Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

During the pleasantries, I tried not to gawk. To describe the Bradley home required a vocabulary that would take me months and years to accumulate: a majestic white Colonial overlooking Long Island Sound, with a circular driveway and a carriage house. A sprawling green lawn with an orchard of Bosc pear trees, a swimming pool edged in travertine, a dock jutting into the water.

Through that week, I gave them reasons to like me. Stella’s mother found me cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast. Stella’s father saw me reading The Portrait of a Lady and complimented my taste; Thomas Bradley had always regarded Henry James as one of our greatest novelists. Anne and Thomas watched me, their polite-but-cool judgment evolving into warmth. They had oysters as an appetizer one night. When Anne demonstrated how to slip them loose from the shell, her guidance was free of condescension, like I was an exchange student from a foreign country.

In good palate-cleansing Protestant manner, the Bradley family always capped Thanksgiving dinner with a brisk walk through the neighborhood. It was freakishly cold that year. Stella looked at my thin jean jacket and said, “That won’t work. Take this,” handing me a parka from the hall closet. It was tomato red, heavy with down filling, the lining slippery smooth. Expensive clothes were like camouflage, or alchemy. During the walk, the Bradleys waving at the occasional neighbor, I liked the idea that—from afar, at least—I blended right in.

“Keep it,” Stella said, later. “You’re going to need a real jacket. I’ve got others.”

Stella had treated it as a fait accompli that I’d come home with her for Thanksgiving. I hadn’t even considered going back to Florida, and Stella didn’t question that, which was another reason to love her. “Thank God we saved you from those people,” she sometimes said, which was the closest we ever got to talking about my family. My home seemed to exist in her mind as a dense jungle, a tangle of sinister mysteries.

“And my parents love you, by the way,” she said, after Thanksgiving. “I can tell.”

“Oh!” I said. “Good. Well, I love them, too.”

Stella snorted. “You don’t have to say that.”

“But it’s true.”

“Really?” She arched an eyebrow. “Then you’re a better person than me.”

It was, in fact, only half true. I loved the calm and comfort of the Bradley family. But what I couldn’t admit to Stella, what I could barely admit to myself, was the underlying calculation. It whirred constantly in the back of my mind. To wind up at a private college like this was luck enough, but to wind up best friends with the most dazzling girl on campus? It wasn’t that my personality changed when I met Stella. It was that it became, it flourished, because I could say things to Stella that I wouldn’t have said to anyone back home—knowing they would only respond with bafflement, or laughter—and she always volleyed right back, sharpening me like a whetstone to a knife. I didn’t just want the friendship of this dazzling girl. I wanted the world that had made her so dazzling in the first place. This was a golden opportunity not to be taken for granted. So I paid attention. I studied everything. I learned the vocabulary and the syntax. It was hard work to win over people like Anne and Thomas Bradley. But in the service of a larger ambition, hard work is nothing.

Besides, genetics dictated that I had inherited the streak of darkness in my parents. Overcoming that would take deliberate effort. I’d rip the weeds out by the root, leave the soil rich and bare. I was certain that if I played the game correctly, I could become someone better. The past could be overcome. Outcomes could be changed.

And through the years, new things grew. My role became firmly established. “Violet’s the responsible one,” Stella told people, slinging her arm around my shoulder, spilling her drink in the process. “And I’m a mess.”

Everyone came to agree on this. Stella Bradley didn’t care about anything. That’s what made her so fun. Stella’s credit card paid for spontaneous road trips, lavish meals, and hotel rooms. She made cutting remarks about her family’s net worth as she handed over the platinum AmEx. She liked being rich, but she knew that it wasn’t really her money, so she expurgated her guilt with fits of generosity. The fun we had was genuine and real, but Stella was also strategic when she declared me to be the responsible one. My responsibility had a particular utility. Stella had a unique tendency to get herself into binds; I got her out of them. I retrieved her when she was stranded, brought her money when she’d forgotten her wallet, held her hair back when she vomited from drinking too much. I saved her, over and over. See? she’d say, when I rescued her from yet another scrape. See how right I am?

There was an assumption, shared by nearly every student at our expensive college, that anything was possible. No careers, no avenues were off-limits. Your ambition didn’t have to be circumscribed or compromised. Stella had taught me how to live in this world of long horizons. I imagined the years ahead, the two of us gradually becoming equals. Look at how well the system had taken care of the Bradleys. If I worked hard, wouldn’t it take care of me?

But that, I eventually realized, was naive.

Stella opened doors for me. She showed me how confident and outspoken a person could be. Even a young woman, whom the world is not inclined to take seriously. I learned by watching her, witnessing the power of her charm and confidence. I loved Stella, and beyond that, I needed her. This life wouldn’t have been possible without her.

But the things you need when you’re nineteen years old aren’t the things you need later. People change. Relationships change.

There would be a test in the years to come. Could I do it without her?

Or, more accurately, could I do it in spite of her?

BACK WHEN I was in high school, Corey Molina described what it felt like to walk into the CBS offices for the first time. The walls were lined with portraits of legends—Edwards, Cronkite, Rather, Stahl—and it was thick with the aura of seriousness and 60 Minutes. He had gotten his first job by showing up and not leaving until someone gave him something to do. “You need two things to succeed in this business,” Corey had said. “A news instinct, and a little bit of masochism.”

I had moved to New York the summer after graduating from college. I struck out at the page program at CBS. Ditto for NBC, and ABC, and CNN and Fox and MSNBC. My résumé lacked the right internships and connections, but it didn’t faze me. My mother was always falling for those law-of-attraction scams: think like a millionaire and you’ll become a millionaire! She assumed it was as easy as ordering a pizza. But I believed in my own version of the law. You can become a millionaire if you really want it. You just have to bust your ass to get there.

There was a relatively new channel called King Cable News. It had no ideological bent, nothing that made it stand out, except for a wealthy owner—Mr. King, of King Media—who was happy to run the company in the red for as long as he had to. For the decade of KCN’s existence, Mr. King had been poaching stars from other networks, wooing them with massive paychecks, complete editorial independence, and equity in his privately held media conglomerate. When King Media eventually went public, the star anchors wouldn’t be wealthy in the usual multimillion-dollar-contract way. They’d be wealthy like tech titans, or hedge funders. KCN had won several Peabodys and Emmys in the past few years and had started gaining respect in the industry. Their audience was growing, too; they were often in third place, sometimes in second. More to the point, they were the place that offered me a job.