The Sixth Station Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole world was watching.
    I could feel the wetness of his kiss on my lips and closed my eyes as though savoring the kiss of a lover who had just walked out the door. It was similar to the feeling I’d had when I’d kissed Donald good-bye that last time—when I knew he was going for good. All of that seemed to happen in the nanosecond before I instinctively wiped his saliva off my mouth and cheek with my scarf. But regardless, I could still feel his wiry moustache and the bristles of his beard on my face against the background of whizzing, clicking, buzzing cameras. I put my fingers to my lips again.
    Dona smacked my hand away protectively and whispered, “Stop it … just stop it.”
    It was pretty much all they had, the images of me touching my lips, in place of the big photo—the one of the kiss—that every reporter had gotten from some obscure angle, but none had gotten up close and personal the way Dona had. She had both shots from thisclose in 12-megapixel still, and video versions.
    I heard her saying somewhere in the background, “ Damn, girl! And I’m the one who bought new panty hose!”
    Inexplicably near tears, I croaked, “Why me?” The answer I would later learn was more complex, more dangerous, and more horrible than any poison gas or weapon of mass destruction that humans in their infinite wisdom had yet to devise.
    Within an hour those pictures of me touching my mouth were posted on the front page of every media and gossip site in the free and unfree world, blasted to millions of e-mails, Tweeted, Facebooked, forwarded, YouTubed, and you name it on millions of monitors and phones, shown on JumboTrons, and on loops on every 24/7 news channel.
    Dona knew, though, that she alone was holding the best video of the kiss, and with that she could become a very wealthy woman. Because Fox News had relegated her to “permanent freelancer,” Dona’s film did not belong to them.
    “‘God works in mysterious ways,’ my mother always told me,” Dona said as we began to make our way inside.
    Before I could focus, we were shoved so hard that Dona almost lost her cameras. “What the hell…” she snapped, turning around to see what looked like the entire media descending upon us.
    The frenzy snapped me out of my confused state. Oh, my God. I realized I was no longer part of the pack covering the story; I was now a part of the story. No longer one of them, I was one of them —the people that people like me chased down the street.
    What was I supposed to do? Give interviews? How weird would that have been? But there was no time to think, because in seconds the crowd was pushing us both, surrounding us, suffocating us.
    “Hey Russo—you know ben Yusef personally?” “Ali—over here! Over here!” Microphones were shoved in our faces, and for the first time in my life, I knew how terrifying it was to be on the other side of all that need, that want—that terrible insatiable hunger of the 24/7 news machine. I, Alessandra Russo, was dinner.
    We then both did what we hate for news “victims” to do: We hid our faces and tried to run like indicted Mafia capos—from our own colleagues.
    The police commissioner finally gave the OK for a few cops to go in and grab us. The commissioner was proving a point: show the taxpayers that the “mainstream media” were self-serving lefties who’d eat their own young for a story.
    Two plainclothes cops grabbed Dona, while a bruiser of a woman and her slightly smaller male colleague grabbed either side of me, wires clearly poking from their suit jackets into their ears. “C’mon ladies, let’s get you inside,” the bruiser said calmly.
    “Stand back!” the commissioner bellowed over the electronic megaphone. “Everybody back!”
    Then he said under his breath, “Bunch of animals. Real goddamned animals.” The statement was nonetheless picked up by the hundreds of mics in the hands of the hundreds of reporters, which caused a near riot. Police officers in equal