I set down my pen in the middle of a Wednesday sunbreak and turn in my chair to face her. “Of course.” This is far too early for her to be at the station. Something’s up.
The coffee I drank too fast churns in my stomach. There’s no way she could have overheard Russell and me. And yet there we were, so openly shitting on our bosses in a semipublic place. It’s not impossible that it got back to her.
She slides into the chair next to me, looking a little softer than usual in jeans and a white sweater. No camera makeup, just a touch of eye shadow and mascara. “I was hoping to catch you without too many people here,” she says. “I wanted to personally apologize for what happened on Friday. Sober, this time. What we did—what I did—was unacceptable, and at a party, no less.”
Torrance Hale is apologizing to me. Again.
It’s almost as out of character as this meme of her that went viral before I started at KSEA. She was covering a heat wave and getting some man-on-the-street footage at Hempfest, Seattle’s annual marijuana festival, when a guy offered her a joint on camera. She declined it with a laugh and a “maybe later,” and I’ve never known whether she meant it or whether she was joking. Regardless, the internet turned it into a GIF that still makes me double-take whenever I see it. Some people swear they can see her winking as she responds, while others have argued that it’s just a blink.
“Oh . . . okay?” I manage, my thumb brushing the lightning bolt at the base of my throat.
Torrance straightens some papers, and I wonder if she’s thinking about what Seth said about the weather center being a disaster zone. “Seth and I shouldn’t have dragged you into it, with that game. We were acting immature. It was personal, and we should have stopped ourselves before we went that far. I absolutely should have stopped myself before what happened with the Emmy.”
I want to tell Torrance that it wasn’t just what happened at the party. It’s been a hundred different things—this is just the one with the most visible wreckage.
“I—I appreciate that.” In spite of everything, my optimism takes over. I want to believe her. And maybe this makes me naive, but part of me does. I believe the Torrance who was on my TV as a kid, who was there for me when my mother was sunk in her own deep depression.
I’m just not sure how much of that Torrance is the one sitting next to me right now.
She grins like she’s about to tell several thousand viewers that there’s no rush-hour traffic today. “Let me take you out to lunch today to make it up to you? You pick the place.”
A lunch invitation, like maybe it really is that easy for the two of us to be something more than employee and distracted boss. Like maybe there’s more of my childhood idol in her than I thought.
“You really don’t have to,” I say.
“I insist.” Torrance cups my shoulder with one hand, gives me that upper-seventies smile again. “Thanks, Ari. I look forward to it.”
I glow the rest of the morning, the conversation waking me up more than any amount of caffeine. My first forecast, I’m all smiles, despite my three hours of sleep. I’m half tempted to edit emojis into my cloud graphics. Maybe Torrance and I will talk about Halestorm, about the bigger stories I want to be doing. Maybe I’ll bring up my annual eval, and while I won’t say how disappointed I was last year when she simply said “You’re doing great, Abrams” and gave me the union-mandated 1.5 percent raise, I’ll make sure she knows how eager I am to learn. To improve.
By eleven o’clock, I’m scanning menus of the Belltown lunch spots I haven’t tried yet and posting viewer photos of last week’s storm on social media when I hear Seth’s voice booming from Torrance’s office.
“I told you we can’t air this,” he’s saying. The office door is open a crack.
Avery Mitchell catches my eye from a couple desks away. “Torrance’s story about Dungeness crabs and climate change,” she says by way of explanation. “About how the rising acidity in the ocean is damaging their shells. We were working on it all last month, talked to a ton of scientists. It was supposed to air this afternoon as part of a series on marine life, and I’m guessing Seth just watched it.”
“What was wrong with it?” I ask, just as Torrance yells, “It’s not biased, it’s science!”
Avery shrugs as though to say, that.
“You know that and I know that,” Seth says, “but the advertisers don’t, and I’d rather not field a dozen angry phone calls about it.”
“We get angry phone calls whenever we talk about climate change. I report the weather. I can’t not talk about it.”
“I’m aware of that! But we have to be careful about how we do it. This is about all our viewers, not just the ones who agree with you.”
“Well, the ones who don’t are wrong.”
I’m firmly on Torrance’s side. It’s something we have to contend with every so often on social media, though not nearly as much as the comments we get about showing both too much and not enough skin. It’s disheartening how many more people care about our bodies than rising ocean levels.
Seth goes quiet, too quiet to hear. And then: “What if you cut out this part at the end, or—”
A sharp laugh from Torrance cuts him off. “I know what’s going on here. You’re trying to get back at me for Friday. Your Emmy.”
“That is blatantly untrue. I’m just doing my job, Tor.”
“I don’t think you are. I think you’re trying to silence me to make yourself look like the big man here. So you can feel better about your pathetic little—”
And I’m done.
With shaking hands, I push out my chair, making more noise than I intend as I shove to my feet and stalk out of the newsroom. My ears are ringing, my lungs tight. No one can see me like this, and if I stay in this room a second longer, I’m going to scream.
When the door to the Dugout opens and someone says, “In here,” I’m in such a state that it takes me a moment to register the voice as Russell’s. He opens the door wider, beckoning me inside. The Dugout isn’t super high-tech or anything, but it’s quiet. There’s Russell’s desk, and those belonging to our other sports reporters and anchors, most of them strewn with sports equipment and memorabilia, the walls covered with jerseys and pennants and posters of athletes. Maybe there was something to Chris Torres’s football theory.
It’s stunningly, blessedly empty.
“Thought maybe you needed to hide as much as I did.” He gestures to a free chair at the empty desk next to his before leaning back in his own chair. He looks so casual here, so right. The kind of comfort I’ve never managed to grasp at the station. “Everyone’s out to lunch, but I had a story to finish up.”
I finally let out a breath, collapsing into the chair he rolls over to me. Out there, my emotions were on the verge of taking over. In here, I’m safe. “Thanks.”
“Hey,” he says, leaning forward, a little worry-divot appearing between his brows, right above his glasses. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure yet.”