I Hope He Is A Gentleman

Henry and I had a good combination of talents between us -- he did most of the talking and came up with different ideas we could pitch in terms of advertisements, and then it was up to me to do the mockups. Even during my classes (which were all at night, now that I had a daily internship) I found myself constantly doodling different ideas we could show to Toby. Everything else was pretty easy, just a lot of paperwork that, marketing expert or not, anyone could fill out.

As a group of interns, we got along pretty well. Miranda got to know the players pretty quickly because she worked with them so often, but when she wasn't with them, she was in IT, hanging out with Jackson, the computer whiz. Lisa and Anna would laugh and ask if there was anything really wrong with her computer, and Miranda would just shrug and blush profusely.

The common area in front of the locker room was, in the end, a good spot for the interns to hang out in, assuming the players weren't using it themselves, which was pretty frequently. We tended to eat lunch there as a group everyday (unless we had other places to be -- usually only Jackson, he easily seemed to be the busiest out of all of us) and when we had breaks, we could study and get work done there.

Even though my classes for the semester were all at night, they kept me busy as ever. I had advanced Russian Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, and history of modern architecture the rest. On Saturdays I had a five hour technical drafting class. And on Sundays, I slept.

Today, a Wednesday afternoon about a week into my internship, I had skipped lunch and instead sat alone in the lounge area with headphones in and my eyes pouring over my Russian textbook. I had a test tonight, one I felt no more ready for than I did when I began studying the previous week. I copied down chart after chart of cases and flipped through flash cards of vocabulary, but all it did was make my hands shake a little more furiously and my feet tap against the metal bar on the base of the chair.

I could hear voices coming from behind me, but I didn't look back, and instead focused more intently on the work I had to do. I hoped the voices -- I could now identify them as players, and not other interns or workers -- would move along, but they didn't. "Hey Remy," James Neal said, as he, Ben Lovejoy and Geno pulled out the other chairs at the table and sat down. I pulled the earphones from my ears. "What're you working on?"

Before I could open my mouth to respond, Geno had grabbed my textbook from me and was flipping through it intently. "Is Russian. Easy."

"Not easy," I fired back. "Exam tonight."

"On what?" He questioned.

"Verbs of motion," I replied in English, so I wouldn't look stupid in front of Ben and James when Geno laughed at me for struggling with something as simple as Russian verbs of motion -- which, I promise you, are actually pretty difficult.

Ben whistled and pushed his chair back, and with a shit-eating grin said, "Sounds like she knows Russian better than you do, G." Geno frowned at that statement.

"Of course not," he said. "Her accent? Not Russian. She speak slow. Roll your 'r's better."

"I have only studied the Russian language for two years," I argued back.

"My English is better than your Russian."

"You have a terrible English accent and you speak too slowly," I snapped in response to his original complaint about my Russian accent, and James and Ben howled with laughter. Geno frowned and got up, followed quickly by Ben and James, but not before James leaned down for a quick high five.

"She's feisty," I heard Ben say to Geno. "And not bad looking, either." I didn't hear Geno's response as the doors slammed shut.