"Do you have a favorite crime?"
The girl sitting beside me in the spacious reception area asks the question so brightly, with such a wide smile, that I'm positive I must have misheard her. "A favorite what?" I ask.
"Crime," she says, still smiling.
Okay. Did not mishear. "In general, or—" I start cautiously.
"From the show," she says, a note of impatience creeping into her voice. Which is fair. I should have known what she meant, considering we're sitting in the middle of temporary office space for Motive.
I try to recover. "Oh, yeah, of course. Hard to pick. They're all so.." What's the right word here? "Compelling."
"I'm obsessed with the Story case," she says, and bam—she's off. I’m impressed by all the rich detail she remembers from a show that aired more than a year ago. She’s obviously a Motive expert, whereas I’m a more recent convert to the true-crime arm of journalism.
Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting to land an interview for this internship. My application was . . . unconventional, to say the least.
Desperate times and all that.
Less than two months ago, in October of my senior year, my life was fully on track. I was living in Chicago, editor in chief of the school paper, applying early decision to my dream school, Northwestern. Two of my best friends planned on staying local too, so we were already dreaming about getting an apartment together. And then: one disaster after the other. I was fired from the paper, wait-listed at Northwestern, and informed by my parents that Dad’s job was transferring him back to company headquarters.
Which meant returning to my hometown of Sturgis, Massachusetts, and moving into the house my parents had been renting to my uncle Nick since we’d left. “It’ll be a fresh start,” Mom said, conveniently forgetting the part where I’d been desperate to leave four years ago.
Since then, I’ve been scrambling to find some kind of internship that might make Northwestern take a second look at me. My first half dozen rejections were all short, impersonal form letters. Nobody had the guts to say what they were really thinking: Dear Ms. Gallagher, since your most-viewed article as editor of the school paper was a compilation of dick pics, you are not suitable for this position.
To be clear, I neither took nor posted the dick pics. I’m just the loser who left the newspaper office door unlocked and forgot to log out of the main laptop. It doesn’t really matter, though, because my name was in the byline that got screenshotted a thousand times and eventually ended up on BuzzFeed with the headline WINDY CITY SCHOOL SCANDAL: PRANK OR PORNOGRAPHY?
Both, obviously. After the seventh polite rejection, it occurred to me that when something like that is your number one result in a Google search, there’s no point trying to hide it. So when I applied to Motive, I took a different tack.
The girl beside me is still talking, wrapping up an impressively in-depth analysis of the Story family saga. “Where do you go to school?” she asks. She’s wearing a cute moto jacket over a graphic T-shirt and black jeans, and it comforts me that we’re dressed somewhat alike. “I’m a sophomore at Emerson. Majoring in media arts with a minor in journalism, but I’m thinking about flipping those.”
“I’m still in high school,” I say.
“Really?” Her eyes pop. “Wow, I didn’t realize this internship was even open to high school students.”
“I was surprised too,” I say.
Motive wasn’t on the list of internships I’d compiled with my former guidance counselor’s help; my fourteen-year-old sister, Ellie, and I came across it when we were combing through Boston.com. Until we did a Google search on Motive, I hadn’t realized that the show’s host, Carly Diaz, had temporarily relocated from New York to Boston last summer to be near a sick parent. Motive isn’t a household name, exactly, but it’s a buzzy, upstart true-crime show. Right now the show only airs on a small cable station, but there are rumors that it might get picked up by one of the big streamers soon.