“Then why does it have some dude’s voice?”
“Because the version I submitted to them about five hours before airtime was the version they didn’t accept,” she said. “Even my boss openly admitted it wouldn’t draw the same number of ratings that their version did. They didn’t care about the truth. They cared about ratings.”
“And what is the truth?”
“The version I’m about to show you.”
There was no hesitation to admit I was afraid of the truth, whatever that wound up being. Hailey might have been a little crazy at times, and I definitely didn’t understand how she could toss away a public-facing job like this, but she wasn’t ever bad at what she did. She got straight A’s in high school and got magna cum laude in college. In other words, I didn’t always agree with where she focused her energies, but she always did well on whatever she paid attention to.
She clicked a few icons, leaned back, and let me watch her version.
“Just do your best to have an open mind,” Hailey said.
I made a vow to be as free of judgment and open-minded as possible. It was damn difficult—trying to act like what had happened with Corey had no impact here was impossible.
But as I watched, I began to see that Hailey had done some sort of balanced job. She wasn’t afraid to call out the Devil’s Patriots for being asses sometimes, but she also presented them as men who were misunderstood. It was easy to sound like it was bullshit, but Hailey did it well.
By the end, I was left impressed with her work. Either the Devil’s Patriots had bribed the hell out of her and she’d done a remarkable job, or she really did show a balanced, nuanced approach.
“Do you really believe all of this?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You showed a lot of their interviews. Some of it sounded great, some of it sounded like stock answers. How much of it do you really think is true?”
Hailey sighed.
“At first, no, I didn’t. They were toying with me, and Satan, frankly, just wanted to fuck me. I told them they couldn’t be treating me like this—you saw it in the first clip, where they showed Satan trying to kiss me.”
“And that wasn’t in the second clip?”
Hailey shook her head.
“Because as I got to know them better and they became more comfortable with me, I saw the truth. They’re no angels. And I would never call them that. Most especially Spawn and the way he treated you. Trust me, I got the chance to talk to Satan about that, and I absolutely ripped into him about letting Spawn get away with how he treated you.”
Holy shit. You did that?
Her being the little sister always made it difficult for her to get the chance to stand up for me. Hearing her say that to a guy who would call himself Satan…damn, my little sister had some balls.
I knew she was the best.
“But as they spoke and as I asked more and more questions, I did get to see that they’re just a club that has their own rules. Doesn’t mean those rules are anarchy, though.”
She sighed. She was still being overly kind to those guys, but she was at least thoughtful about it.
“Just because these guys aren’t PC and aren’t being open-minded, everyone thinks they’re dicks. But the opposite of open-minded isn’t hateful; it’s just knowing what you like and being content not exploring anything else. They’re actually good guys, and—”
“I’m going to stop you there, Hailey.”
That was a bridge too far. “Good guys?” Please.
“They’re not good guys, Hailey, lest you forget what happened with Corey. Or Spawn, whatever the hell you want to call him.”
“Poor choice of words, I know. But Melissa, if Corey saw you, I promise he’d apologize.”
I laughed. It was a bitter, sarcastic, dismissive laugh. I felt terrible that on the first night back with my sister, our conversation dissolved to this, but it felt like she’d truly gotten suckered by the Devil’s Patriots.
“Hailey, come on. Seriously? You really believe that? You actually believe that?”
