Never Too Real Read Free

paper tomorrow so . . .” Heather was done. She threw up her hands in surrender.
    The abrupt end caught up to Cat. Maybe four minutes had passed since she’d sat down. “Wait—so that’s it? We’re dark? That show—the one we just taped—was my last one?”
    Cat could not believe her eyes as she watched the once-fawning Heather, the Heather who’d wanted to hang out and gossip about who’s-dating-who or who would slap Cat’s back with joy about their ratings, instead end their relationship by standing up and stepping forward from behind her desk, toward the door. Cat was being ushered out.
    Business is business.
    “I’m afraid so. It’s done,” Heather said coldly as she lumbered behind Cat and opened the office door. Heather’s two research minions stood waiting on the other side. Armed with new reports, surely, on what people wanted to see next, or whom.
    Wow. Great choreography, Cat thought.
    These two were also Cat’s enthusiastic allies only months ago, but now the two small men mumbled hellos and couldn’t meet her eyes. She was tempted to turn back toward the office and yell with pointed finger at Heather, to remind her how recently she had been the one crying gratefully to Cat as the show’s numbers had saved her job. But that was then. This was now. And now, as humiliated and steamed as Cat was, she was all too curious about the feeling of joy ruffling her feathers inside, beckoning her to come closer and away from these people.
    Numbly, Cat walked back to her desk, back straight. As the only brown girl in her private school growing up, the scholarship girl, she had learned how to silo herself in, to protect herself with a psychic bubble. And she was not going to let this be a walk of shame. In her head, she fell onto another mantra that helped her when she was ostracized as a kid: “Fuck ’em.”
     
    It took fifteen years post-college for Cat to scale her way up from intern to local news producer to, with little on-air experience, host of a national cable news show on screens big and small, five days a week. With this network she’d also packed in hundreds of supporting appearances on its highest-rated national morning show, the local news outlet, online post-show shows, blogs, vlogs, and evenings hosting philanthropic events—a thousand smiles delivered, one after another. She’d been featured in dozens of magazines and even had an Ivy League degree. Internally, as she walked with concentration, Cat recited her accomplishments, the lines in her bio, one with each stride. Reviewing all she’d come through, all she’d accomplished functioned like a vaccine. It stopped her from feeling small. From letting her circumstances determine her self-worth.
    But as Cat got to the back elevator, stepping in, rather than taking the main staircase in view of the whole newsroom, other thoughts began to seep in, dark thoughts. She was alone. She’d had no other life. No child. No spouse. No siblings. Just a suffocating, overbearing mother. So focused on accomplishing, building herself and her career, she hadn’t slept in years—hadn’t gotten laid in at least two. What had she done? What was she going to do? What was next?
    Though Cat knew it was only an excuse, Heather said that the cancellation of her show had depended on one thing: Cat hadn’t brought in the hoped-for Hispanic demographic. Sure, Cat wished she were fully bilingual, but an absent father and a mother obsessed with her daughter being as “American” as possible, aka Anglo, white—add that to a New England education and the odds had been stacked against her. But no Latina whom Cat knew in the business was fully bilingual either. Which meant that you were either AltaVision material or SBC network material. The network had assumed that Cat, a gesticulating second-generation Mexican-American, would appear on their sibling network in Spanish. They hadn’t even mentioned it to her agent two years previous when they’d plucked her from