Lessons for Lexi

Chapter 1

The red light went on and Lexi felt the
familiar squeeze in her stomach. It was a burning pain that signified the start
of another panic attack. She clenched her teeth and forced herself to focus on
her producer, Raj. His fingers flashed the countdown.
3…2…1.

“And we’re back at the top of the hour,
the glory of rush hour in full swing. If you’ve landed on KPOX, you either
really like my show, or you’re too busy flipping your fellow motorists off to
care what station you’re on. Either way, welcome to the party.” Lexi flipped
through the script even though she knew the words by heart. It was something
she always did. She flipped the pages to hide the nervousness. Nothing else
about her was nervous. Nothing about her low alto voice, with just a hint of New England drawl would betray the constant turmoil she
felt.

She felt it whenever she was on the
air.

To hide the non stop butterflies, she adopted
a cocky, slightly bored demeanor. For all intents and purposes, it had made her
a star. Lexi considered the irony. The thing she did to hide the fact that she
was terrified of public speaking was the thing that made her famous, which
forced her to do more public speaking. Her standard script over, Lexi shoved it
away to begin her least favorite part of the day.
 
Call
ins
.

“Lexi,” Raj’s voice came over the
headset, “I have Harriet calling in from Coral
Gables.”

“Hello?” The screech of feedback
attacked Lexi’s ears and she flinched.

“Harriet? Do me a favor and move the
radio away from your phone.” Lexi adjusted her headset as Harriet did what she
asked. “Ok, now ask. You might have to yell. For some reason, I’ve suddenly
gone deaf.”

“Am I on the radio?”

Lexi didn’t bother to hold in her sigh.
“Yes.”

“I can’t hear myself.”

“We’re on a five second delay.”

“Oh, there I am, but that’s from
before. I think your radio show is broken. It’s echoing.”

“Lady, you’re killing me.” Lexi
resisted the urge to bang her head on the desk. “Ask your question.”

“Oh,” a pause. “I was having a problem
with my husband…”

“This isn’t a relationship show. “

“I know, but my question is about
politics. See, he thinks I should vote like he does because he’s head of the
household. But last time around, I wanted to vote for Obama, even though he’s a
Muslim and…”

“Stop, I have an answer to your
question already.” Lexi’s face was dead serious. “Neither of you should ever
vote again. You’re dumbing down the pool.” Lexi turned to Raj.
“Next caller.”

Raj smirked as he put the next caller
through. Luckily for Lexi, the next caller actually had an intelligent
question. Lexi got to engage in a debate where he called her a lesbian hippy
liberal and she called him mouth breathing, brain damaged redneck.

Through it all, the conflict made her
heart pound, but her voice never wavered. She laughed mockingly, made snide
comments and eventually made the caller look like an idiot.

It was what made Lexi Logan famous.
The sharp tongue, the quips and comebacks.
She was an
outspoken, frequently controversial liberal political commenter with a huge
following. She was a commercial success, with her face plastered on busses and
billboards. She was a party girl who wound up in more than one paparazzi photo.

One year before, she’d been no one.

Lexi placed a hand on her stomach as
her show ended and she did her usual sign off. The stress melted as soon as the
red light went off.
Summer hiatus.
The three month
break she’d been waiting for. Raj jumped out of his chair excitedly.

“You were in rare form today.”

Lexi grabbed the water bottle he held.
“I’m in a shitty mood.” She took a sip. “Why do you keep putting idiots through?
I told you, there’s no sport in it. It’s like hunting on a closed range.”

“I thought you could use a break. You
look tired.”

Lexi sighed. “I’m hung-over. Want to go
get a recovery drink?”

“You’re not
going to Leo’s closing party?” Raj was referring to the party held every year,
for the shows that were lucky enough to be in syndication. As Lexi’s show,
Lessons from Lexi, was syndicated on several different stations, she was at the
top of the list.
Hiatus.
It was like summer vacation
for adults. So every year, as the radio shows went into hiatus, the station
manager had a party on the last night of live programming. Everyone was
expected to attend.

Lexi never did. “No. Why would I?”

“It might be nice to make an
appearance.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to set a precedent
for being nice.” Lexi yanked on his arm. “Come on, skip school with me.”

“Lexi, five minutes,” Raj pleaded. “I
need to go. You can get away with not showing up. I can’t.”

 
“You know that’s not true. You’re my producer.
You make the show. You get to ride the diva train with me.”

“Lexi!
Ron!” A voice
boomed out from behind them.

“It’s Raj sir.” Raj responded to the
station manager, Leo Everward, as the portly, middle aged man waddled up to
them.

Everward wasn’t alone. He was with a
man in a suit. To Lexi, he was nothing more than a blurry form. Everward
ignored Raj’s name correction and stood directly in front of Lexi. “Lexi, I’m
glad you’re still here. I was worried I wouldn’t catch you at the party later.”

 
“I
can guarantee that you wouldn’t have caught me there later.”

 
“I
wanted to introduce you to the new owner of the station.” Lexi looked up. A
generically handsome blonde man was watching her with interest, but she didn’t
have the time
nor
the energy to flirt. “Lexi,” she
murmured, without offering a hand to shake. She met Leo’s eyes. “Was that all?”

“I figured you might like to meet him,
and he wanted to meet you. He has a few ideas for your show.”

“No.”

“Why JT was just stating…” Leo turned
to her in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t care about his input for my
show. If that’s going to be a problem, fire me.” Lexi turned to leave. “Now if
you’ll excuse me, I would really like to get my vacation bender started.” Lexi
didn’t wait for an answer. She stalked away, her stilettos clacking on the
floor.

“You know you’re going to get yourself
in trouble.” Raj gasped as he stumbled into step with her.

Lexi gave a humorless smile but didn’t
answer. The truth was
,
she didn’t care. She had
nothing to lose. When Lexi had gotten into radio, her goal had been behind the
scenes work. She loved the script writing and the prepping for the show. What
she hated was the yelling at people…and dealing with conflict. Then, one year
before, after the worst day of her life, she’d been shoved into the spotlight
and for reasons that completely escaped her, people loved her. She’d blasted to
the top of the charts. She was famous.

She hated every second of it.
 

***

“Well, she was pleasant.” JT watched
the woman walk down the hallway. She was a looker. Long jet black hair fell
down her back, stick straight, the color of ink. She was tall and
leggy,
though a little thin for his tastes. It was her eyes
that caught him though.
Dramatic bottle green.
They’d
been so bright he thought she was wearing contacts.

“Sorry about that,” Leo turned away
with a forced smile. “She starts hiatus tonight, so she’s probably trying to
check a flight. Regardless of what she thinks, I think your idea of cross
marketing her with your brand is perfect.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking she’s not going for
it,” JT drawled out lazily. She was even better in person and he knew he’d been
right. If they were going to get a younger following for their hotel line, they
were going to need to the perfect spokesperson. The perfect spokesperson was
apparently a bad tempered radio DJ with a drinking problem. JT held in a sigh
and tuned back into whatever Leo was droning on about.

“We had to argue with her about the
billboards too. But did you see that face? It was worth the extra padding in
the contract.”

JT smirked. She probably used it to pay
FCC fines. Lexi racked up her share. She wasn’t in the same league as Howard
Stern, but there had been a few times where her temper got the better of her
and the five second delay hadn’t caught all the profanities.
 
As far as JT was concerned, Lexi Logan would
be better off if someone would take the bull by the horns and wash her mouth
out with soap.

“Of course, she won’t be back for three
….”

“No,” JT interrupted. “If we’re going to
have any benefit from the partnership, this has to be done while her star is on
the rise. Radio is dying a slow death. We need to get her involved in something
else.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “I want a meeting with her and her
representative within the next two weeks.”

They moved on to the party and he
walked in with Lexi Logan all but forgotten. She would fall in line. People
always fell in line for JT Hussner.

***

Lexi picked the darkest corner of the
bar and Raj, plans to show at the hiatus party abandoned, slid into the
opposite side of the booth.

“You didn’t even listen to what they had
to say.”

Lexi sighed and rubbed her eyes, her
contacts starting to bother her. “It doesn’t matter what they had to say.
Anything anyone does is just going to make the damn show bigger and I really
can’t handle that.”

Raj nodded in silent acknowledgement.
He was the only person on earth who knew of her performance anxiety.
 

“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about the
show.” Lexi let a smile cross her lips. “We’re on vacation.” The smile got
bigger as the waitress came for the drink order. A few drinks in, Lexi started
rubbing her eyes again.

“Why don’t you just take them out?”

Lexi nodded. If she wanted to avoid the
bloodshot eyes of an alcoholic, she needed to take out her contacts. She left
Raj at their table and went to remove the contact lenses before they became
permanently fused to her eyes.

She plucked out the green tinted lenses
in front of the bathroom mirror and appraised herself silently. She hated her
eyes. As JT had suspected, they weren’t really green. In fact, they weren’t
even the same color. Lexi had been born with heterochromia, which while
noticeable, wasn’t a serious condition. In fact, her vision was twenty/twenty. Instead
of having two hazel eyes, one was pure hazel, the other was half blue. It was
an immediately noticeable attribute and Lexi had been covering it up with
disposable contacts since she was a teenager. She tossed her latest two and
decided to stick to dark bars for the rest of the evening.

Raj laughed when she got back. “It
always throws me when I see the two different eyes.”

“It did to the kids in school too. What
was it they used to call me?” Lexi tilted her head.
“Oh yeah,
mutt.”

Raj gave them an absent smile as he
sipped a beer. “Yeah, our class was full of assholes wasn’t it?”

“Where do you think I learned to be
such a bitch?”

Lexi and Raj met in high school. Lexi
was a drama department trouble maker who spent a lot of time in the principles’
office. She wasn’t really a bad kid, just a class clown. Raj had been the
overachiever who couldn’t satisfy his parents. Both class misfits, they’d been
drawn together and had been best friends since they were 17.

Now, Lexi was a famous shock jock and
Raj was her faithful, straight-man producer.
  
Raj liked to call himself the
gay-straight-man producer. Raj was satisfied with his circumstances, while Lexi
was a little less accepting. Neither of them had spoken to their families in
years. They had each other.

Raj looked down at his cell phone.
“Andrew Flaxman is texting me. He said he tried to reach you four times.”

Lexi smirked. “Screw him. I’m on
vacation.”

Raj read his screen. “He says you’re
not technically on vacation until midnight.”

Lexi sighed as her cell phone beeped
again. She tugged it out of her pocket.
 
“What?”
She barked into the phone.

“Is that any way to treat the man who
made you a millionaire?”

“My parents made me. You just take 10%
of it.”

“Now Lexi…,” he agent began.

“Don’t ‘now Lexi’ me. The last time you
did that, I wound up on a billboard. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to
see my face plastered up on the side of the road every time I drive to work? It’s
fucking creepy.” Lexi shuddered.
 
“And
Raj is on a metro bus with a swastika spray painted on his forehead!”

“That was a little disturbing,” Raj
agreed.