Free Once Around the Track by Sharyn McCrumb Page A

wasn’t doing it because she wanted to go to stock car races, and no, she didn’t have a jones for runty little guys in firesuits. The point, she would tell them, was that the job would offer valuable experience in public relations, and it might lead to a more prestigious gig—Hollywood, perhaps, or a corporate position in industry, which would really pay well. Making something look good was the name of the game, whether you hyped a car, a new movie, or a race car driver, so it didn’t matter where she started out, as long as she performed the task with skill and creativity.
    The NASCAR job would be a hoot, she would tell her colleagues. Surely she’d soon be able to regale the gang with tales of excess on the Redneck Riviera (aka Lake Norman), and stories about Thunder Road prima donnas behaving badly. Stay tuned, she would tell them, leering.
    She took the job. There was never any doubt that she would. Diversification looked great on a résumé, and she was still young enough to get away with it and pretty enough to have a good shot at any job she really wanted. She had a good academic record, a modest legacy from her grandmother to use as a safety net, and two older sisters to deflect her mother’s lust for wedding planning and grandchildren. Sark was out to see the world before age, career demands, or Mr. Right put an Invisible Fence around her life.
    She had already worked in the publications office of her university, spent the obligatory year in New York working for a fashion photographer, and worked as a publicist for a minor music company, whose main claim to fame had been a group called “The Okay Chorale.” Then she’d tried her hand at newspaper reporting, but the “assigned beat” system of a metropolitan daily had soon bored her, especially since the reporters with the least seniority got the most mind-numbing assignments. The zoning board. Oh, please . Taking a job as a NASCAR publicist was a small price to pay to escape that; during some of the interminable board meetings she thought she might have gnawed off her own foot to get away.
    She had seen the story about the all-woman NASCAR team before it had even made headlines. One of the guys in the sports department had been bruiting the news about as his current favorite joke, but Sark had not been amused. NASCAR was a notoriously all-male enterprise, and on principle she applauded an injection of diversity into the mix. It had been easy enough to get the sports guy to give her the contact people, once she’d managed to convince him that her interest was opportunistic rather than journalistic.
    She had e-mailed her résumé to the team, and by the time they called her for an interview three days later, she had put together an impressive portfolio of fashion photographs, zoning board stories, and record company press releases.
    Christine Berenson had studied the work samples with clinical interest, and then she’d taken a long look at the slender girl with long cognac-colored hair and an expression of impish intelligence. At last she said, “And just what experience do you have with stock car racing?”
    There it was. Sark knew she couldn’t bluff her way through that one. She had done some reading on the subject—at least enough to know that Jeff Gordon and Robby Gordon were not brothers—but she thought it best not to feign an interest or an expertise that she did not have.
    “I’m eager to learn,” she said, with what she hoped was an enthusiastic smile.
    Christine Berenson’s expression was noncommittal. “Well, your credentials seem satisfactory, and your photography is quite good. How exactly would you suggest we promote Badger Jenkins?”
    Sark’s smile wavered. The name of the driver had not been made public, and while she had tried to memorize as much as she could about forty-three race car drivers who were just names on a page to her, she did not recognize this name, and not a single fact about him surfaced in her consciousness.