Adam Canfield of the Slash (25 page)

She came back around, stood behind them, then grabbed their collars, yanked them up, and pushed them toward the stairs. “Get out,” she yelled as they stumbled forward. “I want you in here first thing tomorrow morning with the
Slash
proof. And it better not be full of those vicious lies.”

Even if Adam and Jennifer had wanted to back down, they realized they couldn’t. All day long, they ran into kids from the
Slash
wanting to know if the two of them had done the interview with Marris yet and how it had gone. Usually, when Adam was trying to track down some
Slash
reporter for an overdue story, he could go days without seeing the kid at school. Today it seemed like he bumped into every last staff member. “We on for tonight, sir?” Phoebe had whispered as she rushed past on her way to a class. And the big wink she’d given him along with the military salute had pierced his heart.

They couldn’t let these people down now.

Adam realized that this must be how history got made. In a moment of bold dementia, you made a speech about how you were going to undertake this amazing plan if such-and-such happened. And then, when it happened, you had to go through with it, even though you realized too late that there were going to be lots of battlefield casualties.

The odd thing was, neither Adam nor Jennifer was as scared by the Marris meeting as they probably should have been. For Adam, the turning point had come when Marris started foaming about their permanent records. In his experience, teachers who threatened you with your permanent record were one step away from a nervous breakdown.

Maybe they had Marris on the run.

Maybe they didn’t. As Jennifer once said, who knew with Marris?

At this point Adam just wanted it to be over. If he was expelled, he planned to sleep for a week.

Jennifer arranged with the print shop to have proofs made first thing Tuesday morning.

It was past midnight by the time the coeditors had e-mailed the final version of the lead story back and forth and felt they had it right.

By then the
Slash
members were snugly asleep in their beds. But before turning out the lights, they all had used the heralded Adam Canfield middle-of-the-night wake-up system. When it was time to brush their teeth for bed, they’d gone into the bathroom with a large drinking cup and closed the door.

They drank six tall glasses of water.

Then they went to sleep.

The littlest among them woke first. They had the smallest bladders and were up by 2
A.M.
, racing to the bathroom to take the most urgent, most enormous pee they could ever remember. The bigger ones with bigger bladders made it until 3
A.M.
Then, per Adam’s instructions, without flushing the toilet or turning on lights, they crept to their computers.

Computer screens glowing in the dark give off a pale blue light, but they were prepared for that, too. They took a sheet from their beds and draped it over their terminals and their heads, creating a tent to hide the screen’s glow.

Safe from view, they signed on. The story was there. Most didn’t bother reading it right then; they wanted to be done with this treachery as quickly as possible. Still, they couldn’t help noticing that Adam and Jennifer had included a little box with the article that said, “The following staff members also contributed to this story,” and then named every
Slash
member.

They
were
contributing. They had already typed all the addresses for forwarding the story beside the carbon copy function in the header marked
cc.
They positioned the mouse at
send,
pressed
enter,
and in an instant the story was on the way, forwarded all over Tremble to hundreds and hundreds of important adults who would find it when they next opened their e-mail.

The typist contributed, too, posting the
Slash
investigation on a do-it-yourself romance website.

Within minutes, they emerged from their secret hideouts and were safe in bed.

Not one was caught.

The only thing the moms and dads noticed when they woke Tuesday morning was toilets that needed flushing. But that was business as usual and aroused absolutely no suspicion.

Adam and Jennifer went straight to Mrs. Marris’s office. Not even Adam wanted to put this off. They walked in, and immediately Mrs. Rose’s head said, “She’s waiting for you.”

Marris was sitting behind her desk. Her face was expressionless. Adam handed her the
Slash
proof.

It was impossible to miss. On the top right half of the front page where the Miss Bloch story was supposed to go, there was white space.

In the middle of the white space, in the smallest type font Adam could find on his computer, was a brief message:

“The Harris principal, Mrs. Marris, has prohibited the
Slash
editors from printing the story planned for this space. Those interested in reading the banned article should go to . . .” and it gave the do-it-yourself romance website address.

Marris looked up. She seemed calm, in control. “That will be all,” she said to them. “Expect to be called down this morning for your expulsion notices.”

That
was
all. As they climbed the stairs toward daylight, each footstep sounded like a small explosion.

Walking along the empty corridors to home base, they heard Miss Esther’s voice over the loudspeaker calling the technology aide to the principal’s office.

All morning they waited to be summoned, but lunch came and went and they were still there. Every time they ran into a
Slash
person, there was a new tidbit. Someone had seen the superintendent walking into the building. Someone had spotted the board of education president in the main office.

Adam wondered why they just didn’t call him and Jennifer down, expel them, and be done with it.

By the end of the school day, there was still no word.

Phoebe stopped by the
Slash
office after school. She’d left a book in 306 that she needed for a homework assignment, but the door was locked, which was odd. It never had been before. Phoebe found Jennifer at her locker, but Jennifer knew nothing about it either.

So they went down to Eddie’s office. He had keys for everything. The girls called his name, but there was no answer. The boiler could be so noisy, Eddie might not be able to hear them, and they walked in.

The room looked strangely bare. Then it dawned on them. All Eddie’s personal things — his family photos, his lunch pail, his black bubble winter coat, his red-and-black checked wool cap with the earflaps — all were gone.

They tried to find Adam to let him know but couldn’t.

The whole day Adam had moved from room to room like a man waiting for the Grim Reaper to tap him on the shoulder. He walked with his chin thrust forward, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

His math teacher had asked if he had a stiff neck.

Adam’s voluntary/mandatory teacher did a double take when he arrived early. Afterward, Adam went straight home.

He was accustomed to both his parents working and normally liked having the run of the house after school.

Today it would have been nice if there were someone at home to talk to.

He dropped his coat and backpack by the front door and moped down to the family room. He planned to e-mail Jennifer. See if she knew anything.

He logged on and checked his in-basket. There were seventy-eight new messages. His heart was pounding. He quickly scanned the subject fields. The e-mails had titles like “Way to Go,” “Need to Talk,” “Amazing Job,” “Great Story,” “Tip of the Iceberg.”

Before opening a single one, Adam jumped out of his chair, twirled around, pumped his fist, took a running leap, stretched with all his might, and, for the first time in his life, touched his entire palm to the family-room ceiling.

The Wednesday morning notices were read by Mrs. Rose. All day there was a spooky public silence at school. Officially, no one said a word. Unofficially, people gossiped endlessly. All kinds of wild rumors circulated among Harris students and beyond.

One had Mrs. Marris barricaded in the Bunker with dynamite strapped to her waist, refusing to come out. Another reported that she had escaped through a secret tunnel and was now living in Argentina, where she had stockpiled massive amounts of gold plumbing fixtures.

Miss Esther seemed to have disappeared, too, and someone said they’d heard she was actually Mrs. Marris’s aunt. Franky Cutty swore to Adam on his grandmother’s holy grave that Miss Esther had once been a Las Vegas showgirl married to a bigtime mobster. “At this moment,” Franky said, “I bet she and Marris are sitting in a comp suite for high rollers at the Desert Flamingo, drinking free brandy alexanders.”

This much they knew was true: the parking space reserved for the principal was empty. During recess Sammy had sneaked around to the teachers’ lot, and the red Porsche was gone.

That week no teacher said a word about any of this to Adam. Then, the following Monday, Mr. Brooks asked him to stay after class. The world history teacher remarked that he had seen one story from the November
Slash
that he called “Pulitzer Prize material” but wondered whether there were more.

“We had the whole issue ready to go,” said Adam, who proceeded to fill in Mr. Brooks on the final Bunker showdown with Marris, including her threats to expel them and blacken their permanent records.

“You know,” said Mr. Brooks. “If you want to print the rest of the November issue, I’m sure you’d find a receptive audience.”

Two days later all twenty-three
Slash
members stood out front of Harris, handing out the paper, the smallest among them shouting the loudest. “GET YOUR
SLASH
!” bellowed Phoebe. “ALL THE LATEST FRONT-PAGE NEWS!” Even parents wearing pajamas under their overcoats, who were just dropping off their kids, jumped out of their vans and SUVs to grab a copy.

Second period, Adam was summoned to the principal’s office — but only because he’d forgotten his baritone mouthpiece and his dad had dropped it off. When he walked in, Mrs. Rose’s head said, “Good morning, Adam,” and there was an unmistakable softness in her eyes.

Phoebe had been checking the boiler room daily, and finally that afternoon came racing up to 306 to report Eddie was back. The janitor’s union had gotten him a lawyer and he’d been rehired — with an apology. He was paid for the time he missed and told Phoebe it was just like a vacation except for the worry of it.

Jennifer had no trouble convincing Adam to go with her to the December school board meeting. There was a line of grownups waiting to speak that snaked halfway around the auditorium. The leadoff question was about “the Harris principal situation.”

The board chairwoman explained that because it was a personnel issue, she could not discuss the matter publicly. She said that as soon as everyone in line had a chance to ask questions on other subjects, the board would go into executive session to review the case.

Everyone standing immediately sat.

Three hours later, when the board members emerged, the auditorium was still packed. The chairwoman explained that all she could say at the moment was that the current Harris principal would be taking an indefinite leave to care for an elderly aunt who recently had suffered a major shock to her system.

The search for a replacement was to begin immediately.

They’d done it and, yet, the
Slash
reporters found they had no time to rest on their laurels. It was as if every story they wrote spawned a new story — and a whole new set of worries.

They couldn’t wait to see the
Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser.
They figured finally that rag had to acknowledge what the
Slash
had done. But there was not a word in the next issue. There was a report labeled
EXCLUSIVE
on the front page about a new principal for Harris. The story said that “according to an unnamed telecommunications magnate,” the school board was “seriously considering” an assistant senior vice president for marketing at Bolandvision Cable. The story pointed out that Bolandvision always put the people of Tremble first and was willing to grant any executive a leave of absence “to save the public schools.”

No school official thanked Adam or Jennifer or anyone from the
Slash.
These adults had trusted Marris, felt honored when she had confided in them. One board member told Jennifer’s mother that the
Slash
had a lot of nerve tarnishing the school system’s stellar reputation and said such matters should have been handled discreetly “within our Tremble family.”

Jennifer was planning to go to the zoning board meeting in mid-December to see if there was any hoop news. But then, one evening that week, her dad hollered for her to come into the den quickly.

There on the giant TV screen was Peter Friendly, Cable News 12, saying that the zoning board’s December meeting had been canceled due to “pressing holiday demands on board members.” The board would meet again in January, he said. “Sources have told Cable News 12 that the accessory structure policy is going to be thoroughly reviewed by a blue ribbon commission,” he added. The camera then panned to a very tanned-looking zoning board chairwoman explaining that she was working overtime to straighten out a confused public. “Apparently two overzealous, low-level Code Enforcement boobs acted in a totally unauthorized manner,” Mrs. Boland told Cable 12. “Believe me, Peter, I have handled this with an iron fist.”