“Then you went to USC,” says the girl from Vice.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t go into television?”

“No.”

“And from USC you went to Seattle.”

“Right.”

“That seems strange,” she says. “Most people would stay in LA, try to break into the local market.”

“I wasn’t proud of being from Los Angeles,” I say, unable to avoid the correction—I hate when people say LA. “I think I internalized other people’s stereotypes of my city—a criminal wasteland beneath that rosy haze of death. It seemed cooler to hate it there. But now, when I think back on my childhood, all I remember are wildflowers and succulents. I think you could rip a piece off those plants and heal any sort of wound.”

I catch her glancing again at the bandage on my wrist.

The girl starts removing printouts of my old articles from her bag, some all the way back to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. My tongue goes cold.

“I adore these pieces,” she says. “Even in this early work, I see traces of your future style.”

When I pick up one of the pages, I notice my thumbnail against the white of the paper. Blood still stains the underside. I’ll have to hack the nail down to pick it out.

“There’s something I want to say,” I don’t say. “I made this story up.”

My professor at USC had sent me off to Seattle with that warning about having to work hard to vault from the internship to a permanent position. As my contract progressed, I realized she was right. No one was paying attention, let alone advocating to hire me. I’d resisted the creep all year, but the work only came out okay, nothing special, nothing that mattered.

So gradually, I began backsliding on my promise. While I don’t count myself among the worst journalistic fabricators, like Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair, I allowed the creep to finesse the edges, correct the fine connective tissues, and give the stories an artfulness real life never had. Sometimes a character had to be invented, but it was always a composite character, a merging of true elements in a more perfect vessel, and that’s as far as it went.