The Last Reporter (22 page)

Sammy had found the perfect chocolate milk at a new restaurant in town. He gave it a top mark of 4.5 yummy-yummies, plus an extra half-yummy for perfection. The milk was cold. It was served in a tall glass-glass, not a plastic-glass. The glass was seven inches high — Sammy had measured it. He liked to be precise. There was no chocolate syrup visible at the bottom of the glass — meaning all the chocolate had been stirred in. The drink was served with a straw and was not filled to the top — there were one and a half inches of space, so if you blew bubbles, they wouldn’t spill over and mess up the table — not to mention wasting perfectly good chocolate milk.

“I just want everyone to know,” Sammy said, “that I went back three times on three different days to make sure it wasn’t some freak, one-shot perfect thing, and it wasn’t. I mean, I wanted to be fair. . . . I think that’s important . . .” He seemed to be waiting for someone to say something, but when nobody did, he said, “Thank you very much,” and sat down.

Everyone was still. They were amazed at how much thought Sammy had put into writing about a glass of chocolate milk. They felt like they were in the presence of greatness.

Jennifer called him back up.

“That’s only half,” Jennifer said. “Tell them the rest. Come on, Sammy.”

Sammy looked puzzled.

“The other story you did.”

Sammy shrugged. “The restaurant?” It turned out that the new restaurant with the perfect chocolate milk was called Only Kids Only, and just like the name said, it was really just for kids. Sammy had written a whole separate story, calling it “a revolutionary breakthrough in kids’ dining.” Parents could drop off kids or sit in a waiting room, but only kids were allowed to eat there. The menu featured kid food — peanut butter and jam, grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, tuna fish with nothing in it, quesadillas with chicken and cheese only — no onions or relishy nonsense. And they only served top-of-the-line desserts, like Mrs. Radin’s Famous Homemade Super-Chunk Buckets O’ Chocolate Moisty Deluxe chocolate-chip cookies.

“It’s pretty great,” Sammy said. “You can order like twenty different types of PB&Js. I got strawberry jam with double crunchy peanut butter on whole wheat, and they’ll take the fat berry parts out of the jam if you ask. . . .”

“Gross,” said a girl. “I hate those berry boogers.”

“And you can order all these good side dishes. I got it with Cheez Doodles and carrot sticks. The whole thing came to five dollars.”

Everyone was talking at once; they all wanted to go to Only Kids Only.

Adam shot to his feet. “Quiet!” he called. “Quiet. I think there’s an important lesson here. This is all about excellence. Sammy had a dream: to find the perfect chocolate milk. A lot of us, including me, thought it wasn’t important enough to make a story, but Sammy stuck to his principles. And he sacrificed — I guarantee you, he drank a lot of bad chocolate milk on the way to that 5.0. He did not give up. A lot of people might say, ‘Oh, fine, this chocolate milk is good enough for our readers.’ Not Sammy. No way. He searched until he found a glass of milk that met his standard.”

They were on their feet now, clapping and whistling and banging the tables.

Sammy turned a bright pink, but he was beaming. He raised his hand and kept saying, “Thank you, thank you. . . . I know every one of you would have done the same thing.”

It was time to talk money. Adam and Jennifer brought them up to date. The coeditors told the staff they needed to raise another $750; Jennifer wanted to make sure they had a little extra in case there were any unexpected, last-minute costs from the printer. Plus they were hoping to have some money left over to pay the Ameche brothers.

They repeated almost everything Mrs. Ameche had said, including the part about the
Slash
being a great newspaper that had more truth to tell. They talked about the importance of going to every single person who’d believed in them. About the only part of Mrs. Ameche’s speech they left out was the
Wizard of Oz
stuff — the last thing they needed was a room full of news hounds clicking their heels and chanting that they wanted to go home.

Jennifer explained that the money must come with no strings attached. Just because someone gave didn’t mean the
Slash
was going to write some nice, puff-job story about them. “And anyone who does ask for favors, just say never mind and don’t take their money,” said Jennifer.

“We’re making a list,” she continued, lifting her pen high and wiggling it at them. “And we need to know now — right now — how much each of you can raise. And I must have it by the end of the week. I’m not talking what you’d like to raise, or what you might possibly raise, what could be or what may be . . . I’m talking five days from now.”

“Cold, hard cash,” said Adam.

The coeditors didn’t know what kind of reaction they’d get, but in the few seconds it took Jennifer to look up from the legal pad where she was making notes, practically every hand in the room had shot up.

They were all talking at once. People mentioned several teachers and coaches and librarians who they knew would give. Adam wrote down the Tremble children’s librarian who’d helped him on his Shadow report — the one who had told Adam how much she’d liked the
Slash.

“That’s good,” said Jennifer. “Librarians, I didn’t think of that — librarians seem quiet, but they’re kind of surprising people.”

Adam wrote down Mrs. Rose, and Danny, his grown-up friend from the animal shelter, and Erik Forrest, the world-famous journalist, and his favorite teacher, Mr. Brooks.

“I bet I know a thousand people, cinchy-easy, who’d give,” said Phoebe. “There’s Eddie the janitor and Mrs. Eddie, his nice wife, who made us the cookies and calls me Little Sweet Potato, and his grown-up children, who loved my stories best of any stories . . . and —”

Adam had to give Phoebe credit: even when she was doing good, even when she was helping her fellow man, she still somehow managed to find a way to be really annoying.

“We’re getting there,” said Jennifer. “But —”

“I’m not done!” squeaked Phoebe. “I pledge the twenty-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents that I made selling my bead necklaces and ankle bracelets at the Riverfront Crafts Fair last weekend —” She took a deep bow. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. “I bet I collect the most of everyone. Thank you, thank you.”

“I pledge one hundred dollars and zero cents,” said Shadow. “From my job at the Rec, working for Mr. Johnny Stack and doing what needs doing. And I’m going to get money from Mr. Johnny Stack, too. He likes the
Slash.
Mr. Johnny Stack says it’s good for a person like me to mix with kids like that. So, I think he will give a lot, which is not an exact amount, but it will be.”

Shadow never ceased to amaze Adam — he didn’t even have his own house to live in or parents to live with.

“Shadow,” said Jennifer, “that’s so nice, but it’s too much. I know how hard you work —”

“Work’s not hard for me,” said Shadow. “Mr. Johnny Stack says work is my middle name. It’s not my really middle name. It’s just a figure of speech. My really middle name —”

“Nobody cares what your really middle name is,” said Phoebe. “We’re trying to collect money to save the
Slash.
No offense or anything, but like Mr. Adams, my Language Arts teacher, says, you need to focus . . .”

“Focus-pocus!” said Shadow. “Mr. Johnny Stack says when it comes to work, no one can focus on a job like Theodore Robert Cox, which is my real name, including my real middle name and my first real name and my last real name and not Shadow, my real nickname —”

“Excuse me,” said Phoebe. “Can I say one word here?”

“
Excuse me. Can I say one word here?
is eight words, not one word,” said Shadow. “Even
one word
is two words. You’re just saying everything because twenty-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents is not the most of everyone, thank you, thank you. One hundred dollars and no cents is. And I can prove it.”

“Stop,” said Jennifer. “Stop, stop, stop. You two, you have to learn to get along better. Come on. It’s great what both of you are doing. Everyone is doing the best they can, and that’s wonderful —”

“That’s right,” said Shadow. “I’m just doing better than her.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that,” said Phoebe. “There’s still five days to go. I’m going to ask special permission to set up a table at lunch in the cafeteria to sell my necklaces so I can rack up the bucks.”

Adam’s head was pounding. “Stop,” he said quietly. “Please stop. Please.” Phoebe started to open her mouth, but Adam screamed,
“No!”
and it seemed like she heard him this time, because she sat down, pulled out a purse full of beads, and started stringing an ankle bracelet.

Watching Phoebe, it occurred to Adam that maybe she was the perfect reporter. She was exuberantly and irrationally self-confident, it was impossible to wear her down, she never took anything bad you said about her personally if she even noticed at all, and whatever ridiculousness she was up to, she always seemed to be able to twist it into something useful. Her shameless pledge war with Shadow set off a whole new round of pledges from the staff. Kids pledged to donate their babysitting money, mother’s-helper money, snow-shoveling money, leaf-raking money, yardwork money, car-washing money, returned-bottle money.

When Jennifer finally lifted her head, having caught up with all the names and pledges people had given her, she said, “If everyone comes through, looks to me like we’ll have more than we need — as long as everyone means what they said.” She paused; it seemed like she was trying to decide whether or not to say something.

“You know what’s funny,” she said. “I’m looking over this list — no one mentioned parents.”

They were quiet. It was true: they — Adam included — hadn’t even thought about their parents, but it made sense to him. Room 306 was their place. The
Slash
was theirs. Of all the activities in their overprogrammed lives, it was the one thing they did where they were the ones who decided where to go and whom to talk to and whom to listen to and whom to trust and whom not to trust — certainly they weren’t about to trust Mrs. Boland, or Dr. Bleepin, or their old principal, Mrs. Marris, or Stub Keenan. They still needed help from grown-ups. Lots of grown-ups. But they chose which ones — like Mr. Brooks and Mrs. Rose and Erik Forrest and Mrs. Willard and Reverend Shorty and their acting principal, Mrs. Quigley, and Mrs. Ameche. Mrs. Ameche was a perfect example. Adam and Jennifer had found Mrs. Ameche all by themselves, which made her seem better. She was theirs.

For everything else, their parents made all the decisions. Their parents took them to baritone and cello and choir and ballet and Irish-step lessons. Their parents signed them up for baseball and tennis and lacrosse and soccer teams. And when their parents dropped them off at the field, other grown-ups, who were picked out by their parents, told them where to stand and when to run and when to stop running and when to swing their bats and when to take a pitch — even if it was right down the middle and Adam was dying to clobber it.

In Room 306, if Adam felt like swinging, he swung away.

“I might ask my parents,” Adam said softly. “If we’re really desperate.”

Jennifer nodded. “Me, too,” she said. “If we’re really desperate.”

It was time to go. Adam and Jennifer were hoping to catch Mrs. Gross after the meeting to interview her about the state test. Every last one of them had people to visit, phone calls to make, e-mails to send, money to raise. Not since last winter, since they’d all used Adam’s 100 percent foolproof middle-of-the-night wake-up method and e-mailed out the story on Mrs. Marris stealing money, had the entire
Slash
staff been so unified in a single cause. The atmosphere in 306 was positively tingly.

“Before we go,” said Jennifer, “listen up. Before we head out on this mission, I just want to say how proud I am. We’re going to do this. We’re going to put out this paper. We’re going to show the school board and the Bolands and everyone else that they can’t stop the
Slash
from being published. They shut us down, but they did not shut us up. So . . . wait, wait . . . Hold on, everyone — Adam, you want to make a little speech? Any final words to motivate the troops?”

A speech? Adam thought. A speech? Adam could talk well enough when he needed to, but he wasn’t sure it would turn into an actual speech. He felt a little too disorganized to make a speech. A speech was more like a bunch of words you thought up ahead of time and repeated back in the proper order.

Then something occurred to him.

“Yes,” he said. “I know a speech. An actual speech . . . Give me a second. . . . OK, I’m ready. It’s pretty historic.” He raised both arms, as if he was an orchestra conductor.

“June 18, 1940,” he began. “The Bolands and the school board know that they will have to break us here in 306, or lose the war. If we can stand up to them, all Harris Elementary/Middle may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

Adam climbed up on the picnic table in the middle of the room. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the
Slash
and Harris Elementary/Middle School last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

The staff of the Slash had witnessed a lot of good talking in 306, but what Adam said was the most speechy that any had ever heard from a fellow kid. They didn’t know exactly what it meant, but it sounded great. They stood and cheered, and then they grabbed their backpacks and went marching out the door. Even the oldest among them, the eighth graders, were excited about having a finest hour.