Page 73 of Cuts like a Knife
“I thought you hired me to do more of what I was already doing?” I remember saying.
“Right!” He replied. “More of this.”
It finally clicked.
If I wanted to write features at Flash, I had to be mean242.
Nonetheless, back then, I wasn’t ready to accept it. I remember complaining to Adele right away, that very afternoon.
“He wants me to be mean. That’s what we need to do if we want to get feature placement here,” I moaned.
She’d shaken her head. “It’s more than that. You need the right subjects. I’ve pitched at least thirty features to Kelsang since we launched and he’s ignored every single one.
“Who have you been pitching?” I asked.
“Celebrities, mostly. And I haven’t been nice in my pitches. Not at all. So it’s more than meanness. Who would you profile, if you could?”
She said it so casually. Like we were just talking. And like an idiot, I told her.
Pat Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, the founders of a group called Black Lives Matter. I’d been following them online, ever since the (deeply shocking) Trayvon Martin verdict, I explained. They were amazing. There was something there, for sure. And there was also a football player — Colin Kaepernick. He’d knelt during the national anthem during a few football games recently. I just had a feeling that he was going to be a thing. I would love it if we could contact him now, before the whole thing blew up.
“But what if it doesn’t blow up?” I remember Adele asking. “Like, he’s just kneeling. So what? Doesn’t seem like something worth a story.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it won’t,” I said. “I just have a feeling.”
We’d talked and talked that day. Adele had made notes. And in the end, she’d asked me what I thought about letting her pitch a few of my ideas.
“Rian definitely hates you,” she said, “so you’ll never make any progress there, and these people that you’re interested in aren’t really feature material. Not the sort of features Kelsang wants. But if I were to pitch to Rian, at least we’d have fighting chance of getting a few of these people in the paper.”
She wasn’t wrong. I’d agreed.
The next thing I knew, Adele had bylines under stories about all the people I’d suggested writing about. And she’d given me zero credit for my ideas.
Weeks later, we were sitting in side-by-side beanbags waiting for the morning meeting to start and I’d whispered something to her about whether she’d seen the growing popularity of the Shout Your Abortion hashtag. She’d never heard of it.
Five minutes later, Rian was calling for pitches and Adele was saying “I really think we should do something on the Shout Your Abortion hashtag. I had the idea last night.”
“Adele!” I’d said. I couldn’t help myself. I was shocked.
“Oh,” she’d said, looking my way. “Maybe we could assign it to Lex. She hasn’t had a decent byline recently. Sorry, Lex.”
Rian had looked back and forth between us, before responding.
“Good idea, but you write it, Adele.” He’d turned to the whiteboard to write #ShoutYourAbortion under Adele’s name for the daily assignments.
WTF? I’d mouthed to Adele.
She’d pretended she didn’t see the problem. Later than day, out on the picnic benches, she made a whole argument for why I was crazy to be upset.
“Didn’t we agree that I was going to float pitches for you? Because Rian hates you so much? Anyway, I tried to get him to assign it to you, didn’t I?” She blew out a long plume of smoke, totally unfazed.
I remember just staring at her. None of it made sense to me. Yes, we’d agreed she’d make a couple of pitches for me. Weeks ago. And she had. Then she’d written the pieces herself. And that morning she’d said, we could assign it to me. We, meaning her and Rian, like she was on his level, an editor, and not on mine.
But our job titles were the same.
“You’re not upset, are you?” She’d asked.
She made me feel crazy. Like it would be crazy for me to be upset. I’d shaken my head no.
