Fritz came in as I was finishing my orange juice and tossed me his phone.
“Your phone is off, so Frank called me instead. Here.”
I fielded the phone in midair and held it to my ear.
“What’s the good word?” I asked Frank.
“We kept working overnight because having a coherent response is critical right now. The goal is for reporters to be lazy and just use what we give them. To that end, we’ve put together one-minute, three-minute, and ten-minute all-point rebuttal clips. We’ve also just finished a half-hour infomercial reply we’re putting on your web page. There’s also a roadmap of every point where they edited their material to change your answers.
“Ms. Dixon’s reviewed what we created and is fully on board with everything,” he assured me.
“The coverage was mixed at the start. But as more time has gone by, more and more of the outlets are going with the story we want to tell. That’s the story of a teenager who was targeted by two unscrupulous women with an agenda.
“When the videographer’s mug shot first appeared on the news last night, I was pretty confident the reactions were going to trend our way. Then when the clip of the women talking by the car was aired, I knew we’d turned a corner and things were looking up. A mug shot and a ‘gotcha’ moment is too much for the media to resist. And as soon as one network showed it, the rest of them almost had to go along, or they’d look like fools.
“If the trend continues, the damage will be minimal, and you may come out of this with a higher Q-Rating,” Frank said.
I felt too guarded to breathe a sigh of relief, although I wanted to.
“How’s my social media trending?”
“They’ve blown up. The best part is, we’re tracking the number of hits on the materials we put up yesterday evening, and you already had a ton of downloads of our videos. Like I said, you took some heat early on, but now it’s all looking pretty damn good,” he explained.
“What’s to stop the outlets from taking our video and doing the same hack the two women did?” I asked.
“None of the mainstream outlets have done that, although a couple of hanger-on sensation rags have. It looks like you might actually survive this one,” he said, which was good news, as far as I was concerned.
I felt like I could breathe again.
“All of this makes me feel better.”
“Something that helped was the two clocks. We could do split screens of their footage and ours to show that the footage was from the same interview. But we could also highlight the time differences between the times a question was asked and the times when you said something.
“Your varied responses sealed the deal. It made it easier for us to highlight precisely when you gave an answer, and where they’d edited the video to change your response. It was absolutely clear their editing was a hack-job.
“That’s the main reason we put the raw footage out there. That, along with the edited versions we made to highlight what those two were doing,” Frank reminded me.
I wasn’t sure if he was ever going to take a breath or let me get a word in edgewise.
“What should I do today?” I asked.
“Just keep doing what you did last night. If you stick to the program and everything continues the way it’s going, this should be done by Monday—except for media follow-up, which I’ll handle.
“Tell them that what you actually said, including unedited videos of the full interview, is on your website. Then just shut up and go about your business.”
◊◊◊
As soon as I turned my phone on, it started ringing. I put it on silent and checked messages. I deleted all but the ones from my friends and listened to those. Then I started making calls. The first one was to Pam.
“Oh. My. God!” she started.
She was about to launch into full girl-babble mode, and I didn’t really have time for it.
“Stop!” I commanded.
Unbelievably, she stopped! Hmmm, gotta figure out how I did that.
“David,” she said hesitantly, “can I please tell you some things? They’re important.”
I sighed. This was my baby-mama, after all.
“Sure, Pam, go ahead.”
“I’ve talked to Tracy, Zoe, Brook, and a bunch of others, both guys and girls. We’ve been going through the material on your website, and we want you to know we support you. If you need anything, anything at all, let us know.”
I had to smile. It was good to have friends you could count on to support you. Right now, it made a world of difference in how I felt.
“Just tell them all to be careful. It wouldn’t be good to pour gas on the fire. The wrong thing said right now could be bad,” I warned her.
“Yes, David. We love you too.”
I ended that call and returned others. It seemed that everyone had questions. Frankly, I did too.
Their responses were the same, too: mingled amounts of shock, disbelief, and anger, along with offers of support. My friends had my back.
When I got home, I said the same to all the reporters that hadn’t left: go to the website. All the information was there.
I was glad when they packed up once they saw I wasn’t going to comment further. I’m sure the local police and neighbors had to be happy.
The only other development today was that reporters started asking my friends in the business about it. The good news was they were, in fact, my friends. Adrienne’s response when she was approached on the street said it all.
“David A. Dawson is a friend, and I only keep good people as friends. I’ve gotten to know him well, both personally and professionally, and I will tell you point-blank he’s pretty much the opposite of the way he was portrayed.
“I’m all for women’s rights and in favor of equality for women. But when individuals try to promote those based on falsehoods, or at the expense of innocents, that’s where I draw the line. What those two women tried to do to David is just plain wrong!”
It was best to let it die down and to chalk it up as another hard lesson in social dynamics. I didn’t want a ‘been there, done that’ t-shirt for this moment, either. I vowed to never make this mistake again.
◊◊◊
So, the day started out better than I’d expected, but I had other, more important stuff to do. Now at least I could do it with some semblance of a real smile!
Today, they would hold graduation in the Field House. I was going to see Jim, Mona, Kim, and Sammie all graduate. Tracy would have been with them, but she’d missed a semester and would graduate in December instead. I’d hinted it was okay that she was slow. That earned me a poke in the ribs and an admonishment to be good.
Mother Nature had given us a gorgeous day. It was supposed to get up to 78 today, and there was just a slight breeze. As I drove down the street, I think every lilac bush was in full bloom. I loved the scent of the flowers. When you saw the lilac bushes come to life, it was like seeing the first robin. You knew that the grip of winter was over.
I was halfway to the door when two girls waylaid me.
“Miss us?” Beth Anderson asked me.
The other girl was Suzanne Ball, Jim’s sister. I hugged them both.
“Of course I missed you two. I hoped I would see you today,” I admitted.
“Come on, my parents saved us seats,” Suzanne said.
Each one grabbed an arm as if they were afraid I would disappear on them and guided me to where Jim and Suzanne’s family was seated.
As I watched the seniors graduate, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was happy for them. You couldn’t help but see their excitement for moving on to the next step in their lives. On the other hand, I would miss them. Most were off to college. I almost wished I were going with Jim to Alabama this summer.
But only almost. I guess I realized I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I’d watched my other friends and my brother all move on. Greg said in many ways, college was the most exciting time of his life. His experience was a little different from most students because of his family. He said that he loved the campus atmosphere and learning things that he would use for the rest of his life.