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“Oh gosh, don’t apologize! Asking questions is, like, sixty percent of being a reporter. You’re already doing great.”
She leads me into an office on one side of the room and tucks her long black dress underneath her as she sits down. The dress is simple, and she’s wearing large tortoiseshell glasses, no makeup. And yet there’s something about her that feels so much older than a junior or senior. More sophisticated, like she’s had the time to figure out the true essence of Annabel Costa. There’s a warmth to her that no one has shown me in a while—not anyone at Island, not Lucie, not physics stan Miles. It puts me at ease right away.
“You know the basics from yesterday, yeah?” Annabel says. “We used to be daily, but now we’re Mondays and Wednesdays because of budget cuts. We usually bring on a half dozen new reporters every fall quarter, depending on what our staff looks like for each section.” She leans back in her chair to see if the window behind her will open any further and sighs when it won’t. “These interviews are always more fun when they’re a little casual. Informal. I’m not going to sit here and ask you to tell me where you see yourself in five years. I have your résumé and the links to stories you did for”—she checks it—“the Navigator. Really impressive. You wrote… almost fifty articles in four years? For a monthly paper?” She lets out a low whistle.
“I didn’t have many friends,” I say, and her laugh is worth the drag of my own self-esteem.
“What initially drew you to journalism?” She wrinkles her nose, shoves her glasses higher. “Sorry, I guess that’s one of those typical interview questions, but I swear, I really am curious!”
I smile back at her. Annabel and I could be coworkers—we could be friends, even.
“As we’ve already established, I’m extremely obnoxious. It’s a natural fit.” She laughs again, and I continue. “When I was little, my mom and I would geek out over celebrity profiles, the kind that would make you see someone in a completely different light.”
Some of my favorites: a decade-old interview of Chris Evans in GQ that makes the reader question whether the writer had an intimate relationship with him. An oral history of Legally Blonde. And of course “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese, arguably the most impactful piece of pop-culture journalism. Sinatra refused to speak with him, but Talese followed him around for three months regardless, simply observing, talking to anyone close to Sinatra who’d allow it.
The result was a piece of narrative writing that rocked the journalism world—a vivid, personal story that read like fiction but wasn’t.
“I love stories that take someone untouchable and make them real,” I continue. “There’s so much hidden beneath the surface most of us don’t get to see on a regular basis.”
None of this is a lie, but it’s hiding an uncomfortable truth: I’ve never known how to talk to people in the way that comes easily to others. My whole life, I’ve been closer to my mom than to anyone else. In elementary school, I used that to avoid making other friends: I have my mom; I don’t need to hang out with other ten-year-olds! Given she had me so young, my mom didn’t fit in with the other parents, either.
Once I hit middle school, I realized that having my mom as my best friend didn’t exactly make me cool, though it didn’t feel that way when we stayed up late brainstorming borderline-inappropriate greeting cards she could absolutely never sell at her shop, or when we had themed movie marathons—Judy Greer Is Doing the Most Night, Modern Austen Weekend. I inherited both her taste in pop culture and her dry humor. By the time I thought I might want other people in my life, everyone had their solidly established friend groups, and it felt like I’d been left behind. Like I’d missed out on making those connections when I was younger, when everyone was supposed to.
And then I found journalism. In seventh grade, I was eating lunch alone in the library when a guy I didn’t know approached my table. An eighth grader. “Hi!” he chirped. “Could I ask you a few questions?”
“I… don’t think we know each other?” I said.
He laughed, the confident laugh of an upperclassman who didn’t eat lunch in the library. “I know. It’s for the school paper.”
The guy’s article was a fluff piece about the remodeled library that included some talking heads, with me saying “I love eating lunch in here!” along with a photo mid-blink. When it was time to sign up for classes for the next semester, I picked newspaper, and what began as something of a social experiment grew into a deeper love for storytelling.
Seeming satisfied with my answer, Annabel cycles through a few basic interview questions before getting more specific. “We have openings on every section—news, features, arts, sports,” she says. “Would you have a preference?”
“I did a handful of news and features—well, as much ‘news’ as you can get in high school, which was usually a new pizza topping on the cafeteria menu,” I say. “Honestly, I’d report on the school sewer system if you wanted me on staff.”
“It’s a very in-demand beat.” On her computer, she gestures to something I can’t see. “What I’m really curious about is this article you did a couple years ago on the tennis team.”
“Are you sure? Because I think ‘Down the Drain: Secrets of the Sewer System’ could be very hard-hitting journalism. I’m ready to run with it.”
Annabel’s smile falters. Whatever amount of charm I have, it’s wearing off. “There’s a note here that says comments have been disabled,” she continues, “which doesn’t seem to be the case with other articles.”
I force myself to take a few deep breaths. It’s not that I’m ashamed of the story itself—it’s everything that happened afterward that I can’t allow my mind to linger on. And I won’t. Not here. “I found out that a bunch of tennis players had cheated on a test,” I say, working to keep my voice level, choosing my words carefully. “There was this one trig midterm that was impossible—almost no one did better than a B-minus. But all the tennis players in my class managed to get As, and when I started poking around, I realized that was the case in every one of that teacher’s classes.”
Mercer Island: a wealthy Seattle suburb where the public schools feel like private schools. Because of our moody weather, you pretty much had to belong to a club to play tennis, and those clubs were expensive. The tennis players owned Island High, with their shiny racquets and polo shirts and district championship banners. When they won state for the first time in the spring of my freshman year, the school canceled classes for half the day and threw them a special assembly.
Ms. Murphy had a terrible poker face, and when I confronted her, she immediately confessed. The most ridiculous thing was that I actually felt proud when I broke the story. I imagined myself winning student-journalism awards, maybe even scholarships—for about five minutes. The evidence was so damning that Island was disqualified and a dozen players wound up in summer school. Blaine, Lucie’s boyfriend at the time, was one of them, and she blamed me for their subsequent breakup. Stopped talking to me, except when necessary. Made sure her wealthy, powerful friends did the same.
Just like that, I turned the entire school against me.
“Oh, I heard about this,” Annabel says. “I went to Bellevue, but everyone was talking about it.”
It has to be some kind of accomplishment that my notoriety spread to schools I didn’t even go to.
“The aftermath was a little rough, as you can imagine.” A shaky breath, and then I can keep going. If I make it to the end of the week with all the buttons on these jeans intact, it will be proof there is a god. “But I think it helped me become a better journalist.”
“How so?”
“For one, I’m not afraid to make enemies.”
