Forgiven (Ruined) (2 page)

             
Instead, he held me close for a minute and thanked me for telling him.  I think that's when I started to heal.

             
And Emmy, the third of my friends to start drawing me from my self-imposed exile from life, went with me when I went to interview David Reynolds after Kellan and I went to see his best friend.  Jake Cochran is engaged to be married to a beautiful, exotic girl named Bria and he's a paraplegic athlete.  Neither he nor his father were angry with Kellan.  Jake had made his own choice to get in that car, to not take the keys from Kellan.  When that encounter initially helped Kellan and then dumped him back into his own guilt as he contemplated what Aimee's husband, Tallie and Madison's father must think, I went and interviewed Mr. Reynolds and found he was newly remarried to a woman he'd met at a Mothers Against Drunk Driving meeting, and had an 11 week old son.  He didn't blame Kellan, he'd forgiven him, and he was willing to tell Kellan to his face if it would help.

             
Not only did the interview help Kellan, it helped me.  Because I was able to interview my mother, Emmy manning the camera again and my mother and I talking about the fact that she'd forgiven me for killing my father.  I still struggle with understanding that it was all in self defense – my father was trying to kill me at the time.  He was strung out on bath salts and choking me when I grabbed a butcher knife.  I only meant to cut him, hard enough that he'd let go and I could run, but he stumbled and fell into the knife and died before emergency services could ever reach us.  My mother arrived before the ambulance, too.

             
Not that we don't both still have long dark nights.  Not that we don't still have those moments of thinking we're ruined.  But things are definitely improving.

             
And Reed Miller had been central to the sea change.  Though I started the project without telling him, after he saw the initial videos he allowed me use of the editing studio, the cameras, looked at the footage I'd shot and okayed my turning the videos into a documentary series, which had aired to acclaim.  Now the series was running every six weeks with new stories, and people were contacting us, wanting to meet with people they'd hurt, wanting to tell their stories, seeking forgiveness or at least understanding, and the station was up for National Student Production Awards for best documentary series.

             
The group of Deaton University students sitting in the production room has apparently run out of things to talk about.  Everybody has their phones out and they're all searching online or texting or playing a game.  They glance up uninterestedly as I enter, then double take when Reed walks in behind me.

             
"Hey, Reed!"  Collective greeting.

             
Of course they're not going to welcome me like that.  Not yet.  Most of these people have worked together for a semester at least, or longer.  I've been here what, two months?  If it hadn't been for Henry Tate Miller dragging Reed away from here, I might have worked into the job naturally.

             
Stop panicking!  Things have been going so much better lately, I tell myself, and I'm totally up for this.  I've been studying how television stations work, a crash course in broadcasting, one of my professors pitching in because she believed Reed was right to name me his successor and I was right in wanting a little more foundation under my feet before starting!

             
But there's still that little residual voice that says if things seem to be going much better, something is poised to strike me down.  Before it was always me, my own worst enemy.

             
We'll have to see who it is now. 

             
If it's anyone.  Maybe I'm just paranoid.

             
"Are you back?" Dexter asks Reed incredulously as Reed more or less pushes me to the front of the room.  If he thinks he's going to just shove me up there and start the meeting and leave me no other recourse but to lead it – he's probably right.  What else would I do?  I've never run from a fight.  Life, yes.  Fights?  Not so much.

             
"I'm not back," Reed says, holding up both hands to quell the noise.  Amazing that six people can make as much noise as they are.

             
"Told you," one of the Tylers says.  This one is female.  There are two Tylers, a male and a female.  Just to make things interesting. 

             
"I wanted to be here to help pass the baton to Willow."  He waves me closer and we stand together, leaning against the table in the front of the production room, which holds absolutely everything that runs the station plus the video library of all media from discs to tapes.  "I asked Willow to take over as operations manager for me because she was working with me so closely before I left for Boston."

             
I wince.  Yep, there's the catcalls.  "Thank you, Dexter."  Seriously, if I stand up here with Reed much longer I'm going to feel like their mother.  At 19, I'm younger than some of them.  But I've always been more focused than other people my age.  Comes with the territory when you take yourself out of the action and start living such a constrained life.

             
Which is exactly what I'm trying to get past, I remind myself.  Once Reed's father's blackmail options – telling my mother's husband what I'd done in Seattle – blew up in his face because I told Bruce myself, I was supposed to start living.

             
I shake my shoulders, try to relax. None of us at the station are getting paid.  We all take it seriously.  But a little kidding around isn't going to hurt anyone. 

             
Reed goes on, ignoring Dexter, talking about the forgiveness series, which gets everyone involved.  Once the series took off, Ashley and Zack, "Your anchors from A to Z" as we've resisted letting them bill themselves, have done some narration and the students rotating in and out of the engineering slots have helped man the cameras and film the interviews, which are usually someone who's done something they're looking to make right, and the person they feel they wronged.  The series has garnered good publicity for the station.  The college supports it and the crew has gotten involved, pretty much everyone, including Dexter who wears hats of digital media manager, sports guy and sometimes camera man.  Tabby's our news director but the news is from the AP wire service and local news is covered pretty lightly – a lot of DCTV's local news is college-based.

             
It's a little crew and pretty tight.  Which doesn't mean I'm not nervous that I'm going to be talking in front of them as soon as Reed stops.

             
Which is what he does, right then.

             
"So, now that I'm way out of your league," he tells everybody, and gets booed.  "I'm depending on you all to make life difficult for Willow like you did for me."

             
Which they all cheer.  So all I can do is thank him as sarcastically as possible before I shove myself off the table and pace a little.  I'm talking on autopilot, about wanting to hear what everyone wants to do with the station and being open to new ideas, how the forgiveness series can be a launch point, not a finished product.  But what I'm doing is putting together names and faces.  Reed's only been gone a couple weeks.  Before he left I had hardly any time working with him and when I did, it was him, not the team.  So I'm taking mental notes, of Dexter, who I already knew, and Ashley and Zack, Boy Tyler who does creative services and Girl Tyler, our interning engineer, and Tabitha, who we call the news director, but in a place where we do such a little bit of news, she's really a gofer. 

             
It's Tabitha – Tabby – who's watching me with a look on her face that's anything but welcoming.  I can't help glancing at Reed to see if he notices, but he's finished with the intro, which failed to make an impression on Tabby.

             
The meeting doesn't last long.  We're there to set up the rest of the fall semester, and assign tasks.  I'll be working with Tabby to create a schedule that the college ultimately will approve, and now I'm not looking forward to doing that.  Dexter is lining up camera volunteers to cover the University's sports events.  Sports is far more popular than the news and we don’t even do weather anymore.  There'll be more programming, though, as we expand the number of documentary type series we're doing.  Tyler keeps pushing for a cooking show, but there's not really a culinary department at the school and I don't know who she thinks would be the on-air personality or why she thinks there's a need for such programming when the professionals are out there doing it on the Cooking Channel.  Then again, the professionals are out there doing all of it, and people still watch us.  We have our audience share, as proved by the award we're up for with the forgiveness series.

             
Which I'm not going to talk about right now.  One person glowering is enough.  I'm afraid to say too much.  Beating my own drum and patting myself on the back was never something I was good at.  By age 15, keeping to myself and flying under the radar was.  I'm still leery of too much attention.

             
So I wrap up the meeting.  Reed's just been sitting and watching, making notes, reminding me of a few things, but none of those things have been important enough to make me feel I'd have blown the meeting without him there.  Some of them I could have followed up with later.  Others I would have remembered at some point.  My confidence is returning.  Next time I might only have to hang out in the hallway for 10 minutes before the meeting, I think with a certain amount of snark, and open the meeting to questions.

             
There are a couple.  We always come back to funding and everyone always presents the altruistic motive of paying out "stringers," the volunteer students, many who aren't necessarily journalism majors but have an interest in something else and the ability to cover it for us.  I can't help thinking that the altruism would also including getting themselves paid. 

             
I can't blame them for that.  It's hard when you decide on a creative career to realize that while the world seems to value the things creatives come up with – movies, video games and videos, books and stories and music – it always seems like since it's an enjoyable task to create such things, enjoyment should be payment enough.  That's why there are so many actors working as waiters and the like.  Working in television, especially for those students who cover their real passions in our news reports, is kind of the same thing. 

             
Too bad.  There's still no money in the budget.  There's just enough from the college to keep the lights on.  I made the decision when my mom married Bruce that I'd live with them during college, which means having a nice allowance for clothes, and college is paid for, and I'm living in a big, beautiful house with a live-in maid, but that I would make my own money.  If I want to go out, buy a car, see a movie, whatever, I'm paying for that.  Which means I'm going to have to get a job too.  Because there's no room in the budget for me to get paid.

             
Gonna be a busy semester.

             
"Reed, am I correct in thinking the University hasn't changed the budget for DCTV?"

             
"They haven't lowered it, at least," he says lazily, coming to his feet and pacing.  He's wearing loose cargo shorts like he might go get on a boat, and deck shoes, and a t-shirt with blue and white stripes.  The dark blue of the shirt make his eyes all the bluer.  I'd forgotten how hot he is.

             
Scattered laughter from what he said.  People are starting to stand away from the multipurpose tables that, jammed into the production room, form our conference room, and shuffle about collecting tablets, phones, laptops, pens. 

             
"You all realize that the station manager isn't getting paid either, right?" Reed asks.  General agreement.  "I think your best bet," he says, distancing himself more than ever with that
your
rather than
our
, "Is to wait for the Awards and see what happens.  If any of the station's entries win, you've got a much better bargaining chip for getting the budget raised.  Still wouldn't be more than a stipend."

             
"Would anyone like to put together a proposal to take to the college?" I ask.  That's the kind of hands-on thing I'd rather do myself, but if I'm going to climb out of my shell, not to mention not go insane with too much on my plate, this seems like a place to start.  By the end of the meeting, Zach and male Tyler have agreed to work up a basic proposal that can either go with the award or stand alone if we don't win anything.  Zach's the perfect anchor – always looks pressed and dressed and ready for camera, with dark hair cut fashionably if long, deep brown eyes, a chin dimple and chiseled cheekbones and the kind of unobtrusively buff body that's just enough to get an appreciative glance from the girls but not movie hunk showy.  Tyler on the other hand looks like a creative services director – wildly curly hair, eyes magnified behind trendy horn-rimmed glasses, always a little stubble (how do guys manage that, anyway?  That fine line between shaven and bearded?) and he usually looks like he tumbled out of bed and came in wearing the clothes he'd had on while sleeping.  Fashionable, nice clothes, today's chinos and an Oxford cloth button down, but both looking like they've never been introduced to an iron.