These had to have been the fastest 3 days of his life. Josh was finally beginning to feel as if he were coming into his own. Iowa would never be big enough to hold him again.
Which seemed a great irony. Iowa gave off almost nothing BUT a feeling of vast space. Oceans of flat cornfields and bland, one-story ranch homes sprinkled with a few lonely clutches of office buildings (all, too, single story), strung together lazily with a few dangling stretches of interestate.
Whereas New York City, where he was now, literally was a concrete jungle. The avenues and boulevards that wound warily around the shadow of sky scrapers, glass office towers and enormous public buildings of every description buzzed with non-stop traffic, foot and vehicular, had to been 24-hours a day. If these buildings themselves didn't have some vital, throbbing presence, you could certainly never shake the feeling of it--the strangest, most exotic looking characters would burst upon you, through you and past you before you even knew that you'd turn the street corner. Josh later wondered if he'd ever had a horizon of more than 20 yards ahead of him during that whole 3 days. Yeah, THIS was where he was meant to be. A place that could keep up with the pace of his ideas, vibrate with his own intensity.
But the moment the thought entered his head he felt a little ashamed of himself. After all, the project that won top prize in the Future Business Leaders of America's "Business Plans of Tomorrow" contest was a GROUP rather than individual effort. He hadn't flown in from Dubuque alone. He, Emma and Waldo were a team. True, the market quantification models, which were the main operational feature of the project were largely his creation. Waldo was the computer guru who supplied the raw number-crunching power without which his own high-order calculations would be onerous and out of reach of the lightening-quick strike times that could render this thing a market buzzsaw.
And Emma . . . Well, inspiration counted more than as much as inspiration, Josh was pleased to concede. A marketing whiz, it was Emma who fixed on the overall pitch approach, aesthetic form of the dealcraft. She and Josh were complementary opposites; he the hard-driving mathematical realist, she the amiable marketeer with an almost effortless ability to please. Y'know, in one way, that way, at least, her coming from Iowa had to be a real advantage--she'd be able to disarm people with such a guileless charm that Josh and Waldo's software would have been pitched, sold and installed in any one of the great Manhattan trading houses before the competition could get the ink dried on its RFS.
But guileless didn't mean 'gormless'. Emma exuded a reliable confidence, not just a ditzy charm. She was a brunette, not a blonde. Beautiful, petite, and always dressed with a tasteful understatement just shy of elegant, she could have just made a passable Jackie O in another world. And if things went Josh's way in THIS world, she might still have that chance. Provided he had a moment to be alone with her.
Frustratingly, he hadn't. Up until this point, anyhow. Every living minute of their trip so far they'd been whisked from one engagement or sight seeing tour to another by Mirrah. Mirrah radiated more than a little bit of glamour herself. Maybe fourty-four or so years old, five-foot-four, maybe 110, 115, well-put together with immaculately coiffeured raven hair, Mirrah was the host, tour guide and, as Josh at first suspected, chaperone, that the FBLA had assigned them during their visit.
On one hand it was flattering to have so much solicitous attention poured on, and maybe inevitable given the importance of the prize they'd just won, but it was also a little embarrassing. As if the New York slicksters didn't trust the corn-fed trio of 17-year olds to stay out of trouble for four days in the big city. But come on, the prize they'd won was for a BUSINESS PLAN, for Christ's sake. He wasn't just some babe in the woods here, but a sophisticated grown man.
Mirrah seemed to catch on to this fact over time. In fact, by the afternoon of that third day (a Friday), she seemed to have been completely sold, and even let her own hair down a bit. He couldn't really tell for sure, because her unfamiliar East Coast accent was sometimes hard to make out over the noise of the busy downtown traffic, but he even got the impression that she was trying to tell a racy joke on a couple of occassions.
It could have been his hyperactive imagination, though. The heady atmosphere of Manhattan and the jostling, close physical proximity he'd had to this older but still exotically beautiful woman over the last few days could have been getting to him. It was only when Mirrah, Josh and Waldo returned to the hotel from dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant, and run into Emma in the lobby, did he take notice that he'd been away from her nearly half their precious short time in New York.
That prior day, Thursday, Josh'd realized that the clock was ticking and tried to get a little time alone with Emma. The best he figured he could do without totally showing his hand was to send Waldo and Mirrah off on a diversionary sight seeing trip to the Statue of Liberty while he and Emma grabbed a quick lunch at the hotel restaurant, saying that he'd wanted to coach her through her portion of the presentation they would be giving on Saturday when they would formally accept their prize.
So far so good, but Josh made the dumbass move of actually bringing an outline of the presentation down to the restaurant. When some beefy old dude and his niece in the next table overheard them it was all over. This fellow introduced himself as Schuyler Van Houten, local sponsor of the FBLA who would be compere-ing the event on Saturday. And from there Josh's plan went off the rails alltogether.
Maybe he was a bit harsh in describing Schuyler. Yeah, he was old, maybe 45, 50, and a little more beef than hair these days, but he did seem like a nice guy. He bought them a round of beers. Very decent of him, didn't even ask their ages although technically he probably should have. It was probably a sign of his respect for their achievement and business acumen. Though that was a double-edged sword, too--turned out Schuyler was a 25-year marketing man himself didn't need any prompting to launch into a lecture on that topic, full of tips and pointers on Emma's pitch.
Emma ate it all up. What else could she do? As the team's marketing expert that was her job, if not to please the FBLA audience generally, at the very least this specific man. So Josh was glad when he caught a glimpse of Waldo and Mirrah returning to the hotel lobby. Making his excuses, and allowing the two to continue their marketing dissertation without him as a superflous third wheel, he rushed over to join the others.
And so he hadn't caught sight of her since the previous afternoon.
