The Last Reporter

by Michael Winerip

  Jennifer shrugged.

  “It’s just a little surprising,” said Adam. “I guess good people can have bad cousins.”

  “Your cousin does,” said Jennifer.

  “That’s probably an insult, isn’t it,” said Adam. They talked about whether one of them — or maybe both — should ask Stub for a free iPod download to see if it was true, but decided against it. The whole thing could get twisted around, like it was their idea to get something for their vote. It could make Adam and Jennifer look like the bad guys — asking for a freebie. And then Stub could say he’d only done it because they asked.

  “It would be our word against Stub’s,” said Jennifer. “We don’t want that.” Adam agreed. If it were their word against Stub’s, they’d lose. The school board had shut them down for being troublemakers. Most adults didn’t look closely into stuff like that; they wouldn’t understand that Adam and Jennifer were good troublemakers.

  Adam could see what they had to do, and was dreading it. “We’re going to have to talk to the kids on that list,” he said. That would be a mess. Once he or Jennifer started asking kids about free downloads, word would get back to Stub. Then they’d be in a big fight with Stub, and none of the other kids on that list would talk.

  How could they ever get someone to admit it?

  The bell rang. “Who knows?” said Adam. “Maybe there are stories you can’t put in the paper even though they’re true.” He hated to think that. He’d always believed that if it was true, there was a way.

  “We have to,” said Jennifer. “The person who gave me the list took a huge risk. We can’t let Stub steal the election.”

  Adam shrugged. He used to think that truth would win out, but since the Slash had been shut down for printing the truth about the Bolands, he wasn’t so sure. He took his apple and carrots, put them back in his lunch bag, and tossed the bag in the garbage.

  “That’s good food,” Jennifer said.

  “I used to bring it home,” said Adam. “But my dad got ticked — he really believes in making me a balanced lunch. So, I chuck it out to make him feel good.”

  After school, but before baseball practice, Adam went out to the bike rack. His bike — or rather, his mom’s — was still there. Several kids were unlocking bikes to head home and Adam noticed a boy he didn’t know pulling out a black bike. Adam’s eyes riveted on it; he’d swear it was his. It was different, but the same. The bike was a flat black color, not the shiny black-and-white of Adam’s bike. There was no chain guard. And in several spots — the post under the handlebars, the back of the seat, the bar supporting the seat — were big decals with lightning bolts that Adam’s bike didn’t have.

  “Hey,” said Adam. “Wait.”

  The kid was starting to push off.

  “Could I take a look at that bike for a second?” said Adam.

  The kid was pedaling. Adam didn’t recognize him. He hadn’t gotten a great look at the two boys on the corner that day, but this boy didn’t look like them. They were tall; this kid was short and chubby. Adam caught up, got in the way of the boy, and held the bike by the handlebars.

  “Can I look at that bike?” asked Adam. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Borrowed . . . from a friend,” the kid said. “I really need to go.” He hopped on and pushed away.

  Adam was almost positive. The curve of the handlebars felt so familiar. Somebody must have painted it. And the decals — that was it! — they’d been put everywhere the Electra nameplates would be. The kid had disguised it. Adam could have grabbed the kid; he didn’t seem tough — but held back. There wasn’t total proof. Adam was going to have to get the serial number from his dad and keep it in his pocket. His dad had showed him where the serial number was, on the bottom, under the pedals. He’d said it was like a fingerpint, branded into the metal, so you couldn’t get rid of it, even if it was painted over.

  Maybe the kid was telling the truth. Maybe he had borrowed it. But then this kid had to know the boy who stole it. Adam was mad at himself. He watched the kid ride off. He should have asked. He thought of following the kid, but he had baseball practice. The coach might bench him for being late, or worse, make him do laps.

  Adam didn’t know where to start for the test story, so he decided to visit Mrs. Quigley, the acting principal. She’d be delighted to talk to him about such good news. He figured that even if she wasn’t the exact right person, she usually had an extra plate of Moisty Deluxe cookies sitting around, so it wouldn’t be a total waste.

  On this afternoon, bless her acting-principal heart, she had cold milk, too. Why did Mrs. Quigley have to be leaving at the end of the school year? It wasn’t fair. Adam figured maybe they were getting rid of her because she liked kids too much.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, Adam,” she said. “I really miss the visits from you and Jennifer. I miss being the Slash adviser. I miss our story meetings. I miss knowing what’s really going on around here. So come on, tell me, how’s the Slash doing, now that you’re free from Dr. Bleepin and the school board and all those grown-ups who believe in censorship?”

  Adam told her they had a webmaster and business managers selling ads and raising money to pay to get the Slash printed. He didn’t mention who; he figured it would be better if she thought they were actual grown-ups with suits and shoes with laces, instead of the Ameche brothers working in a storage shed.

  “Can I buy an ad?” asked Mrs. Quigley. “I’d be delighted. Would two hundred dollars help things along? I could give you a check right now.”

  Oh, would it. If only. “I’m sorry,” said Adam. “We can’t. Not while you’re principal. No offense, but it would be kind of like an ethics violation. I mean, not you, Mrs. Quigley. You’re no ethics violation; you’re the nicest principal. But if we took —”

  Mrs. Quigley nodded. “It would be like I was trying to bribe you to put good news in the Slash. You’re worried that for my two hundred dollars I’d want you to say, ‘Mrs. Quigley, the world’s greatest acting principal . . .’ You are something, young man. I don’t meet many adults as ethical as you.”

  Adam was embarrassed. He didn’t feel too ethical. He knew that if it weren’t for Jennifer, his ethics would be way down in the sewer with everyone else’s.

  “So how can I help?” she asked.

  Adam told her they wanted to do a story on the state test scores going up but he wasn’t sure where to start. He said everybody was saying how well Harris did, and he was wondering if she could give him the results for each grade and some reasons she thought the school did so well. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mrs. Quigley. I hate before school/after school mandatory/voluntary prep for the test,” said Adam. “But I guess it worked, right?”

  “Well, maybe,” said Mrs. Quigley. “If you’re taking sample tests and drilling kids day after day so everyone gets so familiar with the test, scores will go up. But there’s more to it, Adam.”

  “I know,” said Adam. “We talked about it at the Slash meeting, like teachers got better, right?”

  “Well, I’m very proud of our teachers,” said Mrs. Quigley. “But we didn’t get a single new teacher this year. It’s the same group as last year when the scores were lower. Adam, can we go off-the-record for a minute?”

  Adam nodded. He wasn’t worried about Mrs. Quigley. If there was any chance to get it on the record later, she’d do anything to help.

  “You need to go see Dr. Duke,” said Mrs. Quigley. “I believe her title’s Second Associate Deputy Superintendent for Assessment.”

  Adam’s heart sank. The last thing he wanted was to talk to another deputy super-duper. It had been bad enough talking to Dr. Bleepin for the last Slash. People who lied for a living were exhausting to interview.

  “Cheer up,” Mrs. Quigley said. “Dr. Duke is not like Dr. Bleepin. Dr. Duke’s a good woman. I’ve known her forever. She spent twenty years teaching before going into administration. She really understands testing. That’s her job. She can give you a full picture of what
’s going on, not just here at Harris. She’s got all the numbers for the county and the state. I promise, you won’t be sorry. It’s an important story, Adam. It’s every bit as important as the one you did on the Bolands. I’ll call her and let her know you’re coming by.”

  Adam asked if her office was near Dr. Bleepin’s. “I don’t think she’d want to be seen with me if Dr. Bleepin’s around,” he said. “He’d probably report her to the deputy super police.”

  “Well, Dr. Duke outranks Dr. Bleepin, but it’s a good point,” said Mrs. Quigley. “I’ll e-mail and see what she says. Maybe you could use my office.”

  Adam was grateful, but he felt discouraged. Wasn’t there ever a story where you could get all the information in one place? Another story that wasn’t going to turn out to be as easy as he’d hoped.

  “Why so glum?” said Mrs. Quigley. “I know it’s complicated, but life is complicated. It’s a blessing to see the complications. You and Jennfier have done remarkable things with the Slash. That mention in the New York Times — amazing. Most people go to their grave never making the front page unless they murder someone.

  “It hasn’t helped yet,” she continued, “but it may — you may get the Slash back in this school yet. Not right away, probably not while I’m here, but maybe sooner than you think. I know it’s hard. The better you do, the more people expect. I could give you the Harris test scores and a quote about how great we did and stop there. That’s what I’d do with most middle-school reporters. That’s what I’d do with the Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser or Boland News 12. They live on the surface. Not you — I’d feel like I was cheating you.”

  She said that she was glad to hear about the business manager and webmaster. “You’re going to need a few grown-ups to help out,” she said. “My door’s always open, you know that. I told you my dad was a newspaperman back east in Boston. He used to say that great reporters comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. You sit with Dr. Duke, you’ll learn stuff that will open your eyes. Before you’re done, you’ll be afflicting people all the way from Harris to the state capital.”

  Adam thanked her. It was nice to be praised, but an easy story would be better.

  “So what do you think?” said Don Ameche.

  “Pretty amazing, huh?” said Alan Ameche.

  “Right,” said Jennifer. “Pretty amazing.”

  “Definitely pretty . . . um . . . amazing,” said Adam. He could feel it — Jennifer was going to explode. Adam liked the Ameche brothers a lot, and God knows, he liked Jennifer, but somehow, he couldn’t make them like one another. Whenever Jennifer was around, the exact wrong words came out of the Ameche brothers’ mouths.

  He and Jennifer had biked to the May Way West studios to find out how ad sales were doing.

  But that’s not what the Ameche brothers wanted to talk about.

  “Look at that action,” said Don.

  “See — the moment of impact,” said Alan. “Crash.”

  “Did you miss it?” said Don. “I get worked up every time I see it. Let me play it back.”

  “Stop,” said Alan. “That’s it. . . . I love this.”

  Adam must have been seeing wrong. He couldn’t spot the crash.

  “Look,” said Don. “See the bumpers touch? . . . There!”

  “And look at the guy jamming on his brakes,” said Alan.

  “See the car rock?” said Don.

  “It’s a little hard to tell . . . .” said Adam. As he stared at the computer screen, he could feel his butt getting sore from the plastic crate, but that was not what was making him uncomfortable.

  Jennifer was way sorer than Adam’s butt.

  “Look!” said Don. “The guy’s jumping out of the car. He’s pissed.”

  “See how he walks around and checks the point of impact?” said Alan. “And the other guy gets out and looks at his bumper.”

  “Look at them look,” said Don. “Look how they’re looking. Did you see that look he gave him? And now they’re looking at each other look. I thought it was going to be a huge fight.”

  “What’s all the shaking?” asked Adam. The video seemed to have been shot during an earthquake.

  “Alan was so excited to find real news,” said Don. “He started jumping up and down. He kept yelling, ‘Anybody here see what happened?’”

  “It made the picture jiggly,” said Alan. “I’ll do better next time.” He stopped the video.

  Adam asked what happened next.

  “Nothing,” said Don.

  “Nothing?” said Adam.

  “They both got in their cars and drove off,” said Alan.

  “Didn’t they exchange papers or something?” asked Adam. “Or wait for the police? That’s what they do on TV. That’s usually when the guy and girl fall in love.” He took a sideways glance at Jennifer.

  No sign of love there.

  “I guess it wasn’t a big enough accident,” said Alan.

  “No real damage,” said Don. “Plus it was two guys.”

  Adam kept looking at the screen. He did not want to make eye contact with Jennifer.

  “This will be great on the new Slash website,” said Alan.

  “We’re going to put it on as soon as we get the site up,” said Don.

  “Maybe do a link — great car crashes,” said Alan.

  “And fires,” said Don.

  “Police chases,” said Alan.

  “Ambulances,” said Don.

  Why didn’t Jennifer say something?

  The three boys were now staring at Jennifer.

  “The wall,” she whispered.

  “The wall?” asked Don.

  “The wall?” asked Alan. “They didn’t hit a wall. It was bumpers.”

  “Oh — you want a car crashing into a wall?” said Don. “No problem. . . . I just Google . . . hit Images . . . type in car, crashes, wall. . . . Look!” There were 291 photos of cars crashing into walls. He clicked the first. The car was halfway into someone’s living room. Three firefighters were studying it. “How’s that? A wall crash in under ten seconds,” said Don. “You want a video? I go to YouTube. . . .”

  Adam was getting frantic. Jennifer seemed to be in a trance. She was staring at the storage-shed wall. Adam followed her gaze. There was a big daddy longlegs climbing up. “The spider on the wall?” asked Adam. Was Jennifer afraid of spiders? He couldn’t remember.

  “The wall,” Jennifer repeated.

  Maybe she was frozen in terror. Like that time in the climbing tree. Adam looked at the wall again. On a shelf there was an old stuffed duck, covered by cobwebs, with a small pile of peat moss on its head. Jennifer was kind of environmental. Maybe she was mad about that?

  “Are we playing ‘I’m thinking of’?” said Don. “I know! The saw hanging on the wall?”

  “I love guessing games,” said Alan. “The 1987 calendar? No?”

  “Adam,” Jennifer said, her voice a whisper. “Did you tell them about the wall between the news side and the business side? The wall?”

  That wall. Thank heavens. It was so much easier if you knew what you were talking about.

  The truth was, he may have overlooked mentioning that wall to the Ameches.

  “Look,” said Jennifer. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Slash, but we’re not big on car crashes. I mean, if a car crashed into the school, that would be a big story for us. Or if some kids from our school were hurt in a car crash, that would be a story. But if you want general car crashes, all you have to do is turn on News 12. The TV news, that’s all they have — car crashes, and fires, and people shooting each other, and people being arrested for selling drugs, and other mayhem. That may be how the world seems to you, but I walk out my door and I don’t see a lot of that. To me, things generally seem to be in order. We try to go for stuff that really affects a lot of our readers, things they might not know if it wasn’t for the Slash. Stuff kind of lying under the surface that can cause big problems if you don’t shine light on it. Like when the c
ounty had a secret plan to take down all the basketball hoops. Or the principal tried to steal seventy-five thousand dollars of the school’s money. Or the science fair being unfair. Or the three-hundred-year-old climbing tree almost getting cut down. Or kids from the Willows being forced to move away because the Bolands were buying up their neighborhood.”

  Adam stared at Jennifer. How did she speak so well? He wondered if the Ameche brothers understood a word of it.

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” said Jennifer, “but we can’t have you putting whatever video you like on the Slash website. Adam and I, we’re the news editors. And you — you’re the business managers. We do news. You do money. And there needs to be a wall between the two parts of the paper. News on one side of the wall. Business on the other. If you’ve got something you think should go on the Slash website, you need to tell us, and we’ll see if we agree. But just because you know how to put something on the site, doesn’t mean it’s OK.”

  The Ameche brothers looked at each other. “Um, we didn’t mean to break any rules,” said Don.

  “We didn’t know about the wall,” said Alan.

  “We thought we were giving you like, free, extra news,” said Alan. “We had no idea it was a violation. This is the first newspaper business we had.”

  “In our other businesses, we don’t have walls,” said Don. “Everyone just works together to make money.”

  “Yeah, like our golf business. Mom wakes us up in the middle of the night,” said Alan. “And helps us get on the wet suits.”

  “And Uncle Louie corks up our faces,” said Don.

  “Corks up your faces?” said Jennifer.

  “Yeah, so we don’t show up in the headlights,” said Alan.

  “And Grandpa Mike drops us off at the twelfth hole . . .” said Don.

  “At White Lake Golf Club . . .” said Alan.

  “And stands guard and puts the balls in the buckets,” said Don, “while we search the water hazard.”