NONE OF US COME at journalism fresh, even if that’s what we tell ourselves. Everyone has an agenda, and we know it. We’ve all sat at the bar: liquor-fueled tangents on the injustice of it all, of what makes a story worthy; or the long-buried idealism rising back to the surface as our words and thoughts begin to slur. It’s a tie that binds, or so I’d thought. But there’s a line in the sand. And it’s hard to know where it is until you cross it.
The story was mine, but I was too close to it. That’s what Noah had warned. “It’s taking you over,” he’d said as I’d paced my tiny apartment, working late into the night, circling around it at all times. Like he could see it creeping in and pulling me under.
“He did it, Noah. I know him. He did it,” I’d said.
He’d paused, fixed his cool gray eyes on mine, drummed his fingers. “That’s a big story. You need it to be airtight.” A criticism, a warning, a preemptive jab at my yet-to-be-proved shortcomings.
But isn’t that what we wanted, what we all admitted to, late at night over drinks at the bar: to shake the truth free. And here I was, finally, in a position to do it.
“Eventually, the truth will come out,” I’d said. “Someone will come forward if I push.” This was what I believed: that the truth would rise to the surface, like air bubbles in boiling water.
But Noah was already pulling away in the middle of the conversation. “And if they don’t?” He shook his head, his disapproval apparent in the lines around his mouth. “You’re not going to be a martyr, Leah. You’re going to be crucified.”
“That’s the very definition of a martyr, Noah.”
He’d brushed me off with a flick of the wrist, no longer interested in the playful semantics, the way we twisted words to fit an argument, the way we could file them into a point and attack.
“Do you want to be the news or report it?” he’d asked.
What I really wanted was to go back in time, back to the first time I’d heard his name from Paige’s mouth, and stop her. I met a guy. Aaron. We both showed up to office hours with the same test that we both failed. He noticed and said, “Don’t take my story. I call a death in the family.” She’d raised her fingers to her mouth, covering a smile, stifling a laugh.
Aaron had existed more in thought than in sight for me: Going to Aaron’s. Staying at Aaron’s. And then, when he was more firmly in our world, it was always in relation to Paige. Maybe this was where I first went wrong: seeing Aaron filtered through Paige.
This was the time around which Noah cut and run. You’re going to tank your career, and for what? One dead ghost.
The breakup, at least, I should’ve been ready for. Maybe if I hadn’t been so deep in the story, I would’ve seen it coming. I could typically feel that moment when everything shifted, when the slide began, could identify the point from which there would be no recovery. Of course this would be that moment.
I had become too focused, too serious, too driven—all things I had always been, that he had neglected to see first. Both of us striving for something greater. For me, the truth. But for him, the bigger goal was his career.
Even before Noah, there had been a slew of men who, on the third or fourth or tenth or eleventh dates, had reached an inevitable breaking point. When something had happened, some crack, some slip, and the other Leah, the one underneath, the one who lived with Emmy for a summer—the one who was not as put together or as solid and unchanging—would become visible, and I’d see the twist in their faces, the confusion, the pieces being reassigned, recategorized. The gap would start to grow between us, and I’d see it coming. Sometimes, if I was feeling particularly masochistic, I’d cut it off right then, at the end of that date. But most of the time I’d let it slide, watch it happen, wait.
I couldn’t look away. As if I could pinpoint my own demise every time. As if I were someone else, looking in: There she is, Leah Stevens, not at all who they thought she would be. Notice him pulling back? Changing the topic? Looking over his shoulder? There was some pleasure, along with the defeat, because I could solve it.
But the story had stolen my focus, and everything that followed had been a blindside: the reason Noah dumped me, and my boss, Logan, fired me, and Paige took out that restraining order against me. All because they thought I had become obsessed—obsessed with him.
* * *
THE END-OF-CLASS BELL RANG, and I packed up my things. I wanted to read the essays, see if someone was trying to tell me something. See if there was anything to a rumor I could find some truth in.
Someone knocked on my open class door, and Theo waved a blue form in the doorway. “Hi,” he said. “Mr. Sheldon said I could do my detention today?” He raised his voice at the end, as if asking permission, but he was already hovering just inside. Mr. Sheldon had said he could, he was telling me. “I just want to get it over with,” he added.
And so did I. There were teachers in the hall, students talking, the doorway open. I looked at the clock. “Yes, come on in.”
He did, then lingered near my desk, shifted on his feet until I looked up. “Do you want me to do anything?” he asked. “Some teachers want you to clean the room.”
The idea of Theo Burton going through anything here made me uncomfortable. “Do you have any work to do?”
He held out a spiral notebook. “It’s for history, though.”
Kate Turner peeked in, saw I had a student, said, “I’ll catch you later,” and left.
And just like that, the hall was eerily quiet again. How quickly the building turned empty and stale.
“Just sit down,” I said.
I stared at the clock again. I hated this rule—they owed you time, when really, they were just stealing more of it.
Theo sat at his desk on the other side of the room, but his voice carried, felt too close. “Is it true what they say?” he asked. “About you and Coach Cobb?”
I considered ignoring him. Considered the consequence of silence. How a no comment could get twisted into a story instead. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” I said, “but I’m willing to bet that it’s not true.”
I didn’t look up from my computer screen when I said it, and he didn’t respond. But I could feel the charge in the air. Hear his pencil tapping against the desk, the slow rip of a sheet of paper. He balled it up, tossed it into the trash can. Something he wanted me to notice.
I packed up my bag a few minutes early, but he didn’t move. I cleared my throat, and he finally looked up.
“Time to go,” I said.
“Can I just . . .” He gestured toward his notebook, implied he was in the middle of something.
I shook my head. “I have to be somewhere. Let’s go.”