Boomerang, Part 3 by Noelle August

Author:Noelle August
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062369802
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 49

Mia

Q: Bright lights, or quiet nights?

Only in Vegas does a hotel exhibit hall blaze with neon and feature carpeting patterned to look like someone fed a tiger into an industrial shredder. Soft techno ebbs and flows beneath a steady stream of conversation punctuated by bursts of shrieking laughter that make my entire body clench.

Of course, I’m on edge already, not just because I’m responsible for finally putting my part of the display together—with help from Paolo, thank God—but because I have to spend the entire day working side-by-side with Ethan, acting like I’m perfectly fine with the fact that we haven’t spoken since I cornered him at the bar yesterday. Everything’s still wrong. But I’m here now, and I’m determined to do the job Adam entrusted me to do.

All around us, people hustle elaborate displays into place, erecting massive vinyl banners, latching together platforms, hauling up shelves. And at every other booth, it seems, someone is having a full-on nervous breakdown.

Nearby, a man with a helmet of straw-gold hair and a shiny steel-gray suit paces back and forth with his cell phone glued to his ear and a face red enough to make me look around for EMTs. “I ordered the ten-foot chrome pyramids, and you sent me these fucking dinky shelves.” He stands back and holds his phone out to capture a pair of triangular bookcases that stand about as tall as my shoulders. “Seriously,” he says. “Are you seeing this shit?”

Just then, a massive ripping sound splits the air, and I look over to see two girls about my age, only tall, wearing dresses that look recently sprayed onto their bodies. Each holds half of a heart-covered banner, now torn neatly in two.

“Jesus Christ, Amy,” one of the women, a redhead, shrieks and throws down her side of the banner. “What did you do?”

“What did I do? I told you to stop tugging at it!”

“This place is cray-cray,” Paolo mumbles and unfolds a schematic of the cavernous space.

“What number’s our booth again?” I ask for about the sixtieth time.

“We are”—he consults the diagram—“in the primo spot, right between the bar and the bathrooms. Number thirty-three.”

Someone almost clips us with a giant wheeled backdrop of men in fatigues and a sign that says, “Love Is a Battlefield,” which feels like an iffy approach to me but hey, I’m not their marketing intern.

Finally, I spot our display, and even from here I can see it’s perfect. Shaped like two boomerangs back to back, it has an almost yin-yang effect, with Ethan’s curved wall and floor a deep, glossy black and mine a gleaming white. LCD monitors line a narrow shelf running the length of his side, leading to a tall screen with a console in front of it that I know will run the boomerang game he commissioned. A message scrolls over and over again on every screen: In the dating game, play to win.

My side is softer, with café tables, comfy chairs, and a curved projection screen that runs almost the full length of my wall.

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