CHAPTER 1
Ellie chose to wear a white silk suit because she was absolutely sure she had covered every contingency that would have made that a dangerous idea. The cut and fabric of the crepe de chine was so uncomfortable and distracting, she’d have to practically hold her breath until the suit was safely back in its rightful spot in her closet. But the suit did look amazing on camera. If it were up to her, she’d be wearing her old gym shorts from high school and a T-shirt stolen from her dad’s closet, but “comfy” wasn’t going to keep the masses tuned in. Her show, Games Over, was the world’s first live multimedia show hosted by a woman, broadcasting simultaneously on television, YouTube, Instagram, and as an audio-only version in podcast form. Since it was recorded in a glass-walled studio called the fishbowl inside the lobby of the Magniv Media building in Midtown Manhattan, there was nowhere to hide. If her outfit, hair, and makeup didn’t cause convulsions in the accompanying live chat on the Discord or the Reddit threads, she was doing something wrong.
Today’s fashion attack was going to come courtesy of a white Zuhair Murad beauty. It was perfectly dry for late June, so there was no risk of water stains. She walked to the studio, effectively avoiding both the Axe-scented film that seemed to cover every New York taxi seat and the oniony grime of a typical subway car. She had eaten breakfast at home because there was no way she was going to put anything in her mouth that could drop, slop, slip, or drip. Ellie even wrapped the handles of her tote in a vintage scarf so that the leather wouldn’t muss the shoulder of the jacket as she walked. Caffeine was unfortunately still a necessity, but she made sure that a firm plastic lid was clamped over her iced coffee with sweet cream cold foam. Why did everything with caffeine have to be dark in color, anyway? Was it so much to ask for a clear liquid that could deliver a wake-up call when the fate of a clean outfit hung in the balance? She’d spent a few minutes investigating caffeine pills on Amazon in an attempt to do away with the entire beverage idea altogether, but that seemed unbelievably clinical, even for a person who brushed her teeth with two kinds of toothpaste simultaneously (sensitive, whitening), though she needed neither, to “be on the safe side.”
The one variable she didn’t imagine being directly connected to the cleanliness of her suit was whether she could remember to always, always, always check the ON AIR sign before opening her mouth and wrecking her career, live, and in front of four million YouTube and six million podcast subscribers. Perhaps then she would have had the good sense not to place her coffee within range of the jerky hand movements that would inevitably crop up when she suddenly realized, with dizzying clarity, the enormity of her mistake. She therefore could not quite believe it when she found herself wearing a coffee-colored, slightly foamy, definitely wet ensemble. Like many of the professional athletes she had as guests on her show, she’d covered all the bases but the correct one.
This was not supposed to happen. She’d just wrapped up a great interview with the starting pitcher of the Mets. Dougie Baylor was yet another athlete who found himself on the guest list of Ellie’s show at the urging of his agent, Bud Lewis. He’d become tired of watching people give his client, Dougie “The Magic Man” Baylor, the finger while he drove out of the player’s lot postgame. Dougie’s pitching performance this season had descended from genius to absolute garbage, and the fans had begun to suspect it had something to do with him being called out in the media as the deadest of all deadbeat dads. Dougie’s agent begged to get him on the show now that he reconciled with his kids’ mother and was buying them all a house in Clearwater to be together, even during training. As usual, Ellie was not impressed—not by his stats, not by his attempt to appear regretful, not by his custom-made Katzkin leather baby seats for the Range Rover. Just, not.
Usually, Ellie’s stoicism was part of the show. The epitome of objectivity, she didn’t care to hear too many personal details about a guest before they found themself in the hot seat across the table from her. Her producer, Omar, was the sports-stats yang to her psych-minded yin. He attempted to tutor her on the basics of their performance and records, but none of it ever seemed to garner more than a head nod. Despite being famous for magically turning around poor-performing, rehabbing, or otherwise repentant athletes, the fact remained that she really, truly did not care about sports. Professional sports had turned every sane person she knew into shirking, excuse-generating fools, eager to sacrifice any shred of intelligence to the almighty cult of the athlete ego. No one came on this show looking for a conversational massage from a fan masquerading as talk-show host. They came to get laid out on the rack and Ellie was chief flogger.
“You honestly don’t care about his FIPs and DIPS do you?” Omar had asked Ellie ahead of the interview while she scrolled through a psychology journal website.
“Omar, you could be reading off bingo numbers right now. That stuff tells me nothing about a guy who can’t seem to recall the existence of the two kids he brought into this world because of his insecure attachment pattern. Find me footage of him interacting with his caregivers as a neonate or else I’m not interested.”
She’d listened to Dougie for a full eighteen minutes of the episode while he wound his way through a coached, yet weak explanation for why he had avoided real fatherhood up until this point and true commitment to the mother of his children for the last four years.
“The pressure of the game was so heavy, you know? I couldn’t, like, be a super pitcher and be a super dad, too.” Dougie paused. He glanced back at Bud, whose face was contorting as he silently mouthed the next line of an obviously rehearsed statement. “I chose me, yeah, but it was for them.”
Ellie had to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment to prevent them from rolling back so hard she’d end up with a corneal abrasion. Had he chosen to screw the waitress in Milwaukee, the kindergarten teacher in Tampa, and the barista in Chicago for his family, too? Perhaps she should ask him if he was aware that throwing a ball straight did not depend on his own balls. She took a deep breath and looked at Bud, who’d given up and hung his head in his hands. Didn’t he realize this was a live shot?
“Responsibility is not a choice, Dougie. Once you have kids, it’s a requirement,” she said. He stared back at her, nodding. She let a good five seconds of dead air hang before giving up on him activating his frontal lobe long enough to respond and reached her hand out to thank him for sitting with her. This guy needed more work than she could dish up on a show that was so “lite” on therapeutic intervention that the words for entertainment purposes only appeared no less than three times in its description on all platforms. She could be delivering better mental healthcare as a hairdresser at this point. And with more integrity, too.
“I think that went really well!” Omar said through the mic inside the producer’s booth once Dougie and Bud exited the fishbowl.
“In what way, exactly?” said Ellie, still sitting in her white leather swivel chair. She suddenly felt so incredibly tired. What was the point of all this? No one was paying attention, really. Even Dougie hadn’t missed the opportunity to offer to take Ellie on a private tour of his suite at the Standard Hotel as a thank-you during a commercial break. Had he listened to one word she said? Had he listened to one word he himself said? She almost slapped him in the face, but the truth was that she was more disgusted with herself for continuing the show’s charade. What had started out as a too-good-to-be-true offer to be the host of Games Over was now becoming a where-did-my-life-go burden.
The coffee in front of her seemed like a good way to shake the feeling off. Ellie took a sip while bowing over the desk to avoid errant drips. She cocked her elbow out to the side and scooted her butt back away from the cup for good measure.
“Dougie seems to be happy, and I think you were able to get some of the pressure off him. I think we’re gonna see good things at the game tonight.”
“Hmm…” she muttered, sitting down again.
“What, El? You didn’t like the show?”
“Yeah. The show was just fine for what it is. And you’re amazing, as always. The guest? Come on, do you really think he believes one quarter of the crap he was slinging in here? Here’s a better question: Do you think he would have even been slinging that crap without his career being in jeopardy?” As much as she wanted Omar to answer no to both questions and see her side, she also wanted him to give her the listener perspective since they were often wildly divergent.
“Well, I mean … I can’t say. You’re the expert.”
Ellie risked a seated sip, shook her head. “You give me too much credit. I’m not an expert at this. I understand human interactions, motivations, patterns of behavior. I don’t understand these guys. I will never understand how chasing sports balls around makes them into heroes while they consider raising their own damned family to be an optional hobby. Then, when they do finally pull their heads out of their asses, we are supposed to praise them for doing the bare minimum of human duties. It’s gross.”
“I don’t know Ellie. They’re under a lot of pressure,” he said as he collected his notes, the rustling paper sound crackling in her ears.
“Ugh. Please. They are ungrateful, spoiled, entitled, and a waste of my PhD. The players, the coaches, the agents, all of them. I honestly can’t figure out why people tune in every week for the same shit, unless they are as daft as the people that walk in here. This wasn’t how I wanted to do this show, you know? And I’m tired now. It feels so fake to me. At the beginning of all of this I had the ambition to help people. Can you believe that?” She looked down at her drink, the scummy foam now listing to one side of the plastic cup.
“Hey, our guests are real people. I only book actual humans on here as far as I know. Though we could get that disgraced Kentucky Derby horse in here if you want.” Omar chuckled.
“Yeah, I don’t know. Might be better, actually. I think some of these people traded their souls for sneaker endorsements.”
“Ouch, El.”
“Ouch nothing, I don’t know what’s worse—me pretending this is good for people or them pretending they care. I wasn’t even supposed to be doing this, except for that New York Jets second-stringer who became a star because I made him cry hard enough to score three touchdowns in a playoff game. I didn’t even know what the playoffs were for, Omar. Is that messed up or what? I sold out. I am so done.”
And that was when she looked up at the orange sign right over the producer’s booth whose portentous glow was flashing slowly.
ON AIR.
Ellie’s stomach dropped to her shoes. She pointed up at the light with a trembling finger.
“O?” she asked. Surely there was some kind of electrical gremlin that had made it look like she was LIVE, ON AIR, right now because there was no other explanation for why that light would be lit. “Oh fuck.”
Omar looked from Ellie’s finger over to the other side of the booth and promptly leapt across the board to cut her audio and the live video feed. She stood up and tried to walk out of the line of the camera, forgetting that she was still wearing headphones that were plugged into a soundboard, and was immediately yanked back down to her seat. The right earpiece rotated off her ear and landed squarely in the middle of her mouth, smearing her Charlotte Tilbury gloss in Candy Darling pink up to her nose. That was when she ripped off the headphones, thrashing her wrist directly into the iced coffee, turning herself into a caffeinated Rorschach. Ellie’s mouth, still smeared with gloss, hung open as a pool of cold liquid collected in a divot in the seat cushion of her chair. She was 100 percent certain that it was about to soak through to her underwear if she didn’t stand up immediately. Still, her legs were stuck in cement.
Clusters of people passing through the lobby had stopped to see what was going on inside the fishbowl since the broadcast was audible through speakers planted along the ceiling. Those, plus the ten monitors set up around the lobby, never failed to capture everyone’s attention, especially when the famously composed Dr. Beltrami just ripped an expletive through the studio and the airwaves beyond. Omar flipped a switch on the soundboard to continue the broadcast, but the screens stayed a cold black, reflecting the disaster back to her.
“Well, everybody, there you have it. Dr. B and I were just messing around a bit—trying a new segment, you know? A little behind-the-scenes for you here today, but it probably won’t make the cut I think, ha ha.” Even through the glass, Ellie could see a sheen of sweat glimmering on Omar’s bald head. “So, we’re off for the next couple of weeks, but don’t forget to tune in for season seven of Games Over starting in August where we have a lot of great guests lined up like—” He shuffled through a notebook, threw it down, and hovered over his computer. “Uh … Like, ah—” he tried, jabbing at the keyboard, searching for something, anything, to right the ship. “And also Dr. B is very excited to share more great…” He trailed off, giving up.
Ellie didn’t remember much after that. She could hear Omar close out the show and then lots of yelling from inside the booth while the show’s outro music blared from all directions. She heard a “Coño” and a “Me cago en diez” and some other expletives as Omar screamed his way through the forensics of trying to understand what went wrong, but she was too dizzy with shock at that point to do anything beyond close her laptop, slide it in her bag, and walk straight out of the fishbowl.
But leaving the scene wouldn’t be easy. Not only had Games Over made Ellie a star, but it had also turned the plaza outside of the building where the studio was located into a permanent press box for paparazzi to hang out and wait for whatever A-lister was featured on the show. When the doors whooshed open, revealing the illustrious Dr. Beltrami in smeared lip gloss and a stained suit, the flashbulbs would start popping. Ellie was too numb with humiliation to think about finding a creative way to cover up the mess. There was nothing between her and certain social media implosion but the clear blue sky and sunshine.
Maybe Dougie Baylor wasn’t hot enough to draw the cameras. Maybe the live feed was messed up and none of the paps heard the last two minutes of catastrophe. Maybe one of those massive sinkholes would open up like the one on 89th Street last summer and swallow her whole.
“Hey, Dr. B! Do you really hate athletes?”
As she stepped outside, a bearded guy with a camera lens jutting out aggressively from his face snapped Ellie’s brain back into focus. He didn’t even wait for her to answer before repeatedly hitting the shutter button on his camera. She ducked her head and marched straight toward the curb like she hadn’t heard him, but the clicking sound was inescapable. It would have been smart to call an Uber, but she couldn’t think of taking even one extra second to pull up the app. Right now, she was better off just looking for a taxi. She had to get off the street by any means at all. More time in public meant more chances to get photos of her from every possible, messy angle. A yellow car edged toward the curb with the center light lit, and Ellie did not hesitate.
“Forty-Fourth and Second,” she said, sliding into the back seat as her phone rang. Mom. That was fast. Ellie sighed as she answered. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, sweetie, are you home?”
“No, not yet.”
“Oh. Well, can you talk?”
“Yep. Listen, it’s fine, say what you have to say,” said Ellie, bracing for criticism. She pictured her mother standing in the kitchen, her laptop open and streaming the show like Ellie had taught her so she could listen back home in California. It was sweet of her mom to be polite and all, but it was better off if she just let her have it like she normally did. Ellie’s only question was how much worse it sounded streaming into everyone’s phones and laptops versus in person.
“Well … okay, then, you must be very busy. I understand. Let me come right out and say this since you deserve to know what’s going on.”
Ellie was pretty sure she knew what was going on because it was going on all over her suit. “Mom, I’m not going to panic yet—”
“Well, good, sweetie. I know we can all get through this. The truth is, your father and I are getting a divorce.”
Ellie felt lightning shoot across her chest and down into her fingertips. Human bodies were not meant to contain this quantity of stress hormones. Today was going to require a higher grade of recovery than what she normally planned after a big interview. Usually, she decompressed with comfortable clothing and a walk around Central Park with a new audiobook or a favorite podcast, but there was no way a little stroll was going to cut it now. When she felt this torched, there was only one option—lights low, air conditioning on, tea within reach, and lying down in bed with optional Netflix. If she could just levitate the taxi over midday Midtown traffic, everything would be fine.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘divorce’?”
“I mean exactly what I said, Ellie-Belle. We’ve come to the conclusion—well, your dad and I have decided, together. We think we would be better off on our own at this point in our lives.”
“Mom. You’re both over sixty. This point? What are the other points? Isn’t this the point?” Ellie said, trying to ignore that her mom only called her “Ellie-Belle” when she was trying to sugarcoat something. Her mom had used it for things like suggesting that her brother, Ben, take her to the father-daughter dance since Dad wasn’t going to make it back from yet another coaching trip in time, so the name wasn’t her favorite thing to hear.
“Well, that’s not very fair. We are not too old to be happy, Ellie.”
“Who else knows? And where’s Dad? Did he already move out?”
“No one knows, and no, Dad didn’t move out,” she said, sounding insulted. “He’s right here.” Ellie could hear her mother pull her mouth away from the phone. She could practically see her dad leaning on the counter in the kitchen in his faded USC T-shirt. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“Does he want to talk to me?”
The cab stopped at an intersection three blocks from her apartment, but Ellie was too antsy to keep sitting. She tapped on the glass to tell the driver she’d get out and pulled out her credit card to swipe.
“Well of course he does, sweetie, why wouldn’t he? Hon—George? Here, talk to Ellie.” She heard muffled sounds as her mom passed the phone to her dad. Ellie exited the cab, and even though the air was thick with exhaust fumes, she finally felt like she could breathe.
“Coccinella.”
The tightness in her chest pulled again. “Ciao, Papino. What the hell are you guys doing over there?” She stood on the sidewalk staring at her reflection in a shop window that had been papered over from the inside for construction and pulled her tote bag off her shoulder because the scarf she’d used to protect her suit was now getting ruined by that very suit. She held the bag away from her body like it contained a bomb, nearly whacking a tiny woman in a turquoise turban and a matching paisley caftan. The woman yanked her twin Yorkies in pearl necklaces out of the way, setting off a chorus of yips in protest of such a violent change in direction.
Copyright © 2025 by Jill Francis
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