You know who I am, but my name escapes you. It’s filed away in the back of your mind with Tot Mom and Those Brothers Who Killed Their Parents. I’m one of those people you read about online under a headline like I WAS RAISED IN A CULT. Or when the essay was reprinted on another site, I ESCAPED THE MASSASAUGA MASSACRE. Four days ago I sold my soul for a chance at my dream job at an important magazine. This isn’t what I had in mind.
The editor’s name is Ed, which is unfortunate. He should be a Ted, maybe, or Teddy. With a thin, bony frame, he looks like Iggy Pop with a gray David Beckham faux hawk. His Patti Smith T-shirt says he was down with the scene at Max’s Kansas City in ’69, and his loafers suggest his edges have softened with age. In his office, he sits on a stool beside a sculpture of Ikea components cobbled together to create a standing desk. It is a minimalist contraption smartly appointed with sleek and shiny Apple hardware and one of those little potted plant impulse buys you pick up with the subconscious knowledge that taking home this living organism is an exercise in homicidal mania. Because you’re going to kill it—eventually. That’s a foregone conclusion. The entertainment is in seeing how long the withering thing will cling to life. Like a goldfish.
But Ed hasn’t done much talking. Amid a backdrop of Rolling Stone and Village Voice covers hanging on his office wall, he stares at the iPad in his lap—perhaps reviewing my scant résumé or reading emails or searching for micro-living retirement options in Nepal. Whichever it is, he looks bored—while Cara, the web editor, gives her spiel. She talks about page impressions and verticals, demographics and target markets. She’s said Millennials eight times in six minutes. I’ve stopped listening and now spend most of my cognitive function on creating different versions of the same pleasant facial expression that says, Yes, this is fascinating. Please, tell me more, wise one, so that I might assimilate into your collective. Hail Hydra. Oh, and I nod. When her inflection changes and her shaped eyebrows rise, I nod and tilt my head with a little smile. It’s my “charming” smile. I do want a job here, but this android woman spewing analytics is sucking all the joy from my being.
I don’t know why I’m in a shit mood, but from the moment I walked into this job interview, I had a sinking feeling I’d made a mistake. That I had committed the fatal error of peeking into the factory to see how the sausage is made, and now I can’t stomach the truth. Terms like cost-per-click and conversion rate being tossed like darts at the balloons of my naïve journalistic dreams. It started in the lobby with Cara, a thirty-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow in tailored Calvin Klein and deadly heels. She made me feel inadequate and underdressed, though I had spent a combined eight hours schlepping through three different malls to put together what I thought was a convincing version of myself as a young, smart, hip journalist. It only cost me a small fortune and three exchanges to come up with the T-shirt, jeans, casual blazer, and flats ensemble. And I fucking hate every thread of it. But whatever.
She sits on a stool on the other side of Ed’s desk. His perfect opposite. I get the distinct impression that, given Ed’s obvious lack of interest as he remains slouched over his iPad, she was installed as a strategic upgrade by the publisher. A harbinger of the Instagram age of journalism come to pry his print edition from his cold, dead fingers.
Among the print magazines still functioning in America, Riot Street could be voted most improbable to exist. It has operated as an independent news and culture publication since 1964, all from a cramped brick building on Liberty Street in the shadow of Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. It’s the scrappy kid sister still making noise long after its bedtime. The little monthly that refuses to quit. And it has been a crucial part of my career plan since I graduated journalism school last year. Because Riot Street has a reputation for breaking out top talent that lands at name-droppable places. But first, I must survive Cara’s droning seminar on digital media synergistics or some shit.
Mostly I’m just bummed out, I think. I had imagined the inner sanctum of the magazine as something a little dangerous and destructive, wild and frenetic. So far, what I’ve seen is more San Francisco disrupt than Chelsea subversive.
“So, Avery…” Cara folds her hands in her lap and clears her throat, which gets Ed to wake up from his iPad trance. “Tell us about yourself.”
My mouth goes on autopilot: “Well, I graduated from J-school at Syracuse University last year, where I was a beat writer on student government for the Daily Orange.” Ed still looks bored, his wrinkled face drawn with deep lines around his mouth, but at least he’s making eye contact. “I did my senior internship with the Post-Standard, and since then I’ve mostly been freelancing for an ad agency, writing blog copy, social media posts, that sort of thing.”
Saying it out loud sounds even more depressing than the reality. I have former classmates who are already getting clips in the New York Times and Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, I sling SEO copy for real estate agents and car dealerships while also working part-time at the mall. In the past year, I have pitched Riot Street ten times looking for a freelance assignment. Always to no response.
“But I maintain a blog on Medium—I sent over a few links with my résumé—where I write about politics, entertainment…” I’ve run out of words and now see myself sliding down the cliff into desperation as Ed glances out the window and Cara stares at me with her semi-permanent semi-smile.
“As a matter of fact, while I was at the Daily Orange—”
“We saw your first-person essay on Vice.com,” Cara says with a perky inflection. “Everyone here is a big fan of that piece.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” I say, nodding like a dashboard bobble head. I want to smack myself. “I was kind of surprised, actually. I got so many Twitter notifications I had to shut off my phone for a few hours.”
“It got over a hundred thousand hits in the first three days. We checked.” Cara likes this. Her plastic smile turns ambitious. “Very impressive.”
I can’t help that her approval gives me a warm fuzzy all over. I mean, I hate that it comes from a woman whose cornflower-blue eyes twinkle with ad revenue, but all writers are essentially self-hating praise whores. I won’t claim to be above it.
“Have you written anything else on the topic?”
“No. First-person essays aren’t really my niche.” My stomach sinks as her eyes dim. “But I’ve prepared a list of pitches in other areas,” I offer like a defense.
“Would you consider diving back into that well?” Cara asks.
My eyes flick to Ed, who doesn’t seem to have much to add to this conversation, though he leans forward as if interested in my answer. Or his sciatica is acting up. Either way, any hope of employment hinges on my response.
The essay in question, my first and only byline since college, was a Hail Mary pass into national publication. After twelve solid months of soul-crushing rejection, I decided to take a stab at what they call the Confession Economy—writers earning a few bucks in exchange for doling out the most sensational or controversial anecdotes from their life story to hang on a line for public view. Now, I’m not sure it was worth it.
“I could be open to the idea,” I say, offering what I hope sounds like reluctant agreement. Something to the tune of If you held a gun to my head while placing my feet in a vat of acid, yes, I would consider it.
Cara’s eyes light up again and she looks at Ed across the desk, a greedy smile spreading over her nude-gloss lips. His response is something like a facial shrug. Ed doesn’t want to be here.
“Why Echo?” Cara asks.
“My given name,” I say. “My mom is…” Cara gets the gist without making me say it out loud. “So when I was born, she made me Echo Avery Avalon. I go by Avery, but I didn’t want this essay linked to my professional persona.”
Because I plan to have one of those. At some point.
Cara holds up her hands. “Completely understand. In fact, we’re comfortable if you’d prefer to keep the—I don’t know if we can call it an alias—but you could keep writing as Echo within the first-person vertical. It would be a shame to abandon the traction you’ve gained with that identity.”
She makes Echo sound like a character I created, but a few years ago she was a real person. Part of her still lives in the corner of my memory. And she isn’t for sale. Not again. Publishing the essay felt like giving a blowjob in a back alley for an eight ball of coke. I have regretted it every minute since then. But I cashed the check. When you have rent to pay and student loan debts, dignity and pride are something only the wealthy can afford.
Cara waits for a response. Her straight back and crossed legs stone-still. She stares at me, into me, with the sort of intense concentration of a woman attempting to will me into assent. If she could lunge across the room and shake me, she would.
And Ed. Poor Ed. In this instance, he is a man not in control of his own destiny. His office has been hijacked. As his eyes glaze over, I am convinced this wasn’t his idea. That perhaps he doesn’t want me here at all, or couldn’t care less either way, except even Ed has bosses who make demands and expect him to carry them out.
My heart breaks as I consider what I’m about to do, but this isn’t the sort of place I want to work in every day. Not if it means selling off a piece of myself bit-by-bit for no other purpose than generating a good cost-per-mention for the ad department. I’ve still got a seven-hour train ride back to Syracuse ahead of me. Best not to draw this out any longer than necessary.
“Thank you for inviting me today, but—”
The office door to my left flies open, making me flinch. Noise from the bull pen of reporters roars in on the wake of Ethan Ash.
“Fuck you, Ed,” Ethan says with a vicious bite. A tall, commanding presence, he takes the room with complete authority. “You’ll print it as is.”
Ethan is a big deal, with a list of awards longer than my entire résumé. Only four years out of J-school at NYU, he’s written for numerous major outlets and published two books. Strange it’s taken us this long to meet.
“I’m tired of dicking around on this one,” Ethan says.
Ed isn’t impressed. He crosses his arms and leans one elbow on the side of his desk. “Not without a quote for rebuttal in the third graf.”
His bland expression and tilted head seem to tolerate Ethan’s argument only as the path of least resistance. As if this were a daily occurrence Ed had long since stopped getting worked up about. Let Ethan get it all out of his system until he tuckers himself out.
“So you cut the entire section? Bullshit. That’s the crux of the story.”
In a heather-gray T-shirt and jeans, Ethan is almost unassuming. But he’s got the kind of wavy brown hair and deep-water eyes that sell wedding rings and cologne on TV. Makes it hard not to notice him in a crowd. And I’m sure it doesn’t hurt book sales, either. Though it’s his shoulders, I think, that define him. The way he carries himself. Ethan Ash is the lone standing larch after the brushfire has scorched the forest black. At the moment, he doesn’t notice me hidden behind the open door and staring at his back as he squares off against Ed.
“We can’t go to print on that version without a quote.”
“That’s the point.” Ethan tosses up his hands like the whole world’s gone mad and he’s the last sane one among us. “They know that. They’re holding up the article until after the shareholders’ meeting. Then we’ll get a canned denial and three months of research goes to shit.”
“Ethan,” Cara says like a sigh, “can this wait? We’re in the middle—”
He snaps his head toward her. “Piss off, Cara.” Then back to Ed. “I’m not changing it. You butcher my story and I’ll post my version online today.”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Ed’s eyes slide to me with a sympathetic slope to his mouth. “Avery was about to turn down our job offer. You’re stealing her spotlight.”
Thanks, Ed. Thanks for that.
Ethan turns around and slams the door shut, shaking the walls, to reveal me sitting awkward and mortified. I’m the little girl clutching her dolly in the shadows while Mommy and Daddy fight.
“Avery Avalon,” Ethan says, brow furrowed.
Clearing my throat and sounding half my age: “Yes.”
“I wrote you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Uh…is that a trick question? “You read my essay—”
“Yes, I know.” He shakes his head, dismissing my truncated response. “Why are you turning it down?”
“Oh, well, to be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of only writing first-person essays. I’m a reporter.” Though I don’t think my voice is too convincing on that bit. “I want to be a reporter here. But I’m not sure this is a role I’m well suited for.”
“Why not?” Crossing his arms, he levels a severe glower at me, which pokes at my more petulant instincts.
“Look, I appreciate the offer. I’m grateful for the opportunity,” I say to Ed, because I don’t want to burn a bridge, “but I—”
“Give us the room.” Ethan keeps his eyes on mine as he gives the order to Ed and Cara. They say nothing and make no move to leave. “Five minutes. Hear me out.”
Ed looks to me for an answer, to which I shrug one shoulder. I’m not going to be the one to kick the editor-in-chief out of his office, but I won’t tell his golden boy to shove it up his ass, either. Not with an audience.
“We’ll wait outside.” Ed stands and jerks his head at Cara. She rolls her eyes as she stands and smooths the creases from her dress.
When they close the door behind them, Ethan picks up a chair from across the room and plants it right in front of me. His knees almost bump mine as he sits.
“Is it me?” he asks.
“What?”
“The reason you’re about to make a huge mistake.”
I’m not sure what bothers me more, that he places such significance on his tangential connection to my past, or that he might be half-right.
“No.”
Ethan wasn’t the only person to publish a book about Massasauga and the ensuing trial, but he was the first to land a prison interview with my father. A fact that propelled The Cult of Silence to bestseller status when it was published last year and resulted in a new wave of public fascination with the decade-old crime. I saw Ethan once, when he came to SU on his college book tour. Had fantasies of confronting him for hijacking my life story. Threw up in the bathroom instead.
“Then what did they offer you?” he asks.
“Frankly, I sort of tuned out when Cara started talking.”
He smirks. “Everyone does.”
“I think the gist of it is she wants me to write for one of the online sections. More essays. And I’m flattered,” I say so as not to sound like a horrible ingrate, “but I’d rather cut off my hands than make that my career. No one is going to take me seriously as a journalist if my entire portfolio is nothing but diary entries.”
“I’m taking you seriously.”
“No offense, but you don’t count.”
“Oh,” he says, leaning back in his chair with arms crossed. There’s something goading in his expression. A dare. “Why’s that?”
“Let’s not kid ourselves. You have a financial stake in keeping Echo’s story in the headlines.”
Ethan was the one to contact me after my essay went viral. He arranged this interview. And while the lure of a job at a major magazine was too tempting to ignore, I’d be an idiot to think Ethan doesn’t see some personal advantage in this. Like when a musician dies or an actor goes on a Twitter tirade, publicity sells. How many spots has his book climbed in the Amazon rankings since my essay went live?
“Then why write the essay if you don’t want the attention?”
If I’m honest, Ethan’s book was at least partially to blame. Response or retaliation, I’m not sure anymore. But in the time since The Cult of Silence was released, I had this gnawing urgency to put the ordeal in my own words. To reclaim the narrative and with it what little agency Echo had left. I thought the essay would feel like a victory, a bit of redemption for Echo and all the ways she’d been distorted over the years, pimped by strangers who profited from her tragedy. Instead, I feel like just another john.
Now Ethan wants me to work with him. How am I even considering this?
“I have ambitions,” I say. “Why should I abandon them because people like Cara are preoccupied with one brief episode in my past? I’m more than that.”
“No one starts out at the top,” he says. “You have to be willing to pay your dues.”
“I know. I’d be happy grinding it out at some little alt weekly to get a few miles under my tires. At least it wouldn’t feel like prostitution.”
“So it’s about pride? You’re too good for us?”
“What? No.”
I take a deep breath and slide my hands into my jacket pockets. I’m making a mess of this, and I don’t want to leave Ethan with a bad impression of me. He is on a short list of journalists who have reached that rarefied air of influence and respect. The articles he writes shape debates and affect policy. Whatever my personal feelings, it doesn’t help my career to make an enemy of him. These sorts of encounters can follow you for a lifetime. Forever known as the brat who spit in the face of Ethan Ash.
“If I take this job now, I don’t want to get stuck, you know? I don’t want to be typecast in this narrow field. If I don’t start getting some professional reporting under my belt soon, I’m never going to get my career off the ground.”
He mulls this over, appraising me with intelligent eyes. I can’t help the feeling that everything I say digs me into a deeper hole. Ethan’s too important a name in this industry to brush off. It’s in my best interest to create a professional alliance that I can revisit in the future when a better opportunity comes along. He owes me that much. But as Ethan cracks his knuckles on one hand with his thumb, I realize I’m wasting my time.
“I should go,” I say, and reach for my messenger bag on the floor. “Again, thank you for getting in touch, but—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Avery, take the offer.” Ethan rubs his hands through his hair and entwines his fingers behind his head. “It isn’t a death sentence, it’s a job. You put in some time, make friends, and maybe you have an opportunity to branch out, move up. But you won’t get that if you walk out. Here you can learn. You can tap into a vein of experience you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.” Ethan leans forward, elbows on his knees, and speaks with a voice that wrests all the air from the room. “This magazine has a history and a name that will enrobe you in a certain layer of credibility and open doors for the rest of your career. Writing a few essays seems like a small price to pay for that kind of privilege. And they’re going to fucking pay you for it.” He punctuates this with a hand in the air. “So swallow your pride and be grateful.”
He has a point, sure. I’m not oblivious to that, nor the idea that just appearing on the Riot Street masthead will be the most significant step in my career to date. And who’s to say I can’t parlay that into a better gig? When someone is in bed with pneumonia and Ed needs a hungry reporter to drop everything and run down a story. When an associate editor is looking for someone willing to pull an all-nighter tracking down a source or a quote.
But what if I accept and that chance never comes? And one day I realize five years have passed and I’ve missed my moment? We live in a world where youth is not only a prized commodity, but a prerequisite. If I’m not landing cover stories by the time I’m twenty-five, I can kiss my dream of a Pulitzer goodbye.
In my right pocket, I feel for the shell casing of a Winchester .308 and roll the smooth brass between my fingers. I don’t know if it helps, but I’ve been doing it so long I’d miss it if I stopped.
“I’ll think about it.”