And while he’s nice to look at, that’s only when he’s not talking. When he opens his mouth, it’s usually to tell me something I’m doing wrong. “You shouldn’t let a source dictate the terms of an interview” or “never agree to tell a person what quotes you’re using in a story. If they say it on the record, you can quote it,” he’s told me. More than once.
While I appreciate the advice and know I can learn from the more senior reporters, it’s the way he says things that annoy me. Like I’m a neophyte idiot who couldn’t possibly get it right without his help.
Jack isn’t my boss or even a person who has the power to fire me. But that’s irrelevant. He’s a highly respected reporter and people listen to what he has to say. Most of the time. Fortunately for me, the people who hired me didn’t listen to him when he apparently objected, and they hired me anyway.
That didn’t stop him from voicing his objection to the deputy bureau chief one morning when he thought I wasn’t there. I overheard him say, flat out, “I think it was a mistake, putting her in that job. She’s too green. It’s going to blow up in her face.”
I turned around and walked the other way so they wouldn’t know I’d overheard the conversation. I felt a rolling wave of nausea in my gut and the urge to quit right then. There was no mistaking that the conversation had been about me. I’m the least experienced reporter in the bureau, by a long shot. I’m the only reporter who could be described as green. But instead of giving him the satisfaction of thinking I quit because of him, I went to the bathroom, cried for five minutes, and talked myself off the ledge.
Most of the other reporters treat me like they assume I’m capable unless I show them otherwise. From the attitude Jack gives me daily, I can tell he thinks the exact opposite. Which is why I need him to understand that he can level that blue-eyed stare at me all day long if he wants to, and I’ll feel nothing.
2
Jack
She’s fucking late again.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for a junior reporter to get to the office before eight in the morning. When I was a junior reporter, I was the first one in and the last to leave. That meant getting here at seven and staying until eight at night, even if no one asked it of me. That was the way you proved you were hungry for the job, the way you let everyone else know you were willing to work harder than them. That way, when you finally got promoted to a prime beat, it felt deserved.
Not the way she did it. Actually, I don’t know the way she did it. There was a rumor flying around for a little while that she slept with the assistant bureau chief, but I don’t believe it. Not that I know her well enough to assess her willingness to do something like that. I just know that Jeremy would never do it.
If I had to lay odds in favor of one guy on the planet staying faithful to his wife, I’d gamble on Jeremy. He’s the epitome of a good guy. Amiable, fifty-seven years old, grey-bearded and stooped-shouldered from so many years spent huddling over a keyboard. He’s been happily married for something like twenty-eight years. When I occasionally overhear him talking to his wife, his voice takes on a sweet kind of reverence that I can’t imagine feeling for a person after one year, let alone twenty-eight. It’s almost disconcerting that he’s still so in love.
No, not disconcerting. It’s great, even if I can’t see myself ever having something like that. Honestly, I’m not even sure I want it. The kind of relationship he has—marriage, forever love—it feels so… final.
Obviously, that’s the point, and it’s not my deal. I’m pretty damn happy the way things are, dating—or not dating, as the case may be—and never worrying too much about what will happen, eventually. There doesn’t have to be an eventually.
I’ve ruined every relationship with my career ambition, so I’ve stopped trying to have a meaningful personal connection. My last breakup left me feeling like an asshole, and that was two years ago. I was chasing a huge story, which required travel, nights and weekends spent reporting, and hard questions that earned me the occasional death threat. I broke a lot of news, sent some bad people to jail, and changed a few industry policies for the better. In other words, exactly what I’d hoped to do when I chose journalism as a profession.
Let’s just say my fiancé didn’t see it the same way. She gave me an ultimatum—work or her. I chose my job because, truthfully, it seemed like a kinder, gentler option. Guess that should’ve told me something about the woman I thought I wanted to marry. So we parted ways. Not four months later, she was engaged to someone else. I unfriended her on social media because who needs to see that?
Now I mostly work and occasionally engage in a no-stress hookup. The emphasis is on low mental strain, instant gratification, and little emotional work. It’s my safe zone.
Case in point, Linden, who is petite with gorgeous green eyes and a personality as fiery as her auburn hair, and she’s made it clear she thinks I’m scum, the reason undecipherable to me. And it’s not worth two minutes more of my time to try to figure out why. Who needs that kind of drama? So no, she and I will not be dating.
How did I get sidetracked? Dating her is not the point.
The point is that Linden has gone from being a news assistant to a junior reporter in record time and now she’s getting some plum assignments. And she doesn’t think enough of this job to get here on time. She needs to show up and do the basics. She needs to learn and get better at reporting, not just reach for big assignments because she’s ambitious and no one has the balls to say no to her.
The news desk has to get taken care of first thing in the morning. It’s crucial. The whole day depends on getting everything sorted at the beginning. And I seem to be the only one who’s in the bureau early enough to get the job done. Her job.
She always comes in looking a little defensive, rushed, and apologetic. Then glides right into her chair and picks up where I’ve left off. She tosses a thank you my way and almost seems annoyed that I picked up the slack, as if I was doing it to make her look bad instead of doing her a favor. Did I mention that she’s a junior reporter?
I should just stop doing it. Let her fall on her ass once or twice. It would serve her right. Some people only learn the hard way.
But I guess I’m just a special kind of sucker because I keep coming back for more. By the time she breezes in, I’ll have gone through all the breaking news and organized the assignments for the bureau into piles for each reporter to pick up on the way in. I should be one of those reporters. Linden should be the one organizing the beat work. Why am I such a Type A idiot that I can’t stand leaving the incoming wire stories for her to suffer with when she finally rolls in?
I don’t want to think about the answer to that.
But I’m here already so there’s no harm in having a look at what’s on the wires and the twitter feeds of the companies we cover. It will help me in the long run. Maybe I’ll stumble on to a story idea or an angle that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
And right now, I need a good idea.
I work in the entertainment pod at the paper, mainly covering new media. I used to cover the biggest entertainment players like Disney and Comcast, but once Netflix claimed a stake in the content business, all bets were off, and it was a feeding frenzy among the Silicon Valley reporters and the LA reporters to divvy up the reporting territory. I still cover the biggest companies because I’ve been at it for the longest, but now I also write about everything and everyone, streaming services, old-guard companies, some small tech companies that are creating entertainment. Honestly, it’s all kind of a mess.