VIPER || Oscar Piastri

TEASER

Please listen to —  4th of July by Wild Pink
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The morning was not, by any stretch of the imagination, going well.

Andreanna Saunterre, who had her phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, was late.

Not catastrophically — just the kind of late that made people sigh pointedly and check their watches in unison.

She was trying, and mostly failing, to get her stupid left arm through the stupid sleeve of her stupid team jacket for the first time in approximately three geological eras.

"Yes, Dad, I'm about to go in, can I go?" she said, half-smiling at someone across the room who was very obviously waiting for her to hurry up. She gave them the kind of polite, teeth-baring grin that said I am coming, I promise, please don't hate me, and added a frantic little nod for emphasis.

Once they looked away, though, she pulled a face at them.

"No, they haven't—" She pinched the bridge of her nose, phone wobbling precariously between shoulder and cheek. "—they haven't started the thing yet, so I can't exactly—" She stopped, sighed, and swapped the phone to her other ear. This conversation also required her to be a contortionist too, it seemed.

"Because they haven't started the thing yet?!" she repeated, louder now, earning a glance from a grizzly looking woman with a clipboard by the door.

"Dad, no— I can't ask them that before the interviews happen. That's not how this works. You don't ask someone what they thought of the movie before they've even seen it, do you?"

...

"No, Dad, I don't mean literally—"

He said something else. Then something else. Probably a third something, too — something about preparation, or manners, or the proper way to talk to the press — all of which Andi ignored while staring out at the track behind the fence, the one she wasn't sure she missed or resented or maybe both.

Then she turned away from everyone, pressing one hand over her free ear to hear him better.

Her voice dropped.

"Yes, I'm okay, Dad," she whispered. "You don't have to ask me that all the time."

There was a hum on the other end — a sigh or a static breath or one of those non-sentences parents make when they don't know what to say but still want you to know they care.

"Can I go now?" she asked.

"Okay, bye. Yep, bye—"

"Bye, Dad."

Her throat tightened, just slightly, imperceptibly, because for half a second she was back in that doorway; back in Abu Dhabi; back there, saying—

She blinked. She could hear it as clear as it had been the day she said it.

Bye, Oscar,

Andi paused for too long. She was still late. There wasn't time for this.

She shoved her phone into her pocket, shook out her shoulders, and exhaled through her nose. Then she turned back toward the noise and movement of the room, the tiny, minuscule, flicker of whatever tension that was already folded back into her casual posture.

She was about to locate the nearest bathroom, just as another woman with a clipboard appeared, wearing the expression of someone who'd been dropped into the middle of a maze and told to smile through it.