Page 1 of No More Bad Boys
ONE
Guess Who
So I’m the smart one. That’s what my parents have said—well,Mommahas said—since I was a little kid.
I have a sister four years older and about twenty-five times prettier than me. And that’s fine. I don’t resent her—it’s not her fault.
Besides, who wouldn’t want to be intelligent? Smart’s cool, right?
There’s only one problem.
For a smart girl, I sure can be stupid.
* * *
It’s ninety degrees, at least a hundred-fifty-percent humidity, and I’m standing on top of a TV news satellite truck.
Not the most comfortable spot I could’ve picked on a late May afternoon in Georgia. But it’s my job—well, kind of—it’s my paid internship.
“Okay, Cadence—you see the hydraulic antenna controller?”
“It’s kind of hard to miss. Which valve is stuck?”
Wiping sweat from my eyes, I peer down over the edge of the high-profile vehicle at the reddening bald head of Frank, the chief engineer at WATV, Atlanta’sNumber One News Source,according to their latest promo campaign.
For the remaining two weeks of my internship he’s my boss, and I may not live through it.
The reasonI’mon top of the sat truck is he’s too… um… how do I say this nicely? The cumulative effects of his lifelong eating habits prevent him from safely climbing and balancing atop slippery raised surfaces.
Seriously—the man’s pushing four hundred. And he’s got to be at least sixty. When I saw him starting up the ladder, I volunteered for truck-top duty.
“Okay—I think I found it. What should I do? Turn the valve?”
I reach toward the sticky valve socket with the wrench Frank provided.
“Wait! Make sure you’re not under the dish when you turn it.” His frantic warning stops me cold. “It could fall on you. Those things are heavy.”
No kidding. “Thanks,” I yell back and move to a slightly safer spot on the truck roof before attempting the maneuver again.
This is all new for me. I’ve already done co-ops at Georgia Power and Light and Coca Cola for my double-engineering major at Georgia Tech.
That covered the industrial and systems engineering end. Mechanical engineering is a totally different animal.
After spending the first semester of my junior year interning with an automobile manufacturer, I thought it would be fun to finish out the year working in TV, like my sister Kenley. She’s a producer for WNN, Worldwide News Network, and loves it.
Unfortunately, they only offer unpaid internships, and God knows I need the money, so I took the position here instead.
Of course, money doesn’t do you any good if you’re squashed like road kill on I-75 at rush hour. I send up a little prayer, brace myself, and turn the valve. The enormous dish drops a few inches, but thankfully, no more than that.
“Got it. It’s loose.”
“Great. Good job. Okay, let me get inside the truck and see if the electronic controls will move it now. Stay up there, okay?” Frank says.
I slide to a sitting position on the hot surface and mutter, “Sure. Nowhere I’d rather be.”
I’ve been Frank’s number one favorite person since he figured out I was capable of working on most of the equipment around here. The man’s counting days until his retirement, and he’d probably just sit back and let me do everything if he thought he could get away with it.
That’s fine with me—I like to be busy, and the more I learn in my five month stint here, the better prepared I’ll be for a career after graduation.
