Melody's Muse ✓

3. Arts and culture

Cole

I walk into the meeting room and the whole team is already sitting at the long wooden table. "You're late again Cole," Michael, our editor in chief, groans and shakes his head. He's standing at the front by the whiteboard, already covered with his messy handwriting.

I've been a writer for the university's bimonthly newspaper, The Green and Gold for over a year now. It was freshman year on orientation day, and all of the clubs had set up booths to attract new members. I headed straight for their booth to join, and the rest is history. This year, the university gave us this dingy old office in the basement of one of the libraries to use as our HQ. The Wi-Fi is spotty, the heater stops working every couple of weeks, and it's so tiny that we have to go upstairs to use the library's meeting rooms for our meetings.   

Good to know how appreciated we are.

"Sorry Michael, my class was on the other side of campus." I quickly sit down at the table. My shoes kept sinking into the snow, and I nearly slipped and fell a few times on patches of ice too. I don't bother adding that, Michael doesn't have a sympathy bone in his lanky body.

Michael took over as editor in chief this year. He's a huge pain in the ass sometimes, but I'll begrudgingly admit he knows what he's doing. We didn't even have an office last year. Supplies had to be divided up and kept in our houses. It took him weeks of relentless arguing back and forth with U of M's administration staff over the summer to secure the office space and funding we needed.

"Anyways, since you're late, there's only one section left for the upcoming issue." He uses a marker to point to the only section title without someone's name written underneath.

Arts and Culture

Dread sinks into my stomach. "Aw come on," I groan and lean back in my chair. It's my least favourite section to write for. "Francine, could we trade?" She's assigned to sports for this issue. Everyone knows I'm the best at that.

"No way." She shakes her head and her brown curls bounce animatedly. "I get to report on the football team's game," she giggles with a dreamy look in her wide brown eyes. Typical.

I quickly skim over the other names on the whiteboard. "Raymond? Want to trade?" We're relatively close, the two of us are usually willing to help each other out. He's doing the advice column this time.

He looks at me apologetically and shakes his head. "No offense Cole, but you're not the most, err... compassionate or sensitive person out there. Remember what happened the last time you did the advice column?"

Everyone nods in agreement. 

"Rude." I scowl at them. 

It was last year. I had done the final edits for that issue alone, so no one had seen my part before it was published. I might've caused a tiny controversy with my response to someone asking for advice about their boyfriend cheating on them. It spread like wildfire on social media, and we got in quite a bit of trouble.

We started reviewing articles as a team after that.

"You're writing the article, Flynn." Michael uses his I-don't-care-what-you-want tone. He probably speaks with that tone more often than not.

"I don't even know what to write about," I grumble, slumping even lower in my chair. The last time I was assigned arts and culture, I interviewed an art student and wrote an entire article on paint drying. The paint was probably more interesting than they were.

Michael chuckles as he writes my name on the board. "There's supposedly a famous musician secretly rehearsing on campus, my girlfriend says they're cousins."