Adam held his breath and extended his hand like it was perfectly normal for him to be swapping secret memos with a first-assistant-associate-superintendent.
“You want the memo?” Dr. Bleepin said. “Hmmm . . . the memo . . . all righty,” and he handed it to Adam.
Adam could not believe it. What reporting! At that moment, Adam felt like there wasn’t any piece of information he couldn’t squeeze out of Bleepin. It made him wonder — was there a Reporters’ Hall of Fame?
The Slash’s star reporter quickly skimmed the memo. It was from Mrs. Boland! That was huge. She was calling the shots, not school officials. But in the memo, she blamed school officials for everything. It made it sound as if Mrs. Boland’s zoning board had nothing to do with messing up the renaming ceremony. Everything in the memo was “School officials were sorry . . .” “School officials regretted . . .”
Adam slipped the memo to Jennifer to copy.
“Dr. Bleepin,” said Adam, “we were really wowed by you at the board meeting. I mean, that’s why we’re here. What a presentation!” Adam was laying it on thick. Feed the big guy’s ego and get the news — that was Adam’s motto. “But this doesn’t seem fair,” Adam continued. “Weren’t there hundreds of petitions for this?”
Bleepin opened a drawer, hoisted a stack of papers, and thudded them on his desk. “Over a thousand signatures,” he said.
“Wow,” said Adam. “The people have spoken. Mind if we borrow these?”
“Be my guest,” said Bleepin. “They’re copies. The originals are with the county. They’re public; anyone can see them.”
“With all these signatures, how could they cancel it?” asked Jennifer.
“Check the addresses,” said Bleepin. “Not one from the Willows. The county used a couple stooges — two idiots named Herb, I think — and these Herbs got signatures in North Tremble and West Tremble, but not a soul from the Willows.”
“Wow,” said Adam. Bleepin was dazed, a deer frozen in Adam’s headlights. The Slash Hall of Famer moved in for the kill. Adam opened his eyes wide and flicked on the high beams. “Dr. Bleepin,” said Adam, “do you think it’s a problem, not getting anyone from the Willows?”
Bleepin got up and walked around his desk, so he was towering over Adam and Jennifer. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot. I know who you are. You’re the two kids who got Marris fired.”
Adam felt like he’d just been slammed against the wall. It was like Bleepin had grabbed the remote and changed channels in midsentence. They’d been cruising along on Disney, and suddenly they’d been switched to a reality cop show with a shaky camera.
“Pay attention,” said Bleepin. “You’ve got what you need to write a story that says it was the county zoning people who screwed up this King thing, not the schools. You’ve got the cover-up memo from Boland, and, of course, you won’t say where you got it.”
They looked at him.
“And of course you won’t say where you got it,” he repeated.
They nodded.
“And the petitions,” he said. “Public record. Same thing’s in the county building. And of course you won’t say where you got your copies.”
They nodded.
He walked to the door and said, “See you.”
“We might need some official comment,” said Jennifer.
“My comment?” said Dr. Bleepin. “No comment.”
They walked back to school to catch a late bus.
“That was great,” said Jennifer.
“It was?” said Adam, who wasn’t feeling great.
“Do you know what just happened in there?” asked Jennifer.
“Truthfully? said Adam. “I don’t have a clue. I thought I knew exactly what was happening until we got to the end, and then everything changed so fast.”
“We’re being used,” Jennifer said cheerfully.
That was good news? To Adam it sounded awful. One minute he thought he was squeezing out Bleepin’s deepest secrets; the next minute Bleepin was throwing documents at them.
“Reporters are always being used,” said Jennifer. “Bleepin gave us that stuff because he doesn’t want Mrs. Boland blaming everything on him. He’s using us to attack Mrs. Boland.”
“Is that fair?” asked Adam.
“It wouldn’t be fair if we just printed Bleepin’s side,” Jennifer went on. “But we take everything we know, including Bleepin, and weigh it and then do the story.”
“Being used,” Adam said. “It makes me feel . . .” He didn’t finish. It made him feel unimportant.
“Get used to it,” said Jennifer. “Don’t you ever watch C-SPAN? When the president’s pissed at some senator, what does the president do? He gives a bunch of secret documents to a reporter that will make the senator look like an idiot. And then the reporter writes a story: ‘Secret Documents Reveal that the Senator Is an Idiot!’ Then, to get even, the senator takes his secret documents and gives them to a reporter, and there’s another story: ‘New Secret Documents Reveal that the President Is an Idiot!’ Then they both start screaming, ‘Someone has been leaking secret government documents to the press! We need an investigation!’ And then they show congressional hearings on C-SPAN: ‘Plugging the Leaks, Day 24.’”
Adam nodded. “I guess,” he said. “I was wondering — what do you color-code your C-SPAN viewing time?”
“Pale rose,” Jennifer said.
“Got you!” yelled Adam. “You are sick. Color-code me out of here.” And he raced off.
She hated him — she really did.
“Cookies?” said Mrs. Quigley, offering Adam and Jennifer a plate of Mrs. Radin’s Famous Homemade Super-Chunk Buckets O’ Chocolate Moisty Deluxe chocolate-chip cookies.
Boy, Adam loved Moisty Deluxe. He was thinking Mrs. Quigley must buy them by the case, the way she gave them out. Word was getting around Harris that being called to the principal’s office wasn’t that bad.
“My philosophy is ‘Eating healthy twenty-four hours a day causes unhealthy stress,’” said Mrs. Quigley, who was munching a Moisty Deluxe herself. That was Adam’s philosophy, too, but he eyeballed Jennifer to see what to do. After the Erik Forrest circus, Adam wasn’t sure if these Moisty Deluxe might be an ethics violation.
He hated how complicated this ethics stuff was. Mrs. Quigley was really two people at once for Adam and Jennifer. She served as adviser for the Slash, and it probably was OK to eat Moisty Deluxe offered by your adviser, since you worked together putting out the paper.
But she could also wind up being someone they had to write about, making free Moisty Deluxe an unethical gift. What if they had to investigate her? What if those Moisty Deluxe were a cover-up, and she was stealing the children’s money, like Mrs. Marris? She seemed nice, but one thing Adam had learned: Adults had secret personalities that they hid under their public, jolly selves.
“Thank you, Mrs. Quigley.”
Jennifer, the Ethics Queen, ate a cookie! Adam was cleared. When the plate reached him, he grabbed three, since, as Mrs. Quigley correctly pointed out, he was a growing boy.
Going over the final proofs of the Slash with Mrs. Quigley was way better than with Mrs. Marris. Mrs. Quigley hardly changed a thing, but that wasn’t the best part. For a principal, she seemed like a newshound. They could tell she’d read every word and not just because she was looking for problems. She kept saying, “How’d you get Reverend Shorty to talk?” And, “I’m going to the Lido Deli and see if the bacon-egg-and-cheese really deserves 4.5 yummy-yummies.”
She totally got Adam’s piece. She said Erik Forrest sounded like a very nice man, but she certainly wasn’t going to buy his pancake book.
And Jennifer was beaming after Mrs. Quigley said the bully story seemed fine. The principal said bullying was a serious problem meriting front-page coverage.
Two stories were scoops, beating the Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser, TV-12, and the radio stations.
The front-pager about naming the street for D
r. King ran under the headline “King Street Dead-Ends!” Jennifer and Adam both got bylines.
Mrs. Quigley said she was impressed with all their digging, and Adam had to admit that even though Jennifer was an editor type, she was making good progress with investigative reporting thanks to his steady guidance.
Jennifer did not stop after the interview with Bleepin. Next, she called back Reverend Shorty and told him everything they’d discovered. He was most impressed with the Mrs. Boland memo. “Where’d you get that?” he asked, but of course, Jennifer could not say. Until Jennifer’s call, Reverend Shorty had not even known the ceremony was off; no one from Mrs. Boland’s office or the schools had called him.
Even so, Reverend Shorty still did not want to go on the record, until Jennifer squeezed him.
Jennifer explained that Dr. Bleepin’s secretary told them the ceremony was off because the people in the Willows did not want it.
Jennifer explained that the story could stop there. But then, she said, readers might think people in the Willows didn’t like Dr. King. “You know,” Jennifer had said, “Adam and I looked through the petitions and we didn’t see one signature from the Willows. You could give us a quote on that.”
And he did. The Jennifer squeeze worked as sweet as fresh orange juice from the blender. Reverend Shorty’s quote talked about the need for the county to consult people in the Willows before making changes to the Willows. He also noted that Willows residents would be happy to meet with the county to discuss any “future issues affecting where our people live.”
Jennifer knew what that meant: the houses boarded up by Boland’s real estate company and the pressure on Willows residents to move away. She tried mightily to get Reverend Shorty to say more, but that was as far as he’d go. No more fresh juice.
“If your article turns out good, we’ll talk again,” he said. “Those Bolands say we’re a ‘pocket of blight.’ They claim they got to eliminate the Willows to beautify Tremble. I’ve got lots to say on that. But we need to be careful. The Bolands have all the power. They can squish you like a bug.”
The other scoop was the three-hundred-year-old climbing tree.
As predicted, Phoebe was a total train wreck when she heard that the coeditors insisted on a much shorter story.
Phoebe said she couldn’t think of a single word, not one, that could be cut out without ruining everything and demanded that they take off her byline.
But, as Adam predicted, she calmed down once she realized she’d have two front-page stories in two months. “No third grader,” Jennifer said, “has ever produced so many front-page stories in one year.”
“Really?” Phoebe said. “Not even your coeditor when he was in third?”
“Nope,” said Jennifer, who wasn’t sure, but needed to get the tree story in the paper sometime before they all turned three hundred.
After much persuading, Phoebe called the state people. A spokesperson e-mailed a statement acknowledging that the climbing tree was one of several under study but emphasized that no decision had been made. And though this was the last piece of information collected, it became Phoebe’s lead:
Tremble’s beloved 300-year-old climbing tree could soon be cut down under a new state program aimed at eliminating dangerous trees before they fall on people, a state official told the Slash.
Jennifer even got Phoebe to take a photo of the tree without Phoebe in it. The story ran on the top left of page one:
Even Phoebe liked the headline. “Sounds like a haiku,” she said.
Adam was right about another thing. After the Slash came out, Phoebe got lots of calls from tree lovers saying that her story was good as far as it went, but it was just the tip of the iceberg!
Phoebe was in heaven. Notebooks full of secret info began piling up on her desk. After a while, whenever Adam or Jennifer picked up the phone and it was for Phoebe, they’d call out, “Iceberger, line two!” One afternoon, while lying on a newsroom couch reviewing her secret files, Phoebe fell asleep, and a kid put a sign on her that said CAUTION, ICEBERG CROSSING. And if someone was making a McDonald’s run, even if Phoebe wanted chicken nuggets, they’d always put her down for an “iceburger.”
Mrs. Quigley visited several delis that week, then sent Sammy a note saying that she found his bacon-egg-and-cheese ratings “scientifically sound.” The story was a big hit. Kids who couldn’t care less about the Dr. King story memorized every rating. Letters to the editor poured in; everyone had an opinion on bacon-egg-and-cheese.
The Lido Deli asked for permission to put Sammy’s 4.5 yummy-yummies review in the window, which Jennifer said was fine. However, she nixed the deli’s offer to supply two dozen free sandwiches. In the past Adam would have joined the mob of Slash staffers throwing things at Jennifer, but since the Erik Forrest story, he was with her.
Adam’s Erik Forrest story ran at the bottom of page one under the banner “Celebrity Profile: Erik Forrest.” The story started on a harsh note:
Why would one of the great war correspondents write a stupid book about being a Mr. Mom for six months?
“You know why I did it?” Erik Forrest said. “I figured, ‘This is going to be the easiest $200,000 I ever made.’”
But as the article went on, it became clear that Adam liked Mr. Forrest. He talked about how kind Forrest had been to give a student reporter an exclusive. He talked about how Forrest’s war stories could touch a person’s heart. He described Forrest’s comments about what it took to be a great reporter and how that was what Adam tried to do, too.
Adam mentioned how much Forrest knew about great writers like Dickens, Kafka, and Faulkner. He described how Forrest was scared his third marriage might fail and then concluded by saying that writing a book that was unimportant in order to try to save your marriage was a lot better than getting drunk and writing bad movies or burning your books, like other famous writers.
As requested, Adam mailed a copy of the article to the address on Mr. Forrest’s business card.
But without question, the biggest splash of the February Slash was the story announcing the bully survey. It ran page one, top right, and was the talk of the school. Kids’ only complaint was they’d get just one vote.
They loved the chance to write down their favorite bully story.
No one was more excited than the newest Slash member, Theodore “Shadow” Cox. The coeditors had made Shadow official fact-checker and already Shadow had proved his worth.
He caught a math error in Sammy’s bacon-egg-and-cheese formula that nearly gave several delis an extra three quarters of a yummy-yummy.
Shadow saved Adam from writing Erik Forrest as Eric Forest.
And Shadow noticed that the story on Dr. King had mixed up two Willows streets.
When a Slash staffer asked what he was working on for the next issue, Shadow said, “I will be official fact-checker, reporting directly to the coeditors, checking all official facts for the bully survey. That’s it.”
And when kids asked how he liked the Slash, Shadow said, “I found seven mistakes so far.”
The staff was glad to have him — except Phoebe. Every time Phoebe was alone with Jennifer, the world’s greatest third-grade reporter would drop it into the conversation. “That new guy,” Phoebe would say. “The official fact-checker. He’s weird.”
“Relax,” Jennifer said. “He’s nice. You’ll get used to him.”
“I don’t think so,” said Phoebe.
Adam and Jennifer were convinced that the real thing upsetting Phoebe was that there was now someone on the Slash as weird as she was.
Wherever Adam went, kids asked about the bully survey. They wanted guarantees that the vote would be secret. One wanted to vote for himself.
Several claimed that Adam had created the survey to get back at the kids who stole his shoveling money, to make himself look like a big antibully star.
Adam denied it, but when they insisted, he let it go. He didn’t bother explaining that he was the only staffer who voted again
st the survey. It didn’t matter anymore; he could live with it.
But a week after the Slash came out, something happened that did worry him. Mrs. Quigley showed up in 306 and asked to speak with the coeditors alone. She said since the Slash had come out, she’d been having second thoughts about naming the top ten bullies. She said a lot of grown-ups she respected said it might be unfair to single out troubled kids who were still only in middle school. She said she still felt the poll would be useful for school officials to identify the worst bullies, but after the results were in, she might ask them not to print names. “You know I love a free press,” she said. “I’m sure we can work this out.” And then she gave them a smile that reminded Adam of Mrs. Marris’s do-it-or-die smile.
Adam was worried that he was getting his first glimpse beneath the public-jolly Quigley to the true-hidden version. The real Mrs. Quigley appeared to be seeping out.
Adam was making great progress on his science fair investigation. He’d drawn up surveys and gotten one hundred kids to fill them out so far. His goal was three hundred, which would be half the seventh and eighth grades. He had them do it at lunch, a table at a time. At first it was hard. They complained that they spent their whole day working like dogs and the last thing they needed at lunch was filling out a stupid survey. But when Adam told them it could mean that they would never have to do the science projects at home again, they got into it. Plus, the survey was anonymous and supposed to be secret, so that made it seem a little dangerous.
Adam asked kids to use a scale of 1 to 5, to rate how much their parents had helped on last year’s project: 1 was not at all; 2 was somewhat (helped with up to one-fourth of the project); 3 was moderate (helped on half the project); 4 was a lot (helped on three-fourths); 5 was REALLY a lot (helped on every step, from finding an idea to creating the poster display). Then he asked for their grades on last year’s project.
Adam Canfield, Watch Your Back! Page 10
