Keynote Kink

I signed up to volunteer at the conference for a dumb reason, which is that my Thursday nights had turned into laundry and a baking show. I'm Barbara, I'm 33, I drive a forklift at a logistics startup, and by that winter I had gotten so predictable that I could tell you what I'd eat next Tuesday. So when the startup conference needed floor crew for a weekend in Oakland, I clicked the link before I could talk myself out of it.

My sister thought it was a midlife crisis, which feels early. "You volunteered," she said on the phone. "You, Barbara Stark, volunteered to wear a lanyard and point people to the bathroom."

"It's three days," I said. "It's not the Peace Corps."

"You're going to end up directing traffic and picking up someone else's trash."

She was probably right. That's the thing about me. I've been the reliable one so long that I don't even get asked anymore, people just hand me the clipboard. I'm the friend who drives everyone home, the coworker who covers the shift, the girlfriend who plans the dates and then gets dumped for someone with a motorcycle. Not that I want a motorcycle guy. I want, I don't know, one weekend where I'm not useful.

Setup day was a Friday. The venue was a converted warehouse near the water, all exposed beams and concrete floors, and the expo hall smelled like fresh coffee and new carpet. I got there at seven in the morning, put on my black volunteer shirt, and got handed a radio and a roll of gaff tape, which honestly was more exciting than it should have been.

My job was mostly staying out of the way while vendors set up booths. I taped down cable runs along the walls. I moved two folding tables. I pointed a man from a payroll company toward the loading door four separate times. Normal stuff. I was on my knees taping a cable by the coffee booth when I looked up and saw her.

She was standing by a booth across the hall, some fintech thing with a lot of blue in the banner. Dark hair pulled back, gray blazer over a t-shirt, holding a tablet against her hip like she was bored of it already. She was watching the room the way I watch a forklift aisle, like she knew where everyone was going before they did. And then she looked at me. Not past me. At me, for a second, and she didn't do the polite thing and look away. She sort of tilted her head, like she'd filed something away.

I felt that in my stomach. Which was embarrassing, because I was kneeling on the floor with tape fuzz on my jeans.

I went back to taping. I am 33 years old and I got flustered by a stranger in a blazer, great, put it in my file. But I kept clocking her as I worked my way down the hall. She wasn't a vendor. She walked behind the main stage area, talked to a guy with a headset, checked her watch twice. Staff, I figured, but not volunteer staff. Somebody's assistant by the way she kept stepping in front of problems before they happened.

Around eleven I was at the AV cart near the breakout rooms, untangling a situation. Somebody had run a video cable under a door threshold and then closed the door on it about forty times, so the cable was dying and the breakout room had no signal. I was crouched there with the cart, pulling slack, when a pair of black ankle boots stopped next to my knee.

"Okay, I have a question," a voice said. "Is that the cable for room two, or is that the cable that is currently ruining my life?"

I looked up. Blazer woman. Up close she was shorter than I thought, and she had a small scar through one eyebrow that I immediately found very interesting.

"That depends," I said. "Are you the reason the door kept closing on it?"

"I'm the reason everyone else's disasters land on my desk." She crouched down next to me, which I didn't expect. "Rosalind. I'm running tech for the keynote speaker, which means I'm running tech for everything he touches, which is everything."

"Barbara. Floor crew." I held up the tape roll as my credentials.

"So, Barbara of the floor crew. Can that cable be saved, or do we run a new one?"

"We run a new one. This one's been pinched, see?" I showed her the flat spot in the jacket. "It'll work until exactly the moment someone important is talking."

"That's always how it goes." She looked at the cart, then back at me. "How long for a new run?"

"Twenty minutes if the ceiling clips are where they're supposed to be. Forty if they're not."

"Nobody has ever told me a real number in this building until right now," she said it dry, but she was smiling a little. "What do you need?"

So we ran the cable. It turned out she was good at this, fast hands, no fussing, and she held the clips while I fed the line, and we only argued twice about the route. There's a thing that happens when two people work a cable run together, you get in a rhythm, and somewhere around the third clip I realized I was having more fun than I'd had in weeks and it was cable management. That's where my life was at.

We got to the last clip by the cart and both reached for it at the same time, and her hand landed on mine on the clip. And stayed there. It wasn't a grab, it was more like she forgot to move it, and I forgot to move mine, and we were both crouched next to this AV cart with our hands stacked on a metal clip for what was probably three seconds and felt longer.

"Sorry," she said, and didn't sound sorry. "Warm hands. Yours are cold."

"The warehouse is cold."

"Mm." She pulled her hand back slowly and stood, smoothing her blazer like that put everything back in order. "Well. Cable's fixed. You're officially my favorite person in this building, and I've been here since six."

"I've been here since seven. You win."

"I usually do," she said it flat enough that I laughed. Then she glanced toward the main stage and back at me. "They're doing crew meals in the back room at one. The good coffee is back there too, not that sad urn out front."

"Good to know."

"Barbara," she said my name like she was checking it fit. "Thanks for the real numbers."

Then she walked off toward the stage, tablet back on her hip, and I stood there next to the AV cart feeling like I'd been handed something without a label on it yet.

Lunch was actually decent, sandwiches and the promised good coffee in the crew room behind the stage. I sat with two guys from registration and a woman named Dot who had done security for thirty years and had a story about every venue in the Bay Area. I kept half an ear on the door.

"Speaker's assistant," Dot said when I asked, casual, into my sandwich. "Rosalind. She's good. Sharp as a tack, that one. Been with the keynote guy two years, keeps him from setting himself on fire on stage."

"Huh," I said, very smooth.

Dot looked at me over her coffee. "Uh huh," she said, and went back to her story about a trade show in Reno.

The rest of the afternoon I did floor crew things. I untaped and retaped. I found a lost badge. I got asked where the bathroom was eleven times. Every so often I'd catch sight of Rosalind across the hall, and twice out of however many times, she was already looking. Not a big look. Just a check, like marking something off a list. The second time she raised her coffee cup at me about an inch, barely a gesture, and I felt it all the way down my back.

I told myself it was nothing. She was like that with everybody probably, sharp and warm at the same time, a person who collects people. I was the cable girl. By tomorrow there'd be four hundred attendees in here and I'd be pointing at bathrooms and she'd have an actual job to do.

Then at about five, with the hall mostly done and the light coming sideways through the big doors, she appeared at the end of my aisle with her arms crossed and that same little tilt of the head.

"So here's my problem," she said. "The greenroom TV is mounting crooked and the speaker will notice in about nine seconds. I need someone with a real number and a steady hand."

"That's a weird way to ask for help."

"It worked on you before." She unfolded her arms. "Coming?"

I put the tape roll in my pocket, which was a decision I made with my legs before my brain voted. "Lead the way," I said.

The greenroom was behind the stage, past the black curtains, a room with a leather couch that had seen better years and a TV hanging about two degrees off level. Rosalind handed me a level off the cart and watched me check it.

"It's the bracket," I said. "Somebody tightened one side more than the other. Give me the screwdriver and hold it straight."

She held it. She smelled like coffee and that cold clean hotel-soap smell, and she stood closer than the job required, close enough that I was aware of her the whole time I worked. I talked while I loosened the screws, which is a thing I do when I'm nervous, told her about the forklift job, how I'd gotten volunteered for this conference because my sister does the volunteer lists and I owed her for a wedding.

"You drive a forklift," she said. "That's the least boring thing anyone has told me all day."

"It's a forklift. It goes forward and it goes up."

"Yes, but you're the person they call when the load is weird. I can tell. You're the person everyone here calls when anything is weird. You've said yes to eleven things since noon."

"That's the job."

"That's the job," she agreed. "And you're exhausted. Don't argue, I watched you re-tape the same seam twice because a badge lanyard guy dragged a case over it."

I tightened the last screw and stepped back and the TV was level and I felt stupidly proud of that. She looked at the screen, then at me.

"Thank you," she said. "Genuinely. You've saved me from a two-hour conversation about optical illusions."

"That's what I'm here for."

There was a pause. Outside, somebody was testing a mic and it thumped through the wall. She slid the screwdriver back onto the cart very carefully, like she was buying herself a second to decide something.

"The keynote's tomorrow at ten," she said. "But tonight, after load-in wraps, I was going to go find a drink somewhere that isn't this building. There's a bar two blocks toward the water that does not know what a startup is. You should come."

I should explain here that I had a whole system. I date from apps, I meet people at neutral coffee places at seven PM on weeknights, I'm home by nine-thirty, I text my sister a rating out of ten from the parking lot. Six months since the last time, a bartender named Adam, and before that a string of nice men and one very nice woman who all felt like doing homework. So the smart answer was the one my system would give, which was some version of I have an early call tomorrow.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

"Okay?" She looked honestly surprised, which made me like her more.

"I mean, sure. A drink."

"Good." She didn't smile big, just the corner of her mouth. "I get out of here around eight. I'll come find the floor crew door and loiter in a suspicious manner until you're done."

"I'll be the one loitering back."

"That's the spirit."

She left and I stood in the greenroom for a second with my hand still on the level, wondering what my legs had just signed me up for. Then Dot came through the curtain with her walkie and looked at me, then at the TV.

"You fixed that thing?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Been crooked since noon." She nodded slowly. "Good. What did Rosalind want?"

"Help. With the TV."

"Uh huh," said Dot, and went back out through the curtain.

The next hour was the slowest of my life. I struck tape. I coiled cable badly and then redid it. I texted my sister from behind a stack of folding chairs, which is a thing I never do, and she replied with nine exclamation points and the words DO NOT COME HOME EARLY, and I put the phone away feeling like I'd been caught skipping school.

At eight sharp there was a knock on the crew door frame, and there she was, jacket on, hair down instead of in the bun, and up close without the bun she looked