Front Page Face-Off

by Jo Whittemore

  “So, does Katie have pyrokinetic powers like in Firestarter? Should I start wearing flame-retardant clothes to school?”

  I shook my head and filled her in on the article. “I know who, what, when, and where. But I don’t know why.”

  “As in, why would she torch her school?”

  “Exactly. And how did she never get caught?”

  I advanced through the microfiche in search of a follow-up article but found only a brief snippet saying that the police had decided to rule the fire an unsolved case, most likely the result of a prank gone wrong. Two months later, after the buzz had died down, Katie had transferred to Brighton.

  She named her clique Hot Stuff, I assumed, in honor of her brief career as an arsonist, but that didn’t explain the fire extinguisher in her locker or her motives. But I knew the answers to these questions would be found at her old school.

  I fished my cell phone out of my bag and dialed Marcus. Jenner didn’t know that I’d sort of started liking him, so I did my best to act professional.

  “Delilah?” He made no effort to hide his surprise. “I didn’t think you’d ever call back.” His voice lowered a bit. “It’s cool that you did, though.”

  I blushed and winced, already feeling guilty for what I was about to say. “I was … actually calling because I need a favor.”

  His simple reply spoke volumes of disappointment. “Oh.”

  “But later I can—”

  “Don’t worry about it. What did you want?” His tone changed to the Marcus I’d run into last week, the one who couldn’t have cared less if Renee Mercer pummeled me into the ground. I tried not to seem flustered.

  “I … uh … I … need to borrow part of your uniform from Sheldon. The sweater … if you still have it. Please.”

  “Okay. Is that it? I have to go.”

  My shoulders sagged and I bit my lip. He wasn’t even remotely curious why I wanted the sweater. He just wanted to stop talking to me. “Yeah. Thanks.” I snapped the phone shut and Jenner prodded my shoulder.

  “What, may I ask, do you want Marcus’s old uniform for?”

  I took a deep breath and swallowed any emotion before turning to look up at her.

  “Tomorrow after lunch I’m going to be a Sheldon Sea Turtle.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  On Monday I awoke to a bugle playing reveille in my ear. It was the military’s morning wake-up call, which meant only one person could be pacing the floor beside my bed.

  “I’m up, I’m up.” I swatted at the CD player blasting the music, but Major held it just out of my reach.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  I checked my alarm clock, which read 6:53. “I still have an hour until school starts. Don’t worry. I’ll be on time.”

  Major finally turned off the CD player. “Your mother tells me that on mornings when the school paper comes out, you’re already in class by now to help with the final layout.”

  Ordinarily, this was true, but ordinarily, I wouldn’t have spent the weekend before kissing my editor and assaulting my co-reporter with turbo-strength apple pie spice.

  “I turned my articles in last night. Ben doesn’t need my help to put the Bugle together.” I shrugged and added a yawn for good measure.

  Major scrutinized me. “You’re a creature of habit, Delilah, and I know this paper is important to you. I refuse to believe you’ve suddenly taken less of an interest.” He narrowed his eyes. “Which means something’s changed.”

  “Everything’s the same.” I burrowed under the blankets. “I just don’t want to share the front page with the French girl.” It wasn’t a complete lie, but it would be enough to keep Major from getting suspicious.

  “And sleeping in will get you what you want?”

  “No, but I can dream that it will.” My words were muffled by several inches of blanket, which Major pulled down until he could see my face.

  “You have to fight for what you believe in, Delilah.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, his sappy made-for-TV moral was true. My weekend drama might have been more than enough reason to avoid school until everyone graduated, but I needed to be there to keep an eye on Ava. If people started to think I didn’t care about the paper, I could kiss the front page good-bye.

  Thirty minutes later, I walked through the front doors of the school to find Paige and Jenner waiting for me. Jenner looked pained, as if she’d been listening to one of Paige’s beauty rants, and the first thing she did was tackle me with a hug.

  “She’s trying to convince me that blue eye shadow will make me a better surfer. Make her stop!”

  Paige didn’t respond, but I could sense her hovering around me. “What?” I finally turned, only to catch her staring aghast at my outfit.

  “Your debut edition comes out today, you’re the hot topic of the school, and you dress like that?”

  Jenner rolled her eyes, but this time I couldn’t disagree with Paige. My outfit was designed to help me blend in with the uniformed crowd at Sheldon, not win any beauty contests. I’d borrowed one of my mom’s navy blue business skirts, which was one of Sheldon’s colors, and paired it with a plain white button-up shirt and black Mary Janes.

  “You look like a flight attendant!” Paige reached into her bag. “But I can fix that with scissors and a little glitter glue.”

  I grabbed her hand. “Don’t even try. I need this skirt to be perfectly boring to fit in at Sheldon.”

  Her fingers flew to my waist and started rolling up the skirt. “At least wear something that shows your knees. And tie this around your neck.” She fished a silk scarf out of her bag, knotted it around my collar, and stepped back to inspect her handiwork. “Much less frightening, but the shoes could still use a little pizzazz.” She smiled hopefully and reached for her glitter glue.

  “Absolutely not.”

  The three of us made our way down the hall, and I kept my eyes fixed on the lockers. If people were pointing and whispering, I didn’t want to know. Unfortunately, I was so focused on ignoring everyone that I didn’t even see Marcus until he was standing right in front of me.

  “Marcus!” I yelped, startled. He jumped too, along with Jenner and Paige.

  Paige took Jenner’s sleeve and pulled her far enough away to allow Marcus and me to talk, but close enough so she could still hear everything.

  “Here.” Marcus dropped a navy blue sweater emblazoned with the Sheldon crest into my arms. “Good luck with whatever you’re planning.”

  “Thank you.” He walked away, and I clutched the sweater to my chest, the scent of detergent wafting upward. “You …

  you didn’t have to wash it,” I called after him.

  He turned and shrugged. “It smelled like me.”

  My nose buried in the sweater, I summoned up the courage to say, “I don’t mind the way you smell.”

  Paige clapped a hand to her forehead, so I assumed it hadn’t been the best compliment to give a guy, but Marcus didn’t seem to mind.

  Smiling, he ran his fingers through his hair and came back over. “I … uh … meant that people would get suspicious if you walked past them smelling like a guy.”

  “Oh.” I wondered if the pink in my cheeks clashed with the Sheldon blue. “Well, thanks again.”

  Instead of leaving, Marcus shifted his weight from foot to foot. “So, I hope the sweater isn’t too big.”

  I tried it on. The sleeves engulfed my hands, and the bottom hung just below my bottom. “It’s a little huge, but that’s okay.” I started to take it off. “If anyone asks, I can say it belongs to my boyf—” I froze with the sweater halfway around my head.

  “Boyfriend,” Jenner completed for me. Then she squealed in pain and rounded on Paige. “Why’d you pinch me?”

  Paige regarded her with wide eyes. “You’re embarrassing Delilah.”

  Jenner’s forehead wrinkled. “Because I said the word ‘boyfriend’? It’s not as if she likes …” She turned to point at Marcus and saw the mort
ified look on my face, “Um …”

  No sweater was big enough to hide me at that moment.

  “It’s not as if she likes who?” Marcus pretended to not understand, but the corners of his eyes were crinkling, and he was staring intently in my direction.

  I cleared my throat and checked my watch. “Wow. Look at the time. Thanks again for the sweater. You’ll have it back by the end of the day.”

  Without even waiting for Jenner or Paige, I hurried to my locker. From a distance the locker looked like it was spotted with red polka dots, and when I reached it, I discovered why.

  The entire surface was covered in lipstick kisses. I opened the door and an avalanche of Styrofoam peanuts quivered and tumbled over the front of my clothes and onto the floor. Static electricity caused the packing bits to stick to me, and I noticed that each one had a word written on it in French. Somehow I doubted any of them were nice.

  Two kids from my math class stood nearby, watching me empty books into my locker and murmuring to each other.

  “Who do you think she’ll go after next?”

  “You don’t think she’ll keep chasing Ben?”

  “Well, he rejected her, so she’s probably on the prowl. Whose sweater is she holding?”

  I glared at them, kicking my way through the Styrofoam. “You might want to learn the true meaning of ‘whisper.’” The closest one winced as I approached her. “And keep an eye on your boyfriends … because I’m on the prowl!” I waggled my fingers in her face and stormed off to the journalism room.

  Ben sat alone at the table, articles spread out before him, and he glanced up when he heard me move through the doorway. He didn’t look thrilled.

  I stopped a few feet from the table. “Hey.”

  He nodded and returned to his work. “Hey.”

  His response hadn’t included any mean names or rude gestures, so it was a safe bet that he didn’t hate me nearly as much as his girlfriend did.

  I let out a deep breath and took a tentative step toward him. “On a scale of one to five million, how mad are you?”

  He answered but didn’t look at me. “Depends. Are you talking about the fact that you kissed me, the fact that you brought my enemy to the social, or the fact that you nearly blinded my girlfriend?”

  My fingers twisted themselves into a knot. “All of the above?” I dropped into a chair beside him and the papers fluttered, threatening to slide to the floor.

  Ben lunged for them. “Zero, five million, and zero.” When I looked at him curiously, he explained, “I wasn’t mad that you kissed me. Just … shocked. And I know you didn’t spray Ava on purpose.”

  I bowed my head. “But you weren’t a fan of Marcus being there.”

  Ben leaned back in his chair and sighed. “You know how much I hate him. You know the kind of guy he used to be.”

  “Used to be,” I repeated. “He’s changed … just like you’ve changed.”

  “Don’t compare me to him, and don’t ever, ever bring him around me again.” Ben must have realized how harsh he

  sounded, because he rested a hand on my arm. “You and I will always be friends, but you’ll never convince me to like the guy.”

  “You don’t have to.” I fixed my eyes on his. “Because …

  because I do.”

  I’d finally voiced the words to someone, and the earth hadn’t exploded.

  Ben and I stared at each other for a moment, and then he nodded and pulled away. “I could tell from your article.” He waved the paper and smiled. “You did a pretty good job of making Marcus sound like a halfway normal person.”

  “That’s because he is.”

  Ben shrugged, and I knew I would never win that battle with him. At least we’d come to an understanding.

  “Okay, then …” I returned my article to the table and gave him a sly grin. “Do you need help deciding which piece goes front and center?”

  “Nobody’s going to believe that’s your real hair.” Jenner sat on the restroom counter while I adjusted the blond wig I’d found in the drama department’s wardrobe. It was ten minutes into lunch, the only time the restroom was devoid of all female life, and I was dressing up for my espionage adventure at Sheldon.

  “Redheads stand out anywhere,” I informed her.

  “So do blondes who look like their hair was gnawed by rats.” Jenner tried to run a comb through the snarls of the wig, but it immediately became entangled and ripped the wig off my head. I caught it before it hit the floor, almost busting a seam in my mom’s skirt in the process.

  “It’s fine. Nobody will notice.” I put the wig back on and smoothed it down.

  “You’re right. They’ll be too busy wondering if you’re a deflated bodybuilder.” She tugged on the baggy sleeve of the Sheldon sweater. “This isn’t going to work, Delilah.”

  “Of course it will. It has to.” I checked my reflection in the mirror, then headed for the door.

  Leaving the school turned out to be easier than I had planned. I caught a city bus across town and got off half a block from the Sheldon campus, with five minutes until the end of lunch. The night before, I’d printed out the school’s schedule and building map so I’d be able to blend in … despite my rat-eaten wig.

  Giving the wig one more smoothing, I walked around the school until I’d reached the rear courtyard where students ate lunch. A few of them glanced up when they saw me, but if they thought anything seemed unusual, they kept it to themselves. I weaved among the tables in search of the one face I’d been picturing since the night before … the editor of the Sheldon Sentinel, Henry Cho. Unfortunately, as kids started filing into the building, he wasn’t among them, which meant he’d either eaten inside or was working on his newspaper.

  I followed the crowd into the school and tried my best to not gawk too much at the decorations and banners on the walls. Sheldon’s journalism room was across from the library, but when I peered through the window, the room was dark. I hurried up the hall to the eighth-grade lockers, but again, Henry Cho was nowhere to be found.

  A nagging doubt tugged at the back of my mind—maybe Henry wasn’t even at school. I hadn’t thought to look up anyone else on the newspaper staff, so if I couldn’t find him, my whole trip would be pointless. My only hope was to sneak into the journalism room and find the information on my own.

  The halls were starting to empty, and I had to duck into several doorways to avoid teachers doing last-minute sweeps for stragglers. When the warning bell rang, I pushed open the door to the journalism room and dropped to my hands and knees as their shadows passed by the windows. After a few minutes I flipped open my cell phone and used it to light my way across the room to a bookshelf filled with yearbooks. I found the one for the previous year and flipped slowly through the pages, looking for mention of the fire or pictures of Katie.

  Suddenly the lights flipped on.

  I froze, lifting my head to see who’d caught me.

  An Asian guy with a shock of spiky black hair and a cute but crooked smile stood in the doorway. “It’s easier to find what you’re looking for with the lights on,” he said.

  I dropped the yearbook and got to my feet, brushing off my skirt. “You’re Henry, right?”

  “I am.” He continued to show his pearly whites as he picked up the book. “You must be new.”

  “Actually”—I reached behind him to close the door—“I’m from Brighton Academy. I came to ask you something.”

  Henry’s smile finally fell. “You came from Brighton?”

  “Yes. I snuck out of there and into here.”

  “What!?” Henry clapped a hand to his mouth. “Get out! You snuck into our school?”

  “Yes,” I said, still not sure if he would help me or rat me out. “I need to know about one of the students who used to go here.”

  Henry’s stunned expression turned into a curious one. “Who are you interested in?”

  “Katie Glenn.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “She’s not torching your class
rooms, is she?”

  I couldn’t help the excited gasp that escaped me. “So, she did start the fire in the science lab!”

  Henry tilted his head to one side and glanced thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Well … she never confessed to it, but that’s what everyone thinks. Even the police.”

  “The police?” I shook my head in confusion. “The papers said it was an unsolved case.”

  Henry leaned toward me. “Because they were paid to say that … and the papers and the school were paid to stay quiet too.” When I glanced at him doubtfully, he crossed his heart. “I would’ve broken the story if I could’ve.”

  I pulled up two chairs and dropped into one of them. “Have a seat. I want to know everything.”

  “Okay.” Henry sat obediently and opened the yearbook he was holding. “The thing is … you have to know the old Katie first.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A purple-haired girl wearing a cutoff T-shirt stuck her tongue out at me … or rather, at the person taking the photo.

  Student by day, rebel by night, the caption said.

  I stared at the image in disbelief. “That’s Katie?”

  Henry took the yearbook from me and flipped through to another page. “Here she is again.”

  This time Katie wore her school uniform but was holding a lit match in each hand and smirking at the camera.

  Mess with fire and you’re gonna get burned, the caption said.

  I shot Henry a dubious look. “Nobody suspected anything even after seeing this?”

  “The ‘tough’ students used to do that for fun,” he said. “They’d light matches and have contests to see who could hold on the longest. Katie was one of the best.”

  I leaned back in thought. “Did she have easy access to matches?”

  Henry shook his head. “The school banned them way before the fire. Although, knowing her, she probably still carried some.”

  “She is so different now.” I traced the edge of the picture. “I could never imagine her looking like this.”

  “The Friday before the fire, her hair was longer than yours,” he explained, marking a spot halfway down his back, “but the following Monday”—he held his hand up by his ears—“suddenly she was one of the guys.”