Page 91 of Cuts like a Knife
I’m not going to do it. If SpyMaster outs me and I get fired, so be it. I’m not going to screw these people over to save myself.
Why did I ever think I could291?
I don’t know who the f— I am anymore, or what the hell I’m even doing, but yes. I’m fine. I nod again to Drew as JP starts the outboard motor and begins piloting the little boat out of the harbor.
Who knows if the best exposé in the world could even save me now anyway? Once a plagiarist, always a plagiarist. If SpyMaster moves forward, I'll likely be done, regardless.
I need to let it go.
That’s what Eve Wolf, the lawyer, told me to do two years ago. She told me to start over. I haven’t been able to, but maybe I should start trying right now.
Chapter Twenty Four
As the little boat slowly makes its way to open water, my thoughts race.
Suddenly, JP’s voice rings out.
“Best to hold on,” he says, and I grip the cool metal railing that runs around the bow. My other hand is still in Drew’s but I don’t look at him. I look out at the bay, sparking under the bright morning sun. It's aquamarine, cerulean, emerald, blue, and every similar shade in between
Suddenly, JP guns the engine and we fly forward and world seems to blur. Ahead, the tiny sand spit that is Stocking Island gets imperceptibly closer, as I get farther away.
I go all the way back in my mind, to the day when it happened.
I’d been at Flash for eight and a half months and I’d finally found my footing. At least once a week, Kelsang was assigning me features that ran over two big pages. And even though imagery dominated, my words were pretty prominent. And if my byline, which had initially thrilled me, now appeared under stories with headlines I wasn’t exactly proud of, at least it appeared. I was making a real name for myself.
“Great stuff, Al,” Kelsang told me, countless times, once I’d learned to be snarky in every story I suggested.
Even Owen, so rarely in the office, had given me specific compliments on my work.
“Really funny piece last week,” he’d said one day when we crossed paths in the elevator. “Keep it up.”
Adele was baffled, and grudgingly impressed. She rarely landed longer features.
“You’re killing it,” she told me. “I wish I could figure out how to write something Kelsang liked as much.”
What she didn’t realize was that the pieces that ended up in Flash were often so far from what I’d initially pitched, I barely recognized them. I never wrote a single headline for myself, and the stories often contained full paragraphs I had no memory of writing at all.
Bits added by the copy editors, or by Kelsang himself, but it was my name on those pieces, so I was getting the credit. And the pieces were doing very well. Incredibly well. And the “best” ones, at least according to the metrics and Kelsang, were, the meanest and the trashiest.
Jennifer Lawrence: is it bump watch time or is Katniss getting chunky?
Emilia Clarke bares all on GoT, but some say they wish she'd cover up
Pre-teen Millie Bobby Brown is already hotter than you
Sometimes it felt like the stories were writing themselves. The pieces on Jennifer Lawrence, Emilia Clarke, and Mille Bobby Brown, for example. I’d pitched stories about the over-focus on actresses’ bodies and the ways in which media culture ignored their work in favor of physical critique. In the case of Mille Bobby Brown, who was just a kid, I’d pitched a story about how gross it was that she was already being sexualized online.
But the stories that published … weren’t that. Not at all. And they had my name on them.
Bits and pieces of my prose were the same. The structure was there, but the substance was always altered. What appeared in Flash was so twisted, so rarely what I’d intended to say at all.
It was confusing and embarrassing, but also, I admit it, exciting292. It was like a drug. I started to believe the edits were fine. All that was happening was that I was being made better. When I got the job, I hadn’t really known how to do it. Kelsang was helping me, teaching me. And giving me credit at the same time. I wasn’t going to turn my nose up at that. I tried to be grateful.
The only problem was Rian. Nothing had changed there. His inexplicably dislike was so palpable and he was still assigning me multiple stories a day about the city council, various overseas military conflicts, major decisions made in the senate — stuff I didn’t understand and had no business commenting on.
With news pieces, I still had no idea what I was doing a lot of the time.
Luckily, I’d finally figured out the whole wire-service rewrite thing. Or so I thought.
