Page 14 of Weather Girl

What I needed to do was simple: prevent what happened with my parents. None of my exes had Garrison’s problem. They seemed perfectly content not knowing everything. They loved how upbeat, how positive I was, how I let them get out their anger while never airing any of mine. I was the cool girl, the easygoing girl, and I loved her. If I was upset about something, I journaled or rage-texted Alex. If they forgot an anniversary, I bought myself flowers. I was—am—bright sides and silver linings, and it’s always worked for me before.

If I insisted on being difficult, if I let any of the darkness out—well, then I’d end up like my mother.

“You can’t be sunshine all the time, Ari,” Garrison said during that fight, when his inflatable tube man costume had lost all its humor and lay flattened on a couch cushion. He didn’t understand. I lived in two realities, and he could only be in one of them with me. If I’ve learned anything from my mother, it’s that sunshine is the only way to make someone stay. “No one can.”

Funny, really, since I don’t like sunshine at all.

Determined to get myself back on schedule, I go to a yoga class and the farmers market, keeping myself busy by cooking an elaborate, too-expensive meal for one person. At the very least, I’ve discovered one great thing about living alone: I don’t have to hide from anyone.

By Sunday afternoon, my goal is to tire myself out so I can get to sleep as close to my regular bedtime of eight-thirty as possible. I ride for an hour on the cheap exercise bike I nearly broke my back hauling up the stairs. Then I hunch over my kitchen table, bending wire and stringing beads for a pair of chandelier earrings. It’s soothing, losing myself in this work for a couple hours. Once I’ve finished them, I light candles around my apartment, pull up some of my favorite videos in an incognito browser, and give myself two orgasms before my vibrator runs out of batteries and I can’t find any new ones, even after I turn my apartment upside-down and open every device. Apparently, nothing else uses triple–A.

Except when I crawl into bed, knowing I have to be up in six hours, I can’t sleep. Back when I was training my body for this, the more anxious I’d get about needing to go to sleep, the tougher it would be to fall asleep. I wasn’t lying to Russell—I really do love mornings, but I love them a little less when it’s nine o’clock, ten o’clock, ten thirty, and I have to be up in three and a half hours.

Eventually, I grab my laptop, pay $3.99 to rent an HD version of The Parent Trap, and drift off right around the time the British Lindsay Lohan flies to Napa Valley to meet Dennis Quaid for the first time.

•••

MY ALARM GOES off at 2:30 and again at 2:40 and finally at 2:47, I force myself out of bed, force myself to be content with the couple hours of sleep I got, even if remembering the Emmy incident makes me want to hibernate for the rest of winter.

I throw my makeup into a bag and stumble out to my car, bleary-eyed. Sometimes I do my makeup at home and sometimes at work and sometimes while stopped at traffic lights, and today is a traffic light kind of day. I picked one of my favorite dresses to combat my exhaustion, a three-quarter-sleeve mulberry sheath paired with brown suede calf boots. I have five of this dress because the camera prefers rich colors and solids. No green, or I’d disappear into the weather map. Patterns can wobble and shake, which is bad news for the frightening amount of weather-themed clothing I’ve accumulated over the years.

I was never fully prepared for viewer comments about my clothes. It was shocking at first, people not just judging my appearance but outright rating my hotness. They usually score me the lowest when I wear pants. I hate that I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s a hazard of the job. My first couple years working full-time, I thought about what kinds of comments I’d get when I got dressed, but I haven’t since I started working in Seattle. If the trolls want to waste energy talking about it, that’s their choice. And it’s our choice to hit delete. There probably isn’t a piece of clothing I could wear that wouldn’t draw either scrutiny or a string of fire and/or eggplant emojis. It’s not worth it to dress for anyone but myself and, more importantly, the map.

After I drop my bag off at my desk, I make my way to the weather center, a cluster of computers in the studio we use mainly for forecasting, though sometimes we shoot in there, too. I check all my usual models and data, starting with the National Weather Service and the University of Washington, taking notes and crunching numbers before putting my own daily and seven-day forecasts together on one of our forecast sheets. This worksheet might seem basic, but it’s how meteorologists have been doing this job for years, and many of us still do it by hand. After I finish, I’ll start building the graphics viewers will see during the broadcast.

I yelp when I feel a hand on the back of my chair.

“Sorry,” Torrance says, and prior to Friday, I wouldn’t have been sure I’d ever heard her utter that word. “Can I talk to you?”

I set down my pen in the middle of a Wednesday sunbreak and turn in my chair to face her. “Of course.” This is far too early for her to be at the station. Something’s up.

The coffee I drank too fast churns in my stomach. There’s no way she could have overheard Russell and me. And yet there we were, so openly shitting on our bosses in a semipublic place. It’s not impossible that it got back to her.

She slides into the chair next to me, looking a little softer than usual in jeans and a white sweater. No camera makeup, just a touch of eye shadow and mascara. “I was hoping to catch you without too many people here,” she says. “I wanted to personally apologize for what happened on Friday. Sober, this time. What we did—what I did—was unacceptable, and at a party, no less.”

Torrance Hale is apologizing to me. Again.

It’s almost as out of character as this meme of her that went viral before I started at KSEA. She was covering a heat wave and getting some man-on-the-street footage at Hempfest, Seattle’s annual marijuana festival, when a guy offered her a joint on camera. She declined it with a laugh and a “maybe later,” and I’ve never known whether she meant it or whether she was joking. Regardless, the internet turned it into a GIF that still makes me double-take whenever I see it. Some people swear they can see her winking as she responds, while others have argued that it’s just a blink.

“Oh... okay?” I manage, my thumb brushing the lightning bolt at the base of my throat.

Torrance straightens some papers, and I wonder if she’s thinking about what Seth said about the weather center being a disaster zone. “Seth and I shouldn’t have dragged you into it, with that game. We were acting immature. It was personal, and we should have stopped ourselves before we went that far. I absolutely should have stopped myself before what happened with the Emmy.”

I want to tell Torrance that it wasn’t just what happened at the party. It’s been a hundred different things—this is just the one with the most visible wreckage.

“I—I appreciate that.” In spite of everything, my optimism takes over. I want to believe her. And maybe this makes me naive, but part of me does. I believe the Torrance who was on my TV as a kid, who was there for me when my mother was sunk in her own deep depression.

I’m just not sure how much of that Torrance is the one sitting next to me right now.

She grins like she’s about to tell several thousand viewers that there’s no rush-hour traffic today. “Let me take you out to lunch today to make it up to you? You pick the place.”

A lunch invitation, like maybe it really is that easy for the two of us to be something more than employee and distracted boss. Like maybe there’s more of my childhood idol in her than I thought.

“You really don’t have to,” I say.

“I insist.” Torrance cups my shoulder with one hand, gives me that upper-seventies smile again. “Thanks, Ari. I look forward to it.”

I glow the rest of the morning, the conversation waking me up more than any amount of caffeine. My first forecast, I’m all smiles, despite my three hours of sleep. I’m half tempted to edit emojis into my cloud graphics. Maybe Torrance and I will talk about Halestorm, about the bigger stories I want to be doing. Maybe I’ll bring up my annual eval, and while I won’t say how disappointed I was last year when she simply said “You’re doing great, Abrams” and gave me the union-mandated 1.5 percent raise, I’ll make sure she knows how eager I am to learn. To improve.

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