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"Oh, I don't chase storms."
The smile on her interviewer's face was blank and unsettling—his eyes glistening with that reflection of uncertainty and confusion that was so often the response to Caroline Sullivan explaining what she does for a living. Especially now, she couldn't say she blamed the interviewer. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty—obviously an intern journalist trying to get his big break by interviewing the closest thing to a "storm chaser" he could get his hands on.
The young interviewer sat, blinking, his pen poised midair. He wrote nothing. "Uh.." he said smartly, still smiling that blank grin. "Right. Yeah. You don't chase storms. So you're not... a storm chaser...?"
A thousand thoughts of disbelief and unprofessionalism coursing through her mind, Caroline blinked too, her painted lips not wavering from their own smile as she formulated the best possible response to such an idiotic question.
"No," she said, shaking her head in reply, cursing every course of nature that brought her to be sitting in Interview Room C across from a secondary news station journalist who didn't know his right hand from his left. "No, I'm an environmental analyst. My team and I follow where storms hit so we can track the short- and long-term effects they have on atmospheric conditions in surrounding areas."
Yeah; she'd had a feeling this poor kid would have been lost in the process, and she wasn't surprised to establish her hypothesis as correct. His smile had melted from his face by the time Caroline finished. He cleared his throat, looking down at his notes, searching for anything to save his ass. He clearly did not find what he needed. He picked his head back up.
"So.." He wiped his nose awkwardly. "So, uh—you do chase storms, you're just not a storm... chaser."
Caroline raised her eyebrows, her smile unwavering despite every natural instinct in her body fighting it. She took a long moment of thought before replying.
"I, uh—yeah, I guess you could say that," she ceded with a nod. She offered her interviewer—whose name she couldn't even pretend to remember—a tight-lipped smile. "You know, I actually forgot; I have a meeting coming up real soon—"
"Oh, there it was!"
She didn't even try to smile. "Sorry, what?"
The interviewer was grinning, waving the end of his pen at her like he'd caught her red-handed—but doing what, she wasn't sure. He exhaled an awkward laugh, leaning further back in his seat.
"Your accent," he elaborated, clearly overjoyed with the thought that he finally had something to write about. "I just heard it. 'Ah've got uh meetin' comin' up reayl soon—'"
Caroline pinched the bridge of her nose. She waved Riley—the media girl—into her interview room, then stood and left the damage control to be handled by the person who had actually gone to school for such a thing.
