new motto,” Dag said. “Gonna get it on a T-shirt.”
“Really?”
“No. That’s just some guy’s blog.”
She read the header. “The Hero of the Teeming Masses? Who’s he?”
“Who’s anybody with a blog? Some self-important shmuck who thinks somebody else actually cares what he thinks.”
“I guess you do, if it’s your home page.”
“Well, I like that motto. Do you want to stay over?”
Not in a single bed with a six-foot guy. Not if she didn’t want to wake up totally cricked before she even started to work out. “No, thanks.”
“You’re different now, Heathen,” he said.
“Heather,” she corrected him. “What are you talking about? You don’t remember me.”
“I know you don’t remember me, but I remember you. Heathen the party animal. You had this pink hair and the crazier toques than the boarders. The worst Abominable Snow Slider around.”
He’d graciously refrained from the acronym: ASS. Anyone on the slopes who wears a really stupid-looking hat to get attention. And he sure knew a surprising, and kind of disturbing lot about her. “I still use a neon orange helmet,” she said. “And I was not a party girl.”
“Anybody who teaches bar servers sign language so they can shave five minutes off their drinking time is totally a party girl.” He sat up in bed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s bad that you reinvented yourself, I was just noticing it.”
She was glad that it was dim enough that he couldn’t see her flush. “I could make the national team by the end of this season,” she said, “and be in the Olympics here in 2010. I’m trying to be more serious about my sport.”
“So that’s why you don’t have pink hair any more,” he said. “You want to look respectable when CBC comes around to do an Athlete’s Diary segment on you.”
She felt her face go even redder. “It could happen. And it’s Heather, not Heathen.”
“Because Heathen sounds too wildchild for the IOC?” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. Heather hated being teased. “And I remember you now, too,” she said, trying to tease back, even though she really didn’t. “Sort of, anyway.” One small fragment had come back to her, either aided by, or in spite of the beer. “Dangler Dag, right? Why’d they call you that again?”
“A commentator used that once about me at a meet,” he said. “Because of my incredible hang time. I just dangled up there.”
“I thought there was something else.”
“No, that was it, I busted big air.”
It was an answer that sounded good, but his tone sounded both defensive and dismissive, suggesting he had left something out. And Heather remembered something else fuzzy. She remembered that none of the girls in the group, or on the fringes, got involved with Dangler Dag, no matter how often relationships switched around. Heather couldn’t recall entirely why, because he seemed nice enough, but obviously, Dag wasn’t going to fill her in himself. Heather was glad she’d remembered this much, though, because there had to be a good reason for it. Even if she couldn’t remember it now with the alcohol in her system, she knew not to take this little attraction any farther, Bambi eyelashes or no Bambi eyelashes.
“Anyway,” Dag said abruptly, when she sat there, musing quietly for too long, “it never caught on the way you’d think. Not the way Heathen is going to stick to you.”
By her next shift at work, he had everyone else using it. And it stuck.
Three
Heathen started checking in on the Hero of the Teeming Masses blog after seeing it on Dag’s computer. Back at the beginning, the first one read:
What is important is that the Hero believes in himself. If you do not believe in yourself, feel free to believe in the Hero.
Watch this space.
• • •
Dag was a fucking star at work. Tips were excellent when he was on. And he was “on” all the time. Heathen didn’t know how he did it. Sure, you had to be pleasant to the customers, but Heathen didn’t make a religion out of it. There were a number of times she wanted to tell Dag to cheer down and, since they were now pretty good pals on the job, a couple of times she actually did. But it really worked for him. First, he had the cuteness thing going on. Then, he chatted people up: how was their drive up with all the roadworks, were the kiddies good in the car, how’d their ski run been. He couldn’t possibly have cared, but he made it sound like he did.
Ginette, another barista, told her about a day that Dag spent trying to flip the whipped cream canister around like Tom Cruise flipped the bottles in that bartender movie. He had gotten pretty good by the end of the shift, she said, after dropping it so many times that even Mohammed, who adored him, had threatened to take it away.
Her next Saturday on with Dag, Heathen was looking forward to seeing the flipping thing, but instead he came in and did the whole shift like a normal person, no acrobatics, no insufferable perkiness—except he did it all with a New Zealand accent. Just like that, all damn day. Heathen and Tim, who was on cash, and Mohammed were agape as he “G’day’ed” everyone who came in the door, and when they mistook it for an Australian accent, explained cheerily and repeatedly how it was a subtly different accent, demonstrated the difference, and proceeded to talk about life in Lord-of-the-Rings land.
Heathen had to do a reality check. “You’re not a Kiwi,” she said when they were refilling pastry trays on a lull. She remembered him talking about being from Winnipeg over beers that night. Then she had a sudden doubt. “Are you?”
“No, my folks were from Sweden,” he said, not dropping the accent, even though it was just the two of them alone in the back. “But they did go to New Zealand on their honeymoon. I’m just having some fun.”
“You’re making it all up?” she said. “That’s not right.”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember signing an oath to give customers my real personal information. Is there a javaslinger code of ethics I don’t know about?”
“These people don’t know you’re feeding them lies. I think we’re supposed to deal with them honestly.”
“Are you serious, Heathen?” He stopped arranging loaf slices to turn and look straight at her. “It’s not like I’m deliberately shorting them on change, or watering down the cream, or giving them a hard-luck story to solicit tips. They don’t care who I am so long as I get the stuff in the cups right. This is Saturday. None of the locals come in, because it’s all tourists
