Balancer by Patrick Wong Page B

Nicole felt a little sad at the state of things. She missed Amy riding along at her side, noisily deconstructing their evening. The spare room at Nicole’s house had been prepped for both of them, and her mom had promised to make them pancakes for breakfast.
    Nicole hoped things would get back to the way they used to be.

Zero to Hero
    “Hold still.” Nicole clenched her eyes shut as Amy applied a final sweep of eyeliner. Jokingly, she wriggled around in her seat like an impatient child, which made Amy laugh.
    “There. You can stop wriggling now!”
    Amy sat back beaming, and Nicole picked up a mirror to look at the result. She was relieved at what she found. The light rose colors Amy had picked were pretty and — as Nicole had as requested — took the edge off her summer freckles.
    “Nix. This is TV. It could be our big break!” Amy had insisted on wearing a strappy top emblazoned with “AmesAndNix.com” in an attempt to bring more traffic to their website. She had been debating whether to wear her hair long or back ever since Nicole’s mom had received the call from National Network News about a possible Skype interview. Drake apparently preferred her hair down.
    It had been like this for most of Saturday afternoon and evening — the phone had been ringing off the hook after the Allerton family had given an emotional interview to WBN praising Nicole’s bravery, which was then echoed by the policemen and firemen who were at the scene. Word had spread about Nicole’s feats of heroism, and it had become the “feel good” story that was taking the nation by storm.
    It was almost too much for Nicole. She knew most girls her age would give up most of their prized possessions and sell their pet to get this kind of media attention, but she felt uncomfortable about it, and had only agreed to the interview because Amy had been beyond excited about the prospect of being on live TV.
    Nicole’s mom had only permitted the interview to be held in her house with her present. Nicole had also heard her demanding that, if she agreed to this one interview, the girls would be left alone.
    So, instead of getting ready for a day of shopping and hanging out, her mom had spent the morning prepping the living room for a Skype interview at midday.
    Amy was just scooping up her hair in a sparkly clip when Nicole’s mom knocked on the bedroom door and entered.
    “You girls ready?”
    “Are we ever!” announced Amy, scrambling to her feet.
    She smiled. “You both look great!”
    Nicole noticed that, despite her reservations about the TV interview, her mom had made a real effort with her appearance. She’d swept back her wavy black hair and added a little makeup to her pale, delicate features. Nicole was so used to seeing her either in her ER gear or slouching about in everyday clothes that she’d forgotten how pretty she could look.
    “Does dad know?”
    “Yeah. He’s watching from his hotel room. He’ll call us after.”
    Nicole was pleased. The National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, had claimed her dad for another month’s investigation, and he was currently holed up in a hotel somewhere in Oregon after a passenger jet had been forced to make an emergency landing. Nicole always remarked how unfair it was that other people’s emergencies called her dad away — and how she didn’t even get the right to complain about it because he investigated big crashes, often involving fatalities. Even if she felt upset that she wouldn’t get to see her dad for days at a time, she could always be brought to her senses by the reality that some unfortunate family had just lost a loved one forever.
    “The network emailed us their advance questions. They’ re printed out downstairs. Go have a look,” Nicole’s mom urged. Nicole’s heart leapt at this turn of events, as she’d hardly slept at all out of fear of being cornered on TV. All night she had been tossing and turning, worrying about the sneaky questions a Network News