Page 3 of Weather Girl

I do my best to temper my sigh so it doesn’t sound as long-suffering as I feel. “Isn’t it always?”

We’re about to get up when a thirtysomething guy with a soaked umbrella stops in front of our table and stares right at me. “I know you,” he says, wagging a finger at me as rain drips onto the linoleum.

“Oh, from the news?” I say. It happens on occasion, strangers recognizing me but for the life of them unable to figure out why. Usually they’re disappointed I’m not my boss, and honestly, I’d feel the same way.

He shakes his head. “Are you friends with Mandy?”

“I am not.”

My brother waves an arm out the window at the billboard. “Channel six. She does the weather.”

“I don’t really watch TV,” he says with a shrug. “Sorry. I must have been thinking of someone else.”

Alex is shaking with silent laughter. I elbow him as we head to sort our trash into its proper bins.

“I’m so glad my pain is hilarious to you.”

“Gotta keep you humble somehow.” Before we leave, Alex waits in line to grab a few dozen donuts for his fourth-grade class. “Guilt donuts,” he explains. “It’s state testing week.”

“It’s a wonder some of us make it out of school with only minor psychological wounds.”

He gives me a half smile that doesn’t quite touch his eyes, and then he lowers his voice. “You’ll text me if you’re feeling down or anything this week, right?”

It’s so easy to joke around with him that sometimes I forget I can do more than that. “I will.” I glance down at the time and tap my phone. “If you can get me to the dressing room in twenty minutes, I’ll make Nutella rugelach for Hanukkah next weekend.”

“On it,” he says, reaching for his keys while I balance his boxes of donuts. “You could really use that extra time.”

“Hey, I am very fragile right now!”

With his chin, he gestures outside one more time. “Fine, fine. You look just as good as your billboard.”

2

FORECAST:

Showers of shredded paper moving in this afternoon

WHEN I WAS little, I wanted to grow up to be Torrance Hale.

I watched her every night on the evening news, mesmerized by her smooth confidence and the way her face lit up when sun was in the forecast. The way she looked at the camera, looked right at me, one corner of her mouth hitched in a quarter-smile as she joked with the anchors—there was something electric about her.

As a baby science nerd, I’d been fascinated by the weather since an April blizzard shut down the city for two weeks when I was in kindergarten. Of course, I’d later learn that this was not normal and in fact a very scary thing, but back then, I wanted to experience as many weather phenomena as I could. Living in Seattle made that tricky, given how mild it is year-round. Still, I saw enough to keep me curious: record-breaking summer heat, a lunar eclipse, a rare tornado that touched down in Port Orchard when my family was on vacation.

Torrance made science, made weather seem like it could be glamorous. I didn’t have to be stuck in a lab, poring over data and writing reports. I could tell stories with the weather. I could help people understand, even help protect them, when Mother Nature grew brutal.

My mother was unreliable, her dark moods sometimes turning her into a stranger, but Torrance never was. She was a source of comfort and calm, always exactly where she was supposed to be: in front of the green screen at four o’clock and then again at twelve-minute intervals. Friday nights, she hosted a half-hour show called Halestorm that focused on in-depth climate trends, and I’m not ashamed of the party invites I turned down so I could watch it live. I even bleached my red hair blond in eighth grade to look more like her, nearly burning off my scalp in the process.

Even when my own moods dimmed in a way that sometimes matched my mom’s, the earliest symptoms of the depression I wouldn’t get diagnosed until college, my love never wavered.

A couple years later, after all my red had blessedly grown back out, I won a high school journalism award for a story about the life cycle of a solar panel, and Torrance herself presented it to me at the banquet. I was sure I’d faint—I kept pinching the inside of my wrist to make sure I stayed conscious. When she whispered in my ear how much she’d loved the story, there was zero doubt in my mind: I was going to become a meteorologist.

The reality is that working for Torrance Hale is a very different kind of Halestorm.

“Have you seen this?” Torrance slaps a piece of paper on my desk, her ivory-painted nails trembling with the indignity of it. “It’s unacceptable, right? I’m not losing my mind?”

After three years at KSEA, I’m still intimidated by Torrance, especially when she’s in full makeup—the kind that looks natural on camera but creepy when you’re two feet away from someone’s over-blushed, over-eyeshadowed face. As always, her mouth is slicked with her signature lipstick, a shade of cherry red that costs $56 per tube. I used to beg my mother for it every year for my birthday, with no luck. When I finally bought it as an adult, I realized it was garbage with my complexion. Such is life as a pale redhead: keep us out of the sun and away from half the color wheel.

I unzip my jacket and hang it on my cubicle hook. Although technically, we’re not supposed to call them cubicles. During orientation, HR stressed to me that this was a “low-partition office,” which is... basically cubicles, but the walls aren’t as high. It was a recent redesign; the staff had been unhappy with cubicles, and an expert had come in and made all these changes designed to increase productivity. I’m not sure if it increased productivity, but it definitely increased people talking about how it’s supposed to increase productivity.

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