For a long time after that, Faith stopped texting and calling but simultaneously stopped talking to Laura in person at all. If Faith had to convey something about the evening shows, she made a big deal about going to the producer instead, who was one level below Laura’s executive producer status.
“Kyle, I might need extra time for weather tonight. Storms are moving in,” she’d say, not even glancing at Laura.
“OK—did you tell Laura too?” he’d ask.
“I’m telling you,” she’d reply, turning on her heel and returning to the weather office while Kyle looked over at Laura and rolled his eyes. By now, most people in the newsroom thought Faith was a royal pain in the ass. She did not exude “team player” or “good newsroom citizen” (as people in the industry liked to call it).
Faith sometimes snapped at producers, directors, teleprompteroperators, and people on the assignment desk if she perceived any mistake on their part. She acted like the life of the party at station-wide meetings and get-togethers but whispered behind people’s backs to the point where no one trusted her. She refused to become a mentor to the younger on-air talent when they asked all of the more veteran people to do so, saying she was too busy. She somehow wormed her way out of taking part in Fourth of July and other parades like the rest of the talent, and people said she had whined to Perry and he had given in. The prevailing sentiment was that Perry would do anything for her because the public loved her.
And now here they were two years later. Laura had learned to live with Faith’s iciness toward her, and they simply coexisted. Laura and Elliott were married, and Laura was pregnant. Honestly, Laura had almost forgotten about Faith’s antics, or at least she had pushed the thoughts far away thanks to everything else going on in her world.
Then, out of the total blue, Faith texted. In the middle of the night.
The ping startled both Laura and Elliott and they jerked awake. Laura had been dead asleep, and that was saying something given how hard it was to sleep with her growing belly. Elliott rolled over and said, “Who in thehellis texting at threeAM?”
“It’s Faith,” Laura replied, feeling a dread come into her bones. Not again. She scanned the text, then read it aloud.
Laura—I really need you. I have a stalker who won’t leave me alone and I’m also having some money problems. Can we please talk? I miss our friendship.
“Fuck no,” Elliott said, pulling his pillow over his head. “You’re pregnant, Laura. Does she have no class texting at this time? And what does she mean by money problems? She makes a boatload and lives alone.”
“I know, honey, I know. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
“Either you will or I will, Laura. I’m not going through this again. And if it’s me, it’s going to get ugly.”
This side of Elliott didn’t come out often, but when it did, it always startled Laura.
He gave a harrumph and made a big scene of bunching his pillow, readjusting the blankets, and flopping over to his side, his back to her.
Laura rolled the other way and put her hand on her stomach, mentally sending messages of calm to the baby. She couldn’t turn her phone off in case the station called with a true news emergency, but she couldn’t risk Faith texting again in another hour or two. It would send both her and Elliott off the edge. So she went to her phone and hit “Block” on Faith’s number. She would unblock it in the morning. Closing her eyes, she thought of Elliott’s words, his tone:
Either you will or I will, Laura. I’m not going through this again. And if it’s me it’s going to get ugly.
She didn’t need some scene between her husband and her meteorologist. What if he really marched over to Channel 9 to give Faith a piece of his mind? What would that look like? How would it affect Laura’s role as the executive producer to have her husband out of control? She had trouble sleeping the rest of the night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matthew
February
It was Tara who came with the idea to play a few tricks on Faith. The first one she proposed was small, harmless, just a little plan to get back at Faith in an anonymous way for what she had said about Matthew being “sooo small-market” and for Faith just being a plain old bitch.
“Go into Faith’s makeup bag when she’s out of the weather office and hide her favorite lipstick,” Tara proposed. “That red color she wears every night. I know the exact brand because she talked about it on one of her videos. I’ll screenshot you a picture. Put it somewhere so she can’t find it for a few days. She’ll be desperate before the show, flustered. A woman without her favorite lip color is like peanut butter without jelly. She’ll feel naked and lost.”
Wanting to both please Tara and torment Faith, Matthew agreed, although he was on edge. He had never really been a troublemaker. He liked to follow the rules. He wouldn’t call in sick, for example, when he wasn’t truly ill. Not like Faith.
He waited until Faith was on her dinner break the next nightand walked slowly toward her desk. Faith’s enormous makeup bag was overflowing with cosmetics. Next to it sat a portable mirror with lights, four different types of curling irons, cords everywhere, and three cans of hair spray, one on its side. No surprise to him that Faith’s makeup area was disorganized with items absolutely everywhere; it was a perfect reflection of her, he thought.
Gingerly Matthew approached the makeup bag, and he pushed aside pencils and tubes and containers of all sorts looking for the prize he coveted. There were oddly shaped sponge things, all dirty and smeared with various colors. The makeup brushes also seemed like they needed to be cleaned, and he avoided touching the bristles.
Women’s cosmetics was largely a foreign landscape for Matthew. Although he was forced to wear powder on the air himself, as all of the men did to keep the shine down, he despised doing it. Other than ordering the same MAC brand of powder the consultant had told him to wear, he had no knowledge of makeup and felt unsure he could find this one tube of lipstick, even with the picture Tara had texted.
His fingers finally reached the lipsticks at the bottom, all in smooth tubes. Consulting the picture on his phone, he looked down and rummaged through them until he identified the tube with the red color Faith favored. When he wrapped his knuckles around it, the metal against his skin was cool but felt white-hot, stolen contraband pulsing in his hand. Now that he had it he backed away from her desk quickly. Even though no one else was in the office he felt his heart going and knew he couldn’t waste any time.
Tara had said to hide it but to make it seem as if Faith herself had misplaced it in case she started to look around.
Each meteorologist had their own desk, plus there was one long shared one with all of the weather computers and forecasting tools they needed next to a desk phone and a printer that had to be from the 1990s. It was huge and took forever to print.
