Adam Canfield of the Slash

by Michael Winerip

  “Just driveway hoops on poles and sidewalk hoops?” said Jennifer.

  “Exactly,” said Herb Black. “That’s all.”

  “You know how many that would be?” asked Adam.

  “Not many,” said Herb Black.

  “Maybe a thousand?” asked Adam.

  The Herbs glanced at each other.

  “About,” said Herb Green.

  “About one thousand and forty-eight?” said Jennifer.

  The Herbs didn’t look quite so jolly anymore. “That is the final tally,” said Herb Black. “That is the number we just came up with today. You going to write all that in your little newspaper?”

  Adam and Jennifer nodded.

  “Whew,” said Herb Black. “I don’t know.”

  “You might want to check with Mrs. Boland,” said Herb Green. “She likes to be in charge of what goes in the news.”

  “You understand,” said Herb Black.

  “We understand,” said Jennifer.

  “We definitely understand,” said Adam.

  They thanked the Herbs. It took all of Adam’s and Jennifer’s willpower not to cartwheel down the hall. As they neared the elevator, Adam whispered, “We did it.”

  “Shhh,” said Jennifer. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They pressed the “up” button. Finally, the arrow lit up, the door opened, and there, behind the metal gate, stood the very large woman from od Enforcement.

  A chill went through Adam and Jennifer. She stood in their way.

  Then she smiled and stepped aside. “Got tired of waiting for those Herbs, I bet. Knew you would. Got to go a mighty long ways to catch a Herb.”

  “You aren’t kidding,” said Jennifer. “The N-7 . . .”

  “To the Q-13 . . .” said Adam.

  “To the P-104,” said Jennifer. As the metal gate closed, they waved and Adam said, “Ave atque vale, honey.”

  Adam and Jennifer knew it would be a long, hard weekend finishing the October issue. They’d heard horror stories from past editors about getting the paper out and planned to spend every free moment at Adam’s house. He had the best computer, complete with a scanner for photos.

  The Slash had three students who typed stories on their home computers, then e-mailed them to Adam. Even if they wanted to, the typists could not have worked in 306. Newsroom computers were not hooked into the Internet. Mrs. Marris had forbidden it. When Jennifer had asked about getting the room wired, Mrs. Marris gave her a big speech about how overrated the Internet was and how most kids wasted their time playing violent games or surfing adult websites. “How long do you think I’d be principal,” Mrs. Marris said to Jennifer, “if I came in some morning and one of your clever little reporters had plastered Harris with printouts of naked web babes?”

  To assist them in laying out the pages, Adam’s parents had bought him Pagination Made EZ software. At the top of the first page, he programmed in the banner typeface, THE SLASH. On the same line, in a box at the right top, he typed, October Edition. On the next line, he typed, Harris Elementary/Middle School.

  Then came the real work. Adam and Jennifer spent Friday night arguing about what the front page should be. Both agreed the basketball story had the hottest news, and they placed it at the top right side of page 1, with a large headline: “Your Hoop’s Coming Down!” The story carried a double byline, by both Adam and Jennifer, and was continued inside, taking up nearly two pages.

  They disagreed about what story should go on the top left of page 1; Adam wanted the missing plywood cow and the hundred-dollar reward; Jennifer favored Eddie the janitor.

  While Jennifer agreed that a hundred-dollar reward would create more buzz than Eddie, she felt there were other considerations. “We don’t want two stories at the top that aren’t about Harris,” she said. “We need balance.”

  So they put Eddie on top and the hundred-dollar reward right below it. Jennifer wanted Phoebe’s smile contest to run under the basketball piece, but Adam said he had something else.

  That afternoon on the bus ride home, he had dashed off a story about the new state test study guides. It was only fifty-seven words long and described how the guidebooks were being made available free of charge thanks to a generous grant from the Boland Foundation. Adam’s headline read simply, “Free Help!”

  Jennifer was surprised. “You hate that testing stuff,” she said. “Now you’re Mr. Test Prep?”

  “Trust me,” said Adam. “We’re going to need it when Marris realizes there’s no story on Miss Bloch’s gift to the school.”

  Along the bottom they stripped the smile story, with the headline “Dental Contest Sugarcoated.”

  They picked three photos for page 1. Two were by Front-Page Phoebe: Eddie with the two saved mourning doves and smile champion Suzy Mollar with the M&M bag stuffed over her head.

  They also ran the cow’s photo, an old snapshot the owner had passed along to Jennifer. The three-deck headline by Jennifer read:

  FIND THIS COW!

  $100 REWARD!

  NO QUESTIONS ASKED!

  In the lower-left corner was a box with summaries of stories on inside pages, including “Halloween Safety Tips” and the tryout schedule for the Say No to Drugs Community Players.

  They were exhausted and didn’t finish until Sunday night. Whatever could go wrong went wrong. The software for laying out pages was not that EZ; Adam had to call the company’s 1-800 help line seventeen times.

  Still, they did it. At 9:47 P.M. Adam popped out the CD and held it high. Their first issue as coeditors. All on that precious disk.

  The next morning Adam’s dad dropped off the disk at the print shop that had been doing the Slash for years. The shop made them a single copy — the page proofs — and Monday night Jennifer and Adam checked them over. The paper was six pages long and, to the coeditors, looked like a Michelangelo. They put their feet up and read every word over. They cradled each page in their hands like it was a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible, reading their favorite sentences out loud to each other. They laughed at the Herbs and once again were moved by Eddie. They kept staring at their own bylines.

  Finally Adam said, “We did it.”

  “Done, done, done,” said Jennifer.

  Their only worry now was Marris. She had to approve the proofs. They’d make the changes she wanted, then take the corrected proofs to the print shop and get five hundred copies made.

  Mrs. Marris once told them that she had not assigned an adult adviser to the Slash because she wanted it to be a true student newspaper. She told them she believed in freedom of the press, that censorship was the enemy of democracy. She explained that she might provide editing guidance, but it was their paper.

  Adam did not believe it. Franky Cutty had set him straight early on. Franky said there used to be teacher advisers, but the last four had quit because Marris was such a witch to work with. He said the real reason it was called the Slash was that Marris made sure she slashed anything interesting out of every article.

  Tuesday morning on the way into the building, Adam dropped off the proofs in the main office. As usual, Mrs. Rose’s head was at the front counter. “The principal was expecting this last week,” Mrs. Rose’s head said.

  Adam stared at her. He found it impossible to concentrate on what Mrs. Rose’s head said. There was something about the way she loomed down from the high counter and that round hairdo — it must have been an optical illusion — because even knowing the facts, he still could not help wondering if she was just the Head.

  “We’ll call you down after Mrs. Marris has the opportunity to look it over,” the Head said.

  Adam kept staring. Finally, the Head said, “You can go.” He stood frozen. “Are you all right, young man? You seem dazed.”

  “It’s your head.” Adam said. “Not your head. It’s my rose, Mrs. Head. No! It’s my head, Mrs. Rose. My head’s still groggy; we were up late finishing the Slash. Your head’s great.”

  “Move it, buster,” the Head said. “No wa
y I’m giving you a late pass.”

  Third period, the voice of Mrs. Marris’s secretary, Miss Esther, came over the loudspeaker telling Adam to report to the office. He was nervous. He didn’t know if hearing back so quickly was good or bad.

  The Head buzzed in the coeditors, then led them past the ancient Miss Esther, who seemed to be taking a midmorning nap; apparently the exertion of calling Adam and Jennifer to the office had worn out the poor thing. They hurried down the stairs to the Bunker, where Mrs. Marris sat in her throne-like chair, the Slash proofs spread across her enormous desk.

  She was smiling, which didn’t mean a thing. “I can see you two have been busy beavers,” she said. “All in all, a good beginning for this editing team, and, really, I have just a few small things, a qualm or two, and one huge question mark.”

  Adam wasn’t sure what a qualm was, but he was pretty certain it wouldn’t improve his day. As for the huge question mark, he was certain what that was about.

  “First,” she said, “I was delighted by the ‘Free Help!’ story. A gem! That’s what I call investigative reporting at its best. You found the story yourself, didn’t need to be told to do it, and gave credit where credit was due. I applaud you. Now, if it were my paper, I’d have it at the top of page 1. What could be more important than a guide to help Tremble children on the state test? But I do respect that this is a student paper and it’s your call. I would just ask that you include the full names of Mr. and Mrs. Boland when you mention their foundation.”

  “No problem,” said Jennifer. “What is Mrs. Boland’s first name?”

  “Spring,” said Mrs. Marris. “Spring Boland.”

  “Very good,” said Jennifer. “So now that will read ‘. . . thanks to a generous grant from the Boland Foundation, funded by Spring and Sumner Boland.’”

  Mrs. Marris beamed. “This is a story,” said the principal, “that meets my test for good journalism: Does it help propel the Good Ship Harris forward? You bet it does!”

  What Mrs. Marris said next surprised them. She liked the basketball hoop story. She actually said that. “I must applaud Tremble County,” she said. “Those basketball hoops are the biggest eyesore, but I always assumed they were just another modern stupidity cluttering up daily life. I had no idea they were such a violation and that something could be done to get rid of them. Tear them all down, I say!”

  She found the missing plywood cow story amusing and told them that she felt the sugarcoated smile contest was “pointed” but fair game, as were dentists in general (“money-suckers who didn’t have the brains to get into medical school”).

  It was the Eddie the janitor story, she said, that gave her “real problems.” She couldn’t understand why they picked Eddie when there were so many “more worthy” people to profile. “He’s a janitor,” she said. “And we have all these educated people. Do you really want to make him a page 1 janitor?”

  They were too surprised to answer.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Mrs. Marris continued. “I think it’s great to celebrate someone from his culture. As you know, ‘Multicultural’ is my middle name. No one loves Multicultural Month more than Mrs. Marris of Harris. Surely, Jennifer, you understand what I’m saying. Positive role models are so important. Now, your father, Jennifer, he’s a lawyer — he’s the person you ought to profile. There’s a man who’s done his people proud.”

  Jennifer’s face was hot and she turned away.

  Adam kept waiting for Jennifer to say something. She was so much better than he was in these tight spots. But Marris seemed to have wounded her pretty good, and when she didn’t jump in, he got so nervous, so jittery, finally he just blurted out: “I love the Eddie story! It made me cry!”

  For several moments there wasn’t a sound in the Bunker, except the faint wheeze of Miss Esther snoring upstairs. Mrs. Marris was caught off-guard by such heartfelt honesty, a style of communication she was not accustomed to.

  Finally she said, “Really?” There was a look of pure disgust on her face. “You, too, Jennifer?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  Mrs. Marris let out a dramatic sigh. “I would expect you, Jennifer, given your background, to understand better than anybody what I’m talking about.” She paused like she was waiting for something. Then she said, “Well, you can’t save people from themselves, I guess. I could not disagree more. But if you insist, I need you to take this out.” And she walked around the desk and showed them what she’d circled in red:

  His newest project is building Mrs. Marris a set of cabinets for an electronic system she’s having installed in the principal’s office. He’s also remodeling her bathroom.

  “But, Mrs. Marris,” said Adam. “That’s such nice detail. It goes to the heart of the story — Eddie knows how to care for baby birds; he can be a carpenter, electrician, plumber. He may not have much schooling, but he has so many talents.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Marris, making the grand circle back behind her desk. “It’s too much detail. Slows down a story that’s already dry as dust.”

  “I disagree,” said Adam. “I think it shows —”

  “Please,” said Mrs. Marris. “Take it out.”

  Adam said, “If you’d only let me —”

  “Take it out,” repeated Mrs. Marris, who was standing by her chair now, squeezing a paperweight so tight, her knuckles were white. “I said take it out. I mean take it out. Am I speaking a foreign language? Take it out, take it out, take it out. As for what you think, Mr. Big-Shot Editor, I don’t give a rat’s —”

  “MRS. MARRIS!” Jennifer interrupted so loudly that the principal shook her head, like someone had snapped her out of a trance.

  “Mrs. Marris, I see your point,” Jennifer continued. “I agree completely. It really slows the flow, does not belong in this story. Too many facts can ruin a good story. We’ll take it out.”

  Adam felt weak, seeing someone as strong as Jennifer bullied into submission, but when he glanced her way, Jennifer did not look defeated. She looked like herself again, actually a much angrier version of herself. Adam knew that look — Jennifer was smoking. Something was up.

  “One more thing,” barked Mrs. Marris, who wasn’t even pretending to smile now. “Where is the story about Miss Bloch’s gift to Harris? I gave you the whole story. Explained everything, A to Z. Where is it?”

  Adam and Jennifer gave a mumbly, long-winded explanation about how they’d been so busy with voluntary/mandatory, Quiz Bowl Gladiators, Geography Challenge, snowflake baseball, baritone lessons, science fair abstracts, tennis, church . . .

  “STOP!” yelled Mrs. Marris. “STOP BLATHERING! Now, listen and listen good. That story on Miss Bloch must be in next month’s issue. Are you clear on that? This is not a maybe. This is not something we are going to debate. This is not something you’re going to tell me you didn’t have time to do because you had to go to a meeting of the Future Dentists of America Club. This is an order. Make sure it’s in there and on the front page. This woman donated her money to Harris. I think she deserves at least as good treatment as the school janitor, the man we call to clean up the vomit around here. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD? AM I COMING IN LOUD AND CLEAR?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, good,” she said, waving them away. “Be gone.”

  As they trudged up the concrete stairs, past Miss Esther — who had reawakened and was doing the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink — Jennifer was sure she knew why Marris had ordered those two sentences cut from the Eddie story.

  Adam, on the other hand, did not have a clue. He was just glad to have emerged from the Bunker alive. He’d never felt so drained. His feet were concrete; his head throbbed. Mercifully, he didn’t have a baritone lesson that day; in his condition, he couldn’t lift a kazoo.

  Jennifer arrived home that afternoon and immediately wrote Adam a long e-mail, explaining her theory on what Mrs. Marris was up to.

  Adam didn’t read it. By the time swim team practice was over, the emotional and phys
ical strains of the day had taken their toll. For the first time since he was a little boy, he fell sound asleep at the dinner table. His head just plopped down on his chest between forkfuls of mashed potatoes, and he was out. His dad cradled him in his arms, carried him upstairs, and put him to bed.

  It was not a peaceful sleep. Adam tossed and turned. He woke in a daze, soaked in cold sweat, then burrowed under his covers for warmth and fell asleep again, only to have another wild, crazy, feverish dream.

  It’s a race again. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and he is way out in front of everybody, gliding effortlessly around the oval track. As he enters the final turn, his fans are holding up the Slash: “Canfield Wins! Canfield Wins!” Adam has never felt happier, but then he has a nagging feeling. How did they know he won before the race was over? What’s worse, and this is not a minor thing, he seems to be falling off the track. Why is that? He leans as far as he can in the other direction, straining to stay in his lane, stretching mightily, but he cannot get himself straight. In the distance he can see the other runners, tiny now, nearing the finish line, and he’s alone, in the middle of the infield. The dirt is soft, so soft, that when he makes one last try at running, he sinks. Fighting is pointless; he craves rest. Deeper and deeper into the soft, warm, rich brown dirt he goes, sinking peacefully until — he’s buried. What?! There’s been some mistake; he can’t be dead; he’s a four-pluser; surely someone made an error. He refuses to die this way. He kicks and thrashes his arms to clear off the dirt and frantically opens a tiny breathing space, but as he leans farther out, toward the cool, fresh air, he goes too far and falls, down, down, down. There’s a thud. He’s in an enormous white room with no windows. An old woman is sitting on a throne, and he knows her right away. Miss Minnie Bloch. She looks like Miss Esther, but he’s sure it’s Miss Bloch. And she says to him, “I’m rich. Come see my bathroom.” She opens a door, and there is the most dazzling bathroom he has ever laid eyes on, including a toilet bowl as big as a swimming pool, with water that’s crystal clear and so inviting. Several swim team members are laughing and waving and calling for him to jump in the toilet.