Page 41 of Home of the Brave

11

VICTORIA

“This is so wrong,” Cambrie whispered as she clicked. “I’m breaking every rule I was ever taught.”

“Sometimes it feels like I’m going to get in trouble. A professor is going to walk in and berate me.” I sighed as I finished yet another.

“They would be so disappointed if they could see us now,” she agreed from behind her laptop.

We took the afternoon off since the men practiced this morning and holed up in my hotel room editing and chopping apart interviews into short videos for the social media team to post.

As much as it hurt my journalist heart to do this, each interview made five or six videos, so we were keeping the content stream well-fed.

This wasn’t the type of work either of us set out to do, but we had no choice but to adapt to the changing demands of our audience.

“So, are you going to tell me or keep me waiting all night?”

I paused the video I was watching. “Tell you about what?”

She pointed at me. “Don’t play coy.”

“Fine,” I caved. I’d expected her to demand answers the second we met up this morning, but she remained professional and on her best behavior. It was only fair to spill. “He not only accepted my apology and explanation, but I think he might be willing to not hate me.”

“Well, obviously. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But there’s a difference between forgiving and forgetting. He would be well within his rights to keep me at arm’s length, even refuse to let me interview him again.” I hesitated. “It was a very uncomfortable reminder that my words have the power to hurt people. That my job has consequences.”

She nodded. “I get that.”

It felt like there was something more she wanted to say, so I stayed quiet.

“I’ve taken pictures and videos that haunt me. I’ve recorded things and had to decide what mattered most: the truth, the story, or the subjects. I’ve lost many nights of sleep debating what the right thing to do is, and how my actions could affect people.”

“Even though you're just the one recording it, not participating?” I knew better than to ask for details. I might be in sports now, but in my college days, I stumbled into information I didn’t want to know and didn’t want to write about, but needed to be shared. Like a cheating scandal being covered up by the administration, a few student and professor affairs, and what was really happening with the food waste that was promised to go to shelters.

She nodded. “Having morals really sucks.”

“In our industry especially,” I agreed and lowered my eyes back to my screen.

“Very true.” She ran her hand over her keyboard but didn’t type. “So you two just talked?”

“Yes. I told him it was all off the record, and it wasn’t very long since he had to go, but I don’t know,” I paused. “I wanted him to see me as a person.”

Her lips wavered as she failed to hold back a smile. “As opposed to?”

“A reporter, a soulless monster, someone only here to do a job?”

“Ah, yes.” She nodded a few times. "We don't deal with that as much from this side of the camera. We generally just go entirely unnoticed.”

“I didn’t really want to be on this side either. I wanted to write, get the details and truth out to the world, not talk to sweaty men about the same repetitive topics.”

“What kind of truth? Did you want to be a war correspondent? An investigator?"

“No, it was always sports.”

She barked out a laugh. “So you just romanticized journalism into something it never was.”

“Yeah, it took me a few years to realize that, though,” I admitted. “I thought every athlete had a story that deserved to be told.”