The Last Reporter (21 page)

“Ma, this can’t be good for business,” said Don.

“You’re going to get security up here,” said Alan.

Mrs. Ameche stopped dancing. She looked disappointed. “Jenny, the Ameche brothers are turning into teenagers,” she said. “They’re afraid of what other people think. I used to do my Ha-Ha, I Told You So, Ha-Ha dance — the Ameche brothers would dance right along. Am I right, boys? You used to love doing the Ha-Ha.”

“Cut it out, Ma,” said Don.

“Can we just get back to regular here?” said Alan.

Mrs. Ameche sat back down and resumed painting.

“So,” said Adam, “we need your help, Mrs. Ameche. We have ten days to get the paper to the printer. That’s ten days to raise another five hundred dollars to get it printed.”

“We know how hard the Ameche brothers tried,” said Jennifer. “And we feel terrible. We may not even be able to pay them.”

Mrs. Ameche didn’t say anything; she just kept working on the wedding portrait.

“Is she in her painting trance?” whispered Jennifer.

“No,” said Don, “she’s thinking.”

“How can you tell?” whispered Adam.

“The eyes,” said Alan.

“They’re more darty,” said Don.

Adam was staring at the wedding portrait. The man
was
taller than his wife now, but the funny thing was, it didn’t look as ridiculous as it sounded. Mrs. Ameche had drawn the couple from a slighty different angle from the photo, sort of off to the left looking downward into the picture from the husband’s side, and somehow from that angle, it seemed he really could be taller, that the photo might have been wrong.

“OK,” said Mrs. Ameche. “When I’m in a tight spot like this, I always try to think of a similar moment in a great movie and how the good guys got out of that. And right now I’m thinking of
The Wizard of Oz
and how that lovely Dorothy — and I have to tell you, Jenny, you remind me a little of her; you’ve got that same sunniness — how she just wanted to get back to Kansas. And after she’s been through everything, she goes to that good witch and the good witch tells her —”

“Ma,” said Don, “they don’t want to go home.”

“They don’t live in Kansas, Ma,” said Alan. “They need five hundred bucks.”

“Oh, shush. What the good witch says is Dorothy had it in her power the whole time to go home anytime she wanted; she just needed to click her ruby slippers a bunch and say she wanted to go, and she was out of there.”

Adam looked at Jennifer’s feet. She was wearing sneakers. They didn’t look that clickable.

“You have the ability to raise that money; you just have to tell people you need it,” said Mrs. Ameche. “We did this all wrong. We were trying to sell ads like a regular paper. You have to explain your situation. You’re a great newspaper, and the Bolands and the school board shut you down. And you’ve got more truth to tell. You’ve got to go to all the people who believe in you and the ones you’ve helped. This is America, and Americans may bellyache about the media, but they love freedom of speech. It’s a country of blabbermouths. They will help. Like that woman you wrote about, with the wooden cow that got stolen. She sounded like a rich lady — lived out on Breckenridge, right? Well, I bet she’d be happy to donate a couple bucks to help the
Slash
— you got her cow back —”

“Whoa,” said Jennifer. “She wanted to buy a mail subscription — I bet you’re right.”

“Yes,” said Adam. “That secretary for the lawyers who saved the basketball hoops — she said the same thing.”

“I knew it!” yelled Mrs. Ameche. “I knew it —” and she rose like she might do her Ha-Ha dance again, but stopped when Jennifer said, “Hold on.”

Mrs. Ameche glanced at the Busy Bee ceiling. “Don’t tell me, Jenny. Now you’re embarrassed by the Ha-Ha.”

“No, no,” said Jennifer. “It’s not that.”

“Ma, she wouldn’t say if she was,” said Don.

“She’s got too nice manners, Ma,” said Alan.

“No, no,” repeated Jennifer. “It’s not the Ha-Ha I’m worried about — it’s ethics.”

Ethics! thought Adam. Oh, no. It seemed like they were about to get out of this, and there was that stupid word again.
Ethics.
It was always getting in the way of everything. He hated ethics; he wished they’d just dry up and die.

The Ameche brothers looked stricken.

“It’s not our fault,” said Don.

“We’ve been one-hundred percent good ethics since you yelled at us, Ma,” said Alan.

Jennifer waved them off. She said the same thing to Mrs. Ameche now that she’d said to the
Slash
staff several weeks before: She was worried that if she and Adam and others on the
Slash
were asking for money from people who’d been sources for their news stories, it would be like they were asking them to pay for being written about in the
Slash.
And then everyone would start thinking only people who gave money would get their names in the paper. “That’s not what we’re doing,” Jennifer said. “But it might look like that.”

Adam mentioned how he’d turned down money from Mrs. Quigley. “Jennifer gave us this huge talk about the wall separating the business side from the news side,” he said.

“The wall!” said Don.

“Not the wall!” moaned Alan, and the two looked at each other, put their hands to their chests, spun around like corkscrews, then fell to the mall floor like deceased Ameches.

Mrs. Ameche ignored them. She told Jennifer and Adam she didn’t see anything wrong with asking people like the wooden-cow lady for money if there were no plans to write about them again. Mrs. Ameche said that she could see how the principal was different, since there would probably be something about her in every issue. And she said if it turned out that they
did
need to write about someone who gave them money in some future issue, they would just have to mention that in the story. “You just say, ‘Full Disclosure,’ and you tell the truth. I got to tell you — the
Slash
is fighting for its life here. I don’t think you can worry too far ahead. You’ve got to get this issue out.”

“Full disclosure,” Jennifer repeated softly. “Sounds all right.”

“Full disclosure!” said Adam, grinning; he felt like kissing Mrs. Ameche for making their ethics problem go away.

“Full disclosure, Ma,” said Don.

“We’re not really dead, Ma,” said Alan.

The coeditors had to go. Adam had baseball; Jennifer, a cello lesson.

They said bye to the Ameche brothers, giving them double knucks, and thanked Mrs. Ameche. She walked them along the hallway to the down escalator. She promised she’d have the Ameche brothers send out a fundraising message for the
Slash
on their
Talk Till You Drop, All-Live Except the Recorded Parts
webcast. “You know the viewership of that webcast,” Mrs. Ameche said. “They might raise ten bucks if you’re lucky. For once,” she continued, “this is not a job for the Ameche brothers. You two have it in your power to do this. Just click those ruby slippers . . .”

She gave Adam a friendly rub on the head and squeezed Jennifer in a big Ameche hug.

Adam hopped on the down escalator, but when he turned to say something to Jennifer, she wasn’t there; she was still at the top. Mrs. Ameche was holding her arm, and Don had joined them — Don?! — and Adam heard Mrs. Ameche say, “You’re all right about this?” Then Jennifer was saying something back, and Mrs. Ameche was saying something else back, and then Mrs. Ameche was kissing Jennifer on the cheek! What was that? Though he tried with all his might, Adam couldn’t hear what they were saying — a girl in front of him was on her cell phone describing her new ceramic cat — and the escalator just kept rolling along, carrying Adam down and out.

“Can everyone please sit down and listen up?” Jennifer called. “Come on, guys. . . . We’ve got a lot to do. Please . . . It’s a week to get the paper to the printer. . . . Come on. . . .”

It was tough; everyone was thinking about the end of school. Summer vacation. Kids just wanted to be free. Adam was watching two boys on a nearby couch, both sports reporters. They were talking right through Jennifer, totally oblivious. One of the boys was holding his arm out, and the two were studying the black ink spots on his hand. The boy with the spots was saying how you could make a fortune if you could just invent a kind of permanent marker that could wash off. And the other boy was saying how stupid this was, since if it could wash off, it wasn’t a permanent marker.

As coeditor of the
Slash,
Adam knew he should have told them to shut up and listen to Jennifer. There was so much to do. But he didn’t have it in him. These two boys were exactly like Adam, last year, when he was just a star reporter for the
Slash,
before Jennifer had tricked him into becoming her coeditor. These two completely oblivious idiots were having so much fun, debating how permanent permanent marker had to be, to be washable and still be permanent marker. That’s what Adam wanted to be talking about.

Not tracking down Stub Keenan.

Not investigating the state test.

Not raising money for the
Slash.

The permanence of permanent marker. That was a mull-able topic with infinite possibilities for a middle-school boy.

But before he could mull, he was distracted by the quiet. Jennifer had on her supersonic coeditor meltdown glare.

She’d silenced them.

“OK, Adam,” she said. “Tell everyone about Stub.”

A few more weeks and they’d be done. Swimming in the Tremble. Jumping on the trampoline at his grandma’s cottage. Learning to surf at the beach. Wakeboarding 180s. Lying on the dock at Lake Ameche, looking up at the sky and watching Mrs. Ameche’s two clouds float by.

He could do this.

They loved the Stub story.

Several asked where to get a free download.

Someone suggested doing a music review of Stub’s Top 250 Hits.

“If his music’s kind of shaky,” said a girl. “It could backfire. He might lose.”

A lot of them had heard little things, but none had put the whole story together. A few said there’d been a rumor about getting free downloads, but they’d assumed maybe a skateboard or cell-phone company was doing it. A boy had gone online trying to track it down, but didn’t get any hits for Harris or even Tremble. One girl had been asked if she wanted a free download but didn’t realize what they were talking about and didn’t have her iPod with her, anyway.

Adam asked if she remembered who it was.

She said it was a boy, but she didn’t know his name.

“Was it Stub?” asked Adam. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Kind of cute.”

Adam didn’t say anything, but he was thinking he might be the last true reporter left on the continent.

“What did Stub say when you told him you knew?” asked Sammy.

Adam said they hadn’t talked to Stub yet.

“Ouch,” said Sammy. “That could be messy, Ad-man. You want some of us to go with you? We’d do it. You might need a posse.”

A third-grade hand in the back was waving wildly. “I volunteer, I’ll do it! Pick me!” squeaked who else — Phoebe! Just what he needed. It wasn’t bad enough that they had a third grader writing the paper’s advice column. Now she was going to be his bodyguard. He’d kill her.

“We’ll be all right,” said Jennifer.

Adam looked at her. “We will?” he said. He was quite sure that if Stub and his goons punched someone in the face, it wouldn’t be Jennifer.

“Trust me,” said Jennifer. “The coeditors can handle it.”

The sports reporters had finished their stories, but Jennifer wanted them to include the final season win-loss records for each team. “That’s important,” she said. “I hate reading about how the girls’ lacrosse team had this great season blah, blah, and there’s no record.”

“When we finished our stories,” said the boy with permanent marker, “the season wasn’t over. You’re the one who wanted us to get them in early.”

“OK, so now you have to go back to the coaches and find out,” said Jennifer. “And we’ll insert the final records.”

The boys moaned.

“Right, Adam?” said Jennifer.

Adam was quiet. It was easy for Jennifer to say; the girls’ tennis team was undefeated. The boys baseball team was 3–9. He wondered if the baseball coach had told the
Slash
reporters about Adam Canfield’s double that had won the game against Broad Meadows Middle. That was the kind of nice little fact that could really spice up a sports story.

The reporters who’d done the bike-theft story were up next. Adam might not have gotten his back, but the story was turning out to be really interesting. The reporters found fourteen kids who’d had their bikes stolen, and none had gotten them back. They talked to a community relations spokesman for the Tremble Police Department, who said it appeared there were two bike rings operating in town. One, he said, seemed to be some kid walking home from school who just grabbed bikes he saw lying around. That, of course, was what had happened to Adam’s bike. The other seemed to strike at night. The thief would find a bike left on the side of a house or on a patio or in an unlocked garage, grab it, and leave a crappier bike in its place. “So they cruise the neighborhoods on a bad old bike, see a better one, and then just ride off with nobody noticing,” explained one of the reporters. “How you know you’ve been hit — there’s a crappy bike lying on your lawn when you wake up in the morning. You see that crappy bike, it’s like the kiss of death.”