Hearts Unbroken

by Cynthia Leitich Smith

  But Features is more of a writer’s writing assignment, isn’t it? Less formulaic than News or Sports, more about the captivating lead than the inverted pyramid.

  Karishma had heard me read a couple of my essays in AP Lit last spring. She’d mentioned my writing ability when she urged me to sign up for the Hive.

  She had to know I was the best reporter for the job.

  “Joey, why don’t you want Sports?” I asked. Obnoxious of me, I know. But most boys hardly talk about anything else, and Joey looked athletic.

  “Why don’t you want Sports?” he countered.

  Ms. Wilson had crossed the room and stepped up on a chair to tack up a First Amendment poster between a laminated front page from the Kansas City Royals’ last World Series win and a laminated front page from the last KU NCAA basketball championship.

  “What if we expand Features?” she suggested, hopping down. “Lou and Joey can work together and separately. It’ll give Joey plenty of room to make the Hive less boring.” She shook her blond curls. “That comment really stung.”

  (Yes, teacher humor at its finest.)

  “I like it,” Karishma said. “Joey will be too busy shooting for everyone else to cover a whole beat by himself.” She capped her marker. “Daniel, how about you take Sports?”

  Made sense to me. Daniel’s a quintessential jock — always in his letterman jacket and class ring. He’s like Cam that way, except just shy of a foot shorter.

  “What about Wrestling?” Nick called from the back, copyediting at his desk near the equipment-storage cabinet. “Daniel can’t cover his own meets.”

  Alexis, the News reporter, had just returned from the restroom. “I’ll take it. I have an older brother who wrestled. The coach loved him.”

  (The first meet isn’t until December anyway.)

  “Can I be the managing editor and the Sports reporter?” Daniel asked Ms. Wilson.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, proudly surveying her journalistic wall display. “Can you?”

  Daniel pumped his fist into the air. “Hell, yeah!”

  Inspired by Hughie’s middle-school experience, I pitched the editors a story on bullying. “The Hive has tackled the topic before,” I admitted. “But not within the past three years, and the bulk of our student readership has turned over since then.”

  (Joey wasn’t the only one who could check the archives.)

  “That’s a fairly ambitious feature for your first week,” Karishma mused. She and Daniel were seated across from each other, as if for dueling keyboards. “It’s already Wednesday.”

  They were working on a joint editorial about the importance of free discourse in student media. Karishma had scribbled her ideas on purple Post-it notes. He’d jotted his on blue ones, and they kept moving them around the tabletop. From their bickering, I could tell it wasn’t going well.

  “I am ambitious,” I replied. “I’d like to make a difference for students who —”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Joey said, coordinating his videography schedule with Alexis’s calendar of school events. Three long tables had been positioned, parallel, behind the two rows of single desks up front. He and Alexis had set up in the middle of the room.

  Was he mocking me or waving off distant assignments?

  “As I was saying,” I tried again, “I’d like to make a difference, but I’d appreciate any tips on identifying sources.” I hated being high-maintenance, but I was still booting my post-Cam social presence. And, if I wanted to make Friday’s back-to-school issue, my article had to be in to Nick for copyediting by early that morning.

  Daniel snagged one of Karishma’s purple Post-it notes and scribbled Wyatt Hanley on it.

  “Friend of yours?” I asked, sticking it inside my Journalism binder.

  The managing editor shrugged. “Some of the guys give him a hard time.”

  “Some of the guys?” Karishma nudged.

  “I didn’t do anything!” Daniel exclaimed. “I can’t control my friends.”

  “You could talk to them,” I pointed out.

  “Sure, gang up on me.” He stood from the table. “Wyatt rides a neon-green mountain bike to school. Should be locked out front. You can’t miss it.”

  With that, Daniel began crumbling up a few of his own sticky notes, tossing them like basketballs toward the trash can.

  Karishma ignored him. “Bullying . . . Lou, it’s a huge topic, complicated, sensitive. I want you to go after big stories this year. But right now, you’re a brand-new reporter.”

  “Give me a chance,” I said. “Let me show what I can do.”

  She steepled her fingers. “Okay. Let’s see how it goes and . . . if you need a backup idea, you might consider doing a feature on the new head janitor.”

  “Sounds thrilling,” I muttered, discouraged by her lack of faith.

  The bell rang. As I was hurrying past the teacher’s desk to beat Wyatt to the bike rack, Ms. Wilson said, “About the new custodian . . . last year, the cafeteria staff compiled a top-twenty list of all the rude, crude things that students had said to them. It was kind of funny and kind of not funny. Some kids treat certain staff members like they’re invisible or, worse, beneath them.”

  Ms. Wilson began cleaning her glasses. “Some teachers and administrators do, too.”

  I hadn’t thought about it like that.

  Wyatt was a senior of average height and weight. He had a generic short haircut and dressed to blend. The only remarkable things about him were his lime-green bicycle and how much he didn’t want to talk to me.

  “Who put you up to this?” he asked, opening the bike lock. “Cam Ryan?”

  “No.” Mentioning Daniel seemed like a bad idea. “I told you. I’m here for the Hive. Karishma Sawker is the editor in chief. I’m doing a story about bullying.”

  Wyatt was still scanning the waves of departing students. “How did my name come up?”

  “I’m interviewing several people.” I hoped to, anyway. “Do you have anything to say?”

  Gripping the handlebars, he replied, “I don’t want you to use my name.”

  I could call him “unidentified senior.” I suggested, “Off the record, then?”

  “Off the record,” Wyatt echoed. “I hate school. I hate the halls. I hate the cafeteria. I hate the locker room and the restrooms and the goddamn bus.”

  He straddled his bike. “I hate every asswipe who messes with me and everybody who laughs when they do. I hate how the Gym teachers look away, especially the ones who coach. How they protect the Cam Ryans of the world. Most of all, I hate girls who go for guys like him.” Ouch. Hard not to take that one personally.

  As Wyatt pedaled off, I keyed the quote into my phone as fast as I could.

  Thursday morning, I struck out with the counselor’s office.

  The school secretary said, “I’m sure that Mrs. Evans has plenty of helpful materials. After all, we have zero tolerance for bullying.”

  However, it was too late to get an interview appointment for that same day, and Ms. Wilson had cautioned us against “regurgitating information” from the Internet.

  Coming out of Calc, I heard a sneering feminine voice say, “Nice outfit, Paul Bunyan.”

  The target was Sage Schmidt, who’s tall and robust and sported faded overalls with a square-cut white T and hiking boots. Sage lives in Emerald Hills, my subdivision, and we’d chatted once at our neighborhood pool. “You okay?” I asked.

  Sage’s wry smile surprised me. “I can Bunyan with the best of them. All I need is a blue ox, and, hey, who doesn’t want a blue ox?”

  “I’d love a blue ox,” I agreed. Then Sage filled me in on how the name-caller had been routinely picked on by other girls back in elementary school.

  “Sorry, Lou.” Karishma glanced up from my draft. “We can’t do anything with this for Friday. You only have two sources, and one of them is anonymous. And you reported just one side of the incident you witnessed in the hall.”

  “The other side said, ‘No
comment.’ ”

  More like, “Go to hell,” but somehow, I didn’t think that would fly in the Hive.

  “We’re a school paper,” Karishma replied. “We’ve got to protect our credibility. There’s too much editorializing, overgeneralizing. We’d need to hear from an expert and include resources —”

  “Got it,” I replied, reaching for my notebook. “Can we finish this tomorrow?”

  Preferably when Joey wasn’t smirking while Nick copyedited his already approved story on a junior who was raising three rescued crow chicks. (And of course, Joey had video to boot.)

  “It’s nothing personal,” Karishma assured me. “You’re not the only one struggling with an assignment.”

  True. Auditions for the musical had been “temporarily” put on hold, and neither the faculty director nor the administration was willing to talk to Emily about it.

  “I’m not upset,” I replied. Not exactly, and I wasn’t going to miss out on a byline in the first issue. “Can we talk more later? I have a janitor to track down and only twenty-two minutes before the final bell.”

  On Labor Day, after a hearty breakfast of Texas-shaped waffles, Mama and I did homework and drank sweet tea at our antique kitchen table.

  For her, pursuing a law degree and a master’s in Indigenous Studies was a huge adjustment. She’d shifted from teacher to student, quit her Tuesday-night book club, and stored her beading supplies on our laundry-room shelf. To me, the new normal didn’t feel much different from the countless previous times I’d studied while she graded English papers.

  I reviewed a diagram of the skin (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis) for AP Anatomy and Physiology. Meanwhile, she turned a page in her Civil Procedure textbook, muttering, “Rituals, code words, posturing.”

  “Posturing?” I echoed. “They teach ego at KU Law?”

  “No need,” she replied. “Plenty to go around already, although I suppose that’s true of every law school and a great deal of legal practice, too.”

  I suspected she needed a pep talk. “You’re becoming a lawyer” — and then I quoted Mama’s words back to her —“ ‘to defend tribal sovereignty and to keep American Indian children in American Indian families and communities,’ where we belong.”

  She chuckled. “You’re a good listener.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, I am.”

  Mama turned another page. “I may need to hear you repeat that every so often.”

  “Yes,” I replied, like a vow. “Yes, I know.”

  The college application process is like a part-time job unto itself. Karishma’s and Nick’s families were among those who’d hired professional consultants.

  Mine was more of an in-house effort. The University of Kansas was my top choice, and I would have no trouble meeting the assured admissions criteria. Consequently my focus was less about where to go than how to cover the costs, especially since Mama and I would both be paying tuition for two overlapping years, and Hughie and I for at least one.

  Mama had briefly set aside her studies to review one of my scholarship essays, reflecting on the protests we’d attended over the years in Austin, Oklahoma City, and Topeka.

  “Maybe it would be better to pick one and go deep,” she suggested, seated across from me. “Tie it into your newfound interest in the news media.”

  “It’s not like I’ve decided to major in journalism or communications,” I said.

  Not yet, anyway. I’d been a co-reporter on Features for over a week, and so far, my one contribution to the Hive had been the personality profile on the new head custodian. (He’d grown up in Wichita and ran a hot-air balloon business on the side.)

  The doorbell rang. “It’s ‘Joey’?” Mama asked, standing.

  “Joseph A. Kairouz,” I reminded her. “We’re doing a story today for the Hive.”

  Meanwhile Daddy had been coming in through the sliding-glass back door. “A newspaper with no paper involved.”

  “Better for the trees,” Mama pointed out. “Reduces litter.”

  “The Hive sounds like an evil space empire,” Hughie said, following Daddy inside, scripts in hand. They’d been running lines on the deck. “Do y’all buzz to the will of your queen?”

  I had a sudden flash of Karishma in the Honeybees mascot costume. “Pretty much.”

  “Oh, how I love air-conditioning,” Daddy said, pouring himself a tall glass of iced tea. “When is Lou’s new boyfriend supposed to arrive?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, not for the first time.

  “That’s probably him at the front door now,” Mama announced.

  I could tell Joey would be treated to a Wolfe family welcome.

  We’d gone through a similar ordeal the first time Cam had picked me up.

  That in mind, I got up and strolled across the great room to the mesquite coffee table. Sure enough, Daddy had strategically fanned out his gun and hunting enthusiast magazines, his military and veteran magazines.

  I held one up. “Please tell me you’re not using these as a warning to Joey.”

  “You are my only daughter.” Daddy squared his chin, caught in the act. “Hughie’s my only son. I have every intention of instilling a healthy respect in his future dates, too.”

  Mama moved to gather up the magazine display. “We can’t always be looking over their shoulders,” she said. “We have to trust them to make smart choices.”

  “They’re not the ones I don’t trust,” Daddy replied, slicing a lemon. “I remember what it was like to be a teenager.”

  “This isn’t even a date situation!” I exclaimed. “Joey is a classmate. We’ve got a Journalism assignment. We’re going to be working together a lot this semester. Platonically.”

  When Daddy shrugged, I finally caught on that he was just messing with me.

  Mama realized it at the same time. “You’re incorrigible,” she said.

  Pleased with himself, Daddy took a sip of tea. “I try.”

  Goofball. I put in, “By the way, Joey’s father is a vet, too — air force.”

  Hughie, bouncy with thespian energy, gestured toward the foyer. “Do you want me to let him in or should we leave him out on the front step all day?”

  The doorbell rang again.

  Once Joey had been given the friendly once-over, we headed out to his white hardtop Jeep Wrangler. It was slightly dented, had four doors and tinted windows, and appeared to have been newly washed.

  “Careful getting in,” Joey said, opening the door for me. “There’s a problem with the floorboard on the passenger side.”

  I looked down, all the way to the concrete. “What floorboard on the passenger side?”

  As I climbed in, my balance wavered and then I briefly felt Joey’s strong, steadying hands against my back. “I’ve got it,” I assured him, half turning to position myself.

  “Tuck your legs up on the seat,” Joey suggested.

  I took his advice and fastened my seat belt. “We’re going to the mall?”

  “You say that like you don’t like malls.”

  I don’t dislike them exactly. Joey hadn’t spelled out his story idea, only that he wanted me to partner with him on it. He came around the vehicle and joined me inside.

  “Why didn’t you want Sports?” I asked in a far more pleasant tone than I’d used in the newsroom. “It’s the most-clicked page on the Hive.”

  “I did want Sports,” he replied, which made no sense at all.

  Backing out of my driveway, Joey added, “I was overthinking, obsessing.” Making his way down the cul-de-sac, he explained, “It’s my ex-girlfriend. We started going out in ninth.”

  “The girl in the picture in your locker?”

  As a lawn-care truck cruised by, I realized I’d been too quick to fill in the blank.

  Joey turned onto the sugar-maple-lined avenue. “Pathetic, right? I should take it down.”

  He winced. “Last spring, she hooked up with my best friend.” His grip tightened on the steering wheel. “I caught them . .
. at a house party. On the trampoline.”

  Yowza. From what I’d gathered, that must’ve fallen somewhere near the end of his parents’ divorce. Bad timing. Apocalyptic.

  We passed the Emerald Hills community clubhouse and swimming pool on the left, four model homes on the right. Signs on both sides read OPEN HOUSE, and the subdivision entrance was landscaped in boulders, red hollyhocks, and ornamental grasses.

  “You don’t want to run into your ex and her, uh, boyfriend at the games?”

  Joey had mentioned that he’d gone to West Overland High School, and the West Overland teams were on the EHHS sports schedules. Either his emotional wound was still too fresh or Joey had thought the distraction would keep him from doing his best work. Maybe both.

  The silence in the Jeep was palpable until we’d almost reached our destination.

  Finally I said, “Maybe they won’t show —”

  “He’s a yell leader,” Joey told me. “She’s in Marching Band.”

  He took the mall exit. “They’ll be there. I’ll be doing a ton of visual and overflow Sports coverage regardless, but I didn’t want to be obligated to go to every game. Daniel will just have to make do without me for that one.”

  “ ‘Big deal,’ ” I said, quoting the managing editor in the newsroom, day one. “ ‘Everybody’s a photographer. Videographer. Whatever.’ ”

  Joey winked at me.

  When we arrived at Burnham Outlets, the parking lot was full, so Joey pulled his Jeep into the concrete garage. The three aboveground levels were likewise packed, but we scored one of the few remaining spots in the basement.

  The mall is home to national retail shops, chain restaurants, a dine-in movie theater, the new city hall, and the main public library.

  The walks are paved with gold bricks bearing the names of local library donors.

  Walking out with his tripod, Joey said, “The light today is amazing.”

  Labor Day sales signs filled the storefront windows. Little kids bounced, shrieking, in a colorful ball pit. Yogurt-store clerks on the sidewalk offered free samples.