I knew I sounded confrontational, but enough already. The school’s zero-tolerance policy sure as hell wasn’t getting us anywhere.
The girl who’d spoken had about four inches on me and a volleyball player’s build. “It’s a free country,” she informed me. “I can say whatever I want.”
I tried her companion. “What are your names? What year are you?”
“She’s Courtney Young, and I’m Isabella Ramos. Juniors.”
Courtney linked arms with Isabella. “We’re friends. We’re kidding. She calls me a bitch and I call her a slut and —”
“A hot tamale,” Isabella said, extracting herself. “You called me that this morning.”
“Hilarious, right?” Courtney laughed. “Because she’s Spanish . . . or whatever.” After an awkward silence, Courtney insisted, “Bella doesn’t mind. She thinks it’s funny, too.”
“Isabella,” I said, “you’re not laughing.”
Walking off, she called, “No, I’m not.”
During Journalism, I interviewed Mrs. Evans, the school counselor, in her tiny office with the Bunnies! calendar and the white-noise machine.
She complimented me on writing about “such an important subject” and chose her words carefully, speaking mostly from index cards.
Mrs. Evans said sexual bullying was a way to take away someone’s power, someone’s voice. To make it seem like if somebody attacked you, you’d had it coming. “It can also be racially motivated.”
I stopped scribbling and looked up. “You mean sexist and racist?”
“Yes, both.” She returned to her notes. “I see the stereotypes every time I turn on the TV. Black women, Latina and Asian women, Arab women, they’re too often depicted —”
“Indigenous women,” I said automatically.
“Uh, yes, I’m sure American Indians were . . .” Mrs. Evans cleared her throat. “I’m sure Native American women were . . .”
She smiled desperately, off-script. “They did call it the Wild West, after all.”
Her hand flew to her throat. “Don’t quote that!”
I couldn’t sleep. Hughie couldn’t sleep. We’d ended up binge-watching The Flash for the umpteenth time while waiting for Mama and Daddy to return from a confab with Chelsea’s and A.J.’s parents at the Weber house. They finally got home after eleven o’clock.
“Are we all meeting with the principal?” Hughie asked.
“Can I talk to Karishma and Daniel about doing a story on —?”
“Hold your horses,” Daddy called, yanking off his cowboy boots in the foyer.
“There are differences of opinion on that among the parents,” Mama said, joining us in the great room. “And among the other kids.” She hugged Hughie. “Right now, the consensus is to not give the haters the signal boost or satisfaction.” She hugged me, too. “The hope is that, if they don’t get a response, they’ll lose interest and move on.”
“That’s it?” my brother replied. “We’re just going to take it?”
“The other families have been living in East Hannesburg longer,” Daddy explained, walking in. “They have deeper roots and jobs to protect in the community. Both Chelsea and A.J. have much younger siblings who could get caught in the middle if this thing blows up.”
Joey ran with a story tip from Alexis on injuries at the skate park.
“There’s drama in that,” Karishma said at our weekly Features meeting. “Conflict.”
She scrolled down. “Joey, I like that you framed the lead around calls for more safety regulations for underage skaters. It personalizes the content to our audience.”
My profile of the sophomore running a tutoring service didn’t fare so well.
Karishma had called it “nice.”
Daniel had said, “Cut it in half.”
Having been bested the week before, Joey didn’t gloat.
Emily stayed put after the bell rang, finishing up her Jazz Band story.
“How’s it going with the musical coverage?” I asked.
“I’m maxed out,” she muttered. “But isn’t everybody?”
“I’d like to help,” I replied. “I don’t even need a byline —”
“Does this have anything to do with your little brother?” Emily asked. “Wait. Don’t answer that. Hang on.” She called, “Karishma, Ms. Wilson!”
They stopped on their way out and veered over to join us at the table.
(Alexis and the boys had already left for the day.)
I launched into my request again, adding, “I know there’s a conflict-of-interest concern, what with Hughie being in the cast. But I could pitch in on research. Deep background research.”
Basically I needed to figure out who’d sent the anonymous messages, and being on assignment for the Hive would give me an excuse to ask around. To investigate.
“Media outlets occasionally tackle stories that they or, say, their parent companies are somehow involved in,” Ms. Wilson said. “Like last year when the Weekly Examiner publisher crashed his car into that church sign during the ice storm. The way to deal with situations like that is to clearly state the relationship — admit to the conflict up front and as clearly as possible.”
She always snapped into teacher mode when we needed her.
“I could run an editor’s note clarifying your sibling relationship at the end of every article,” Karishma offered, setting her backpack on the table. “That’s transparent, Lou.”
“I am biased, though,” I had to admit. “And not only because of my loyalty to Hughie. I mean, Parents Against Revisionist Theater? They’re —”
“I’m no fan girl, either,” Emily said.
Ms. Wilson pushed up her hot-pink cat’s-eye glasses. “Being a journalist doesn’t mean you give up your conscience. It means that you don’t confuse your opinions with the facts. Facts are key to reporting the news. Opinions are the stuff of editorials.”
OPINION: EHHS THEATER SOARS “OVER THE RAINBOW”
by Karishma Sawkar, Hive editor in chief
7:15 a.m. CT Friday, September 25
The EHHS fall musical, The Wizard of Oz, will feature a diverse cast, headlined by senior Chelsea Weber, who is Black, in the role of Dorothy. This decision followed an announcement by faculty director Lisa Qualey that “every student actor who auditions for a role will receive fair and equal consideration.”
Weber will be the first student of color in the history of the school to perform in a leading role. This show of progress is long overdue. Theater should be welcoming and inclusive of all interested students, and all students deserve a real shot at landing major roles.
When asked why he thought Qualey found it necessary to make her statement, former faculty director Howard Leary said, “How dare you try to besmirch my forty-three-year record of excellence in public education with your hateful insinuations!”
It’s true that no previously stated policy explicitly called for favoring white students in casting decisions. However, that bias is evidenced by the fact that all the preceding productions featured almost uniformly white actors.
The few students of color were assigned to small or walk-on roles.
According to the Hannesburg School District, the EHHS student body is almost 80 percent white, 10 percent Latino, 5 percent Black, 5 percent Asian American and less than 1 percent Other. Previous casts in no way reflected those demographics.
Qualey’s approach encourages students of color to pursue Theater by offering them the opportunity for full participation. The result will be productions that fully reflect the theatrical potential of the entire student body.
Weighed against the Theater Department’s track record, Qualey’s statement of inclusivity has been interpreted as a call for change. Reactions have been both positive and negative.
Overall participation in Theater has increased by 20 percent since last year.
Much but not all of that uptick reflects heightened involvement by students of color.
Meanwhile, a newly formed orga
nization, Parents Against Revisionist Theater (PART), is circulating a petition. It calls for a return to “tradition” and a “classic approach to casting.”
The words “tradition” and “classic” are smoke screens. PART’s membership is dismissing social and artistic progress as “political correctness” and advocating for a return to the previous status quo. Their argument is largely built on the false assumption that Weber and the other cast members of color couldn’t have been chosen based on their merit.
PART’s bigotry has no place in decisions about students in the performing arts.
“I can’t control other people’s attitudes or assumptions,” Qualey said. “When I stated ‘fair and equal,’ I meant ‘fair and equal.’ I cast based on talent, choosing the student actors who proved themselves the best picks for their respective roles.”
This fall’s production of The Wizard of Oz is scheduled from Nov. 20 to Nov. 22 and promises to be wonderful.
It’s a giant leap forward along the Yellow Brick Road.
Sunday was Daddy’s only day off, so he always tried to make the most of it. He had trimmed the hedges and dug up a narrow row of the grass bordering the walk from our driveway to our front porch. Stepping outside, I offered him a cold bottle of water. “Planting bulbs?”
I imagined tulips and daffodils bursting forth the following spring. Mama had always been the family gardener, but she’d left a couple of hours earlier to study at the KU law library.
“Nope.” Daddy knelt, gesturing to his project. “Take a look.”
I made myself comfortable on the concrete step, cheerfully bewildered. He was building a series of six-inch-tall mounds, layering rock and soil, circling each with mulch.
Daddy handed me a square cardboard box bearing a postmark and our address. Mysteriously enough, it had originated from a company in Seattle called Frolicking Faeries.
The packaging tape had been key-cut open. I unrolled bubble wrap to retrieve a four-inch-tall forest-green door in a rounded, wood-stained frame, flat at the base. It had tiny metal hinges and a tinier circular knob. I kept looking in the box and found more little doors just like it, except in yellow, blue, red, orange . . . A dozen or so. “You’re building hobbit holes!”
Daddy spread his arms, triumphant. “I’m building the Shire. Want to help?”
I did. That afternoon, Hughie had gone on what basically amounted to a scavenger hunt for props with the Theater group. But when Daddy was stationed in Iraq, the two of them had bonded, long-distance, over Tolkien. I suspected Daddy had envisioned the Shire as a father-son project, but Hughie was so busy lately.
“Nothing in the homeowners’ association handbook says yards have to be flat,” Daddy declared. There was a full-page list of prohibited yard art, he explained, but so long as nobody could identify it as such from the street, the Shire would survive unchallenged. He’d even picked up some scrap sod from the plant nursery to cover the back of the Hobbit holes.
“You’re quite the rebel,” I told him.
For a while, we worked quietly. It was about 70 degrees, clear skies. A pair of bluebirds supervised us from an overhead branch. A squirrel scampered across the freshly mowed lawn.
I asked, “When you were in high school, how did you decide whether to ask a girl out?”
Daddy positioned one tiny pebble after another around the red door. “I didn’t,” he replied, puffing himself up. “They asked me.”
Amused, I tossed a pebble at him, and with his palm, he batted it over my shoulder.
I told Daddy about Joey, how we’d hit it off. How I’d thought, assumed, hoped, he’d ask me out once he knew I was available. So far, nothing.
“Our limo story, the one about the grandfather-grandson team, got over five hundred hits.” It was the Hive’s second highest-traffic, non-sports video of the semester after Alexis’s animal-shelter editorial, and she had footage of three-week-old kittens — an automatic Internet slam dunk. “But Joey’s been absorbed in his own stories and preoccupied with the other reporters’, too.”
Images entice clicks. Joey’s — with his eye, experience, and equipment — kicked ass over everybody else’s, and the reporters on staff were competitive in a friendly way. Especially since Karishma had started listing the weekly article traffic totals on the newsroom whiteboard.
“During class, he’s always off on assignment or busy editing or other people are around.”
“Joey strikes me as a fine young man,” Daddy said. “Polite. Respectful.”
He took a swig of water. “You see this boy five or six days a week. How hard is it to say you like him? What have you got to lose?”
A breeze carried the smoky aroma rising from a nearby outdoor grill. “Well.” I chose the little blue door. “If he rejects me, I’ll be humiliated and I’ll still have to see him all the time.”
Daddy patted the curved soil with his hand trowel. “What I wouldn’t give for this to be the worst problem you’ll ever have. But, Pumpkin, caring about somebody isn’t trivial. It can keep you going. I’ve had days overseas where your mom and you kids . . .”
“Us, too,” I said.
Ms. Zimmerman, our school librarian, was fifty-something, dyed her graying hair fairy blue and was mostly unsuccessful at hiding her Winnie-the-Pooh tattoos.
Still, I wasn’t surprised on Monday morning when she declined my interview request. When it came to PART, the faculty and staff seemed to have an unofficial “no comment” policy, and the administration spoke in gobbledygook.
Then, at lunch, student library aide Brooke Johanson asked me to meet her after school in the basement, beyond the Pep Club storage cage and the empty one farther down from it.
The subterranean hall was dimly lit, heavy on overhead ductwork, and a tad creepy. I waited ten minutes, fifteen. Again, I checked the time on my phone. Twenty-two minutes.
“The librarian sends her regards,” Brooke announced, startling me from behind.
I pivoted to face her. As usual, Brooke’s sleek blond bob was perfectly curled. Her A-line dress fell a modest two inches past her knees.
Hugging a book, she added, “Ms. Zimmerman says she’s sorry she can’t talk to you about PART . . . as they’re now calling themselves.”
“I get it,” I said. “She’s protecting her job.”
Feminine voices wafted our way from the girls’ locker room.
“Shush!” Brooke fished a key out of her bra and motioned for me to follow her past the rest of the storage cages and around a darker corner.
She unlocked an unmarked door, opened it, and motioned for me to go in.
Kidding, I asked, “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”
When Brooke didn’t reply, I entered and tugged a dangling silver chain to turn on the single bare-bulb overhead light. “Let me guess,” I added. “This is off the record.”
“Of course. The library, the musical. We’ve got a common enemy.”
We were standing, facing each other, in a cramped walk-in closet. About two feet apart, which was all the space available. Floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves stocked with janitorial supplies stood against each wall. Toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, and various cleansers.
Brooke reached up and yanked the chain and the closet went pitch black. “Here’s the truth: They’re not just racist assholes. They’re racist, homophobic, control-freak assholes who think they have the right to dictate all our lives. I should know. My parents are among them.”
“Your parents?” I exclaimed.
“They’re proud members of PART. They think I’m monitoring the library to weed out what they’d consider inappropriate material.”
I could almost feel Brooke smiling in the dark. “You’re like a double agent!”
“I’m not like a double agent,” Brooke replied. “I am a double agent.”
Which would make a splendid story for the Hive, but it obviously wasn’t one she wanted made public. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“No, I
brought you here to warn you not to underestimate them and to give you this from Ms. Zimmerman.” Fumbling in the darkness, Brooke handed me the book she’d been hugging. “For your brother.”
She opened the closet door, letting in a sliver of light. “Before you leave, count to one hundred and twenty.” Then Brooke shut me inside and was gone.
Apparently student library aides were not to be trifled with. I was willing to humor her and wait there a couple of minutes. I was not willing to stand by myself in a pitch-black closet in the freaking school basement for one hundred twenty seconds.
I tugged the overhead light back on.
The novel for Hughie was If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth of the Onondaga Nation. It was lacking a clear protective jacket cover or any library catalog markings. The price sticker on the back was from an independent bookstore in Lawrence.
There was a handwritten note inside. A friendly one.
Hughie,
Here’s that novel you asked about.
Consider it a gift.
Your Friend,
The Librarian
In Government class, I stole a glimpse at Joey. Lately he’d been off with Daniel during Journalism, interviewing coaches. Between Cross-Country, boys’ Football and Soccer, girls’ Golf, Gymnastics, Tennis, and Volleyball — let’s just say, there were a lot of fall coaches.
“Three minutes,” Mr. McCloud announced. “Wrap it up, people.”
I’d finished the short-answer section and read over my answer to the essay question. Gerrymandering. Sucked most if the other side was doing it. It was an A answer.
My brain had moved on to mentally rehearsing what to say to Joey after class.
Hey, a new bowling-alley restaurant opened at the mall. They’re still hiring, and I was thinking about doing a feature on it, especially if any students are employed there. You in?
Breezy. Confident. I’d convey my vision but in such a way that said I was still fluid, open to a truly collaborative approach.
Hearts Unbroken Page 8
