30 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
Cat flicked on the lights of the supply closet turned newsroom.
Poorly ventilated with not a single window to let the outside in, the room could double as a sauna. The stale air invited dust mites to take up residence. They clogged the keyboards and coated the monitors with a haze of dirt. Just inside the door, someone had left a used plunger and a chewed-up broom, which she hoped weren’t used for the same purpose.
Still, instantly, Cat’s mind calmed. Her sister was wrong. The newsroom wasn’t her second home. It was home. The place she dreamed of escaping to when her actual one brimmed with so much Angeline, she couldn’t breathe.
Okay, so days like today, breathing brought a sneeze or two, but Cat could fix that. Here, she could do anything, be anything, become something. Someone. Someone who’d leave this small town behind and enter a world she’d report on, like her grandfather had done.
She relished these few minutes before the first day of her senior year officially began. The solitude let her think, let her plan, let her wrap her head around what was to come. She set her backpack beside the chair that had been Jen’s, the one with “EIC” spelled out on the back in masking tape. She drew the seat toward her and hesitated before lowering herself into it.
A nervous smile spread across her face. She pressed her feet into the floor, kicking herself into a spin. But as the chair slowed, the emptiness of the room settled deep in her chest: the three other computer stations, the printer stocked with its last toner cartridge, the physics lab table she and Stavros had snagged from the dumpster. It’d been missing a leg, and the two of them had brought it back to life thanks to a roll of duct tape and two old ski poles Stavros had convinced the team to donate.
This year she’d be alone. Just her and Ravi Tandon, if he came back as the paper’s designer. He’d been flirting with moving on to yearbook at the end of last year. She could hardly blame him if he did.
Her hand dropped to the stack of last year’s undistributed newspapers, piled on the floor beside her chair almost as high as the seat. Jen had tried, Stavros too, but neither of them had been able to make The Red and Blue something anyone wanted to read.
Cat’s investigative reports hadn’t helped. She grabbed the top newspaper with her byline on the front page. It had been good journalism to uncover the source of last January’s daily fire alarm—hotboxing in the server room. She thumbed through the stack and found another: this one exposing the perpetrator selling the password to the school’s unblocked Wi-Fi.
Then there was the series that began with her report on the notorious spirit week incident, in which the hard work of the cheerleading squad—who’d gone to state for the past four years, unlike the football team—was rewarded with the sexist “cupcake” being scrawled across their uniforms. The series continued by asking why such pranks seemed rampant at Acedia. Whether weak investigations by the administration fostered an environment that gave pranksters license to act and to amp up their stunts, which had begun to reflect a sexist and intolerant culture that no one wanted to talk about. There were even rumors that students, namely male students, had been caught in various acts but let go with barely a warning after parental pressure on the school.
Turned out, such articles didn’t endear her or The Red and Blue to student, faculty, or parental readers. By the end of last year, it’d been practically impossible to get anyone to even agree to be quoted in the paper.
She might be riveted by Gramps’s stories of reporting on everything from the war in Vietnam to the attacks on 9/11, but she knew the media of his day was not the media of hers.
One look at her sister giving a tutorial on “identifying your good side” to the delight of two hundred thousand followers on YouTube told her that.
The only places doing the type of reporting her grandfather had done were the best of the best: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic. Cat needed every advantage to get there, starting with the Fit to Print award for best high school newspaper in the state. Without it, she’d be just another eager but undistinguished applicant to Northwestern. Without it, she’d be stuck here. With Angeline.
She rolled the chair under Jen’s old desk and pulled out the notebook Leo had given her three years ago. She ran her fingers along the words he’d written, now in the position he’d predicted she’d have.
She carefully set it to the side and opened the accounting ledger. The newspaper was responsible for funding itself: equipment, repairs, printing costs. Issues were distributed in school and at the grocery store, post office, and town hall—if they could afford the larger print run. The amount left in the account would barely cover the first issue, and Cat’s efforts to recruit new advertisers from the local businesses had gotten her nothing but blisters from those damn loafers Angeline swore were as comfortable as clouds. Perhaps the way they tore at her skin was karma for borrowing them without her sister’s permission.
Cat needed a story that people cared about. Stories led to readers, which led to advertisers. Without them, The Red and Blue would fold, like so many newspapers were doing. She wouldn’t let that be her legacy.
She pressed the power button to bring the ancient iMac to life. The whirring of its hard drive was interrupted by a knock on the door. A woman with medium-brown skin and a straight, layered pixie cut cradled a box in her arms. Written across the side in neat, blocky letters was FOR ACEDIA!
Cat stood. “Can I help you?”
“Sure can,” said the woman, who looked to be in her early twenties. “You can make me proud.”
“Uh, I guess I can try?”
The woman grinned, shifted the box, and held out her hand. “Ms. Lute, adviser to The Red and Blue.”
Cat met her at the door and awkwardly shook her hand. The paper hadn’t had a real adviser since she’d started freshman year. Mr. Monte technically oversaw, but he’d never once stepped inside the newsroom. She doubted he’d ever read an issue, which was fine with Cat. “Oh, okay. I mean, great. And I’m Cat.”
“And you’re in charge here?”
Cat nodded, anxious Ms. Lute’s presence might change that.
“Ah, deer in headlights! No worries, this baby is yours.”
Relief spread to Cat’s fingertips.
Ms. Lute added, “I won’t interfere, but I’m here if you need me. I edited my own high school newspaper before jumping into the political ring.”
“You’re teaching government?”
“Yup. One-stop shop for all things politics and media. I hope you’ll be in my class?”
“Yeah, I think it’s required for juniors and seniors.”
Ms. Lute frowned. She set the box on the floor, a stack of makeshift ballots with the names of the two candidates running for president in November on top. “I wish it didn’t have to be. But this is too important. My goal is for every student to understand why the whole country’s swept up in election fever. My first year of teaching, and it’s like I won the lottery. No better time for a government class to focus on the power of the vote.”