“I’m fine.” Darby tried to wipe her nose with her fingers, as a dam of tears threatened to break through any moment.
“Use my handkerchief,” offered the girl.
“Thanks. I’ll get it back to you.”
A couple of girls dressed in bathrobes and curlers stared when Darby emerged from the elevator.
Stella popped out of her room, toothbrush in her hand, and paused for a split second before coming forward.
“Where did you go?” Darby whimpered, detesting the weakness in her voice. “How did you get back so fast?”
“We didn’t see you when we came down from the rock. And I couldn’t find my shoes anywhere in the dark. Where did you go?”
“That boy—Walter—attacked me in the park. I missed curfew.”
Before Stella could reply, Candy emerged from the bathroom and scrutinized Darby closely. “How did she do?”
Darby blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? How did I do what?”
“Walter, right? Did he try to get up your skirt? He tried the same thing on one of the other girls last week.”
Darby turned to Stella, looking for clarification.
Stella raised a pale hand to her neck. “I didn’t know any of this. You’ve got to believe me.”
Candy piped up. “He’s an ass. But he’s my cousin, so you better not say anything.”
“I don’t understand.” Darby balled up the handkerchief in her fist. “Why would you set him up with me on purpose? He tried to hurt me.”
“My, my, so dramatic,” Candy tsked. “He didn’t hurt you at all. You’re standing here talking to me, right? So he got a little randy and tore your dress. It wasn’t all that great to begin with.”
Darby began to weep. She knew she should hold it in, return to her room, but the sobs came fast, wrenching sounds that erupted from her very core. She dropped her chin to her chest and wrapped her arms about herself, totally alone. The girls stared and Stella took one hesitating step toward her, and then backed quickly into her room.
She was a failure. The letter to Mother was ruined, as was her favorite dress that was really an ugly dress. Tomorrow first thing, she’d pack up and leave for Ohio. This was what happened when you tried to live a larger life.
A voice boomed down the hallway. “That’s enough. Leave her alone!”
Darby looked up as the elevator girl stormed toward them. She must’ve watched the entire scene.
“Come with me.” She took Darby by the arm and spit on the floor, her saliva just missing Candy’s furry slippers.
Shocked, Darby allowed the elevator girl to lead her away as Candy yelled down the hall at them. “You’ll have to clean that up, Esme, you guttersnipe.”
The girl yelled something back in Spanish that Darby couldn’t understand.
Not that it mattered. New York City had beaten her down already. She hadn’t even lasted two days.
CHAPTER FIVE
New York City, 2016
The WordMerge office was housed in a seedy block in the mid-Thirties, far west of Broadway, next to a McDonald’s and a gas station that primarily served taxi drivers. Rose had walked over from her Lexington subway stop in an effort to clear her head, but ended up feeling damp and sweaty in the morning heat. Her mind whirled with what she would say to Griff next, what she should have said last night. So many unspoken possibilities. She clung to the idea that she could change his mind with the right sentence, the right phrase.
“Pitch meeting in my office in ten minutes,” Tyler announced as he whizzed past the editors’ desks.
After he slammed the door shut to his office, Rose moaned out loud. “Anyone have anything juicy?” she asked no one in particular.
“God, no.” Jenna, who sat in the cubicle next to her, rubbed her eyes. “I bet you do, though. You’re the queen of pitch meetings. I just wish some of your glitter would rub off on me.”
In fact, Tyler shot down as many of Rose’s ideas as anyone else’s. But by now she knew there was no point in correcting Jenna.
The rest of the office, all ten of them, were bright young things. She’d figured, when she’d arrived three months ago, that she’d be treated like anyone else, but of course her notoriety had preceded her. The other reporters often turned to her for advice, and three asked her to be their mentor her very first day. Which was ridiculous since all of them were more capable than she was. Maybe not in writing skills, but they were faster and far more adaptable in an environment that valued speed and flexibility.
When Rose worked in television, there’d been a sense of camaraderie, as the producers and editors worked through the night on a story and chugged coffee outside the editing suites. WordMerge exuded an entirely different energy. The two girls who sat on either side of her wore earphones most of the day, nodding in time to the beat, like sunflowers bobbing in the wind.
Tyler emerged once again. “Turns out I have a call with the Coast in ten minutes. My office, let’s go.”
Being pushed around by a grizzled news producer was one thing, but having a baby-faced neophyte do it was harder to take. She joined the others and trooped into his small office. He preferred having meetings here, versus the large conference room down the hall that they shared with an app design company. The employees squeezed into corners, perched on the windowsill, and several leaned against the walls. Rose snagged one of the few chairs.
“As you know, we’re here to save journalism, one story at a time.”
She hated when he started out with this speech. It was so forced and saccharine. Better to save the rah-rah for potential investors.
“I want to hear the best you’ve got. But keep in mind: Right now, we need stories that will go viral, stories that fly, even if they don’t have the same substance we’d want in other circumstances.”
“Wait, I’m confused.” Rose should keep her mouth shut. But she couldn’t help herself. “You’ve always said you wanted quality reporting most of all. If you want viral, we might as well do cat videos, right?”
Tyler was happy to confess that he’d earned a master’s in journalism from Stanford on a whim, as a way to kill time until his trust fund matured. But in his preferred version of the story, he was a changed person by the time he graduated, inspired to save a dying profession from itself. WordMerge, he promised, was the answer, offering old-school reporting in a form that would appeal to modern readers. The guy was a complete prick and endlessly self-impressed, but his pitch was a winner—he had wooed Rose and many others with passion and tenacity. And yet the boy wonder was on edge these days, worried. How much of his investment had he blown through already?
No one spoke for a few tense beats.
“No, Rose. No cat videos. I’m talking about a piece about a soldier with PTSD who overcomes it with the help of his gluten-free diet. Or something about the Peruvian tea everyone’s drinking in order to find a higher plane of consciousness. It’s becoming clear that we need to marry news and entertainment to get ourselves off the ground.”
The other staffers murmured their approval.
Rose tapped her pen on her notebook. The others all carried iPads. She might as well have brought an inkwell and feather. “Look, I’m all for originality. But I thought we were staying away from trendy pieces.”
“We were, last week. But I need to increase page views. I’m meeting with some potential backers and I want to show them we have the click-throughs to grow into a major news hub. Any ideas?”
Jenna piped up. “How about two investment bankers fighting for custody of their pet iguana?”
“Iguanas aren’t photogenic. Neither are investment bankers, for that matter. Next.”
“Or I could do something on the influx of young Mexican immigrants. We’re talking kids, crossing the border alone.”