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7 P.M., TUESDAY, JAN. 11, 2022, Portland State University Lincoln Hall — Blair had no problems getting through all the protesters that thronged in the Park Blocks. Why would they notice her? She was a blonde with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She had a ready smile that she turned on anyone who noticed her. She was wearing a pink skirt that swirled a bit around her calves, and a white shirt and navy cardigan. Her shoes were navy too, flats, because she might look like a stereotypical blonde, but she was no fool. Twelve hours on her feet? In heels? She thought not.
She looked like a cheerleader, most of her coworkers said when they needed to describe her. She shrugged. She’d been a cheerleader in high school after all. Camouflage, Will had accused her with a laugh. “You’re as cutthroat a reporter as I am, and you’re an Honors College student — which makes you as smart as Ryan Matthews. And you’re hiding it.”
She had nodded at his description and bit her lip not to cry. “Sorry,” she said. “You’re not supposed to notice.”
He’d hugged her and laughed. “It’s OK, Blair,” he said. “I love you. The whole package.”
She’d smiled, set aside his comment to think about later, and hugged him back. And later never came, because she was stretched to the max with everything she was doing. She was taking 18 credits and doing the news editor job — which was full-time even though she only got paid for 19 hours per week. University rules. But everyone knew the leadership positions couldn’t be done in 19 hours. They considered their checks stipends and shrugged. They tried to keep the other paid people to actual hours, but sometimes things happened. And you sucked it up and got the job done — you didn’t clock out during a crisis.
So, she probably fit in better physically with these conservative protesters than she did with her own coworkers who were known for being flamboyant creatives who couldn’t color within the lines to save themselves. She smiled fondly at the thought of the eclectic collection of people she worked with. She envied them some, but her camouflage, as Will called it, was too engrained to give up at this point. But sometimes she wondered what she would have been like if she’d been allowed to find out what she was like.
She frowned. She wasn’t sure that sentence made sense even in her own head. She hesitated when she saw the front of Lincoln Hall was barricaded by the protesters, and then she shrugged, walked up to the next building, Cramer Hall, and went inside. A ticket-taker nodded at her when she identified herself and sent her upstairs to the skybridge to cross back over into Lincoln. She guessed the organizers assumed people would know to do that.
Once inside Lincoln, it felt like any function she’d been to here. She smiled a bit. Protesters? What protesters? She mingled around the people outside the auditorium, listening to them chat. Nobody paid her any mind here either. Just another blonde college student. Feelings of both satisfaction and loneliness at that thought. What was with her today?
Apparently, McShane and Planck had escorted Dr. Crenshaw down the center of Broadway to the tune of When the Saints Go Marching In? Could that be true? Suddenly she thought she might know where their advisor had been this evening. She sent Bianca a text that she was safely inside, and about the walk down Broadway. Did they have video?
Bianca: LOL. J.J. has video. Will is here. Cage is here. Ryan is here. And so is Ramirez. Ramirez is not happy with us.
Blair frowned at that: Why?
A shrug emoji came back. Blair shrugged in real life and told Bianca she was powering off her phone to go inside. Back in an hour. And she went inside, found a seat and pulled out her notebook and a pen. Like a good girl.
She didn’t know what prompted this mood, wasn’t even sure she could name the mood, but she sure hoped it passed in a hurry.
An hour later, she put away her notebook, shook out her cramped hand, and stood up. I am a changed person for having heard that speech, she thought. She made her way to the front of the crowd, and found Jacob Lewis, acting vice president for University Advancement. “Can I get some comments for tonight’s show?” she asked him.
He smiled at her. “Be honest now, you just want to meet her,” he said teasingly. “Because J.J. is already asking her some questions on camera.”
She grinned at him. “But I will ask smart questions,” she joked. “Because I’m not J.J.” Which was unfair, because he did a really good job. But he was a 19-year-old guy from the suburbs.
Jacob Lewis laughed and took her behind stage to introduce her to Dr. Crenshaw. They chatted for a few minutes, and Blair blurted out, “We’ve been working with the question, ‘Whose story do we tell? Did Ryan tell you about that?”
The woman nodded.
“And I realized that question gets at the heart of the institutionalized racism of the structures of the media doesn’t it?” Blair asked. “Not just the stories, but how we choose the subjects, what we think about audience, all of it. We asked those questions for the package, Death of a Downtown, so that we could change our coverage of a story. But we haven’t asked that question about how we should change ourselves.”
Blair suddenly stopped, feeling embarrassed about having told this amazing woman her own thoughts instead of asking her questions, and she started to apologize. But Dr. Crenshaw was looking at her as if she had suddenly become interesting. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly that. Not just media — we’re just beginning to look at them as an institution I’m afraid — but all institutions and systems. If CRT has a flaw, and I think it has several, it’s that it was designed by people who were on the outside looking in. So far, it hasn’t been able to force the people inside to ask that question: how do we change ourselves?” she paused, then added, “Are you on the panel talking about Death of a Downtown on Thursday? I saw it on the program.”
Blair shook her head. “No, Will Bristol, the editor, is. Ryan and Ben Waters, our television station manager is.” She frowned. And she caught Dr. Crenshaw’s smile. “Ben is Native American,” she added, because she wouldn’t know that. “But....”
“No women. And yet you’re the news editor? And it was your idea?”
“How did you know that?” Blair exclaimed.
“That it was your idea? Because you are still thinking about it and how it applies,” she said. “And because I’m 67, been doing this for a long time, and I can guess. Now I’ve become quite fond of your advisor. But you tell him I said you have to be on that panel. And I’ll raise a ruckus if you aren’t.”
“I can’t do that!” Blair was scandalized. Fond of their advisor? What was that about?
“Yes, you can,” Dr. Crenshaw assured her. “I’d tell him myself, but I think you need to do it. Don’t you?”
Blair looked at her for a moment. “Maybe,” she said slowly. “But I’m supposed to ask you questions! Did you really march down Broadway with President McShane and Vice President Planck?”
Dr. Crenshaw laughed and told her about it. And then Blair thanked her and made a dash for the EWN building. She got to the front doors and hesitated. There were still protesters out there. Chief Ramirez appeared at her shoulder. “Let’s go out through Cramer,” he said quietly. “I’ll walk you back.”
“You’re doing escort duty, Chief?” she said lightly, as she walked with him. He chose the basement route for some reason.
“After what protesters did to your front door? Hell, yes, I’m doing escort duty,” he said. Blair raised her eyebrows at the tone. Bianca was right, he was angry.
“Chief?” she said after the pause lengthened. “I get that you would be angry at what happened. But why are you angry at us?”
He was silent for a bit, and she thought he might not answer. Typical male, he might not even know why he was angry, she thought. Male anger scared her. You never knew why it happened, when it would lash out. But you could almost guarantee that it would land on you or the nearest woman.
Maybe that was why she fell in love with Will, she thought in one of those lightbulb moments. He rarely got angry. And they’d been through some bad times. He got analytical. He detached from his feelings. But she didn’t think he knew how to be angry. Which was troubling, now that she thought about it.
Oh? She mocked herself. Because you do?
Ramirez sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “You all are not to blame for any of it. But it really set me back about your triage plan. That’s what someone called it, I think? You all have a plan in place for being ransacked.”
She frowned, feeling a bit puzzled. “Well yes,” she said. “Doesn’t the university? It should, right? Isn’t that one of the lessons you all came away with from the Innovation Task Force’s fire drill? Corey and Will came back from that, last summer, and said we need to plan what we would do if we’re under attack. So, we had a retreat, and we looked at the most likely scenarios based on what we’d been through, and we developed some response plans.”
The fire drill, as it was usually referred to, was one of Ryan Matthews’ initiatives. There was a reason why most people in and out of EWN said don’t let Ryan Matthews get bored. He’d been the manager for the task force, and he got bored. So, he staged a mock ransomware attack on the university computer systems while the task force was meeting — a fire drill. It had been a successful finale to the task force’s summer meetings, but she thought a few people might never forgive him for it.
Ramirez took her up and out through the south door, when the north door would be closer. She started to ask, but he shook his head, and they walked silently across the Park Blocks, picking up 12th Street, and then headed north to the EWN building. “Backdoor,” he said briefly. He sighed. “I’m angry, I guess, that you have to. That you’re 21 years old and you’re planning what to do if someone tries to ransack your newsroom.”
She looked at him for a moment. “That’s sweet,” she said at last, and she wasn’t trying to be sarcastic. “But Chief? What were you doing when you were 21?”
He snorted. “Trying to stay alive in Iraq,” he said. “Point taken.”
He picked up the pace then after a glance at her shoes. She grinned. Married man, she thought. A nice man to think of what a woman’s footwear was like before making her walk at his speed rather than hers. She wondered what his wife was like? She’d seen her — at another of Ryan’s events. What had Robert called it? A very good example of performance art? He’d turned student government’s art show that doxed a bunch of students into a BDSM club. But she hadn’t had a chance to actually meet her. She thought she might like to.
She buzzed the door, someone opened it, and they went inside. “You need to know that Will got hit with a protest sign then fell and hit his head on the concrete,” Ramirez said as they started up the steps. “He had to go to the Health Clinic. I think he probably needs to go up to OHSU, and I saw Ryan looking at him like he thinks the same thing.”
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She just nodded. What was there to be said, beyond that? She’d get the newscast out, and then she’d take a look at Will. She knew him well enough he wouldn’t go until afterwards anyway. He might not do anger, but he could do stubborn with the best of them.
She was moving fast when she hit the newsroom and grabbed her computer back from Bianca. Bianca disappeared into the Green Room to change for the newscast. And Blair started typing. She already knew what she wanted to say from the speech. She filed her story, and their latest copyeditor grabbed it. Jennifer... probably Jennifer? They came and went so fast.
As Will said, anyone who was competent enough to edit beginner copy fled from the thought of it.
After nodding her thanks to Jennifer, Blair started pulling up stories from the queue. She looked at the plan for the broadcast, opened up the lead story and started reading. Made a few tweaks. Bianca — or someone — was pretty good, she thought with some surprise. “You edit the lead story?” she asked Jennifer.
“We all did,” she replied. “Kari was here then too.”
Blair glanced around looking for Joe. He’d moved back to the photo computer, and Kari was perched back there watching him finish Folio. They were rarely very far apart. “Joe!” she called. “You have all the stories edited that you need?”
He gave her a thumbs up and continued designing pages. Good enough. He was no slouch of a copyeditor himself. Who knew?
He’d been hiding some secrets from the rest of them. Not just the newsroom’s required stoner after all. She was a little embarrassed that she’d ever labeled him that.
“Good job,” she told Jennifer who looked pleased. Maybe she’d stay around.
“Live in five,” Ben said. He came around from his office and surveyed the newsrooms. He nodded toward Blair at her desk, made sure his anchors were in place, and disappeared back into the television studio control rooms.
Blair stretched and looked around for Will. He was sitting slumped in Ryan’s office, and Ryan was behind his desk watching him. She grimaced. She started to go back there, then turned back to watch the newscast. She grinned at the footage J.J. had gotten of the march down Broadway. They had used very little footage of actual protesters, which was an interesting editorial choice. Whose story do we tell, indeed. She wondered who had made that call. Ben, probably. Will didn’t look like he was in any shape to do it. There was a brief mention of the attack on their building, but no visuals. Well, she guessed they probably didn’t have any of the actual attack. And the newscast closed with a short clip of Dr. Crenshaw and Steve Planck doing the two-step to When the Saints on the steps of Lincoln Hall.
“Good job, people,” Ben called out, the signal that they weren’t on the air anymore. Now she headed back to deal with Will.
She knocked on Ryan’s doorframe, and leaned on it, looking at Will. “You’ve seen better days,” she said at last. He grinned at her, but it was a bit lopsided, and she frowned. She looked at Ryan.
“Can you give us a ride up to see Dr. Clarke?” she asked.
“I can,” Ryan said. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t need to go see Dr. Clarke!” Will protested, although he got to his feet and followed Ryan. Ryan paused and said something to Cage who nodded. Cage and Miguel were editing video from the looks of things. They usually did live stream of key events after the newscast. She figured that’s what they were working on. She paused though.
“Can you do a poster of Dr. Crenshaw and Steve Planck doing the two-step in front of Lincoln?” she asked. “That might be a companion poster for the Avengers.”
Cage grinned briefly. “Might have to get my brother involved. I suspect he might know how that poster got made.”
The Avengers photo had happened last year, when Cage, Emily, Ryan and Corey had to leave Rev. Washington’s memorial service early because of the shootings downtown of protesters. It was a fine poster. She had one. Everyone probably did. At last year’s TIP, someone had made postcards of it and Cage had autographed them for thousands of eighth graders. Probably quite a few college girls as well, she thought with amusement. It was a fine photo. And Cage was hot in it. Ryan was no slouch himself. Toss in Emily and Corey?
She grinned as she hurried to catch up with Ryan and Will.
“Wait here,” Ryan said, and he went after his car.
Will was listing a bit. She swallowed hard. She didn’t like the look of things here.
“I don’t want to go see the doctor,” he complained. “Why isn’t anyone listening to me?”
“Because no one wants to go to the doctor,” Blair said, as Ryan pulled up, and leaned over to open the front door. “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.”
“Bitch,” Will said. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”
She looked at him blankly and swallowed hard. And she turned and walked down the alley and headed home, because that had been said with real venom. And she wasn’t going to deal with it. Not tonight. What was that she’d been thinking about? Will didn’t get angry? Because that had sounded plenty angry to her.