The Last Reporter (28 page)

“Plus what, Adam?”

He hesitated; he didn’t know if he could trust those smiling daisies.

“Plus, those kids mugged me for my shoveling money last winter,” he finally said, “and I got my bike stolen. If I got beat up again — that’s pretty much it. Every kid would think I was a wuss. They go after you. Like you said. In that story about your son.”

The acting principal pulled a tissue out of the box on her desk and blew her nose. It seemed like she was going to ask him something else.

But then she just thanked him and said he could go.

He got up. “Mrs. Quigley,” he said, “what are you going to do to me?”

“Adam, I haven’t a clue. But don’t you worry about it. Nothing too bad. You just finish up that newspaper. Show everybody.” And she pressed in her stomach and smiled at him.

The coeditors worked right up to the last minute finishing the paper. They’d get what they thought was a final comment from someone for a story, and then, because that supposedly final comment turned out to be not final enough, they had to get an even more final comment, or they needed to find someone to explain the supposedly final comment or the comment about the supposedly final comment.

Good reporting was way too much work. Sometimes, Adam fantasized about giving it all up and doing a blog where he could spend his time shooting out opinions based on other people’s reporting. That would be the easy life, merrily blogging his days away right along with everyone else in America.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t do it.

That wasn’t him.

For better or stinking worse, he was a reporter, destined to roam the earth uncovering cold, hard facts.

They decided to play the lead story
huge,
at the top, stretching across two-thirds of the front page, with the biggest headline since they’d been coeditors of the
Slash:

Adam and Jennifer had argued about how many exclamation points to put after
We’re Still Here.
Adam wanted at least a dozen. Jennifer said one was plenty. She went online, found the
New York Times
stylebook, and e-mailed the entry on exclamation points to Adam: “In news writing the exclamation point is rarely needed,” the stylebook said. “When overused the exclamation point loses impact.”

See?
she e-mailed him.

Adam wrote back:

In the end, Jennifer negotiated him down to what Adam kept calling “three measly exclamation points.”

The student council non-election was the off-lead of the paper, running on the top left of the front page.

The statement Mrs. Quigley had e-mailed to Jennifer was very carefully worded and much longer than they’d expected. Even though their story named Stub, Mrs. Quigley did not. The acting principal said that for privacy reasons she couldn’t identify the student involved, but for short, she’d refer to “him/her” as student 916154. Mrs. Quigley said that when questioned, 916154 admitted having given many fellow students free iPod downloads, and Mrs. Quigley had concluded there were so many involved — at least 143 — they couldn’t possibly all be 916154’s friends. Mrs. Quigley noted that 916154 claimed that no one had to vote for him/her, it was a free country, and 916154 said he/she didn’t think he/she had done anything wrong.

The acting principal wrote that since middle-school students were at an age when they were still learning to make ethical choices, still figuring out right from wrong, she was going to use this as a teaching opportunity rather than a disciplinary matter. And then she said in her twenty-five years as a principal, this wasn’t the first time she’d seen a case of kids trying to win votes by doing improper favors. Many, many years ago, she said, there had been a candidate for recording secretary who let younger girls sit in the back of the school bus with her in exchange for their votes. Mrs. Quigley said this girl had gone on to be a very successful pharmacist, filling many prescriptions that helped sick people get well, and so it was clear that middle-school students could learn from their mistakes.

At the end of Mrs. Quigley’s note was a paragraph marked, “Off the record/Not for publication/Private correspondence.”

Mrs. Quigley wrote:
Coeditors: I told 916154 that I was cutting him/her a big break by not suspending him/her and that if I heard that he/she bothered you/you in any way because of your/your story, I myself would personally come out of retirement to deal with him/her in this matter. He/she assured me that he/she understood and would stay away from you/you.

Jennifer felt better after reading Mrs. Quigley’s note, but not Adam. “Doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “He’ll come at me again. A kid like Stub is not going to forget getting knocked down in front of the whole school.”

“I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “I was talking to Billy — he said Stub was pretty shook up from his meeting with Mrs. Quigley.”

“You seem awfully buddy-buddy with Billy Cutty,” said Adam.

“We’re in math together,” said Jennifer.

“No,” said Adam. “It’s more than that. He was your secret source, wasn’t he? He gave you that list of free iPod downloads.”

“Oh, come on,” said Jennifer. “That’s ridiculous. Billy was Stub’s campaign manager. He’d be the last —”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Adam said. “The way I figure it, Billy and Stub have been buddies forever, play the same sports. Stub decides to take over the school, Billy’s a good guy, he agrees to help, and then, when he’s in it up to his ears, he realizes what a jerk Stub is and feels guilty. It was Billy, wasn’t it? He gave you the list.”

“Adam Canfield,” said Jennifer, “even if it were true, and it’s not, you know reporters can’t give up their secret sources. You’re the one who always says that before revealing a source, you’d walk through fire, wrestle with alligators, swallow a tub of poison.”

“I never said that,” said Adam.

“Well, you should have,” said Jennifer.

The story on the state test getting easier was going to run across the middle of the front page, but they were having lots of problems with it.

Jennifer had sent an e-mail to the state education department, describing the results of the
Slash
investigation and asking for a response.

She got an e-mail back that was twelve long paragraphs, single-spaced.

The last paragraph said,
Bottom line: The same scale score always represents the same achievement level of the State Learning Standards per state education law, statute 324.67 section 2(d) revised 279.12 (t).

Adam could not believe it. “That’s the bottom line?” he said to Jennifer. “That’s the worst bottom line I ever heard of. A bottom line is three words: ‘We screwed up.’ Or, ‘I killed him.’ This is way too many lines for a bottom line. Do we even know for a fact this is English?”

“It is,” said Jennifer. “I checked every word online, and it’s definitely English.”

“Just because every word is English doesn’t mean the sentence is,” said Adam.

Jennifer nodded. “True bagels evergreen,” she said.

They were dying to be done, but agreed they needed to go back to Dr. Duke for a translation. Once again, Mrs. Quigley helped set it up. They met during lunch Monday on the school tennis courts, which were empty at that hour and were surrounded by a fence with green mesh, so no one could look inside.

Adam could not remember seeing very many adults as happy as Dr. Duke after they showed her the response from the state. It was like watching Mrs. Ameche’s Ha-Ha dance. Dr. Duke kept saying, “You did it, you did it.”

“We did what?” asked Jennifer.

“They admitted it!” yelled Dr. Duke.

“They admitted it?” asked Jennifer.

“Where?” asked Adam. “You mean the part about 324.67 section 2(d)?” Adam thought maybe that was some secret code of surrender under the Geneva Convention.

“No, no, no,” said Dr. Duke. She showed them. There, buried ten paragraphs in, was this sentence: “‘Because of varying levels of difficulty of the questions on the two exams, students had to answer a few more questions correctly in this year’s test than last year’s test and get more raw points to get the same scaled score.’”

Dr. Duke looked up triumphantly, but the coeditors still were lost. “Don’t you see?” she said. “Oh, my God, I have been doing this too long. I actually understand the state education department. But it’s good news for you, my dear
Slash
ingtons, very good news. They have surrendered to the
Slash.
They are admitting that this year’s test is easier! And they’re claiming they scaled this year’s scores tougher to make this year’s scores and last year’s scores comparable. Bottom line: they obviously scaled them way too easy this year, since everyone did ten percentage points better than last year. Get it?”

Adam sort of did, but he certainly didn’t feel good enough to do the Ha-Ha. This was way too complicated. “Dr. Duke,” he said, “no offense, but any chance you could give us a bottom line that’s little enough to actually fit on one single line? These fat bottom lines are really wearing us out.”

Dr. Duke was quiet, then said, “State secret to better test scores: easier tests.”

Adam ran that through his head a few times and liked it. So did Jennifer. Dr. Duke had given them their headline. It wasn’t three words, but it was a respectable bottom line. Still, he didn’t feel like doing the Ha-Ha. “How are we ever going to explain this in a story?” he asked her.

“You’re going to quote Dr. Duke,” said Dr. Duke.

“But I thought you couldn’t be quoted,” said Adam.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “But that was before you did all this great reporting and got the state to admit it.”

“But didn’t you say they shoot the messenger?” said Adam.

“They do,” said Dr. Duke. “But I’m not the messenger now; I’m the translator. You’re going to tell your readers you asked Dr. Duke to explain the state’s response.”

“They don’t shoot the translator?” asked Adam.

“Not to the best of my knowledge,” said Dr. Duke.

The other two articles on the front page were the bike-theft story and Ask Phoebe. The coeditors debated long and hard over whether they should put Ask Phoebe out front. They went through a whole bag of Cheez Doodles arguing it out. Whenever it came time to put the paper together, Front-Page Phoebe would reemerge, like some monster from the deep, noodging mercilessly, noodling, hinting, pleading, cajoling, doing everything in her annoying third-grade power to once again get her story on page one. It actually made it hard for the coeditors to decide fairly, since they wanted to stick her articles on the last page, under the bowling-team results, just to spite her.

That week she bombarded them with daily e-mails: