Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

Lol, she texted back. Now you know how I feel.

Where are you, anyway?I wrote, hoping to catch her while her phone was still in her hand. But there was no response. Not that day, or the next day, or the day after.

In September, one of Frontline’ s senior producers quit. The gossip was that he had waited until Rebecca returned to give notice, in the hopes that she would make some grand gesture to counter his offer from another network. Instead she told him goodbye and good luck. Rebecca valued loyalty.

This created a ripple effect. Jamie was promoted to senior producer. Someone was promoted to fill his old job. It resulted in an opening for an assistant, a job with a real salary and benefits and security. To say that each of us interns wanted that job was like saying that America wanted to beat the USSR during the Cold War. It was a question of existential purpose.

“Are you busy right now?” I said, stopping by Jamie’s desk one afternoon. There were several rungs between us, but I still went to him with my constant questions. Plus, we were becoming something like friends.

“Always,” he said, typing on his phone. “What’s up?”

“I need some career advice.” I lowered my voice and glanced around. The newsroom was competitive but not cutthroat, so you couldn’t be too blatant. “I want that assistant job.”

He laughed. “Oh? I never would have guessed.”

“What can I do to make sure I get it?”

He put his phone down. “Memorize the difference between a cappuccino and a cortado. The other interns just don’t seem to get it.”

“Very funny.”

“Partly it’s luck. But you should try to make yourself indispensable. It needs to be you that producers think of when they need something done, not someone else.”

The vacant desk sat there like a shiny prize. There was no urgency in making a decision. At this point, several of us interns were capable of carrying out the work of an assistant. There was script-running and lunch-fetching, but there were also the complex systems that we had finally mastered: searching the archive, pulling stock images, monitoring alerts in iNews. Every minute of programming required a staggering amount of technical work. It wasn’t hard, but it was finicky, and a lot of it trickled down to us.

The lack of timeline drove some of the interns crazy. A few of them quit. That just showed they weren’t cut out for the work. If you wanted predictability, this was the wrong business.

“Is it a test?” I asked Jamie, at one point. “Like, Survivor: Newsroom Edition ?”

He laughed. “Really? There’s a hurricane in the gulf and two wars in the Middle East and wildfires in California. You think the bosses have time to think about the interns? ”

“Fair enough,” I said.

One day I walked past the empty desk and noticed that the phone was ringing. No one else made a move to answer it, so I sat down and picked up. “KCN, this is Violet speaking.”

“Who?” the voice shouted. “Never mind. We’ve got a big problem. I’ve got the camera crew here and I’ve got this lady mic’d and lit but she’s getting cold feet.” His voice was familiar: one of the field producers. “Major problem. We’re going to have to scrap this from the rundown.”

“Don’t hang up,” I said. “I’m going to put you on hold, okay?”

I sprinted to find the senior producer for the segment. Her eyebrows shot up when I relayed the message. “What else did he say?” she said. “What were the exact words?”

“I’ve got him on line three,” I said, pointing at her blinking phone.

“Oh!” she said. “Nice. Thank you.”

I wound up as the go-between all day, bringing scribbled messages to the senior producer when she was in meetings, relaying precise instructions back to the field producer. It was such a scramble that when the editor was cutting the tape, the producer asked me to record the scratch track, the narration that the reporter—who was en route back from the field—would later replace with his own voice. In the end, the interview was salvaged. Hours of frenzy were distilled into a neat three-minute package in the C block. After the broadcast, the senior producer thanked me and said, “It’s Violet, right? Good work today.”

The next week, the job was mine.

What’s our address?Stella texted me one morning that fall.

It was a busy day at work, and by evening I had forgotten about the text, or what her reason for it might be. When I got home, the lights were on. A pair of ballet flats and a quilted jacket were discarded near the front door. “Stella?” I called out.

A girl emerged from the kitchen. A brunette, who I didn’t recognize. “Are you the roommate?” she said. “Stella mentioned you might be here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But who are you?”

“A friend of hers,” she said. She was wearing an oversize button-down and, apparently, no pants. There was a cigarette between her fingers, with a delicate column of ash. “She said I could crash for the night.”

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said automatically, thinking of paragraph 5, subparagraph B, in my agreement with the Bradleys.

She took another drag. “Seriously?” she said, stretching out the word. Bad vocal fry.

“It’s their apartment, not mine,” I said.

“I can see that.” She stared at me appraisingly, like she was sizing up an untagged item at the flea market. I followed her into the kitchen, where she flicked her cigarette into the sink and opened the refrigerator. “Don’t you have anything to drink?” she said, scanning the shelves. “Don’t you live here?”

“How do you even know Stella?” I said.

“Isn’t Stella the best?” she said. Her purse had spilled its contents across the kitchen counter. Lipstick, eyeliner, crumpled bills, matchbooks. She lit another cigarette. There were always girls like this, blasé and affectedly cool, who buzzed around Stella like flies around rotting fruit. They made me feel prickly, territorial. Stella was mine, not theirs.

The girl said she was only spending one night. But that turned into two nights, and three. I couldn’t help texting Stella to vent. Not that I had any grounds to complain; she’d invited this girl, after all. And this was her apartment. But that night my phone rang.

“Is she still there?” Stella said, the connection clear despite the ocean between us.

“Yup,” I said. From down the hall came the smell of cigarette smoke and the tinny sound of a TV show playing on her computer.

“What the fuck?” Stella said. “Go get her. Put me on speaker.”

“Oh,” the girl said, startling when I opened the door.

“Hey,” Stella said. “I said you could stay one night. One. Why are you still here?”

The girl glanced back and forth between me and the phone in my outstretched hand. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened and closed, swallowing her panic.

“Hel- lo? ” Stella said. “Can anyone hear me?”

“We’re here,” I said. “But it seems our friend is at a loss for words.”

“You told on me?” the girl hissed.

“Violet happens to be honest,” Stella said. “She happens to be a good person. The kind of friend who warns you about shady shit like this.”

“You should really pack your things,” I said, almost laughing at the look on this girl’s face. “I’ll ask the doorman to get you a cab.”

“See how nice she is?” Stella said. “I would’ve just thrown your crap out the window.”

Stella insisted on staying on the phone until the girl had gone. “Chop-chop,” she kept saying, her voice beaming through the black screen. When the front door finally closed behind the girl, both of us burst out laughing.