Beside me, Colleen Bristow timidly raises her hand. “I—I think I could give that a go,” she says, her voice almost as small as she is. Colleen, the paper’s youngest staff member and copy editor, is a tiny white girl who wears purple-framed glasses and always keeps her mousy brown hair in a neat ponytail.
Johnny looks to Mrs. Raburn, deferring to her. Colleen is supersweet and very thorough, but she’s younger than all the other sophomores because she skipped fourth grade. Even though there’s nothing wrong with being shy, it’s hard to imagine her standing her own ground snooping around a place like Shady Oaks Prep, where the students can sniff out an outsider like a fake designer bag at a flea market.
Mrs. Raburn shifts in her seat. “Maybe we should work up to a story like that, Colleen. Let’s get your feet wet with something more . . .” She turns to Johnny.
“Oh, right!” says Johnny. “How about . . .” He taps his pen against his lips, thin on top with a pouty bottom lip. “How do you feel about covering the new vending machines?”
Colleen gives a flat smile. “Sure.” She must be one of those girls who’s always cold, because she’s wearing purple gloves and a matching scarf.
“And maybe you could help Faith with the Senior Spotlights. I think Gretchen Sandoval is our next senior.”
I stifle a huff. Senior Spotlights are the worst, mainly because the seniors who get spotlighted are the kind of people who think the newspaper staff are a bunch of nerds who spend their weekends writing fanfic and playing tabletop role-playing games. And while that’s actually not entirely untrue, those things are just as cool as being captain of the drill team, which is why Gretchen Sandoval is next on the list for Senior Spotlight.
Colleen catches the grimace on my face. “Um, sure, if that’s okay with Faith.”
I smile, trying to recover. “Oh yeah! Of course.”
After the rest of the workload for this week’s paper is divided up, I settle into my little cubicle to brainstorm. Calling my space a cubicle is generous, but I love this little stretch of home buried deep within the halls of East Glenwood High. The computer at my desk is something straight out of a museum and would probably work faster if I plugged a bike into it and started pedaling. Last spring I ditched my plain old desk chair for a school bus bench Johnny and I found out by the dumpsters when we were cleaning out some old storage space the school assigned to us for our newly instated archive after months of begging.
The greatest perk of senior year is getting not just one, but two class sessions back-to-back in the journalism room, both of which I share with Johnny. First period is my actual journalism class and the other is a study hall, which today I’m looking forward to for blog maintenance.
The study hall bell rings as I open a new browser and Faithfully Yours slowly begins to load. Johnny plops down beside me and as a gut reaction, I lurch toward the mouse to frantically close the browser.
He chomps into an apple with a loud cracking bite. “‘Faithfully Yours,’” he reads over my shoulder.
“Uhh . . .” I scramble to close the screen, but the stupid computer is frozen. Of course it is! Come on, come on. I click incessantly, but the little arrow on the screen doesn’t budge. I swear this computer is straight out of ancient Rome.
Johnny plops down next to me. “‘My Top Five Predictions for Next Season. Number one. Grant will discover that Parker is his sister. If you ask me, Grant’s whole story arc has been building to this—’”
“Stop, stop! Shhh!” I clap my hand over his mouth, and he grins.
“What?” he asks, his voice muffled with fingers still covering his lips. “Just catching up on the latest Grove gossip.”
The arrow on my computer races all over the screen as it unfreezes and tries catching up on all the right clicking and window minimizing I’d attempted. All the while, a GIF of Dakota winking at the top of my latest posts stares back at me over and over and over again.
Johnny reaches for the mouse and hovers over my subscriber count in the sidebar. “Holy crap. Faith, is this your blog? You have almost ninety thousand followers! Wow. The Grove? Isn’t that the one where the kids have weird superpowers but then also can’t figure out normal stuff like how to get birth control? I can’t believe it’s still on the air, honestly.”
“It’s more nuanced than that!” I tell him. “The Grove perfectly blends the paranormal with superhero lore and the everyday dilemmas of American teens. It’s iconic!” I nearly shout that last part, feeling a little defensive.
Johnny lets out a low whistle. “Whoa. Stand down. Sorry, I didn’t know.”
I blush and sink down a bit into my bus bench, the tear in the seat giving way to yellowing foam scratches against my back. Why couldn’t I just have been looking up porn like a normal teenager?
He scrolls and checks out different pages and previous posts as I continue to shrivel right there beside him.
Faithfully Yours isn’t a secret, exactly, but it’s not something I’ve advertised. Call it the fangirl in me, but something about keeping my identity a secret from all of my audience and letting everyone speculate about who I really was excited me. A few readers have figured out who I am, and to me, it’s like they’re the most pure of heart and worthy of such a secret. Just like in Kingdom Keeper, a game I wish I could forget playing. And it doesn’t hurt that none of my readers have been psycho stalkers, but beyond that, only Matt and Ches know that I’m the puppet master behind Faithfully Yours: Your One-Stop Fan Blog for All Things Grove. I used to keep up with all the cast gossip, but honestly, the type of commenters that brought onto the blog disgusted me—the kind of people who would say awful and vicious things about the cast, completely dehumanizing them. So these days it’s mostly in-depth recaps.
I groan. It’s one thing to be a fan of something. It’s a whole other thing to create an internet shrine to it. “It’s kind of a secret, okay? So maybe don’t print this in the paper?”
He minimizes the screen, and his eyebrows shoot up and down knowingly. “Almost like a secret identity.”
I hold my pinky out for him. “Promise you won’t tell a soul.”
He loops his pinky around mine, and my insides flutter. “I swear. I’ll tell everyone it was porn.”
I laugh and tug harder on his pinky, showing him my muscle.
“Okay, okay,” he whispers. “Your secret identity is safe with me.” And then his eyes catch mine, and in a very serious tone, he adds, “All your secrets are safe with me, Faith.”
He clears his throat, talking loudly enough for everyone else in study hall to hear so that it’s very clear that nothing odd is happening here. No sir, nothing to see here. “So you need anyone to go check out the musical rehearsals with you? I could bring the camera. Maybe we could get a bite afterward and brainstorm some more?”
If Ches were here, she’d scream, THIS IS A DATE. HE’S ASKING YOU ON A DATE. But thankfully, Ches is not here. Both Ches and Matt have sworn up and down since freshman year that Johnny has a crush on me, and at first it was so hard to believe. For as much as I love The Grove and Kingdom Keeper and Buffy and Harry Potter and X-Files and Wonder Woman and Squirrel Girl and X-Men and every other fandom where I’ve found friendship and hope, one thing I’ve never found is someone having a crush on a fat girl.