Booth Bitch

Katherine Redding, twenty-eight and six months out of the worst breakup of her life, had been standing behind the state-park recruitment booth for exactly ninety minutes when she decided Craig Brownlow was the single most annoying human being in the Grand Rapids Convention Center.

Was that fair? Probably not. There were hundreds of people here, and some of them had to be worse. But nobody was worse within eyeshot, and eyeshot was all that mattered when you were handing out park brochures for eight straight hours.

"He's doing it again," she muttered to Emmy Rodgers, who was leaning against the booth's side panel pretending to restock maps. "Look at him. Look!"

Emmy looked. Craig, thirty and smug as a cat in a sunbeam, had cornered a silver-haired retiree at his private-consulting table and was gesturing at a trail camera like it was a religious artifact. The old man nodded. Then he laughed. Then he pulled out his wallet.

"Oh no," Emmy said, grinning. "Is he upselling him on the solar panel package?"

"He's upselling him on everything. Watch. Watch the hands." Craig's hands did a little flowing motion over the merchandise, and the retiree handed over a credit card like it was a communion offering. "Two thousand dollars! Emmy, that man just spent two grand because Craig called him 'a natural outdoorsman.' He's a booth bitch."

"Booth bitch," Emmy repeated, delighted. "That's going in my vocabulary forever."

"He's a booth bitch," Katherine said again, because it was true and it felt good to say. "He fluffs his numbers at these things and acts like he invented wildlife photography. Four years I've known him and he's never once had a genuine conversation with a stranger. It's all performance. Every single smile is a sales technique."

"You counted his smiles?"

"I count everything about Craig. It's a hobby."

The problem, and Katherine knew this the second the words left her mouth, was that convention centers echo. The problem was that Craig's table was maybe fifteen feet away, and the hall was still empty-ish on a Saturday morning, and Craig Brownlow had the hearing of a wounded deer.

He turned around slowly, holding his little credit-card receipt like a trophy.

"Booth bitch," he said. "Wow. Did the state park send you here to be charming, Redding, or did they just lose a bet somewhere?"

"Go sell a solar panel, Craig."

"No, no, I want to talk about this. Booth bitch. That's rich coming from a recruitment booth. You know what your whole setup is? It's a card table and a stack of pamphlets nobody reads. Meanwhile I booked three consulting clients before ten." He leaned back in his chair, arms behind his head. "Tell you what. How many real leads have you pulled today? Actual humans who gave you a number or an email? Anyone?"

Katherine opened her mouth. Closed it. The pamphlet stack was, tragically, untouched.

"That's what I thought," Craig said.

"Okay, you know what?" Katherine planted both hands on the counter. "Fine. Let's make it interesting. By five o'clock today, whoever gets more phone numbers from attendees wins. Loser buys dinner."

Craig's eyebrows went up, and she watched the exact moment the bet hooked him. Two years ago she'd beaten him for the district ranger promotion, and he'd quit for private consulting six months later and never, not once, let it go. This was his Super Bowl.

"Dinner and bragging rights," he said. "And you have to tell Emmy I won."

"You don't get to write my dialogue."

"Deal's on the table, booth bitch."

"Deal." She stuck her hand across the gap between booths and shook his, and his grip was warm and irritatingly confident. "Emmy, you're our witness."

"Oh, I've been the witness since 'booth bitch,'" Emmy said. "This is the best expo of my life. Wait, real numbers though. Real humans. Nobody you already know, nobody who works here, and they have to actually be given to you. Written down. We're not counting dudes who yell 'you too, babe!' at you."

"Agreed," Craig said. "Not that it'll matter. You couldn't pull a single real lead all day, Redding. You're great at handing things to people. You're terrible at making them want anything."

And there it was. That was the exact nerve, and he'd found it in three seconds flat, because he always did. Katherine smiled with all her teeth and turned back to her pamphlets like he hadn't scored.

The first hour was rough.

She tried being aggressively friendly with everyone who drifted past the state park booth, and it turned out that "aggressively friendly" read as either desperate or insane depending on the recipient. A woman with a stroller did a shoulder feint like Katherine was a corner predator. Two guys in matching kayaking shirts took pamphlets without making eye contact, which, fine, she'd done that at booths her whole life and now she was on the other side of it and it was humbling.

Her first real attempt was a dad in a "World's Okayest Fisherman" hat who stopped to ask about junior ranger programs. He was polite. He was engaged. He laughed at her one joke about geese. So she deployed what she thought of as the Flirty Closer, the one she'd used in bars back when she was twenty-two and dating and hadn't needed since.

"Well, if you ever want the adult tour of the park," she said, leaning in, "I personally lead some of the night hikes. Very popular. Very hands-on."

"Very hands-on?" the dad said, and then his expression did something complicated, and he held up his left hand, wedding band gleaming like a lighthouse. "Ma'am, my wife is one aisle over looking at Dutch ovens. She's very good at finding things. I'm going to go find her now."

"Oh. Oh no, sir, that wasn't, I wasn't trying to," Katherine said, but he was already walking away at a speed that was not quite jogging. "I apologize."

"That was incredible," Emmy whispered. "I wrote down the timestamp for Craig. He's framing it."

"I hate this bet."

"You proposed this bet."

"I know." Katherine put her face in her hands for a second. "Okay. New strategy. Less predator, more person. I'm just going to be a person. People like persons, right?"

Apparently not, for another forty-five minutes. The hall filled up, the smell of popcorn and floor wax settled in, and Katherine's phone-number tally remained a fat, glowing zero. Across the aisle, Craig's tally had reached four, because Emmy had appointed herself scorekeeper and was tracking it on a sticky note like a boxing judge.

Then a man stopped at her booth who wasn't browsing.

He was thirty-two, tall, with a camera bag slung across his chest and the kind of careful sunburn that said he spent real days outside instead of pretending to. He had a lanyard around his neck with an exhibitor-adjacent badge and a smudge of lens cleaning fluid on his sleeve.

"Hi," he said. "Sorry to bug you. Do you guys