Sources Say

by Lori Goldstein

  And Angeline being Angeline meant he no longer was.

  Leo met Cat’s eye, and she smiled weakly at seeing his left shoulder cradled in a sling, hoping he wasn’t hovering on the fringes of the parking lot just to get a glimpse of his ex, especially after what she’d done to him.

  It was their breakup that had made her sister more antagonistic than usual. At least, Cat suspected as much. She and Angeline didn’t talk about that stuff. Angeline had her friends. And Cat, well, Cat didn’t need to talk about that stuff because Cat never had time for that stuff. School and homework and studying for the SATs took Cat double the time it took Angeline. Leo ending things with Angeline was the first time in her sister’s life that things hadn’t gone her way.

  Cat hit the path that wound around the side and to the front entrance of the school. Most everyone else opted for the shortcut across the lawn, under the WELCOME BACK, ACEDIA! marquee and past the concrete island with the statue of town founder Major Mushing that attracted the pigeons and doves and feathery beasts that kept Cat far away. Her classmates’ heavy, shuffling feet would grind down the pristine blades, leaving nothing but a muddy trail come October, same as every year.

  2

  When Angeline Is Here for It

  30 DAYS TO THE ELECTION

  It was the same as every year, except in the ways it wasn’t.

  The one colossal way.

  Angeline’s heart clenched as her eyes settled on the bright green of that mangy old sweatshirt that smelled like seaweed and sunshine even direct from the wash. She strained to meet Leo’s gaze across the parking lot, to see if he’d been looking for her—waiting for her—but he dropped his Ray-Bans over his eyes and fell in step beside his little brother, Sammy, a shorter, skinnier version of Leo, wearing his own favorite article of clothing: a red plaid shirt perpetually tied around his waist.

  The idea that Sammy was starting his freshman year seemed as ridiculous as Angeline starting her senior year without Leo.

  She’d known Sammy since he was eleven. Eleven. They’d devour Mr. Torres’s homemade arepas—corn cakes stuffed with whatever they had in the fridge: queso blanco or deviled ham or eggs or even just plain butter. Delicious no matter the filling. Then she’d sit on the couch next to Leo, pinkies entwined, pretending to do homework and providing cover so Sammy could sneak clips of Saturday Night Live, which his parents had said he was too young for.

  And now Leo was escorting Sammy through the front door of high school.

  She should have been beside him. Them.

  Angeline hugged her tote tight to her chest and forced air back into her lungs.

  “Good summer, Angeline?” said a girl she didn’t recognize.

  “Loved the last vid,” said the girl’s friend, whose strappy sandals cost as much as a smartphone. Angeline knew because she’d been trying to land a promo gig with the brand all summer.

  Angeline donned her Ask an Angel smile and shifted to showcase her better side. “First day. Embrace it and don’t forget, flut—”

  “Flutter your wings!” the girls cried in unison.

  Her signature phrase.

  The one she ended every video with, the one that brought out the corny she loved in Leo, who’d flap his arms like a seagull on speed when she said it in front of him.

  In front of him now in her place was Tad Marcus, singlehandedly the offensive line for the football team, who strutted up to Leo and high-fived his good hand—the one not in a sling. Guilt and remorse rose inside her like bubbles in a shaken bottle of seltzer, and she fought to shut it down, blinking away the burning behind her eyes. Before anyone saw. Before anyone videoed Ask an Angel losing it in the Acedia parking lot.

  She moved slowly, giving Leo time to enter the school and put distance between them. But Tad, whose white skin had gained a layer of freckles thanks to the summer sun, stood before him, gesturing wildly. Probably telling a joke she was the butt of or that her butt was in. Knowing Tad, probably both.

  Tad was the king of “tics”: narcissistic, misogynistic, and anticlimactic (at least according to Riley’s intel from Tad’s girlfriend, Tamara). He towered over the Torres brothers, and when his voice rose as if coming to a punch line, he slapped Sammy squarely between the shoulder blades, knocking him forward about a foot. Leo’s dimple disappeared along with his smile as he set a hand on Sammy’s forearm and gave a quick squeeze that Angeline swore she could almost feel.

  The group was blocking the doorway, and Leo stepped back to allow others to pass, including Emmie Hayes, shoo-in for valedictorian, lover of causes and fundraisers, and student council something or other. Her strawberry-blonde hair skimmed her shoulders with each purposeful step of her no-nonsense flats. She’d paired them with a wrinkle-free, short-sleeved blouse and straight-legged trousers (on point only for working an afternoon catering job at the yacht club).

  Right before Emmie reached the door, Leo pressed his hand against it, opening it, just like he’d done for Angeline a thousand times. Car, house, school, movie theater. Riley said she wasn’t supposed to let him. Feminism and all. But Angeline saw it less as him thinking she was weak and more that he wanted a way to show everyone, not just her, how much he cared.

  Emmie gave Leo a curt nod as she entered the school.

  Tad pursed his lips and tilted his head to check her out from behind. He shoved a thumbs-up in Sammy’s face, and Emmie whipped her head around just as Leo clamped his fingers over Tad’s, pushing them down so she wouldn’t see.

  Typical.

  Angeline had never liked him. But Leo being Leo meant he gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. Even Tad Marcus.

  Which said a lot.

  Which said everything.

  About what Angeline had done.

  Too much for even Leo to forgive.

  Angeline nervously spun the silver claddagh band on her right hand. A traditional Irish ring, it had belonged to her grandmother. Angeline liked to think the two hands winding around weren’t just holding the heart topped with a crown, but were her grandmother’s hands also holding her. The symbols represented love, loyalty, and friendship, and the ring was a centuries-old way of defining one’s relationship status. Married women wore it on their left hand, unmarried on their right. And the unmarried had a choice: the point of the heart facing toward the hand meant the wearer’s heart was taken and she was in a relationship, away, the opposite. Angeline slipped off the ring and reversed direction, returning it to her finger with the tip turned out.

  She swallowed hard and aimed for the side door.

  As her open-toed bootie (see the official Ask an Angel review in my “Boot Up!” video) landed on the sidewalk, a beanpole of a kid with ghostly white skin barreled into her. He lifted his head of dark curls from the phone it had been buried in.

  “And that’s news to you” spilled from the speaker—the catchphrase from one of the local Boston news stations that made Cat’s eyeballs roll so far back in her head, she risked losing them.

  “Sorry,” said the obvious freshman with an unfortunate first-day-of-school pimple on the end of his nose. “Cousin.” He held up his phone.

  “Your aunt, the tablet, must be so proud,” Maxine Chen deadpanned in that strong, dry tone Angeline knew as well as her own.

  The kid cocked his head, studied Angeline, and his eyes widened behind his gigantic, black-framed glasses. “Aren’t you—”

  “Flutter your wings!” Maxine motioned him along with a twiddle of her fingers.

  He frowned, and Angeline gave a weak smile before he walked away.

  “I do have an image to keep up,” Angeline said.

  “Not for a freshman.”

  “For everyone. I’m everyone’s best friend, sister, and girlfriend all rolled into one.”

  “Definitely the first two for me. For the third . . .” She tapped the ocean wave pendant on her necklace and ges
tured toward Tad Marcus and his girlfriend across the front lawn. “She’s more my type.”

  “Of course she is,” Angeline said. “She’s an ‘a.’”

  “An ‘a’?”

  “Tamara,” Angeline said. “Lana, Zoya, Pamela . . . you do realize you only date girls whose names end in an ‘a’?”

  “Huh.” Maxine’s forehead creased, and she ran her tongue across the “oh-so-berry” gloss on her lips—an Ask an Angel favorite. Maxine was Chinese American, third-generation, and she had her dad’s wide smile and her mom’s smooth black hair, whose ends she dyed a different color every three months. She’d traded in the summer pink that matched the stripes on her surfboard for a bright electric blue. “We’ve both got a thing for vowels, then? Since you’ve only dated boys with names ending in ‘o.’ Well, boy, singular.” Angeline winced, and Maxine quickly switched gears. “How about we both shake things up this year? Now that the administration’s finally stamped yes on my Girl Coders Club, maybe we’ll develop an Acedia dating app?”

  Under the marquee, Tad hugged Tamara while simultaneously checking out a pair of freshman girls nervously shuffling to the entrance. Tamara had light brown skin and short, dark hair that let all the focus be on the petite features of her face. Too pretty, too nice, too everything for Tad.

  “Or maybe we concentrate on us,” Maxine said. “And make our every day epic.”

  “Here for that.” Angeline tucked her arm through Maxine’s and headed into school for the first day of senior year. “Bring it.”

  3

  When Cat Comes Down with Election Fever

  30 DAYS TO THE ELECTION

  Cat flicked on the lights of the supply closet turned newsroom.

  Poorly ventilated with not a single window to let the outside in, the room could double as a sauna. The stale air invited dust mites to take up residence. They clogged the keyboards and coated the monitors with a haze of dirt. Just inside the door, someone had left a used plunger and a chewed-up broom, which she hoped weren’t used for the same purpose.

  Still, instantly, Cat’s mind calmed. Her sister was wrong. The newsroom wasn’t her second home. It was home. The place she dreamed of escaping to when her actual one brimmed with so much Angeline, she couldn’t breathe.

  Okay, so days like today, breathing brought a sneeze or two, but Cat could fix that. Here, she could do anything, be anything, become something. Someone. Someone who’d leave this small town behind and enter a world she’d report on, like her grandfather had done.

  She relished these few minutes before the first day of her senior year officially began. The solitude let her think, let her plan, let her wrap her head around what was to come. She set her backpack beside the chair that had been Jen’s, the one with “EIC” spelled out on the back in masking tape. She drew the seat toward her and hesitated before lowering herself into it.

  A nervous smile spread across her face. She pressed her feet into the floor, kicking herself into a spin. But as the chair slowed, the emptiness of the room settled deep in her chest: the three other computer stations, the printer stocked with its last toner cartridge, the physics lab table she and Stavros had snagged from the dumpster. It’d been missing a leg, and the two of them had brought it back to life thanks to a roll of duct tape and two old ski poles Stavros had convinced the team to donate.

  This year she’d be alone. Just her and Ravi Tandon, if he came back as the paper’s designer. He’d been flirting with moving on to yearbook at the end of last year. She could hardly blame him if he did.

  Her hand dropped to the stack of last year’s undistributed newspapers, piled on the floor beside her chair almost as high as the seat. Jen had tried, Stavros too, but neither of them had been able to make The Red and Blue something anyone wanted to read.

  Cat’s investigative reports hadn’t helped. She grabbed the top newspaper with her byline on the front page. It had been good journalism to uncover the source of last January’s daily fire alarm—hotboxing in the server room. She thumbed through the stack and found another: this one exposing the perpetrator selling the password to the school’s unblocked Wi-Fi.

  Then there was the series that began with her report on the notorious spirit week incident, in which the hard work of the cheerleading squad—who’d gone to state for the past four years, unlike the football team—was rewarded with the sexist “cupcake” being scrawled across their uniforms. The series continued by asking why such pranks seemed rampant at Acedia. Whether weak investigations by the administration fostered an environment that gave pranksters license to act and to amp up their stunts, which had begun to reflect a sexist and intolerant culture that no one wanted to talk about. There were even rumors that students, namely male students, had been caught in various acts but let go with barely a warning after parental pressure on the school.

  Turned out, such articles didn’t endear her or The Red and Blue to student, faculty, or parental readers. By the end of last year, it’d been practically impossible to get anyone to even agree to be quoted in the paper.

  She might be riveted by Gramps’s stories of reporting on everything from the war in Vietnam to the attacks on 9/11, but she knew the media of his day was not the media of hers.

  One look at her sister giving a tutorial on “identifying your good side” to the delight of two hundred thousand followers on YouTube told her that.

  The only places doing the type of reporting her grandfather had done were the best of the best: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic. Cat needed every advantage to get there, starting with the Fit to Print award for best high school newspaper in the state. Without it, she’d be just another eager but undistinguished applicant to Northwestern. Without it, she’d be stuck here. With Angeline.

  She rolled the chair under Jen’s old desk and pulled out the notebook Leo had given her three years ago. She ran her fingers along the words he’d written, now in the position he’d predicted she’d have.

  She carefully set it to the side and opened the accounting ledger. The newspaper was responsible for funding itself: equipment, repairs, printing costs. Issues were distributed in school and at the grocery store, post office, and town hall—if they could afford the larger print run. The amount left in the account would barely cover the first issue, and Cat’s efforts to recruit new advertisers from the local businesses had gotten her nothing but blisters from those damn loafers Angeline swore were as comfortable as clouds. Perhaps the way they tore at her skin was karma for borrowing them without her sister’s permission.

  Cat needed a story that people cared about. Stories led to readers, which led to advertisers. Without them, The Red and Blue would fold, like so many newspapers were doing. She wouldn’t let that be her legacy.

  She pressed the power button to bring the ancient iMac to life. The whirring of its hard drive was interrupted by a knock on the door. A woman with medium-brown skin and a straight, layered pixie cut cradled a box in her arms. Written across the side in neat, blocky letters was FOR ACEDIA!

  Cat stood. “Can I help you?”

  “Sure can,” said the woman, who looked to be in her early twenties. “You can make me proud.”

  “Uh, I guess I can try?”

  The woman grinned, shifted the box, and held out her hand. “Ms. Lute, adviser to The Red and Blue.”

  Cat met her at the door and awkwardly shook her hand. The paper hadn’t had a real adviser since she’d started freshman year. Mr. Monte technically oversaw, but he’d never once stepped inside the newsroom. She doubted he’d ever read an issue, which was fine with Cat. “Oh, okay. I mean, great. And I’m Cat.”

  “And you’re in charge here?”

  Cat nodded, anxious Ms. Lute’s presence might change that.

  “Ah, deer in headlights! No worries, this baby is yours.”

  Relief spread to Cat’s fingertips.

  Ms. Lute added, “I
won’t interfere, but I’m here if you need me. I edited my own high school newspaper before jumping into the political ring.”

  “You’re teaching government?”

  “Yup. One-stop shop for all things politics and media. I hope you’ll be in my class?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s required for juniors and seniors.”

  Ms. Lute frowned. She set the box on the floor, a stack of makeshift ballots with the names of the two candidates running for president in November on top. “I wish it didn’t have to be. But this is too important. My goal is for every student to understand why the whole country’s swept up in election fever. My first year of teaching, and it’s like I won the lottery. No better time for a government class to focus on the power of the vote.”

  “I guess, but the students—”

  Ms. Lute talked over her. “Especially since I hear the full student council is to be elected, and I get to be the adviser of that too. Signups will run through this first week, and then we’re off to the races—or race, singular, in this case. The student council election will be the centerpiece of my course this semester.”

  “StuCo? Sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Lute. But no one cares about student government here. You know the school mascot’s a sloth, right? Total self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  Ms. Lute arched an eyebrow. “Life lesson for you, Cat: people care when someone makes them. Couldn’t be a teacher if I didn’t believe that.”

  She grabbed her box and confidently strode down the hall, her red, white, and blue heels clicking on the tile floor.

  Election fever. Accessorized.

  But she wasn’t wrong. Local and national news, talk shows, podcasts, radio, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—the race for president was everywhere.

  The whole country was swept up in election fever.