A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal Read Free Book Online

mistake, file a correction, and move on. But it wasn’t so simple anymore. Jaime wouldn’t smile at another slipup, and Battinger would make a paperweight of my head.
    No, I’ll wait it out, I thought, chewing a little faster. Cabeza wouldn’t try again. A correction wouldn’t fix what ailed him. He didn’t want the truth; he wanted justice. And The Paper couldn’t give him that. Maybe nobody could.
    I looked around for Curtis, but he’d already gone back to Culture. LaShanniah had moved to graphics and out of our hands. The only people in the newsroom now were copy editors and the Night Rewrite boys huddled in their corner on the other side of Metro.
    Night Rewrite was the 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. slot, aka the lobster shift, the dogwatch, the province of probationary reporters still proving their grit. The boys (and one or two girls) in that corner handled late-night shorties—boat crashes on the Hudson, shootings at the Latin Quarter—and reworked headline storiesafter the lead reporters killed their phones. When I was on Style, I had nothing but pity for the poor Rewrite boys, chained to the desk while the city skyline sang me serenades. That beat seemed like hours with your feet up waiting for someone to drown.
    One night, I’d glided past Rewrite corner, on mule stilettos, wearing a white lacy two-piece number, on my way to the White Party at Lotus. Maybe I was tipsy from cocktails at Joe Allen, or dizzy from champagne at a Fashion Week presser, but as I passed, I’d tapped one of the boys on the shoulder and promised, with a laugh, to “bring back a doggy bag.”
    I shuddered now, thinking of it. Who had I tapped with all that disdain? Could it have been Matthew Talbot, who’d since been sent to Afghanistan to look for men in caves? Or Franklin Cook, who got the coveted biz-day posting in Silicon Alley?
    Rewrite was where I ached to be. Maybe it wasn’t the Milan runways or even white tents in Bryant Park, but it was better than a plywood box. After six months or a year on Rewrite I would’ve been able to move to a legit Metro assignment, like the Brooklyn Courts or Albany capital watch. From there, maybe they’d consider putting me back on Style.
    But when the masthead had convened to decide my fate after the, um, Incident, Battinger said, “Style girls don’t belong on Rewrite.” Style pens, she said, trafficked in functional froufrou, pugs as the new pocket pet, fearless facials, while the rest of The Paper nabbed the apple out of the roast and stuck their forks in the meat. Maybe Battinger was right. But that wasn’t the reason she didn’t want me on Rewrite. Obits was penance, plain and simple. And I didn’t miss the gist.
    Maybe it was my longing glance at Rewrite that caught Randy Antillo’s attention. “Hey Val,” he said, and waved me over. I got up and walked across the newsroom. Randy was hovering over Travis Parsons’s desk saying “Oh, yeah baby.” I didn’t ask, figuring Internet porn. “Dude, can you do that?” Randy added.
    I took a step closer and looked at Travis’s screen. It was Mullets Galore, a Web site honoring Midwestern eighties hair. Randy was rapt. “So, Val, you write that quick hit on Stain 149?” he said, without looking at me.
    “The obit today?” I asked. “Oh, right, yeah, I…”
    “Pretty cool, Val,” he said, standing up straight so I could get the whole length of him. Randy was a six-foot-three-inch matchstick with a cap of red hair. His byline, R. Horacio Antillo, had the sound of a hard-bitten scribe, but he was just a Williamsburg trust-fund hipster who wore his sideburns two inches too thick. Battinger had brought him in from Jersey briefs and put him on the night shift so he’d start his Metro climb. He wasn’t much to look at, but even I could see he was destined for glory.
    “I loved Stain,” Randy was saying. “When I was thirteen, he was, like, my idol.”
    “Every rebel has-been is your idol,” said Travis, a twenty-five-year-old