Paper Daughter (5 page)

"Blew that, didn't I?" the girl said, laughing as she dropped into a chair. Her gaze roved the newsroom the way mine had. She didn't act embarrassed, and only a slight pink color seeping up her neck gave away that she was. If it had been me being hauled back from a mistake first thing, I'd have been mortified.

She turned to me with a quick appraising glance. "So, Margaret, I thought you'd be a boy," she said. "For gender balance. But I suppose you're brainy?"

"No! Or—" How was I supposed to answer? Tell her my IQ, which I didn't know? I settled for saying, "Actually, I go by Maggie."

But she was already done with me and on her feet, not quite launching herself into the newsroom again, but close to it. The receptionist, back on the phone, pressed her lips together and shot me a disapproving glance, as though I were responsible for Jillian.

I folded my arms, realized how defensive that looked, and unfolded them.

Probably Jillian had not dithered one minute over what to wear, hadn't worried at all whether she needed to appear older or younger or be anyone different from who she was.

***

A long ten minutes later a tall woman with careful makeup and clicking heels crossed to us from a wide stairway on the other side of the lobby. Catching a nod from the receptionist, she said, "Girls? Want to come down to Personnel? I've got some paperwork for you."

She went over the forms and then deposited Jillian and me in a small conference room. "Take your time filling them out. When you're done, I'll let the newsroom know you're ready to go to work."

"So," Jillian said as soon as we were alone, "I wondered who the other intern would be. Like I said, I figured it would be a guy, for balance. But"—she gave me a sideways glance—"maybe they needed an ethnic pick more?"

I shot her a disbelieving look, stunned she'd say that, even if she did think it, and I had no idea how to tell her all the ways she'd been rude.

"Right. American," I finally answered, and picked up the top page.

I printed my name and other easy stuff in the boxes of an income tax withholding form and put down zero for the number of dependents I wished to claim.

Jillian said, "You ought to at least count yourself." Then she watched while I declined health insurance, which Mom had said I didn't need.

"Do you mind?" I said, leaning away.

"Mind what?" she asked, leaning with me. Then, "Oh! Am I being nosy? Sorry, but that does go with being at a newspaper, doesn't it? I mean, there are so few careers where you can get paid for poking into other people's business, and some of them you can get killed doing, like if you're a CIA agent."

I had no idea if she was serious, though I thought probably not. If she was as ditsy as she sounded, the
Herald
would never have hired her.

I moved on to a form for emergency contact information.

"Although," she went on, "it's not like people can get away with many real secrets anymore. Like, one time,
one time,
I cut school, and who do you think showed up on YouTube?
Moi.
And you know that thing about five degrees of separation?"

"Six," I said. "It's six degrees."

"Six would be bad enough. But the point is, it was YouTube, then my mom's boss's daughter's computer. Him. Mom. Me, grounded. So—"

She broke off to read what I'd just put down. "Only your mom for a contact?" she asked. "Divorced, or you just have no dad, period?"

I said I needed more working room and moved to another chair.

"Oh!" she said. "Sure. All you had to say was you didn't want to talk."

***

I'd expected that Fran Paglioni, the Metro editor in charge of the high school intern program, would get us started in our jobs, but Mr. Braden, the
Herald
's editor in chief, came for us. As we went back upstairs, he said, "Fran's away for a few days, so I volunteered to introduce you around."

Names came at us fast—way too many to remember, although I recognized a few from bylines over stories.

"Shifts vary," Mr. Braden said. "Wire editor, layout, and electronic edition folks come in later, as does anyone covering nighttime events. This is Metro, here in the middle. Fran's desk, copyeditors, reporters."

Interrupting a tall, thirtyish man reading a
Wall Street Journal,
he said, "Harrison! Meet our summer interns, Jillian Smythe and Maggie Chen. Harrison covers local government and business."

"I do my best," Harrison said. "Where will you two be working?"

We looked at Mr. Braden.

"You'll float wherever needed. Fran's agreed to lend one of you to Photo for a while, and Sports is backlogged, so—"

"Photography!" Jillian interrupted. "I'd love that. Maggie, you don't care, do you?"

"Yes," I blurted out. "I'd much rather—" I broke off, stopped by the way Mr. Braden was frowning, not angrily but more as if he could not believe he was going to have to deal with a couple of arguing teenagers.

Harrison's expression held a hint of amused sympathy.

"Sports will be fine," I said, which wasn't true.

"Great," Mr. Braden said. "I'll introduce you to Jake Brown. He's the editor you'll be working for this week. And then, Jillian, we'll go find the camera crew."

It was pretty clear from the look on Jake Brown's face that I came as a surprise, though he didn't say whether it was because he'd been given extra help or because the help was me.

Whichever, there was an uncomfortable silence after Mr. Braden and Jillian left the back-corner huddle of desks that was the sports department. Jake and the other two guys there—reporters, I guessed—eyed me as though I were some sort of mystery.

"I'm Tonk," one of them said. "Welcome." Twenty-five, maybe, he had a dimpled smile that must have been really cute when he was a few years younger. He looked like he might have wrestled or played football.

"And Cody," said the other, who was about the same age and told me he wrote for online. Cody, I was guessing, had rarely seen the outdoors and never the inside of a gym.

"And that's Matilda," Cody added, pointing to a chip-nosed mannequin atop a file cabinet. Matilda wore sunglasses, a University of Washington Huskies cap, and a Washington State Cougars T-shirt. An index card pinned to her shirt asked "What's the score? Who's got the score? Does anyone know the score?"

"So," said Jake, "I suppose I need to find you work. What can you do?"

"Well..." There was something backward about the way this was starting out. "I wrote a regular column for my school newspaper, edited, did page design." And now I was sounding like I expected to take over the
Herald.
"I put together club notices."

"Rewrites!" Jake exclaimed. "Great! Let's get you going. You can settle at that empty desk over there—just clear the mess. Tonk will show you how the computer system works, and by then I'll have a stack of press releases for you to boil down to something short and readable."

***

Half an hour later I whipped out the first one: "Parents Behind Soccer will hold their first annual bake sale July 11 from nine to three-thirty on the Renton athletic field to raise funds to send their tournament-winning team to regional competition. 'The thousand-dollar goal will allow everyone to go, and not just the starters.'"

I ran it through spell check and moved it to Jake's folder, wondering why I'd been so apprehensive about beginning my job at the
Herald.

The rewrite popped back on my screen within seconds, with the note "Ask Tonk for his style guide."

Embarrassed, I flipped through the guide until I saw I should have written "9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.," using numerals rather than words.

The next time my rewrite came back, I changed "July 11" to "Saturday," since the bake sale would be on the Saturday immediately coming.

And the third time, there was a long note with it. "Which Renton athletic field? What tournament? Attribution for that quote? And first annual is an oxymoron."

I was rereading the note, my face pulsing hot, when Jake said, "Maggie, stop!"

"Forget the bake sale," he said. "Give those releases to Tonk."

"I can do them," I said. "I should have known all that stuff. We have the same style guide at school, only I guess we mostly ignore it."

"Here we don't," he said.

And then, more lightly, he suggested, "Why don't you take a breather? Maybe make a fresh pot of coffee. We take turns."

"Sure," I said, not telling him that since I didn't drink coffee, I'd never actually learned to make it. I thought that making coffee couldn't be that hard. Except that one moment I was prying up the coffeepot's stuck lid, and the next moment old grounds and murky sludge were splattering everywhere. I was doing my best to clean up when Jillian went by carrying a camera bag. Beside her, a man swung along on crutches.

Tonk told me, "That's Lynch, our photo chief, after a parasailing mishap."

Jillian waved at me.

"Last year it was hang-gliding. The year before, skydiving. Each time, a broken bone. You'd think he'd get a clue he's not a bird."

Tonk was trying to make me laugh, but it didn't work. I was washing a mannequin's sunglasses, Mom's cream-colored shirt now had splotches of brown, and my boss-of-the-week was aiming compressed air at coffee grounds in his keyboard. I wanted to disappear through the floor.

***

Finally, after lunch, Jake found another job for me: inputting game schedules for a summer recreation section. "It would have been nice to put it out earlier," he said, "but some of the less formal leagues don't pin things down till they play their first games. Anyway, we've got enough time. You don't need to hurry. Take through Friday if you want."

"I don't work Fridays," I told him. "The intern jobs are for four days a week."

"Then through Thursday. It's just keying in data. Here's the section from last winter to show you how things should look."

Which all sounded good, except the work wasn't just inputting. It was deciphering bad handwriting on information sheets sent in by coaches and players who didn't, any two of them, have the same ideas about what to include.

It was trying to figure out which teams belonged to what leagues. The material didn't always say. Sometimes it didn't even say what the sport was.

I considered asking Tonk what some made-up abbreviations meant, but each time I looked over, he appeared so intent on his own work that I didn't.

And after the rewrite fiasco and the coffeepot mess, I couldn't bring myself to admit to Jake that I wasn't up to this job, either.

Instead of getting help, I spent the afternoon starting schedule after schedule, quitting each time I got stuck, and looking for an easier one to do. My stomach hurt, the newsroom felt as if it were about a hundred degrees, and when five o'clock came, I was so, so ready to leave.

***

Mom, who taught on Monday nights, had left me money for pizza. I ordered it and then switched on my computer to read what Bett and Aimee had to say.

Their joint message began with a rambling account of some very cool guys they'd met, who were in a vacation rental on the beach where my friends' families had summer cabins.

I hit the Reply button and wrote, "If there's an extra (generally perfect) boy, you might UPS him to me." I pictured them laughing, since my pickiness in boyfriend requirements was a running joke.

And then I went on to answer their questions.

"How's the
Herald
?"

I typed "Awful," deleted that, and wrote "Big." Which wasn't exactly what I meant, but it was as close as I wanted to get to saying I felt in over my head.

"Are there other interns?"

"One."

"Do you like them?"

"No."

***

I ate my pizza while trying to read a mystery I couldn't focus on. My thoughts kept skittering back to the disaster of the day. And when they weren't there, they went to the real mystery in my own life.

If I was serious about trying to discover Dad's and my unknown family, I needed to call that Mr. Ames back. With Mom gone, this would be a good time to do it. But then I glanced at my watch—7:30 p.m., after ten on the East Coast. Too late to call someone I'd never met to ask questions I hadn't yet thought out.

I just hoped that when I did call, he would have some solid information to give me. And maybe he'd tell me some personal stories about Dad as well. There was so much about my father's life that I had never even wondered about.

I tossed Pepper a slice of pepperoni.

Perhaps Mr. Ames and my dad had hung around together, had fun, maybe done silly stuff. Or perhaps, working so hard, Dad didn't have time.

I suddenly remembered a picture of Dad looking ridiculous in a knobby, wire-laced helmet. He'd put it on to get a better grasp of the story he was writing about an electronic game company's new products, and someone had snapped the photo and given it to him. Mom and I had threatened to have it framed.

I asked him if the helmet had been fun to try out, and he answered that it had been both fun and uncomfortable, which he'd expected. But he'd been surprised by the overwhelming, disorienting sensation it gave of stepping into a different world.

"Research above and beyond, that I wouldn't want to repeat," he said. "And I enjoyed every minute of it!"

Then he added that if he hadn't tried out the helmet, he'd have written his story without really understanding what he was writing about.

I wondered if we still had that photo. Had it been in Dad's office? We'd sorted through so much.

I'd
sorted through so much. Letters, pictures, newspaper clippings, notebooks, drafts of articles...

There'd been no point in keeping the drafts, and I'd thrown most of them away, though it had seemed wrong somehow. He'd put such effort into his work. Such painstaking care, as though no comma was too small to worry over and no question too unimportant to ask. No oxymoron too insignificant to weed out.

I arrived at the
Herald
a little early the next morning, found the file room, and got a copy of the recreation guide from the previous summer. And before starting on the inputting again, I went online and printed out the Wikipedia entries for every kind of team game played around Seattle in July and August.