Chapter Twenty-Two

From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,

posted by conTessaofthecastle:

Daphne opened her eyes cautiously. The noise and the pulsating wind gusts from the space-shifting spell died away as she looked around. She was in the little house on the hillside outside the Portal of Arden, where she had stopped the night before.

Soph.

I don’t get it. Tess and I, we should be able to hold hands here. No one’s going to tell her family. Joey’s father will never know. Last night, this morning, I thought she was perfect for me; now I think we’re too different and she’ll never catch up. So we head down to breakfast, and I sit somewhere else. I want to talk about it with someone and I bet Orly would understand. But I can’t tell her, of course. I owe that to Tess.

I go over to Orly anyway, noticing that she’s sitting between Janaye and Gabriela. I sit next to Gabriela and listen to them talk. I’m relieved to hear that they are talking about their writing. Janaye’s tone is warm and interested.

I don’t see Chris. But I don’t want to think about Chris now. I’m thinking about Tess, when she told me her home and her town weren’t safe. She was resigned, but I’m mad about it. I also remember Mom telling me to be safe before I left New York. I didn’t agree with what she was trying to tell me. But now she’s starting to make more sense.

I look across the table at Tess. She won’t look at me. I wish she didn’t look so good in my sweater.

Tess.

That morning in the final group session, Keisha, Peggy, and I are all at a loss for words. We have a story about Maizy Donovan finding out her chief editor, George Golden, isn’t paying her the same amount of money as the male reporters. Ultraman can’t do anything to help her by using his superpowers, but only by standing up for her and telling the chief editor that her work is just as valuable as the men’s. We have screenshots of the old comic strip to illustrate it and the whole thing is pretty good. Except it’s not the assignment we were given. I emailed the whole thing to Chris last night, mostly because I thought I should. She never answered. Celestine finishes with another group and comes to sit down, and I figure this is when we’re going to have to come clean. But just as Celestine is pulling out her chair, Chris comes across the room and drops down at the table.

“Hey,” she says, “sorry to be late. I just finished up Maizy’s undercover investigative piece and I emailed it to everyone.”

Sure enough, Peggy pulls up our piece, to which Chris has added a whole section, complete with screenshots of the actual transcripts from a real court case about pay inequality from the 1970s.

I don’t have any idea what to say. Neither does Peggy. Even Keisha is surprised. Celestine looks from one of us to the others. Then Chris starts talking as though she’s been working with us all along.

“So, I wanted to use Tess’s idea of having Maizy be involved in something that happened at the beginning of the comic strip, but I wanted to work on a real investigative news story. I did some online research and found out that in the early 1970s, a group of women reporters at Newsweek magazine discovered that they were being underpaid compared to the male reporters. They sued the magazine for an increase in their salaries. I did all the research on the case and wrote it up for Maizy to give to Mr. Golden. I think it ties in nicely with Keisha’s explanation of the working environment for women at that time and with Peggy’s descriptions. It let me go into the history of a real news story and do some solid background research. Did y’all know that Newsweek was owned by a woman and she ended up settling the case because she didn’t want to come across as a hypocrite?”

Celestine asks a few questions, but she’s excited about how the piece came out, and she tells us what a good job we did of meshing our different writing strengths.

“I wasn’t sure you four would end up on the same page,” she says, before she goes to meet with another group. “I’m pleased that you were able to put aside your differences and work together in the end.”

After she leaves, no one knows what to say. Then I pull my phone out of my pocket. “Can I get your number?” I ask Chris.

* * *

From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,

February 16, 2018

Is nothing what I understand or think?

I’m wrong about so much, even the pink.