Fallout (Lois Lane) (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

I might have a job, but I was still without a schedule.
So I returned to the front office and sat in the waiting area, studying the
Daily Scoop
logo on the business card like it would disappear if I stopped. But it didn’t.

It was real.

I put the card in my messenger bag and took out my phone. After a second’s hesitation, I signed into the secure messenger app that I only used with one person, my one long-distance friend. I wanted to tell someone about this.

All right, I wanted to tell
him
.

I tapped out the message, and it popped up alongside my screen name.

SkepticGirl1:
Guess what?

I waited, not sure if he’d be signed in or able to respond. He was probably in class.

SmallvilleGuy:
You got kicked out of school already, setting a world record?

SkepticGirl1:
Ha-ha. Nope.

SkepticGirl1:
I got a job.

The door opened and a blond twenty-something in a pastel flower-print dress rushed in clutching a tall latte with the word “Skinny” scrawled on the cup.

I texted:
Tell you all tonight
. And re-stashed my phone.

The woman made for the hallway to the principal’s office.

“He’s off taking Perry White somewhere,” I said.

Her shoulders slumped and she turned. She set the latte down on the desk. “My life is over.”

I nodded at the coffee. “That was for him?”

She exhaled, blowing a fringe of bangs out of her eyes. “There was a huge line, and—”

“Then he should have been there to wait in it himself.”

Her eyes widened.

“Yes, he should have,” she said, low, as if he might overhear us. She shot me a smile that was the equivalent of a bright sunrise. “Ronda. What can I help you with?”

“I need a class schedule, locker assignment, the good stuff.”

“Name?” She was still smiling.

“Lane. Lois Lane.”

Her eyes widened again, and her smile dimmed. “Did you really doxx an art teacher who was living under an assumed identity?”

“No. I sent the cops some publicly available documents.”

Ronda raised her eyebrows and flipped through some files on her desk. I resisted the urge to ask to see mine. It sounded like it was full of details woefully devoid of context.

She wrote down a locker number at the bottom of a sheet of paper with a list of classes. “You need someone to show you around?” she asked.

It wasn’t like this was my first new school. Or my fifth, for that matter. “I’ll manage,” I said, taking the sheet. “You should drink the coffee.”

“Maybe I will,” she said as I left the office.

Schools usually felt the same to me. At the others, I’d never minded being asked by the teachers in every class where I was from and having to say, “Nowhere.” Or, sometimes to mix things up, “Everywhere.” My first two class periods at East Metropolis went exactly that way, except this time I had to hide how nervous I was.

My third-period AP lit teacher, Mrs. Garret, herded us to the library to do critical research on a poem before she remembered to ask the inevitable first-day question. I was settled behind a flat-screen computer to search the article database, like everyone else. “Lois,” she said, her updo held in place with chopsticks that could have served as a weapon in a pinch, “before we get started, tell us where you’re from.”

The rest of the morning had gone pretty well, give or take. So I went off script. “Here. Now I’m from here.”

The odd round of looks reminded me why you were supposed to stay on script when you were new.

But then I never had been much good at supposed-tos.

“A philosopher, I see,” she said.

“And a lady,” I quipped.

Stay under the radar.

No goofy jokes.

Mrs. Garret left to go chat with the librarian, and instead of starting on the assignment I pulled up a browser window. I typed: Journalism, history of.

But I hesitated before I hit enter. The history of women in any field was often separated out and I wanted that part of the story too. I changed the search terms to: Journalism, history, women in.

I glanced around and caught the girl in the seat next to mine taking in my screen. Her otherwise blond chin-length hair was streaked with bold crimson around her face.

She didn’t shrink away at being busted. “You should look up Nellie Bly,” she said.

Could she be friend material? Because making a friend here was part of the plan too.

I slid my notebook over. “Can you write it down? I’m one of the top five worst spellers you’ll ever meet.”

With a laugh, she took the notebook and wrote the words. The T-shirt she had on was for a band—Guerilla Bore. I’d never heard of them.

“I’m Maddy,” she said, and we both noticed that Mrs. Garret was watching us chat. Maddy pushed my notebook back.

“And I’m letting you work on the assignment so you don’t get in trouble,” I said. “Thank you.”

I typed in the new search term.

*

After school, I flagged over a taxi driver and flashed him the business card Perry White had given me.

“I need to get here,” I told him as I got into the backseat.

“So you will,” he said, adjusting the collar of his white tracksuit as he checked the rearview mirror. The car lurched into traffic.

I’d intended to track down Anavi and try for some observation of the Warheads during lunch, but after third period Ronda had been waiting outside the library to take me back to the office to fill out paperwork we’d neglected to do that morning. I ate from the vending machine, and my afternoon classes seemed to crawl by in slow motion. Because I could hardly wait for this—going to my first staff meeting at the
Scoop
.

I fidgeted, antsy to get there, and watched Metropolis speed by outside the window.

Most of the places where my decorated Army general dad got stationed—and our family then moved to, careful not to put down too many roots—were military towns. Places with wire fences around bunker-like buildings and clusters of three-bedroom homes that all had the same floor plan. The cities and schools were usually small, a low sprawl surrounded by desert or woods or strip malls.

Metropolis, so far, was all tall, shiny buildings and sleek, crowded subways, with the
Daily Planet
sold at every corner newsstand. I’d never lived anywhere like this before. Metropolis was different. It was
supposed
to be different. My plan was intended to make sure that it would be.

It wasn’t like I had
wanted
to not fit in at my other schools, to never come out of them with true friends . . . but I’d always been able to pretend that it didn’t matter. Soon enough we’d be headed somewhere else, and fewer goodbyes to say made leaving easier. My problem was that I had bad luck. And I spoke up when I saw something wrong. I did it because I could, without having to worry about the fallout lasting years. And yes, there was always fallout.

But this time, we weren’t leaving. We were here to stay. And I had a job. And a plan. The plan consisted of four things:

1. Pretend it’s a tea party. Be on time, polite, and go by the schedule without protest. (In other words, not like what happened in Iowa . . . or Kentucky . . . or Minnesota.)

2. Don’t swim with sharks. No need to make enemies right off the bat. (Even if they’re jerks, and you’re just standing up for someone they’re tormenting, like in California. And Germany. And Michigan.)

3. Make like an invisible girl. Stay on the right side of the teachers and the principal. (And the best is if they barely notice that you exist. Again, even if they’re jerks, or wrong about something, or completely unfair . . . like in New Mexico, Arizona, and Alabama.)

4. Make a friend.

As the shiny, hectic blur of the city passed outside the taxi window, I spun a whole scenario of life here: a perfect set of non-jerk friends chasing down stories together, vanquishing the villainous, and then heading to the movies, where we’d crack in-jokes and share popcorn coated in delicious, chemical-filled faux butter.

The taxi pulled up at the curb of the Daily Planet Building. I’d seen pictures of it on TV and in magazines re-covering stories the
Planet
had gotten to first. It had always struck me as larger than life, but here it was.

“You have to pay me and get out before you can go in there, you know,” the cab driver said, not unkindly.

“Right.” I passed him some money and climbed out. My eyes traveled up and up the many, many floors and landed on the globe at the top.

I looked down at the card in my hand again. And that was when it hit me—I was going to be working at the
Daily Planet.
I added to my fantasy: me and my friends staring out over the city from high in the skyscraper, drinking coffee and rubbing elbows with real reporters, people who pressed politicians and mobsters and people like my dad for answers.

Before I even realized I’d started walking, I was at the bank of revolving doors and then inside one, my fingertips pressed to the glass panel like I could make it turn faster, until I spilled out into the lobby. The buzz of conversation echoed off the marble floor, people clicking across on their way in or out, in the middle of no-doubt important conversations with each other or on their phones.

A fresh-faced, freckled security guard waited behind a desk. I approached, the card still in my palm.

“I’m Lois Lane. Here for Perry White,” I said.

My heart was beating embarrassingly fast, but he couldn’t know that from looking at me. He gave me a sweep of the eyes up and down like he could, though. “For the
Scoop
, I take it?”

“Which floor do I go up to?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You’ll need the service elevator. Go past the main ones there, and then take it
down
to level B.”

“B as in ‘Baby, this view is to die for’?” I asked hopefully.

The guard raised an eyebrow. “B as in ‘basement,’” he said.

So: not exactly my fantasy. But, like a good soldier, I marched past the nice elevators, the trademark globe traced in white like icing across their fronts. I stopped at a set of narrow, grim, gray elevator doors.

Turning, I saw the guard watching me. He nodded.

I pressed the call button, and the service elevator doors creaked open so slowly I was tempted to help them out. I admit it. I was a little bummed that the
Scoop
offices weren’t far above the city streets with a great view through the gleaming windows. But even the basement at the
Planet
must be pretty awesome, right?

Not so much to look at, I discovered. I exited into an even grimmer sub-level, the walls painted a dismal gray. My boots echoed on dingy tile as I passed tall frames that held yellowed front pages, their headlines shouting about murders and corruption, stock market crashes and deadly fires. The sound of muffled voices, hollow and indistinct, came from the same general direction as a dim glow at the end of the long, dark hall.

Past the bend in the dark hall was an open door. As soon as I went inside, I recalled my fantasy vision of working here and pressed the mental self-destruct button to erase it.

There were three staffers my age, a girl and two boys, all of them frowning at Perry White, whose back was to me.

The girl was Maddy from my English class, so at least that was an excellent sign for the making-a-friend part of the plan. She and one of the two guys sat at big slabs of desks—not unlike coffins—which housed computers that appeared to be the only things in the room that weren’t holdovers from history. The ancient variety, recorded in lost decades of decaying newsprint. The third staffer was a preppy boy perched on the corner of his coffin slab.

A fourth desk was empty.

The three noticed me at the same time, aiming their frowns past Perry to where I stood.

“Lois!” Perry turned and greeted me with a suspicious level of enthusiasm. “Welcome to the Morgue!”

I frowned, and he added, “This room still has all the last old editions that haven’t been turned into pictures and ones and zeros. And the ones that are too rare to throw out.”

Around the walls of the long room were cabinets that went all the way to the low ceiling. They did in fact look like every line of morgue drawers I’d seen in movies or cop shows.

“You’re sure there are no bodies?” I asked.

“Bodies? Nah, the obits were the first things we digitized, don’t worry,” he said. “This place is part of history. That’s why we thought it was perfect for the
Scoop
, you know? A past-meets-future kind of thing.”

The cabinets appeared to be labeled with dates instead of names or random numbers. So the odds were good that he was telling the truth about the place being corpse-free. Still, when I raised my eyebrows, he admitted, “And we were out of space upstairs. Come on over and meet everyone. I was just telling them about you.”

Uh-oh. The other three were frowning, and he’d been talking about me?

“Go on,” Perry said, “introduce yourselves.”

He gave a pointed look to Maddy. She’d added a layer of dark eyeliner and bright pink lipstick since class.

“Lois and I already met,” she said. “I’m style editor. Not by choice. Mr. White here thought a girl would be better at style than these two. I wanted to be the music critic.”

“Perry,” he corrected her. “I told you to call me Perry. And you’re . . . stylish.”

Maddy regarded him.

Nice try, Perry
. “Hi again,” I said.

“Too bad your sister wasn’t interested,” said a lanky boy in a crisp button down. He was the one on the edge of his desk rather than sitting in the chair behind it. He had a glossy crown of brown hair and blinding white teeth, like he’d been bred for them.

“I needed a job; the perfect one didn’t,” Maddy said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Aha.

The preppy boy with the posh enunciation might think Maddy was being sarcastic, but she wasn’t. The makeup she’d added before work was one giveaway, but so was the complete sincerity of her tone and how she looked at him when she said it, waiting for him to look back. He didn’t.