Alyzon Whitestarr (2 page)

* * *

That was how I thought of us all before the accident. I had everybody all worked out and filed away. Mum was full of impractical romantic visions that made her inattentive to the real world; Jesse was lazy and absentminded; Mirandah was bossy and superior and tactless; Sybl-Serenity was moody and getting moodier. Luke was sweet, but just a baby. And Da? He was kind and generous and easygoing and filled with integrity. And he loved music.

When I think back, I always come to this thing that happened just before everything changed forever. Our English class went to the office of the
Coastal Telegraph
, our local news paper, on a field trip that had been arranged by our English teacher, Mrs. Barker.

First the editor told us what his job was, then he passed us on to a sad-looking man called Eddie, who took us downstairs to look at the old part of the building where they used to set some of the print by hand. Eddie explained that people used to fit every letter of the headlines into a metal box, which was fixed onto rollers and inked; then paper was pressed against it. Sort of like a huge stamp set.

We saw these enormous wheels of paper in a machine that used to roll them over those inked metal plates. It was exactly like you see in the movies when something happens and they supposedly show the front-page headlines being rolled out. Except it was all frozen forever, like dinosaurs in a museum.

“That’s not how newspapers get put together now,”
Eddie said, sounding wistful. “All the typing and laying out—that’s the way the stories and photographs are organized on a page—that gets done on computers now.”

Eddie abandoned us in the staff cafeteria, where we were to have lunch. Marilyn Bobbit whispered loudly to Sylvia Yarrow that gray Eddie seemed a bit like one of the components of those old machines. Sylvia giggled and agreed he looked just as obsolete.

I spent lunchtime pretending to eat and covertly watching Harlen Sanderson flirt with the elderly cafeteria attendant. It was so sweet to see her blush when he gave her a flower he’d plucked from a vase.

After lunch, a cheerful guy called Clarry showed up and took us to where the advertising was laid out. He told us that newspapers were really only there so people could advertise things they wanted to sell. Journalists were too silly to know any better. He grinned when he said that, to show he was joking, but you could see it was what he really thought.

He took us to a tiny room where there was a typewriter-like machine called a teleprinter. He said it used to spit out news from agencies all over the world, but now they had the Internet. He left us with a girl called Riley—I don’t know if that was her first or last name. Her job, she told us, was to sift through the mass of stuff on the Internet for backfill. This was information that journalists might use to compile other stories, or for research, or it might be stories that were about our region. She printed these out and filed them, or passed them on to anyone who might be doing a story and could use them. Sometimes journalists would ask her to track down information
for them. She showed us the computer room where news was coming in and said that she often knew first when some big news story was breaking. Then we had a look at the photo file before going to the boardroom, where a journalist was going to give us a talk to finish up the day.

We had been waiting about twenty-five minutes when in walked this guy with dark-brown, restless eyes, short black hair, and a loose way of walking and moving, as if he wasn’t properly screwed together at the joints. He wore a dark gray suit that looked expensive, although he wasn’t all that old. He told us his name was Gary Soloman and that he was an A-grade journalist. Then he launched confidently into this talk about journalism as a career. It sounded like something he had memorized and you got the feeling he was just unwinding a spool. But when he said a journalist couldn’t afford to get emotionally involved, Jezabel Aster broke in to ask him if he’d ever done a story that got to him.

That seemed to stump him, and we all waited to see what he would say. I thought he was probably just going to jump back into his prepared rave, but he frowned and said in a slower, less confident voice, “It’s funny you should ask. You need to be detached, but I guess every journalist has stories that get past the barrier you try to set up. For me it was something that happened when I was on court rounds the first time. There was a case about a teenager who had murdered his ten-year-old brother. It wasn’t an accident. The older brother had written in his diary that he wanted to murder his brother and described how he would do it, and then he did it. He took the kid to this bit of track, saying they were going
to flatten coins on the rails, and when a train came along, he pushed him under.”

The whole room was so silent that anyone entering might have thought it was empty. I glanced around and saw how stunned people looked. All the sarcasm and laughter had been wiped away.

“Why did he do it?” Jezabel finally asked.

Gary Soloman nodded. “That’s what I wanted to know. That’s what the court wanted to know. The guy who did it was eighteen. He didn’t seem that bright. I kept thinking he just didn’t understand that when he pushed his brother under the train he’d stay dead. Maybe he thought his brother would get up like the coyote after the train runs over him in the cartoon. That was the tack the defense took.”

“But didn’t the guy say why he’d done it? Didn’t someone ask him?” Jezabel demanded.

“The defense came up with all sorts of reasons. He’d been depressed. His father was out of work. He was in trouble at school. But when they asked him, he only said he’d thought of doing it and then he did it. He got a suspended sentence because the judge decided he wasn’t responsible, that he needed psychiatric treatment. But what got to me was that I didn’t believe this kid was crazy. And if he wasn’t, then why had he done it? I guess that’s why I’m a journalist in the end. Because I want to know the real reason.”

He looked so intensely at us that it made me uncomfortable. It was like he really expected us to tell him why that guy had murdered his brother. I noticed Harlen Sanderson had this funny look on his face, and I thought he was going to
make one of his smart-serious summing-up statements and get us all off the journalist’s hook. But instead, Nathan Wealls, who was sitting next to him, waved his paw in the air and asked whether the journalist wore boxers or briefs. It was the stupidest thing to say, but everyone cracked up, mostly out of relief at having that demanding silence broken.

Mrs. Barker came in then, looking like she wanted to ask why we were laughing. Gary Soloman went back to lecture mode, saying he had gone to university and had majored in journalism and communications, all the while bombarding the
Coastal Telegraph
with applications for an internship until they offered him a job.

Then Sylvia asked in her slightly sneering voice what use newspapers were anyway. “Only old people read them. You see the news on television about a minute after it happens, so why would anybody bother with newspapers?”

Gary Soloman answered, his voice cool and confident. “Newspapers offer some very specific advantages over television. The main thing is that you can take your time reading a newspaper story and think about what you’re reading. Television journalism mostly offers news as entertainment. It’s the news via Steven Spielberg.”

One of the boys said loudly that it just meant he wasn’t good enough for television, and another boy said, “You mean he’s too ugly.”

“That’s enough,” Mrs. Barker snapped. She thanked Gary Soloman for his time and herded us out, her face set in a stony expression.

That night I caught the bus home with Mirandah because we came out of the school gates at the same time. I was late because of the detention Mrs. Barker had given the class, and Mirandah had been practicing in the gym with the jazz kids. We didn’t bother waiting for Serenity, who was always late but wouldn’t be seen dead coming home with anyone, let alone her sisters.

Mirandah was in purple; she even had a purple rinse through her hair.
Amethyst
, she called it. She said it was a healing color, though I don’t know which part of her she thought needed healing. Before purple, it was green.

I only wore dark colors, except for my jeans, mainly because you can’t see dirt on them, and also because I didn’t have to try to figure out what colors to wear together. Serenity wore black, but she wasn’t a Goth. She was just in mourning for the world.

“What do you think of when I say
evil?”
Mirandah asked as we got off the bus.

I shrugged and switched my bag to the other shoulder. “I guess it’s when people do things like kill one another.” I was
thinking of the case the journalist had told us about, wondering if Gary Soloman would have been satisfied with the idea that the guy who had killed his brother was evil.

“You think of murder as evil?” Mirandah sounded disappointed.

“Well, I don’t think evil exists as a force. I think
deeds can
be evil—”

“But what’s the difference between a bad or wrong thing and an evil thing?” she interrupted.

“I think it’s evil when you know it’s bad and it will cause harm, and you want to do it anyway.”

Mirandah shook her purple hair impatiently. “So are loggers evil when they push aside protesters and chop down an ancient tree?”

“Mostly I think they just feel they’re in the right, and they want to let people know they’re angry.”

“But can a person be evil?” Mirandah asked, sounding frustrated.

“What, like a vampire or something?” I asked. The annoying thing about Mirandah in this sort of conversation is that you know she has the whole discussion mapped out in her head and when she asks a question it’s only to get the answer she expects, so that she can draw the conclusion she has already come to.

“Idiot,” she said, sounding disgusted. “Vampires aren’t real.”

“That’s what I mean. I think only fictional characters are evil. I think there are evil actions, not evil people.”

“What about Ted Bundy, that serial killer?” Now she sounded triumphant.

I mulled over that. “I think Ted Bundy was an anomaly. He was human, but some bit of him was something else and that was the bit that did all of the murdering.”

Mirandah was silent for a while. Then she said, “The band says purple’s not the right look for jazz. They say I should wear black or sequins.”

“What’s that got to do with evil?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I were a fool. “What are you talking about?”

I sighed and let it drop, although I thought the conversation about evil was a lot more interesting than the one about clothes. “Tell the band you’ll wear what you want. Where are they going to get another sax player as good as you?”

She nodded. “Yeah. But I don’t like to take such an aggressive stance.”

“Why don’t you ask Da?” I suggested.

“Poor old Da,” Mirandah said, shaking her head fondly. “He’s not exactly with it musically.”

“You shut up,” I said. “His music is great.”

“Like you’d know,” Mirandah couldn’t help saying. I walked faster. “I’m sorry,” she said, catching up. “Stop galloping.”

I slowed down, but I was still mad. I hated it when she talked that way about Da.

“I said I was sorry,” she said impatiently. “Don’t be such a grump. I can’t help it if Da’s music’s just not where it’s at.”

“Where
what’s
at?” I asked coldly.

“Oh, come on, Aly. I just mean Da might be your knight in shining armor, but he’s never going to rock the world, that’s all.”

I said nothing because we’d reached our front-yard gate. Mirandah pushed it open and went through. I lingered to close it, wanting to be away from her. By the time I climbed the steps and came through the door, Mirandah had gone upstairs to her room. I went down the hall to the kitchen to find Jess sautéing mushrooms in pesto and Da talking to Mel and Tich from his band about a gig they had been offered. He was feeding Luke, who was gurgling happily in his arms.

“Well, I guess it’s a break for us,” Mel said in his usual gloomy way.