Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“It can’t feel transactional,” Jamie said once. “A source won’t just hand you a story. You can’t just call them when you need something. Like your Danner story”—Jamie was my sounding board on this, as on all things—“they’re nervous. They’re not ready to talk. But if you keep in touch, maybe someday they’ll get there.”

Trust was a thing we talked about a lot. It was a buzzword, part of the KCN brand, crucial to our relationship with our audience. At our biannual corporate town halls, the bosses talked about the importance of our mission. We were journalists. We had a role to play. In order to have a healthy democracy, one that shared objective truths, people like us were essential.

And this was what I feared I’d always be bad at: believing in that mission. It’s not that others were Pollyannas and I was a cynic. They were all cynics, but only to a point. Sure, the world could be an unjust and cruel place, but if you told the story, if you presented the facts, if you delivered the truth—that would help correct the balance. A fair outcome wasn’t guaranteed, but it was possible. There was still a fundamental optimism at work.

And how could I not agree with that? I was the case in point: a girl from a poor family, the first to go to college, now living in New York City and working as an associate producer at KCN, steadily climbing the ladder. No wonder the Bradleys loved me.

There were times I’d come close to believing it. If I played by the rules, if I did the right thing, if I put my trust in the mechanism of meritocracy and if I worked hard enough, I could do anything. This was America, after all.

But any trajectory can be interrupted. And my problem was Stella.

In June of that year, after dozens of shoddy pitches that gradually got stronger, my first story aired. The business beat had become my domain at Frontline, because it played to my strengths: I could spend hours combing through documents and financial statements, invigorated rather than bored by the dry facts at hand. When the story aired, I felt relieved: I could really do this, after all.

The next morning, Stella was in the kitchen, already showered and dressed and drinking a mug of coffee. The night before, when our group went to the bar and toasted me—Rebecca had also given me a special shout-out, after the broadcast—I’d been giddy with success, and Stella had been in a bad mood, sulking over her vodka soda. Now she held a yellow highlighter, which she ran over an article in the Wall Street Journal . Scattered across the counter were copies of the New York Times, the New York Post, and the FT.

“You’re up early,” I said. Pouring myself coffee, I thought, Stella knows how to use the coffee machine? “What are you doing? Is this for work?”

Stella nodded, staring at the paper. It seemed like an affect picked up from an old movie, this ink-and-paper highlighting in an age when everyone read the news online.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Is this an assignment?”

She looked up, annoyed. “Do you not think I’m capable of taking initiative?”

I held up my hands. “Sorry. I was just curious.”

“I’m trying to get better at this.” She sighed, capping the highlighter. “It’s like,” she said, “everyone just knows everything. In a meeting the other day, someone said—what was it—a tax holiday. And everyone in the room was like, ‘oh yes, of course, a tax holiday.’ What the fuck does that mean? Where do you even learn this stuff?”

She seemed genuinely irritated, which irritated me in turn. What I wanted to say was you learn this stuff by paying attention, Stella. You pay attention because you have to pay attention. The world isn’t going to unfurl itself for you. You have to pry it open. I wanted to say a tax holiday is a simple concept. The meaning is encoded in the phrase itself, and your ignorance is your own fault.

Instead, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll pick it up over time.”

Stella’s initiative wouldn’t last. I was certain of that. It was a reaction to that brief moment when everyone was looking at me, not her. Her earnest newspaper-reading, the newly alert way she answered the phone, the speediness with which she ran scripts to the control room: it was a performance for my benefit, wasn’t it? Sometimes our relationship felt like one long game in which we were constantly keeping score. This was just another way for Stella to rack up a few points. She could be the eager-to-please intern that I had once been, too.

But I was wrong. Stella was putting on a performance, but it wasn’t for me.

The story of our friendship was always the story of opposites. Yin and yang in every regard. The pretty one and the plain one; the rich girl and the poor girl; the social butterfly and the bookish nerd. For every possible measurement, we stood at far ends of the spectrum. And there was one particular metric that clocked a vast gulf between us, that, for years, had allowed us to exist in harmony.

Ambition.

Every decision I made was designed to distance me from my origins. Stella, on the other hand, always knew that she belonged. When you already have everything you could ever want, what good is ambition? Stella never had to think about how to dress, what to say, where to put her hands, whether to laugh or smile, whether to act smart or play dumb. It came naturally, like breathing. It was like that famous line. A fish, asked how the water is, responds, “This is water?” That was life, to Stella. A medium one could move through without even considering what the medium was, or how that medium might feel to other people.

Until, that is, she got to KCN.

This is life? I could see the dismay on Stella’s face, during her early months of work. This is life? This uncontainable and roiling thing, chock-full of complicated ideas and obscure terms? Conflict, avarice, war, incompetence: when you paid enough attention, life had a way of showing its ugly chaos. For the first time, Stella didn’t understand what she was supposed to do.

And now what did Stella want? She wanted the thing she had once possessed, which had been wrenched away from her. That sweet, velvety sense of belonging.

The rich girl and the poor girl, the pretty girl and the plain girl. If we were characters in a story, Stella was the one you always wanted to be. The girl who is quick to laugh, good at making friends, charming to strangers, comfortable in her own skin; the girl whose beauty is equated with virtue. Her heart open and capacious, not curdled by desperate ambition.

Real trust, Jamie said, can’t be transactional. And what is ambition if not a constant transaction? Hard work—days, weeks, months—in exchange for more money, more power, more influence. I wanted to succeed, and that was my problem: people could see that desire. They could smell it. How can you trust someone who reeks of ambition?

Stella’s newly polished performance at KCN worked. The bosses noticed. It all happened within the span of a few weeks. She was promoted to assistant. She was invited to more meetings. People trusted her. Why? They knew she was rich, that she didn’t need this job. So she was doing it out of pure love for the work. Wasn’t that admirable?

I’d had more than a year’s head start on Stella. But by that summer, she was closing the gap between us, and her shadow was looming over me again.

Stella was a distractible driver, checking her phone and texting as we lurched through Friday afternoon traffic on I-95. It was a long drive to the house in Maine, where we were spending the week with her family. When we arrived after midnight, the house was mostly dark, but the porch light was on. The front door opened and a woman stepped out.