Page 104 of Cut Off
His voice is low. “You don’t have to win the whole game tonight. Just win the shift you’re in.”
I nod.
He turns and heads for the doors, leaving me with the echo of his footsteps.
29
The New Job
ZOE
The brochure called it a “boutique long-stay experience in the heart of Capitol Hill.” The reality is beige.
I’m not exaggerating. Beige carpet. Beige walls. Beige curtains over blackout curtains. The comforter is a darker beige, which I think is supposed to feel like a design choice. The artwork above the bed is a framed photograph of a single fern leaf. Beige, of course. The coffee maker is the kind that requires you to insert a pod and then wait three full minutes for it to produce coffee.
I take a sip. I make a face. I drink it anyway, because I’m a grown woman with a corporate credit card and a key card and a job that starts in forty-five minutes.
The grocery run last night was a shitshow. I went down to the corner market—the kind of place with reclaimed wood shelving and a chalkboard menu and a scene that announces, before you even walk in, that you’ll pay for the vibe—and Icame out with a single canvas tote of items totaling a hundred and twenty-three dollars.
Welcome to Seattle, where everything costs roughly twice what it does in Dickens and the rain is, I’m told, a personality trait.
I pull the blackout curtains. The sky is gray on gray, the Space Needle poking up over the rooftops, rain not falling so much as suspended in the air. It is genuinely beautiful, in a way that makes my throat tight. I chose this. I keep reminding myself of that. I chose this.
I put on the blazer. The one I bought with money I didn’t have, the one that makes me look like someone you would trust to fact-check a story. I do my hair and eyeliner. I look at the woman in the mirror and tell her she’s fine, she’s great, and she’s thriving.
The woman in the mirror doesn’t look convinced, but she’s wearing the great blazer.
KISL is four blocks from the hotel, which is exactly far enough that I’m going to have to come up with a system for hair maintenance because the rain in this city is a committed humidity that exists in three dimensions. By the time I get to the building, my hair’s decided to be wavy today, which is fine, fine, totally fine.
The lobby is glass and steel and a living wall, and an espresso bar sits in the corner. A sculpture sits in the middle of the floor. The security guard scans my temporary badge and says, “Welcome, Zoe,” like he’s been briefed, and I’m embarrassed by how much my own name in someone’s mouth lights me up.
Mel meets me at the elevator and looks exactly the same as she did two years ago, but also somehow ten years more competent, hair in a high ponytail, blazer tailored to within an inch of its life, sneakers because that is the Seattle thing.
“Zoe Lane.” She grabs me in a hug that smells like very expensive shampoo. “Get in here. Oh, my God. Get in here.”
“I’m in,” I say into her shoulder. “I’m here. I’ve arrived.”
“You have arrived.”
She pulls back and looks at me with the laser focus of a woman who has approximately eleven minutes scheduled for our emotional reunion before the day swallows her whole. “Come on. I’m giving you the tour. We have to walk fast because I have a budget meeting at ten, and I refuse to let them start without me.”
She gives the kind of tour you give when you are proud of a thing, and want everyone to know.
Edit suites: six of them, each one a glass-walled cube with two monitors and a chair that probably has a name. Morning block studio: cavernous, three cameras on tracks, a desk so glossy it reflects the lights overhead. National feed desk: an entire wall of monitors, a clock for every time zone, two producers wearing headsets. The control room has more buttons than a 747 cockpit. I count, generously, fourteen people in it.
“This is Carl.” Mel gestures at a man hunched over a switcher. “Carl, this is Zoe.”
Carl raises a hand without turning around. “Hey, Zoe.”
“Hey, Carl.”
We’re moving again before I finish saying his name.
She introduces me to Shonda at the assignment desk, who shakes my hand while wearing a headset and typing. Mel introduces me to a man named Devon who’s on the phone and waves. She introduces me to a woman whose name I don’t catch because someone in the corner is yelling about a live shot in Bellevue that is, apparently, no longer happening.
By the time we’ve made it around the floor, I’ve shaken nine hands and not actually had a conversation with anybody.They’re all kind. They’re all distracted. They’re all already mid-sprint on something I haven’t been briefed on yet.
Mel ushers me into a glass-walled office that has my name on the door.My name on a door. There’s a plant on the desk, a small succulent in a white ceramic pot, with a Post-it stuck to it that says, in Mel’s loopy handwriting, WELCOME HOME, BIG SHOT.
