The Gossip: New Wave Newsroom

by Jenny Holiday

  “Yes. ‘Dish from Dawn,’” he said. Wow. I was, frankly, shocked that he knew it. His skeptical-bordering-on-disgusted tone suggested that he was not a fan, but still.

  “Well, I’m this close”—I held up my thumb and forefinger—“to a huge scoop. But my source requires payment.”

  He took his glasses off again—score!—and leaned in, squinting like I was a puzzle he was trying to solve. There were raindrops on his long, dark eyelashes, and I was seized with the absurd desire to reach out and flick them away.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You are stealing a metal snake in a lightning storm in order to use it as payment to secure a piece of gossip that you are going to print in the college newspaper.”

  God. It sounded so tawdry when he put it like that. “I don’t print gossip,” I said weakly, trotting out the rationale I used with Jenny, who was constantly wondering aloud how she had lowered her journalistic standards such that she’d ever green-lighted my column. “I require verification of the stories I print, and they often speak truth to power.”

  The glasses were back on, obscuring his pretty eyes, but his snort was enough to convey his disgust. Well, what did I care what this gunless beefcake of a cop thought of me? “All right, so let’s get this show on the road,” I said. “If you’re actually charging me with larceny, I’m sure my father will want me to get a lawyer before anything happens. So I’ll call him from the station.” I looked around for his cruiser. “I do get a phone call, right? That’s not just on Starsky and Hutch?”

  “This would be the father who never sees you?” he asked. Rivulets of water ran down his face, and his already dark hair turned straight-up black as it got wet.

  Hot embarrassment pricked my cheeks despite the cold rain. I had no idea why I’d told him that last year, except maybe that I had been a lonely freshman, still reeling from not getting a bid from Alpha Phi and afraid that I’d be a nobody on this campus. Obviously, I needn’t have worried. Dish with Dawn had made me more popular than membership in any sorority would have. Everything was going exactly as I’d hoped.

  “Who’s your father?” he asked.

  “How does that matter?” When he didn’t answer, I countered with my own question. “Who’s your father?” But the minute it was out of my mouth, I regretted it. I’d been covering my embarrassment with belligerence, but I sounded like a spoiled child. Which probably wasn’t too far off the mark, but I didn’t like the idea of Officer Perez thinking of me that way.

  “My father is Emilio Perez,” he answered immediately, “lieutenant detective, Boston PD. First-generation American. You should thank your lucky stars you’ve got me here and not him. If he was here right now, he’d eat you for breakfast.”

  Shame flooded me, and it was enough to prompt me to answer his question. “My father is Edward Hathaway. He owns some TV stations.” I was understating it. My father was the head of a media empire, a third-generation billionaire, even if he did like to pretend that his decade of reporting for various B-list newspapers—his father had insisted on it before handing over the reins of the company—somehow gave him street cred in the industry.

  “Hathaway Media,” Officer Perez said. “You own SBC and the Boston Voice.”

  Among other things. I nodded. “Not me, though,” I clarified. “My father.” I wasn’t sure why I was making a point of drawing the distinction. I wanted my father to notice me, to remember that I was his, so why was I so intent on making sure Officer Perez knew the difference between me and him?

  The way Officer Perez’s lip curled as he picked up my crowbar from the sidewalk made me want to shrivel up and die. When he finally spoke, his tone was clipped. “All right, Miss Hathaway. We’re done here.”

  Without waiting for a response, he turned and headed for his car, which was parked half a block down from the stadium—so that was how he’d been able to sneak up on us. Like a dumb wet puppy, I followed him.

  He popped the trunk and dropped Ace and the crowbar into it. Then he took off those glasses again—why was he being so uncharacteristically free with his glasses?—and looked me up and down. It was a slow assessment that made me want to squirm, especially because it was now wet enough that my denim cutoffs and halter top were plastered to my body. If that look had been coming from one of the frat guys, I would have called him out on it. But I kept my mouth shut.

  “Was there some part of ‘we’re done here,’ that you didn’t understand?” he finally said, as if he was lowering himself to explain a very simple concept to a very simple person.

  “Oh, okay. Um, thanks?” I said, apparently having morphed into a very simple person to meet his expectations.

  Then he got in his car, turned on the flashers, and drove away, leaving me shivering in his Allenhurst College PD windbreaker.

  Chapter Four

  September 1982

  Dawn

  The first day of orientation week I was out and about, strolling the campus with my ear to the ground. The first Dish with Dawn column of the year wouldn’t run for another week, but I wanted to find out what everyone was up to and get a sense of the incoming class. My gossip mill had run pretty dry over the summer. I had heard the freshman class included a famous teen actress, and if it was true, I wanted to be the first to report on her.

  As I made my way into the roundabout that showcased the campus’s oldest, most stately buildings and its iconic clock tower, my attention was drawn by a crowd. It wasn’t the usual crowd though. I squinted. Right. It was parents. The school ran orientation activities for parents who were dropping their freshmen off. Daddy had, of course, not attended. He hadn’t even dropped me off—just left me a wad of cash and a plane ticket in the New York apartment.

  A student orientation leader wearing an Allenhurst T-shirt was speaking to a group of parents. Actually, it looked more like she was trying to move them along. Something was holding their attention. No, someone—there was a person in the middle of the parental throng.

  “Ha!” I laughed to myself as I trotted up to the edge of the group.

  It was Officer Unfriendly, and he was surrounded by parents. Well, actually, he was surrounded by mothers. The few fathers in the group were standing in a cluster to one side. Officer Perez was taller than all of them, and his usual steady, substantial presence surrounded by their chattering put me in mind of a mother bird surrounded by squawking babies.

  “I, for one, feel so much better knowing someone like you is looking after our children, officer,” one of the women purred as she touched his arm.

  Ugh. Grody.

  He smiled, but anyone could tell it was a fake smile. He was tolerating her but only just.

  “Tell us again about your philosophy of community policing,” said another, a woman with bright red lips and a wall of hair that told me she was trying awfully, awfully hard to appear young and cool. “I find it so fascinating.”

  Officer Perez pressed his lips together like he was trying to prevent himself from saying something he would regret.

  “Sí, señor,” trilled a third. “Me too!”

  And: nope. Officer Perez might be my nemesis, but I wasn’t going to stand here and let these middle-aged harpies fetishize him.

  “Officer Perez!” I called, shouldering my way through the well-manicured rabble.

  He looked up, and I swear, for one second he looked happy to see me. Then his face hardened into something closer to wariness. Whatever. I might not be his ideal knight in shining armor, but I was going in whether he liked it or not. I pressed on.

  “There’s a little problem in the…” I looked over my shoulder to orient myself. “In the art building. We need your help.” I flashed my best smile at him. “So sorry, everyone,” I said, taking his forearm and pulling him toward me. I’m not really sure how I had the guts to actually touch him. But he came with me.

  “Enjoy your empty nests, ladies,” I tossed over my shoulder, sneaking a glance at him.

  He was pressing his lips together ag
ain, but this time it seemed like it was because he was trying not to laugh.

  We didn’t speak until we’d rounded the corner of the art building and were out of sight.

  “Thanks,” he said, letting the grin he’d been suppressing out of hiding.

  I shrugged, but I was absurdly pleased to have done something he appreciated for once. “I guess even cops need rescuing sometimes.”

  “Giving the campus safety talk at parent orientation is the worst. I drew the short straw this year.”

  “Well, what a bunch of airheads. Gag me.”

  “Can I walk you somewhere?” he asked, looking at his watch.

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m drifting around a bit, getting the lay of the land now that school’s out.”

  “Trolling for gossip, you mean,” he said, smirking. I would have thought he was teasing me, but I was pretty sure Officer Perez didn’t tease.

  It was true, but it made me sound so shallow, and after seeing those women in action just now, I didn’t want him to think of me that way. But what could I do but brush the comment off? “Potato, potahto,” I said.

  “You did some good things with that column toward the end of last year,” he said, and I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d slapped handcuffs on me and arrested me on the spot.

  He started to walk away, and I wanted to run after him and ask him to elaborate. The need to hear from Officer Perez’s mouth the good things I’d done was almost visceral. But that was dumb. So, instead, I said, “Have you heard anything about Jolie Fosting starting here as a student?”

  He cocked his head and flashed me a full-on smile, which was more jolting than it should have been. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He was lying, but what could I do but smile back at him? He turned to leave, and I watched his broad shoulders as he retreated. As impossible as it seemed, I’d kind of missed seeing him this summer.

  How embarrassing, then, when he turned back and caught me staring.

  “I’ll see you at Delta Chi on Friday?” he asked.

  Right. The annual back-to-school bash. I suppressed another smile—man, I was smiling a lot today. It was weird. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Arturo

  I came with a partner this year because the word on the street was that Delta Chi’s back-to-school party was going to be bigger than ever. Kegs were one thing, but cocaine was another, and we’d been finding it more and more on campus, so we were taking an aggressive approach—doing more in pairs, making our presence known earlier and more decisively than we might have a year ago. We only waited for the first noise complaint before my partner, Fuller, and I headed out.

  As we made our way up the path to the front door, it wasn’t lost on me that I wasn’t supposed to be here. Two years ago, I’d assured Dad—and everyone else—that I was going to finish out that academic year, then resign and come home. Dad had been thrilled that I was finally done with my “little detour,” and talked excitedly about lining me up with interviews for the Boston force.

  But here I was. One year had become two. Because I just…hadn’t made the break. Kept putting it off. I tried telling everyone at home the truth: I liked it here. I was doing good work. But it was never enough. So I always added that after one more year, I’d hang it up. And, hey, I thought bitterly, maybe next time Dad decided to ride my ass about it, I could tell him about the rash of cocaine busts on campus. Maybe if he thought things were getting semi-hard-core, he’d decide that Allenhurst was “worthy of my talents and my family legacy,” and get the hell off my back.

  It was only midnight, so things were not as out of hand at the party as they could have been. Fuller, who was younger and was one of those guys who seemed like he’d gone into policing because he was on some kind of power trip, usually went into a bust like this with his dick swinging. Which was fine—it made my life easier, frankly. So I hung back a little and let him play Bad Cop. Contrary to rumor, there was no coke at the party, at least not on the main level, so he went around checking IDs and writing up kids for possession while I looked around for Dawn.

  Yeah, I wasn’t even going to try to deny it to myself. I needed to lay eyes on her. Every single party I busted, every post-football-game bonfire, every parent-orientation tour, she was always there working her connections in service of her column, and I’d gotten into this mindset where I needed to make sure she was okay. She always was, of course. But I had to check. I always had to check. Because something told me that she wasn’t actually okay, not really. So I would seek her out, make eye contact, and then go on my way. I wasn’t sure why I was so compelled to look out for her, except it seemed like maybe no one else was. She was at the center of everything, but she was also alone.

  Tonight, she was nowhere to be seen. A niggle of worry gnawed at me as my initial sweep of the main floor failed to yield a glimpse of her. Earlier, she’d all but admitted she was coming. There was no way Dawn would miss a Delta Chi party. And when she was at these things, she was always on the main level, the calm eye of the storm, the sober, well-dressed one who made her colleagues look like overgrown, sloppy children. I always made sure to read her column after one of these parties. I usually read it anyway, but it was always funny to see something and then read about it later though her eyes. Her column was funny—and smart, though I never thought I’d say that about a gossip column. I thought she had been blowing smoke when she claimed she spoke truth to power, but she kind of did. She sent up the Greek system, for example, even as she reported on it. And she’d printed a series of blind items about an asshole football player preying on freshman girls that had caused the school to investigate and ended up getting him kicked off the team. That had impressed the hell out of me.

  And the column seemed to have gotten her what she wanted: social power. That was the phrase she had used when I drove her home from one of these parties a couple years ago. Every time I saw her in action, she was the belle of the ball. Everyone wanted her attention, and she moved through these sorts of parties with a kind of bemused grace, like the queen that she was. She always wore black—when she wasn’t wearing a toga—and she looked like she was a decade more mature than all her neon-hued peers.

  I scanned the crowd again and came up empty, except I did spot that Tony kid—the Gothy jerk who had bailed on her when I busted her for her Ace the Anaconda caper last spring. What kind of asshole hung his friend—girlfriend? God I hoped not—out to dry like that? He tried to turn tail when I approached, but I grabbed the lapel of his coat. “Where’s Dawn?”

  “She’s around.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “She went upstairs a few minutes ago,” said Jenny Fields, whom I hadn’t noticed on the other side of Tony, probably because she was the last type of kid I’d expect to find at a raging frat party.

  She must have interpreted my raised eyebrows correctly, because she shrugged and said, “Sometimes you gotta see how the other half lives.” But then she leaned in close and said, “Dawn went upstairs with that creep Royce Waldorf. Do you know him?”

  I didn’t pause long enough to answer her; I just hit the stairs.

  Dawn

  Royce Waldorf was a creep. Everyone knew it. He’d been hitting on me since that first party I went to freshman year. Heck, he’d been hitting on everything that moved. And it was his fifth year, so why was he even still here? Of course, the answer to that was probably because he’d partied so much he didn’t have enough credits to graduate on time.

  Anyway, as much as Royce gave me the heebie-jeebies there was no way I was going to turn down his invitation to chat privately about some “serious gossip” he claimed to be sitting on. Honestly, if anyone was going to have some good dirt, it was Royce Waldorf. Not only was he a scumbag who ran with scumbags, he was a rich, well-connected scumbag. An Izod-and-Swatch-wearing scumbag, but a scumbag nonetheless. And he’d spent the fall interning for one of his dad’s colleagues in the Senate. I’m not
going to lie; I was having visions of Dish with Dawn breaking open the next Watergate. Daddy would pee his pants.

  I thought I could handle Royce, but I was beginning to wonder if I’d been wrong. I had made the mistake of letting him hold the door for me—we were in his upstairs bedroom so he could tell me his super-secret dirt in private—but that meant he was between me and the door.

  And he was very, very drunk. Maybe even high. I didn’t have a lot of experience with drugs, but it seemed like he had more than booze in his system.

  “I’ve been trying to get you up here for two years,” he slurred.

  “So what’s your news, Royce?” I said, trying to keep him on track.

  “It will cost you.”

  “I don’t pay my sources.” Not anymore, anyway.

  “Renee Williamson had a nose job.”

  “I know that.”

  He reared back with a degree of shock that was way out of proportion to the situation and probably attributable to his degree of inebriation. It would have been funny in another setting.

  “So why haven’t you printed it?”

  “I don’t do that kind of gossip.” It was true. I hadn’t ever articulated it in my speeches to Jenny about the redeeming value of gossip, but I didn’t print things that had no purpose other than to be outright mean. Or at least I didn’t anymore. I’d done a couple items in the early days of my column that had left me with a bad taste in my mouth. One was about a girl who showed up to my Intro to Social Psych lecture every day in the same clothes. Every single day. I didn’t say her name or print a picture, but it was easy enough to figure out who she was. I thought I was making amusing remarks about her (lack of) fashion sense, but I found out later that she was on a scholarship and lived in a boardinghouse. There had been no point in running that item. So now, I only ran items about people who should know better doing shit they shouldn’t be doing. Hypocrites. People abusing power. Arrogant dickheads who needed to be taken down a peg. The distinction was probably lost on my readers, though. Everyone thought of me as the shallow campus gossip. But, hey, at least they thought of me. “So if that’s all…” I tried to brush past Royce, but he stuck out an arm and blocked me.