Page 28 of Home of the Brave

“Hold on.” I hurried away from here to where I’d spotted several waiting by the elevators and came back, pulling one behind me.

“You’re a saint.” She and I loaded up, and I showed her to the desk to check in before taking her up to her room. Once we unloaded her luggage, she kicked off her black boots and plopped onto the bed, and I dropped onto the chair in the corner.

“Can you fill me in on what’s going on?”

She turned her head to face me. “What do you mean?”

“All Chris told me was to be in the lobby at eight.”

She pushed up onto her elbows. “Excuse me?”

I nodded while she pulled her phone from her back pocket.

“You weren’t added to the email.” She frowned. “That was quite the oversight.” She tossed it to the side. “Basically, the big bosses heard about the women’s teams getting more attention and wanted to capitalize on that. Chris did actually refer you, told them about your expertise and experience, but they wanted someone with their own notoriety, as if women watching care about Joe Banks.”

“Chris recommended me?” That made me feel slightly less full of rage. Toward him.

“Yeah, said you were the best person for the job, but obviously they ignored him because that’s what they do.” She let out a sigh, “Anyway, they called me and told me to get on the next plane here since they were taking Miles from you.”

“Where were you?”

“Atlanta for the World Cup.”

I cringed. “Sorry, that’s pretty cool.”

She waved me off. “It’s okay. The humidity was killing me—at least I can be mostly indoors here.”

“Who’s replacing you?”

“No one. There were plenty of camera people already there.”

“It’s a busy summer.”

“Insane,” she agreed. “So, where are you at?”

I caught her up on what Miles and I had been doing for the past few days and our plan for content. “But Joe said they’re loving the silly content.”

She made a face. “Ew, so we’re not doing that anymore.”

“Agreed. If they want clickbait, they can send out someone from the social media team.” That wasn’t actually a decision I could make, but it felt good to try to take back some semblance of control.

“Exactly,” she leaned back, “but until then we have to do the silly stuff, huh?”

“Yeah,” I slouched in the chair. “Unless I come up with something else to make people care about the athletes.”

“It’s not even that. It’s finding a way to get people to sit and watch a video for longer than half a second. The journalism and photography don’t matter as long as the editing is good.”

I loathed that this was what our industry had come to.

She rolled over to face me, propping her head up with her hand. “What do you remember most from the past few Olympics?"

“Being in Italy?” I wasn’t sure where she was going with this.

“Okay, bad example because you were there, but I mean from people talking about it, specifically online. What moments stand out?”

“The men’s and women's teams winning.”

She nodded. “That was big. What else?”