State of Grace

GRACE:

On Grace Jackson’s side of the world, everybody is just waking up. Or rather, the birds in the trees out her window are awake –and have been for hours- along with the strangely timed crickets out on the lawn and the neighbour’s rooster, who feels the need to crow every damn ten minutes like he is the town alarm clock or something.

The noises chorus together, joined soon after by Grace’s alarm clock which rings out loud and abrasively, causing her to roll over and cover her head with the pillow and mutter words, cursing her mother for ever buying a clock that’s alarm sound is equivalent in both sound and volume to a Police Car siren.

“Ughhh,” she lets herself groan, sleep well out of her reach now that the alarm has sounded, flicking a switch her in brain that has been trained –through repetitive action- to get up and out of bed when it sounds.

‘Two more weeks’ she thinks to herself, trying to burn the thought into her brain, envisioning it flashing on a giant billboard on the inside of her eyelids, though at the moment it remains of little consolation. The first twenty minutes of getting up in the morning is always the hardest.

Eventually, despite her dire attachment to her cosier-when-she-has-to-leave-it bed, she rolls out and dresses in her thick socks, old worn jeans, a bra and thermal t-shirt. After a brief stop in the bathroom to splash some water on her face in a weak attempt to wake herself, she stumbles into the kitchen, rubbing the last of the sleep out of her eye. The rest of the small house is still asleep and showing no signs of life, so she doesn’t bother with toast or cereal for breakfast, instead opting to grab a can of V energy drink from the fridge before she heads out the back door.

The voice of her high school health teacher rings in her ears, going over the lecture of how much sugar is in such drinks and what they do to your teeth, but she tries to push it to the back of her mind. Two more weeks, then it’ll all be worth it. She can handle the consequences of one meal of poor nutrition if it helps her get through the day to the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on and so forth until she’s on that plane, soaring through the sky to a place she’s only dreamed.

At the back door she grabs her blue overalls off a hook and works into them, wrapping the ends tightly around her ankles and pulling up her socks over it so it will be easier to step into her gumboots.

A series of loud moo’s float across the various paddocks between the cow shed and the house, to where she stands. The back steps give a view of most of the low lying farm land, the hills all much further back. A trail of cows lead their way, muddling slowly down the dirt tracks to the shed, and Grace can just make out the silhouette of her father on the four-wheeler behind them all.

In the distance, he waves his hand out to her and she yawns tiredly, scrunching her eyes and relishing the feeling of having them closed, if only momentarily before she’s forced to open them and wave a gesture of acknowledgement in return. It’s then that she notices how white the grass is, covered with a layer of frost, putting a bit of nip in the air. She looks down at her watch, and of course, it blinks 3:15am, the hour of the dead. The hour at which bars are closing and people are stumbling home, an hour when booty calls are made or fun DVD nights are ended with everyone falling asleep at a boring part of the movie. Or in Grace’s less sociable world – the hour at which she begins work.

Feeling in dire need of a boost to get her through the morning, Grace casts a sweeping glance over her gumboots but doesn’t put them on, ignoring them to push back inside and down the hall to her room. As always, in the top draw on the left, the one which is locked and can only be opened with the key that lies underneath her piles of folded underwear in the right hand side draw, are her tickets. They lay still in the envelope they arrived in, kept in pristine condition and protected better than any other belonging in the house – materialistic or sentimental.

Her father had laughed when as he’d watched her lock them away, but Grace isn’t prepared to take any chances. She hasn’t worked two years on this shitty little family dairy farm to have her dreams and all she’s worked for get stolen away from her, regardless of how safe their rural area usually is, or the tight neighbourhood watch groups that keep it that way. Besides, no one can ever over-protect something. At least she figures.

She picks up the envelope with her slender, careful fingers and gently eases the tickets out, with the caution of trying to coerce a new born baby lamb in to a shed. There are a number of tickets in there, given all the connecting flights she needs to take, but it’s not about the departure or the route, it’s about the destination she has spent so long dreaming of and is now almost close enough to taste.

There are even more tickets because her Mom is going with her. She had never really gotten to experience the world like she’d wanted to due to having Grace and her brother at such a young age, so Grace had invited her along for the journey. It had been hard to convince her at first, given that America seems like such a huge, wild place, and the flight from Auckland, New Zealand to the end destination of Pittsburgh definitely isn’t recommended to anyone who can’t handle hours and hours of flying and layovers, but Grace had won out in the end, selling it to her Mother with the sheer passion and excitement she had run through the itinerary with. And, okay, the itinerary isn’t completely netted out to every minute or hour of the day. It isn’t much more descriptive than ‘Fly to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh VS Rangers –Home game at the CEC’ and then an assorted list of tourist attractions to visit, but for Grace it really doesn’t need to be more than that.

This is a trip of a life time. This is a trip of her life time. After years of watching her team on the television or streaming their games and interviews online –a world away- she’s finally going to get to be right there in the thick of it, in the action. She’s going to be one of the fans in her team jersey, yelling and cheering with the rest of them, soaking up the atmosphere and getting to be a part of it all.

And for that, all the years of early mornings and crappy afternoons spent milking cows and getting covered in their shit and mess, will be worth it. So worth it.

She grins to herself wickedly and sets the tickets back safely; shutting the draw and making sure it’s locked.

When she finished High School three years ago her teachers had all suggest she apply for University, do something to put that brain of hers to use they’d said. For the past three years she has had to put up with them all, and the others in the community, looking at her like she’s crazy, watching her go off to work and mumbling to themselves about what a waste it is that the former Dux and Head Girl of the local High School is content with being a farm girl for the rest of her life instead of putting her supposed talents to use. But honestly, the closer Grace gets to the departure date, the less and less she cares.

The farm wasn’t in the best shape financially when her high school years ended, so she knew that someone was going to have to take one for the team and give her Dad a hand, and not for one second was she going to let that person be her twin brother, Jacob, especially after he won the scholarship he’d worked so hard for.

Sometimes you just do what you have to, and with her dream being this close to being actualized, Grace isn’t complaining.

On her way out of the room, Grace stops and takes a moment to look over her pin board on her wall. The calendar she has pinned up counts down the days for her, with a big circle around the departure date in a week’s time. Next to it is a post card from Jacob, filling her in on the joy and mischief he’s been involved in while studying at Massey University in Palmerston North, Grace’s first choice, had she chosen to go. Next to that is a poster of her beloved team, The Pittsburgh Penguins.

“One week, boys,” she says to it with a broad smile. “See you all in one week.”

Back at the front door she finds her favourite Hunting and Fishing cap to pull over her messy mousey-brown hair and steps in to her gumboots, feeling better about the morning already.

SIDNEY:
On Sidney Crosby’s side of the world, he is sitting at a desk in the Penguin’s offices, wondering how much longer he can fake an I’m-completley-listening-and-taking-everything-you’re-saying-onboard look before he goes crazy and has to knock himself out by banging his head against something repeatedly to make the lecture STOP. Because seriously, for the love of god, it is demeaning.

The guy on the other side of the desk, the one in the big fancy swirling chair who owns the office, is talking AT him like he’s a five year old who doesn’t understand what repercussions are, or how the media works –when HELLO, he has been taking pretty great care of himself in both respects for a number of years now, thank you very much.

“I’m sure you understand, Sidney,” the guy says, making Sid wish that their normal PR person hadn’t decided to take a large chunk of maternity leave time and leave this nincompoop in charge instead, “the weight your decisions and actions have on us as an organisation and the team as a whole.”

Sid gives himself permission to be rude for once, moving his eyes from the man to various points around the office, looking for the object which could achieve unconsciousness the fastest, with also doing the least damage. The wall seems easily accessible, but the desk really is closer.

“Are you even listening, Sidney?” the man sighs heavily, sitting back in his chair and folding his arms, looking at Sid like he’s shit on his shoe and wasting his, apparently, valuable time.

“Yes,” Sid forces out in reply, because regardless of how tedious this now half an hour long lecture has been, far be it from Sidney Crosby to be forthrightly bad-mannered. “I understand, and I am sorry for the ripple effects my decision has caused. I didn’t…..” And that’s all he can get out before he trails off, because he hasn’t even allowed himself to think about it much, so how in the world can he bring it up and physically say the words out loud? Especially to this douche bag.

“Didn’t what?” said Douche Bag baits. “Didn’t mean to leave your fiancée at the altar?”

Sid frowns, biting down a snarl, because that’s a really fucking unnecessary comment. It wasn’t like he left her at the altar in front of everyone and ran out. No, what he did do was turn up to the door of her friend’s house two nights before the wedding and tell her he couldn’t go through with it anymore, and then leave without really another word. Which maybe might be just as bad –if not, definitely close to- but if this idiot is going to call him out on it, he might as well get it right.

“I didn’t leave her at the altar.”

The nincompoop-douchebag-idiot has the audacity to throw his arms up like he is the one that Sid backed out of marrying.

“To be honest Sidney,” he says, “you might as well have. I don’t have to spell out for you how important you are to both this team and organisation, and the National Hockey League itself. You have had spotlights on you ever since you entered it and the hockey world was behind this wedding and you chose to end it at the last minute without due cause, effectively kicking up what has the potential to become the shit-storm of the year.”

Sid’s fingers clench around the arm rests of his chair, fingers digging into the black leather. He doesn’t need his fame outlined for him, nor does he need his life decisions questioned. Fuck what the ‘hockey world’ was or wasn’t invested in. They weren’t the fucking ones who were going to marry her, were they?

He chooses to cast his gaze anywhere, on anything, besides the idiot’s patronising face. On the desktop he notes a set of business cards saying ‘Peter Montgomery’.

Peter –the nincompoop-douchebag-idiot- fishes a card out of the holder and tosses it in Sid’s direction. “We have tried to contact Ms Cunnlift and reach out to her, but she refuses to return our calls and her parents say they are not at a liberty to give her current whereabouts. If she calls you, emails you, texts you, Facebooks you or even sends you a fucking fax or note by carrier pigeon– I want to know about it. Right now it’s only been a few days and people are speculating a postponement or cancellation, so we can keep somewhat of a handle on it. But should she chose to speak out, she could really drag you through the shit, Sid.”

Sid files the business card in his jacket pocket to make an effort to seem in compliance, and then treats himself to running his hands slowly over his face and sneaking in a big, heavy, much needed breath. He knows well just how much shit Sierra can fling at him should she chose to, and honestly, he figures that he might certainly deserve at least some of it.

Deciding to not go through with the wedding was a heavy and carefully thought out decision –unlike the one to propose- and he knew it would hurt her, but surely it was better to do it now rather than a few months down the track and have her find out that he didn’t even want it in the first place, right? Though, of course, he knows that the ‘better’ thing to do was never have let himself get to two days before the nuptials, but up until that point he’d thought his apprehension to all things wedding or matrimony related was just nerves.

He quietly supposes he’d hoped that so many years of good behaviour in terms of the media and publicity matters would result in him earning a slight break with his personal life, but apparently not. Apparently he’s on the edge of a one-way slide into Villian-town and he really isn’t keen to leave Saint-ville.

“I’ve thought about damage control,” he reveals to Peter, trying to keep his voice even and not get intimidated by the fact that he –as a hockey player- is trying to share his ideas with the PR Manager, whose job it is to handle said Damage Control. “I can up my presence around the city, do more fan interaction. I could bring the Little Hockey Players Initiative sessions forward and increase my donations to local charities, do more signings and I’ll…..I’ll even do an interview piece. If I really have to.”

Which, he really fucking hopes he doesn’t have to. Interview pieces are great when they are about his hockey or his family or his community initiatives, but not about his love life. All the other stuff he can talk about confidently, he can get up there and answer questions, willingly allow cameras to be all up in his face. But not with his love life. All the charity work he does, the hours of dedication he puts forward to perfecting his craft in lieu of other things, he does because he wants to, because he cares about other people and he loves to be a part of things that help them like that.

This, whatever expose or story or interview, that comes from this mess, will tarnish all the rest of the good he does. One big life decision in his personal life has the power to make everyone forget of the good he does. It’s a scary thought. Even scarier is the thought of having to discuss his private business on camera, in front of a nation. To talk about something he can barley justify to himself beyond “It just didn’t feel right.” But he’d still chose to put himself through the ringer, one hundred times over, than bring bad publicity to all else he does.

Knowing the intensity and level of discomfort Sid has with such an offer, Peter narrows his eyes in on him.

“Well, we will certainly keep that in our back pocket,” he says concisely. “Hopefully it won’t come to that. Though, in the meantime, play hockey and let us handle the rest. One week and a day or so and then you have a few days break in between games to contemplate things and work with us on a plan of attack if need be. You can behave until then, can’t you?”