Willa

 

“Sometimes it feels like the only reason I’m here is to look pretty.” I throw a mock pout at Brittany, but in truth I don’t feel like making a joke out of it. “And some days, I even fail at that.” We’re standing in the breakroom, Brittany leaning up against the counter with a mug of coffee and me leaning against the wall, clutching my bundle of papers. I’ve been chasing up some stories about rogue stringers in the city, running lights, climbing fences, trespassing. It’s a good story. It’s a story which cuts straight to the truth. It’s exactly the sort of story I took this internship to follow.

 

“You haven’t even asked him yet.” Brittany is ten years my senior at thirty-three, with shoulder-length brown hair and big chunky red glasses, and big chunky colorful dresses, and big chunky multicolored shoes. I can imagine sitting around a circle with bunch of hippies hitting a drum and singing into the night, and she’s my only real friend here. “How are you going to stand here complaining if you haven’t even asked him?”

 

“I know, I know.” I nod shortly.

 

She’s right, of course. I shouldn’t throw myself a pity party just yet. Maybe I’ll walk into his office and slam the dossier down and he’ll smile and clap me on the back and tell me I’m the best darn intern he’s ever had. And also maybe a flying pig will watch from the corner.

 

“I better get to it,” I say.

 

“Wait.” She almost falls across the room when she comes to me. “Smile, Willa. You don’t need to look so grumpy. You know what Peter’s like.”

 

“What’s he like?” I ask.

 

She gives me that sideways, cocky grin and leaves the breakroom.

 

Clutching the dossier and trying not to think about all the hard work I did for this story—trailing stringers for almost two weeks, several interviews, several close calls with criminals and their pursuers—I walk across the main floor toward Peter’s office. I would like to burst upstairs to Sofia Silva’s office and present the dossier to her, but an intern approaching the head of the station is a big no-no. It’s the kind of thing which might see the intern unable to pay the rent even on her crappy apartment.

 

Brittany winks at me from her desk, holding up crossed fingers. I force a smile onto my face and then knock on Peter’s door. I have to be strong now. I have to be confident. I have to pretend like I don’t have doubts about the course my life is taking, that I am fully committed to this job and still feel the passion for it I felt for the idea of it back in college. I need to pretend that every night when work is done I don’t ask myself the question: am I doing the right thing with my life?

 

“Come in.”

 

Peter’s office is large, clippings of the sister paper’s biggest headlines framed on the walls, screen captures of the station’s biggest hits right next to them. Peter sits in a large executive’s chair, his hands resting on the armrests, looking far too young for a chair that important. Brittany has told me he’s around thirty, but he looks around mid-twenties, with pale red hair and pale gray eyes. He is always well-kept in his blue business suit, his hair clipped short, his face cleanshaven and not unhandsome. He steeples his fingers and watches me closely. His gray eyes roam more than is necessary. I ignore it.

 

“Take a seat,” he says.

 

I sit in the chair opposite him, placing my dossier on the desk.

 

“And what’s this? A story?”

 

I don’t like the way he says that. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but his tone of voice is like the tone of an indulgent parent. I remember once, before the hell that scarred my life happened, going into the living room with a bad painting of a tree held in my hand, jumping up and down for Mom to pay attention to me. “And what’s this? A painting?” She sounded exactly like Peter sounds now.

 

“Yes, a story.” Brittany said to smile, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Smiling would give the wrong impression. I need to be professional. I sit up straight and smooth down my sweater. “It’s been an open secret for a long time that stringers—you know, the men and women who listen to police scanners and chase down stories for news footage—”

 

His smile is small and somewhat condescending. “I know what stringers are, Willa.”

 

“Well, okay … it’s been an open secret for a long time that they can be unethical, running red lights, getting in the way of the emergency personnel, taking unnecessary risks—”

 

“I’m going to need to stop you there, Willa.” He leans on his elbows, squinting at me. “I like you. You’re a clever young woman. You’ll make an excellent reporter.” He waves at the dossier. “You clearly are an excellent reporter. I am sure if I opened this I would find well-documented accounts and flawless notes. But here’s the thing. We can’t use this story. Just think about it.”

 

“I’m sorry, Peter, but when you tell me to just think about it, I want to scream.” I say this under my breath, far too quiet for him to hear. He’s about to ask what I said. I speak up. “Why not?” I ask.

 

“You did all this work on your own time,” he says. “This wasn’t work we asked you to do.”

 

“Correct.”

 

“That was your first mistake. You should’ve come to me with the idea, or gone to one of your coworkers. They would’ve told you what I’m about to tell you now.”

 

“Which is?”

 

“We can’t run an exposé on stringers in LA. We’re a news station in LA. Where do you think the video footage of our reports comes from? The only people who’d be happy with this exposé are the folks over at accounting.”

 

I sigh. He’s right. It was a silly mistake. But at the same time, I’m pissed off. Weeks of work turned to dust just like that. “What about the viewers? Wouldn’t they be interested? Or the readers?”

 

When he looks at me, he’s Mom again, only this time he’s Mom when she realized the painting was bad and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “More than shootings and car crashes?”

 

“Yeah, fine. I get your point.”

 

I jump to my feet.

 

He waves at the dossier. “Don’t you want your notes?”

 

“What’s the point? I’ll get back to writing copy now.” I tip an imaginary Stetson hat. “Sir.”

 

He winces when I say “sir.” Maybe it is cruel. Peter isn’t my enemy.

 

“If I ran this story upstairs, they’d laugh at me,” he says, his voice trailing me to the door.

 

“I know. I know.”

 

For the rest of the day I sit at my desk, writing mind-numbing copy and listening to the reporters around me gossip about the biker gang problem. Apparently a gang by the name of the Skull Riders has been setting fire to buildings as a way to screw over their rival gangs. I can tell that Brittany is less than horrified by the way her cheeks flush and she gushes, throwing her hands in the air and proclaiming for all the office to hear, “They could start a fire for me any day of the week. I saw one once, in a bar. He came striding in wearing his leather jacket. On the back he had a skeleton sitting on the back of a motorcycle, and he looked hot.”

 

I ignore her and tap, tap, tap away, the copy so mind-numbing that soon I’m not even sitting in the office. I’m a kid again and Dad’s illness—which I later learned was cancer, but at the time seemed like some kind of witch’s spell—is chewing through him. I watch as the big strong man I loved becomes a stick-thin husk.

 

“Are you okay?” Brittany asks me. She’s standing over my desk. The office is almost empty. I’ve been sitting here for five or so minutes just staring at my blank computer screen, lost in the past.

 

“Yeah.” I push my chair back and stand up. “I’m fine. Better than fine.”

 

Brittany looks closely at me. “We’re good work friends, you know that.” She smiles. “You can talk to me.”

 

Work friends … that’s a very Brittany thing to say, a very Brittany distinction to make.

 

“I’m fine,” I say sternly.

 

“Well, okay, then. I was just trying to help.”

 

She clicks her tongue and clicks her heels, leaving me to watch her go. I ride the bus home, since my intern’s wages can’t pay for a car. I don’t want to go home to my apartment, to the creaking doors and the broken cupboards, to the shower which half the time doesn’t turn on, and the other half turns on ultra-hot. I don’t want to sit there listening to the couple screaming at each other through the walls. But an intern’s wages can’t pay for endless nights out, either, so I’m stuck. People tell me I’m lucky enough to be getting a pittance as an intern, that most people have to rely on money from their parents. But then again, most people have parents.

 

I think about the Skull Riders. There’s a story the station would take seriously. If stringers stray into uncomfortable territory for the big bosses, rogue bikers stray into the most comfortable territory. Violence, gangs, but not gangs doing what they usually do, gangs becoming arsonists. Fire is good for ratings, since flames are so attractive on screen.

 

And it’s thoughts like that which make me question if I should even be in this business. I’m thinking of fire as if it’s a moneymaker. I’m thinking of fire as if I’m just as cold and calculating as the rest of them. I think about the novel I was going to write. In my first year of college, I was going to write it. In my second year, I was still going to write it, but there were other concerns. Third and fourth came along and the novel seemed like an object growing smaller in the rearview mirror, except that simile doesn’t work for me because I don’t have a car—

 

Stop, I tell myself, as I thank the driver and step from the bus. No pity parties.

 

I’m about to head into my apartment building when I see him. He’s massively tall, around six-foot-three or four, with the wind- and sun-tanned skin of a biker. His hair is jet-black and wavy wild. From where he’s leaning across the street, reclining in the setting spring sun, I can see his jacket hanging from the handlebar of his bike. He’s a Skull Rider. His jacket matches Brittany’s description perfectly. His dark, shielded eyes are aimed directly at my apartment building.

 

I pretend not to be watching him as I unlock the main door to the apartment building. Once I’m past the broken elevator and in the first floor hallway, I run to the window, looking down at him. He’s shouldering on his jacket, glancing back to the building every so often. He smokes two cigarettes, flicking the stubs into the drain, and then pushes his bike into an alleyway.

 

I don’t think. I just run, run down the stairs and into the street, and then follow him, being as inconspicuous as I can. Even though I’m not completely sure that the road I’m on in life is the right road for me, I can’t deny that there’s a thrill here.

 

I follow him for ten minutes until he walks into a bar with a carved half-naked lady leaning above the door, the words “The Princess” outlined in blood-red letters.

 

As I walk across the street, I feel like I don’t have a choice.

 

Whatever this is, it’s a story.