

“Cutting it close, Mia.”

My blood freezes in my veins, and I turn to find Cookie stalking toward me. I’m shocked, though, because her hair’s down and she’s replaced her usual sharp, almost military, suit with a soft pink cashmere sweater and gray pants.

“Wow, Cookie,” I say. “You look—” Don’t say, “almost human,” my brain begs me, and for once I listen. “Nice.”

“And you look”—she scrutinizes me—“rumpled. Now, shall we see what you’ve done? I need to know how big a cluster this is going to be.”

“I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

“If it’s pleasant, I will be surprised.” She gives an impatient wave. “Lead on.”

Great. As if my anxiety levels needed further charging.

I lead Cookie past a few other booths and start to feel a bit better. Ours is centrally placed and really eye-catching. Though I couldn’t recover my whole film, I was able to dig back into my raw clips and turn the best of them into simple animated GIFS. They play over and over again on the screens around the space, now miraculously integrated into Ethan’s game.

I even transferred a few seconds of my grandparents, sepia-toned and lovely. It was so hard to leave Nana back in LA. I needed her here with me today. And there’s something about the way she and my grandfather look at each other, sitting side-by-side at a picnic table somewhere in the Catskills, the regard and attraction that projects through decades, that feels right, somehow.

I love the way it all looks—romantic yet modern. It feels like me.

My body starts to relax. We’re good. This all looks good. Now we just have to get the crowd to come interact with the space, and we’ll be money.

And then the GIFS wink off one by one, leaving us with a dozen blank screens.

Oh, no. No. No. No.

I hurry over, and Ethan steps out from behind the wall on his side, looking as queasy as I feel.

“What happened?”

“It’s been like this for the past few minutes. Some kind of connection issue, but we can’t figure it out.”

Without the images, the space looks totally different. Unfinished. Lacking.

“Two minutes ’til doors open, kids,” says Paolo. Nervously, he picks imaginary lint off his lapel.

“Let me see.” I tear around behind the display and want to cry at the tangle of cords littering the space. I dig through them, finding where they connect, looking for loose couplings. It occurs to me that Loose Couplings would make a great dating website name, and I giggle.

I’m pretty sure I’m on the verge of hysteria.

I find a few cables, which all converge on some central power supply, and follow the power supply’s cord to a floor socket with a loose plate. I push the plug in more firmly and lift the fat cord out of the way to untangle it from some others.

“Yes!” Ethan calls. “We’ve got it.”

“Awesome.” I drop the cord back on the ground and start to stand, but Paolo says, “Nope. Lost it again.”

Merda. I pick up the cord.

“Okay, it’s working,” says Ethan.

I sit there, the cord in my hand suspended about eight inches from the floor. I’m afraid I know where this is going, but I start to lower it again.

“Damn it!” Ethan groans.

I look around, wondering if I can bring a box over, a chair, a small child—something to help prop this thing. I’ll be damned if all our hard work is ruined by a cheap power supply.

The soft techno music swells, and I hear a surge of laughter and excited voices. A wave of exhilaration and raw anxiety sweeps over me.

Sadie peeks around the wall, her red hair swinging toward me like a pendulum. “Doors are open!”

“Is everything still working?”

“Yeah. It looks amazing!”

I want so much to see it. I want to be there while the crowds come and explore the space. I want to see their faces, watch Ethan show off what we’ve done. But I guess I’m going to sit here and hold a goddamn cord for the next few hours.

Cookie steps around behind the display and stands there, hands on her hips, beaming her usual nuanced blend of utter hatred and complete loathing at me.

Then she shocks the hell out of me by kneeling on the floor by my side. Reaching for the cord, she barks, “Give it to me, and get out there.”

“But—”

“This is your show, Mia,” she says, and something flashes in her expression—so fast I’m pretty sure I’m imagining it. Something that looks like compassion. “Go.”

I get to my feet. “I’ll find some way to prop it up. Or maybe we can plug into a new supply if I can find one.”

“Yes, I’d appreciate not spending my entire night breaking my back down here. Now, go.”

I rush to find Ethan. He, Paolo, and Sadie race around the space, making small adjustments, tidying up the tables and putting the last touches on the rows and rows of premiums: shot glasses with the Boomerang logo and real foam boomerangs, which I suspect may become a menace in the jam-packed hall.

A massive crowd heads toward us, a tide of beautiful, likely inebriated, people. They surge through the space like water rushing through tributaries.

I pan over the throng, and right away, I spot Adam, tall and elegant in an aubergine suit. A posse of suited dudes stride along beside him, their expressions skeptical and blasé. We have our work cut out for us, it seems, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Ready, Curls?” asks Ethan, as he slips an arm around my waist.

I lean against him for just a second, buoying myself with his strength.

“Bring it,” I say.

Ethan

Q: Is winning important, or how you play the game?

Adam betrays nothing as he introduces Mia and me to the five men who could potentially make him a billionaire. Nor does he show any surprise at the radical transformation the Boomerang booth has made since he saw it yesterday. The guy’s poker face should be legendary.

Mia and I took a huge risk. It was my idea to load her images into my video game. Gone is the boring green field and flat blue sky. Now the boomerang hearts fly over images of people on dates, laughing, having fun—and falling in love, in Nana’s case. Occasionally, someone hits a bull’s-eye and the heart explodes, and it looks like fireworks rain down over a couple.

It’s fucking perfect. Like we planned it. We couldn’t have designed it any better.

As good as my idea was, Mia’s idea—to invert the booth walls so the images are everywhere—has taken our booth to a whole other level. With that little stroke of genius, she made Boomerang exclusive, as tough to get into as any premier club in Vegas, and it becomes more obvious by the second that the conference attendees love that. The show’s only been going for ten minutes, and already Rhett and Paolo have had to stand by the entrance to regulate the flow of traffic.

We’re practically standing room only, the whole place thrumming with awesome music, thanks to DJ Rasputin, and with the laughter and fun that tells me something incredible is happening here.