The Last Reporter

by Michael Winerip

  “We’re good,” said Alan.

  Adam was lost. The Ameches could really talk a lot, but if anyone had actually mentioned the problem, it had sailed right by him.

  “I really appreciate this,” said Jennifer.

  “Well, we appreciate being appreciated,” said Mrs. Ameche.

  “But there’s still one big problem,” said Don.

  “It’s actually huge,” said Alan.

  Mrs. Ameche nodded. “The Ameche brothers have not sold a single ad. It appears that once people actually see the paper, they don’t want to buy ads.”

  No one said anything, not even the Ameches. Adam felt terrible, like the time he was playing manhunt, jumped off a friend’s lower roof, knocked the wind out of himself, and couldn’t get his breath back.

  He was sure the Slash was good.

  Wasn’t it?

  “They think the Slash is bad?” Jennifer whispered.

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Ameche, “just the opposite. They’re scared that it’s too good.”

  She told them that people seemed scared to advertise in the newspaper that had written something so critical of the Bolands; the newspaper that prompted the state to investigate the Bolands; the newspaper that was shut down by the Bolands. People were worried that if they put an ad in the Slash, the Bolands would come after them, too. Mrs. Ameche talked about how the Boland companies — Bolandvision Cable, Boland Realtors, Inc., Boland Broadband, the Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser — provided jobs for tons of people in Tremble County. “If a business advertised in the Slash,” said Mrs. Ameche, “like a restaurant — and the Bolands turned against them, that business might go right out of business.”

  “What’s amazing,” she continued, “is these people know about you guys, even though most had never seen the Slash. They told the Ameche brothers they’d heard about this amazing newspaper that stood up to the Bolands. And it was run by kids!”

  Adam understood that this was all terrible, but hearing that, he didn’t feel so bad. He felt kind of mythic. People knew about him. It seemed like he really did have a shot at becoming an urban legend, if he could just move into the city.

  So what Jennifer said next caught him off-guard.

  “Maybe it’s time to quit,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  They all looked at her.

  “I mean, we gave it our best,” she said. “There’s just a few weeks of school left. We can’t raise a thousand dollars that fast. Everyone’s against us. If grown-ups don’t care, if they’re too afraid to buy a stupid ad, how can we do anything?”

  Adam could hear a clock in the next room ticking.

  “I’m sorry,” Don said softly.

  “We really tried,” said Alan.

  “We were wrong,” said Don. “A newspaper’s not like used golf balls.”

  “It’s hard,” said Alan.

  “Jenny, honey —” said Mrs. Ameche.

  “I just feel like we’ve done all middle-school kids can do,” continued Jennifer. Though her voice was quiet, every one of her words felt to Adam like it weighed a ton.

  “I feel terrible,” she said. “The Ameche brothers worked so hard, and they haven’t made anything for it and not a cent has been raised for the Slash. I just feel . . . like . . . such . . . an idiot . . . I was so stupid. A bunch of kids . . . alone . . .”

  Oh, no. Adam could not stand it. Jennifer was crying. Not sniffles either. Loud sobs. He hated this. He felt sad everywhere, though mostly it pressed against his chest. Someone had to help Jennifer. She was such a good person. No one should make her cry. He wanted her to stop. She needed a hug. He felt like . . . Why did they just have to be . . . official coeditors? It was ridiculous. He hated these new rules. Who made them up, anyway? Why couldn’t they go back to . . . like before . . . him and Jennifer, you know . . . That’s what he really . . .

  “Now wait a minute, Jenny,” said Mrs. Ameche. “You stop that crying, baby doll.” And she wrapped her arms around Jenny honey until the girl was totally covered in an Ameche hug. “I told you the Ameche brothers didn’t sell any ads,” Mrs. Ameche said. “That doesn’t mean people don’t want to help. They just don’t want to be too public. I think they’re worried that if they buy an ad, it’s like sticking their fingers in the Bolands’ eyes. What I started to say — what I tried to tell you before you got so worked up — was that the Ameches have collected nearly five hundred dollars in anonymous gifts from people who want to help the Slash.”

  Jennifer couldn’t see it, because she was still locked up in that big Ameche hug, but Adam did: the Ameche brothers looked shocked.

  “Ma!” said Don.

  “Come on, Ma!” said Alan.

  “Quiet, quiet,” said Mrs. Ameche. “I know you wanted to tell her yourselves —”

  “We did, Ma?” said Don.

  “I know you did,” said Mrs. Ameche. “But I just couldn’t wait. I felt Jenny needed some good news right away.”

  All four of them stared hard at Mrs. Ameche.

  She nodded.

  “Then I guess we’re halfway there,” said Adam.

  “That’s what the printer wants for a deposit,” said Jennifer. “This is wonderful. . . .” And she started crying again. But before she could get re-hugged, she waved them off. “It’s OK,” she said. “Like Miss MacLeish used to say in kindergarten, these tears are pink, not blue. Happy tears. I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs. Ameche.”

  “I do,” said Adam. “We’re going to put out the greatest Slash ever.”

  The coeditors were unlocking their bikes from the Ameches’ neon-orange zebra-striped basketball hoop for the trip home.

  “I’ll ride with you,” said Adam.

  “That would be nice,” said Jennifer.

  “I’m glad you’re not crying,” Adam said.

  “Thanks,” said Jennifer. “I’m sorry. It’s such a girl thing to do.”

  “No,” said Adam. “That’s not true. You’re so —”

  “Wait up!”

  They turned to see Don running out from the backyard. It was an odd sight — an Ameche brother alone.

  Don was carrying a jar of tomato sauce with a little bow, which he handed to Jennifer.

  “You try it,” said Don.

  “You like it,” said Jennifer, smiling. “That’s very sweet, Don. Thank you.”

  “No, you’re the sweet one,” said Don.

  Oh, my God. Adam couldn’t believe it. What was going on now? You’re the sweet one? He felt dizzy. Why did this Ameche have to butt in now, right at this moment? Adam finally felt like things were getting back to normal with Jennifer, maybe better than normal, and . . .

  “Um, Jennifer,” said Don. “I thought you might like, sometime, to you know, go to a movie, maybe, and get an ice cream or something?”

  It was hard to say who looked more surprised, Jennifer or Adam. The Ameche brother looked at them both. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “You guys aren’t . . . ?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” said Jennifer.

  “No, no, no, no,” said Adam.

  “Great,” said Don. “So it’s OK?”

  “I’d like that, Don,” said Jennifer.

  “Fine,” said Adam. “It’s really fine.” He hopped on his mom’s bike. “I just remembered, I got something —” And as he raced up the street, for some idiotic reason, the houses on May Way West looked fuzzy.

  There was a knock on his bedroom door. Forget it. Adam was not going to answer. He didn’t want to explain anything to anybody. He was just sick and tired of everything. He had his pillows squished down over his head and his covers pulled high over his pillows.

  Another knock.

  “Adam, can I come in?”

  His mom. Just what he needed. A million questions.

  What did his mother want? Maybe she’d think he was asleep. Probably not. She seemed to have some kind of special sleep-sniffer to know when he was faking.

  “I have some mail here for you,” she said.

&nbs
p; It might be a trick to get him out of bed.

  If so, it was a new trick. She’d never used the mail before. He didn’t get much mail, except from his grandparents on his birthday and his aunts and uncles, and though he was ready for it to be his birthday — he was really ready for everyone to love him a lot just because of the day he happened to be born — it was still months away.

  “It’s a big envelope,” she said.

  It sounded a little true.

  Maybe it was some big card from her apologizing for everything.

  “Can I come in?”

  His mother had already opened the door halfway; what was he supposed to say?

  He could hear her walk over and felt the mattress sag when she sat on the edge of the bed. “You sleepy?” she said.

  “Kind of,” he answered.

  “Well, maybe you could just pop your head out for a second so I can hand you this.”

  What was the use? He pulled down the covers. Before he could push aside the pillows, his Mom lifted them off his head, held them in her lap, and ran her hand gently through his hair.

  She gave him the big envelope. It wasn’t any kind of color that looked like it might be an apology or a funny card. It was a standard manila envelope.

  “There’s no return address,” she said. “So I was concerned it might be — you know.”

  He nodded, though he didn’t know exactly. Probably she meant something grown-up and nasty.

  “Look Adam, I’m not trying to read your mail, but I just wanted to make sure, before I went back downstairs, it’s nothing . . . you know.”

  He studied the envelope. His mom was right; there was no return address.

  “The postmark’s from Pittsburgh,” his mom said. “Do you know anybody in Pittsburgh?”

  He thought about that. He doubted that anyone from the Pittsburgh Pirates was writing to him.

  She looked at him. “You going to open it?” she asked.

  He was still lying flat and didn’t move.

  “Adam, is anything wrong?”

  No, everything was great. Why couldn’t his parents just have the decency to leave him alone to die of embarrassment in peace and quiet?

  “You’re not having problems at school, are you?” she asked.

  He wished that was it.

  “Not another in-school suspension, I hope?”

  “No, Mom, school’s fine, honest,” he said.

  “You know, Jennifer called again,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “She’s such a nice girl,” said his mom. “She sounded . . . I don’t know . . . It’s not so much what she said, but she just seemed — worried about you.”

  Right, Jennifer worried about him. She had plenty of sweet Ameche juicy-poohy stuff to worry about; she probably didn’t even remember his name.

  “Did something happen between you?” his mother asked.

  “Can we please change the subject?” said Adam.

  His mom shrugged. “The subject is your mail,” she said. “If you open it and there’s no problem, I’ll put these two pillows back on your head and be gone.”

  Still lying down, he tore the flap open, reached in, and pulled out the papers.

  There were two thin packets. He read the top of the first page of one. Something about a covered-wagon trip. He looked through the pages. It was stuff to read and questions to answer. It was a test. A test? Why would the Pittsburgh Pirates be sending him a test?

  “Holy jipes!” he said, sitting bolt upright in bed.

  “What?” said his mother.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Really. Nothing.” He had to get his mom out of there. Taking the pages, he flipped through them quickly for her. “See?” he said. “It’s nothing porno.”

  “You’re going so fast,” she said, “I can’t tell what it is.” He didn’t slow down. “It must be something big,” she said. “I never heard you yell ‘holy jipes’ before. I don’t even know what that means.”

  “It’s just for a project at school,” he said.

  She eyed him, holding her hand to her face like she was a private detective peering at him through an imaginary magnifying glass. His mother really was a riot. “I can see for sure, you are up to something fishy, young man. I haven’t a clue what, but I’m just happy you’re sitting up.” Then she held up one of the pillows. “This is yours, isn’t it?” she said, and whipped the two pillows at him, then raced out of the room.

  “Very funny,” Adam called after her. “You’re hilarious, Mom.”

  When he heard her footsteps heading downstairs, he got out of bed and quietly closed his door. He couldn’t believe it. This definitely was not from the Pittsburgh Pirates.

  Some anonymous someone had mailed Adam copies of this year’s fourth-grade state reading test. And last year’s test, too.

  His parents had been a little psycho about the stolen bicycle. They certainly weren’t going to let it go. Every week, his dad called the detective.

  “Still working on it?” his dad asked.

  “We are,” the detective said, though it wasn’t hard for Adam to imagine there could be larger things on the man’s mind. His dad told the officer about Adam being sure he’d seen the bike, but it had been repainted and disguised.

  “That’s helpful,” the detective said.

  “You got a lead?” asked Adam’s dad.

  “No,” said the detective. “But reliable information is always helpful.”

  Then, finally, one week, the detective had news. They’d caught a boy doing graffiti at a Tremble school. And when they brought him home, they found a garage full of spray paints, bicycle parts, extra fenders, mud guards, and bike decals. “We charged him with graffiti,” the officer told Adam’s dad, “but it’s just a matter of time before he tells us about the bikes. His parents seemed like decent people; they looked pretty shocked, their kid coming home in a squad car.”

  Adam’s dad asked the boy’s name and address.

  “Now you didn’t get this from me,” said the detective.

  Adam had to get to the library. He needed to do the research for his profile of Shadow for Mrs. Stanky. He needed to look up the newspaper for the day that Shadow was born — actually, the day after.

  He locked his mom’s bike in the rack out front, walked through the automatic doors, and headed downstairs to the research department. In the front of the room was a desk marked REFERENCE and sitting behind it was a woman at a computer who was on the phone and seemed to be answering a question about what countries had nuclear weapons.

  “No, sir,” she was saying. “I can only go by this list . . . No, sir, I’m not an expert on nuclear weapons. . . . Sir, according to this list from Worldwide Nuclear Watch . . . Yes, they’re considered the number-one source on this, sir. According to this, the Bahamas do not have nuclear weapons. . . . I see several casinos, but no nuclear weapons. . . . Yes, sir, it is possible . . . I’ll check. . . . It says this website was last updated in April, so yes, sir, it is possible that the Bahamas got nuclear weapons in May, but personally, I doubt it. Yes, I do think you would have seen something in the news if that were the case. . . . No, I certainly don’t know everything, sir. . . . You’re right, sir, not even one-tenth of everything . . . Well, thank you, sir. . . . We try . . . and I hope you have a wonderful, nuke-free vacation.”

  She hung up, closed her eyes for a moment, rubbed her temples, took a deep breath, then said, “Can I help you, young man?”

  Adam explained that he was in Mrs. Stanky’s class and needed to look at old newspapers for their profile project.

  “Oh, yes,” said the librarian, and she opened her middle drawer, pulled out several papers, asked him what period he had Mrs. Stanky, then put the class list down in front of Adam. “Need you to sign this,” she said. “I love this project. It’s very important for you kids to see that not all research is Google.” She looked down the list and said, “Let me guess — you must be Adam Canfield?”

  Adam nodded.
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  “You’re the only one left,” she said. “My very last from Mrs. Stanky. Running a little late?”

  Adam nodded. “Just about always,” he said.

  “Well you’re here. That’s the important thing,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Miles.” She asked him for the date of his subject’s birthday and then told Adam to follow her.

  She led him to a section of shelves in the back that had rows and rows of three-inch-square microfilm boxes. While she searched for the year and month he needed, Adam glanced at the boxes — some went back to the 1920s.

  “These newspapers are really old,” he said. “Very cool.”

  “It is,” she said. “They go back to the days when Tremble had four newspapers — the Citizen, the Gazette, the Herald, and the Advertiser.”

  “Now there’s one paper that’s four times worse,” said Adam.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Mrs. Miles, but she was smiling.

  She pulled out two boxes for Adam. One was the Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser; the other was a Tri-River Region city paper. “Next time,” she said, “you should be able to find these yourself.”

  Adam followed her to a big metal projector with an old-fashioned crank handle that looked like something Thomas Edison invented. She flipped a switch, a light came on, and she showed him how to thread the microfilm. “Hold it by its edges,” she said. “Don’t smudge the film.”

  She cranked the handle. “This advances the film,” she said, “and cranking it the other way goes back to the beginning.”

  There was a big opening for his head so he could look at the page images, which were projected, full size, on a screen at the base of the projector.

  “Very good,” Mrs. Miles said. “You should be set, though I have a question. Adam, are you Adam Canfield of the Slash?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Now, that’s a great newspaper,” she said. “We should have the Slash in our microfilm collection.”

  Adam stared at her. How did she know?

  “I get it from my niece,” the librarian said. “She goes to Harris.”

  As he cranked the handle toward Shadow’s birth date, he kept stopping to read the comics and old baseball stories. He’d never heard of most of the players. Adam checked the standings. There was a baseball team in the National League called the Montreal Expos. He’d never heard of them. It made him wonder what the heck an Expo was. Scrolling through the inside pages, he saw an ad for TVs — they looked so small and fat! A story described how movie companies were complaining about illegal, pirated VCR tapes. Adam skimmed the story and wondered why there was nothing about DVDs and then remembered — DVDs weren’t invented yet. And iPods weren’t invented. What would Stub Keenan have done? Given out pirated VCR tapes of Blink-182 concerts, probably. It made Adam wish that he could go back in time. He’d be so smart, knowing everything that was going to happen.