The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom by Jenny Holiday Page B

glimpse.
    My jaw dropped. It literally dropped.
    He had drawn me not once, but twice. In each likeness, I was depicted from the waist up. On the left, I was crying a little—my eyes were all watery, and there was one tear on my cheek. I was staring into space wistfully, like I was thinking about something far away. Someone, rather, because I recognized the moment, even though I had experienced it from the inside and had not been able to observe myself in it as he had. It had been when he’d plucked out the truth about my fears about my father and my guilt over leaving him.
    The second image, even though it was me, in the same dress, was the polar opposite of the first. I was looking right at the “camera” and cracking up. My huge grin exposed my teeth, and my eyes looked…happy. It seemed an anemic word to describe what I was seeing, but it was the best I could come up with. I tried to think when this moment had been, but unlike with the other image, I couldn’t pinpoint this one. I realized that there had been several times something he’d said had made me laugh.
    And…whoa. Hang on a second.
    Matthew liked me?
    â€œYou hungry?” he asked as he stood at a sink at the far end of the room, washing his hands. I had to struggle to make sense of what he was saying, because my brain was still busy exploding. “Because I’m starving. What do you say we hit the A-Hole?” he said, using the Allenhurst Tap Room’s more common nickname. “I can use my vast insider knowledge to steer you toward the least awful items on the menu.”
    â€œI should swing by my room and change first,” I said, amazed that my voice came out sounding calm.
    â€œNah.” He wiped his hands on a towel and looked me up and down. It was hard not to squirm. “You look great.”
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    T en minutes later we were ensconced at a table at the infamously grungy Allenhurst Tap Room, sipping pints of beer and eating mozzarella sticks. I had gotten some weird looks from the other patrons, what with my formal dress, but I’d taken my cue from Matthew, who seemed totally oblivious, and acted like everything was normal. “These are shockingly good,” I said, laughing as a gooey mozzarella string extended from my mouth to the uneaten half of the stick I’d bitten into.
    â€œYeah, it’s hard to mess up fried cheese,” he said.
    It being a Saturday afternoon toward the end of the term, the pub was crowded, so we had to lean close to make ourselves heard. He smelled like turpentine, which wasn’t a surprise given that he was an artist. But the fact that I found it so irresistible kind of was.
    â€œYou do what you can back there,” he said, nodding at the kitchen. “But given the quality of the ingredients, that’s only so much. But cheese, even cheap cheese, is pretty reliable.”
    â€œYou’re quite the connoisseur,” I said. The Hefeweizen he’d steered me toward, suggesting its lightness as a good foil for the rich cheese, was a perfect match for the mozzarella. “Have you worked here your whole time at Allenhurst?”
    â€œYup. And I am not going to miss it at all.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do after you graduate?” I almost didn’t ask the question I’d been wondering about for so long. Things had become so easy between us, and it seemed like the type of question that might scare him off.
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” he countered.
    â€œMove to New York and get a job in journalism,” I said. “Then after a year or two, I’m going to apply to Columbia for a master’s in journalism.” It had always been the plan. It was the one thing in life I could count on.
    When he didn’t say anything in response, I decided to push him further. (I’m a masochist, apparently.) “You ever think about New York? Isn’t that the center of the art world?”
    He was shredding a