“Oh!” she said. “Oh, Violet, I didn’t realize. We’ll change it, of course.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate your understanding.”
“What would work for you? Let’s see. What if we halved it to seven hundred fifty?”
I ran through the mental calculation. Seven hundred fifty on rent, plus two hundred on student loans. That left four hundred and fifty to live on. Fifteen dollars a day. I’d walk to work; I’d eat cheap. Tight, but I could manage.
“That would be great,” I said.
“Oh, good,” Anne said. “Phew.”
“Should I just cross this out?” I said, pointing at the number. “And write in seven fifty?”
“Well.” Her smile slackened. “Actually, why don’t you give me that. I’ll have our lawyer type up a new version. It’s more official that way.”
But the process dragged out. Anne e-mailed me with updates. Just waiting for our lawyer to revise the agreement, she wrote. Then, I have the agreement! Thomas wants to look it over one more time. And then, I’m sorry for the bother, Violet, but could you please send us your employment letter from KCN?
Can you talk for a sec? I texted Stella. By this point I was staying at the apartment, in a sleeping bag on the floor, but Anne and Thomas probably only agreed to this because I had nowhere else to go. An employment letter? Did they think I was scamming them? I felt mildly panicked. If the Bradleys decided to pull the plug, I had no other plan.
Stella would reassure me. She would laugh and say that her parents were crazy, we just had to humor them. You know how rich people are, she’d say. Obsessed with every dollar. If she ever texted me back, that is—which she didn’t. She often forgot to check her phone, and while she was frolicking in Europe, who could blame her? But her silence stung a little.
In the end, it was fine. I signed the revised agreement and handed it to Anne. She nodded, her lips set in a tight line. “Thanks for your patience, Violet,” she said, tucking the papers into her bag. “You see, Thomas pointed out that it’s a…somewhat unusual arrangement.”
I wrinkled my brow, offered a vague smile of puzzlement.
“Stella isn’t living here, after all,” Anne said. “It’s a bit odd, don’t you see?”
“But she’ll be back soon,” I said.
“You’re practically like a second daughter, of course. But still. It’s a big expenditure. The maintenance alone! Well, you know what it’s like in New York.”
It’s official, I texted Stella that night. I am a tenant of Anne and Thomas Bradley.
Lol, she texted back. Now you know how I feel.
Where are you, anyway? I wrote, hoping to catch her while her phone was still in her hand. But there was no response. Not that day, or the next day, or the day after.
In September, one of Frontline’s senior producers quit. The gossip was that he had waited until Rebecca returned to give notice, in the hopes that she would make some grand gesture to counter his offer from another network. Instead she told him goodbye and good luck. Rebecca valued loyalty.
This created a ripple effect. Jamie was promoted to senior producer. Someone was promoted to fill his old job. It resulted in an opening for an assistant, a job with a real salary and benefits and security. To say that each of us interns wanted that job was like saying that America wanted to beat the USSR during the Cold War. It was a question of existential purpose.
“Are you busy right now?” I said, stopping by Jamie’s desk one afternoon. There were several rungs between us, but I still went to him with my constant questions. Plus, we were becoming something like friends.
“Always,” he said, typing on his phone. “What’s up?”
“I need some career advice.” I lowered my voice and glanced around. The newsroom was competitive but not cutthroat, so you couldn’t be too blatant. “I want that assistant job.”
He laughed. “Oh? I never would have guessed.”
“What can I do to make sure I get it?”
He put his phone down. “Memorize the difference between a cappuccino and a cortado. The other interns just don’t seem to get it.”
“Very funny.”
“Partly it’s luck. But you should try to make yourself indispensable. It needs to be you that producers think of when they need something done, not someone else.”
The vacant desk sat there like a shiny prize. There was no urgency in making a decision. At this point, several of us interns were capable of carrying out the work of an assistant. There was script-running and lunch-fetching, but there were also the complex systems that we had finally mastered: searching the archive, pulling stock images, monitoring alerts in iNews. Every minute of programming required a staggering amount of technical work. It wasn’t hard, but it was finicky, and a lot of it trickled down to us.
The lack of timeline drove some of the interns crazy. A few of them quit. That just showed they weren’t cut out for the work. If you wanted predictability, this was the wrong business.
“Is it a test?” I asked Jamie, at one point. “Like, Survivor: Newsroom Edition?”
He laughed. “Really? There’s a hurricane in the gulf and two wars in the Middle East and wildfires in California. You think the bosses have time to think about the interns?”
“Fair enough,” I said.
One day I walked past the empty desk and noticed that the phone was ringing. No one else made a move to answer it, so I sat down and picked up. “KCN, this is Violet speaking.”
“Who?” the voice shouted. “Never mind. We’ve got a big problem. I’ve got the camera crew here and I’ve got this lady mic’d and lit but she’s getting cold feet.” His voice was familiar: one of the field producers. “Major problem. We’re going to have to scrap this from the rundown.”
“Don’t hang up,” I said. “I’m going to put you on hold, okay?”
I sprinted to find the senior producer for the segment. Her eyebrows shot up when I relayed the message. “What else did he say?” she said. “What were the exact words?”
“I’ve got him on line three,” I said, pointing at her blinking phone.
“Oh!” she said. “Nice. Thank you.”
I wound up as the go-between all day, bringing scribbled messages to the senior producer when she was in meetings, relaying precise instructions back to the field producer. It was such a scramble that when the editor was cutting the tape, the producer asked me to record the scratch track, the narration that the reporter—who was en route back from the field—would later replace with his own voice. In the end, the interview was salvaged. Hours of frenzy were distilled into a neat three-minute package in the C block. After the broadcast, the senior producer thanked me and said, “It’s Violet, right? Good work today.”
The next week, the job was mine.
What’s our address? Stella texted me one morning that fall.
It was a busy day at work, and by evening I had forgotten about the text, or what her reason for it might be. When I got home, the lights were on. A pair of ballet flats and a quilted jacket were discarded near the front door. “Stella?” I called out.