Chapter 3
Jenna
I almost don't go.
I have a whole speech prepared for myself about why I'm not going, and I deliver it to my bathroom mirror at six-forty in the morning with my toothbrush as a prop.
"An invitation from a subject," I tell the mirror, "that isn't routed through PR, is a flag.
It's a flag, Jenna. Subjects who want to control the narrative invite you to controlled environments.
He's setting a scene. You don't walk into a scene somebody built for you.
That's amateur. That's how you end up writing a profile that's really just a press release with adjectives. "
This is all true.
I go anyway.
I go anyway because I am a journalist, and the worst thing you can do to a journalist is dangle a thing we don't understand and walk away.
He didn't explain. He didn't sell it. Tuesday mornings.
I'm somewhere you can come, if you want.
That's not how you control a narrative. That's how you bait a hook for somebody who can't stand an unanswered question.
It worked. Obviously it worked. I'm in my car at seven-fifteen with a coffee I don't taste and an address I got from Priya by pretending I wanted to write about community programs generally, which isn't even a lie, it just isn't the truth either.
The place is a community center that has clearly been a lot of things — a church basement, a rec hall, a polling station every November.
The carpet is the color of a decision made by a committee in 1994.
There's a wall of kids' drawings and a hand-lettered sign that says READING IS A SUPERPOWER with the P in superpower noticeably larger than the other letters, the work of a child who ran out of confidence about spacing.
Cole is already there.
He's at a low table, the kind made for people three feet tall, folded into a plastic chair that should not structurally support him, in jeans and an old Wolves sweatshirt washed soft and gray.
There's a stack of picture books. There's a kid next to him, maybe nine, in a hoodie, frowning at a page with total concentration.
Cole is reading aloud. Slowly. One big finger moving under the words.
The kid is following the finger.
Neither of them looks up when I come in.
I sit in the back. I do not take out my recorder. I tell myself this is a tactical decision and it is partly a tactical decision and it is partly that I cannot, for some reason, bring myself to point a microphone at this.
There are six kids. Three volunteers, counting Cole, who I would not have counted as a volunteer twenty-four hours ago and now cannot stop counting.
He moves between the tables when a kid gets stuck.
He doesn't rush. He doesn't perform — and I would know, I have spent my career watching people perform, I can smell a performance through a wall, and this isn't one.
There's no angle for the room. There's no angle, period.
There's just a guy and some books and some kids and a Tuesday.
At one point a girl in a red cardigan — six, maybe seven, with the unblinking certainty of the very young — gets into it with him about a dragon.
"He's bad," she says.
"He's not bad," Cole says.
"He's a dragon."
"Dragons aren't automatically bad. That's prejudice."
"What's prejudice."
"It's when you decide something about somebody before you know them." He says this completely evenly, no wink at me, no wink at anybody. "You're doing it to the dragon right now."
"He BURNED the village."
"He burned one barn, and we don't know why yet, we're on page eleven. Maybe the barn started it."
"Barns can't start it."
"You don't know that. You haven't met this barn."
She considers this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice. "I still think he's bad."
"That's allowed," Cole says. "You're allowed to think he's bad. But you have to keep reading to find out if you're right. That's the deal. You don't get to decide and stop."
The girl turns the page.
I sit very still in the back of a community center with carpet the color of a 1994 committee, and I think: you don't get to decide and stop, and I think about a profile I wrote two years ago, and I think about the stove feeling, and I understand, finally and completely and about two years too late, exactly what the stove feeling was.
I watch for two hours. I don't write a word.
When it's over and the kids are collected by parents and grandparents and one older sister who looks about fourteen and exhausted, Cole stacks the chairs without being asked.
I help. We don't talk. We walk out into a gray morning together and the silence holds for half a block before I break it, because of course I break it, breaking silences is my whole job.
"How long have you been doing this?"
"Four years."
"Why didn't you say something?"
He stops walking. Looks at me. There's nothing defensive in it, which is the thing that undoes me, the complete absence of the thing I've earned the right to expect.
"I'm saying something now," he says.
And he keeps walking.
I don't.
I stand on the sidewalk outside a community center and I watch him go to his car, this man I described to several million people as someone who confused being talented with being owed something, and I feel the bottom drop out of a story I was very, very sure of.
I drive home. I don't remember the drive. I sit down at my desk and I open the original profile, the one that's still up, the one that's still getting traffic two years later because the internet doesn't have a memory problem, and I read it like a stranger wrote it.
Every fact is a fact. I check. The cancellations: real. The photos: real. The agent: real.
The picture is wrong.
I sit with that. I don't have a word for the feeling yet.
It's not guilt, exactly, because guilt is for when you did the work badly and I didn't do the work badly.
It's the other thing. It's the feeling of having built a beautiful, sturdy, structurally perfect house on a lot that turned out to be the wrong address.
My phone buzzes. It's Frank.
"How's the access," he says, no hello, Frank-style.
I look at the dragon book that isn't on my desk but might as well be. I look at the profile on my screen.
"Better than I thought," I tell him. "Way better than I thought."
"Told you the history was the point."
"You did. I'm going to need you to never say that again."
"I'm going to say it constantly. Get me a great piece."
I hang up.
I close the old profile.
I open a new document, and at the top of the blank page I type a single line, just to see how it feels, just to find out if I can:
I wrote you exactly as you are.
Then I delete it, because it isn't true, because it was never true, and I sit in the quiet of my apartment with the cursor blinking at the start of an empty page, and I think: okay.
Okay. Let's find out who you actually are.