I CLAPPED MY HANDS to get the attention of the news staff. They were too busy chatting with each other or feeding Stuff (the goat) to pay attention to their editor (me).

“All right, guys. We have three weeks until school starts. Just enough time to release another issue. What’s on the budget?”

“Budget?” Thom was sitting on a hay bale next to Stuff. Technically speaking, the newsroom was Thom’s barn.

“Newspaper budgets don’t have anything to do with money,” I explain. “It’s a breakdown of the stories that we’re planning—or budgeting for—in the next issue.”

“But what about the other kind of budget? Are walkie talkies in that budget?” Min asked as she pulled the ruffles of her dress out of Stuff’s mouth. Min lived next to me and across the street from Thom, wore ruffles on every outfit, and was prone to dotting the i in her name with a heart.

“I do not have money for this,” Gloria said. She crossed her thin arms and narrowed her eyes. Gloria was wearing the blue jersey-style uniform shirt from her shift at the Wells Diner, the restaurant downtown that her dad owned. “No one said we needed money to be on the newspaper.”

“None of us have money,” I pointed out. We lived in Bear Creek, Maine. Think of a super hip urban area in a city and then make everything the total opposite. That’s Bear Creek. No one is rich, but Min’s family came close. Her whole family went to Disney World every summer—grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins. This year, her aunties from Korea joined them, too. (Even her dad had been wearing mouse ears when they had gotten back from the airport last week. My dad would never do that. It’s called dignity, I heard his voice in my mind. But I knew that I was just expressing my thoughts in his voice. The truth is, Dad totally would’ve worn mouse ears. But he would’ve also pointed out that commercial vacations were an indulgence that shouldn’t be repeated.)

I cleared my throat. “We don’t have a budget about money, just articles we’re planning. Besides, we don’t need walkie talkies, Min. We all have cell phones.”

“Walkie talkies are more fun.” Min crossed her arms.

“Oh,” Gloria said. “I’m okay with story budgets.” Her long brown hair was braided in cornrows except for her bangs, which she blew off her forehead with a puff. The purple and silver beads at the ends of her braids clicked when she shrugged.

Gordon pushed off the hay bale next to Gloria and leaned against the side of the barn, looking out over Thom’s yard. His mom, Dr. Burke, was the superintendent of Bear Creek School District. Dr. Burke and Gordon were a lot alike; and not just because of their looks (both had wide smiles, brown skin, and freckles). They also had something about them that made people around them sit up and take notice. Dad would call them charismatic. I bet Gordon’s family didn’t worry about going on vacation, either. They had a red brick house in Foxcroft Estates, the part of town where people hired landscapers to mow their lawn into long stripes. Mrs. Kim-Franklin told Mom they’d live there but the homes “lacked character.” (I think she just wanted to let people know that they could afford fancy grass.)

“I have money,” Min said, as though she had read my thoughts. At ten, Min is younger than the rest of us, which might explain her affinity for ruffles and pastel colors. I am almost twelve. I wear black and gray as a matter of principle.

Right then Min was wearing a lavender sundress with a ruffle across the chest. She also wore white sneakers with, you guessed it, white ruffled socks. Even her purple headband was ruffled where it lay against her dark hair. Min opened the small mouse-eared backpack resting by her feet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. Waving it in the air, she said, “I got allowance last night. Why don’t we go to the creamery?”

“You got back from vacation yesterday,” I said. “How could you have possibly earned an allowance?”

Min shrugged. “I get paid every Monday.”

“For what?”

“For being a kid.”

I once pulled every weed in the flower gardens surrounding our old farmhouse—even got scraped on the huge yellow rosebush by the front door—and all I got was a ten-dollar bill from Mom.

“Do you want ice cream or not?” Min asked.

“Of course, I want ice cream,” I snapped. Everyone jumped
to their feet, even Charlotte, who had been sitting in a shadowy corner of the barn reading the AP Stylebook like
the dream copy editor she was.

“Wait!” I snapped. “We don’t have time for ice cream right now. We have to figure out the next issue.”

“Well, we have the Annabelle story,” Thom pointed out. He must’ve noticed Gloria blowing on her forehead because he turned on an old metal fan in the corner of the barn. Stuff rammed forward and stood directly in front of the breeze, emitting goat-scented air throughout the barn. Charlotte leaned over and unplugged the fan, making everyone laugh. Soon Charlotte’s face was as red as her hair. She was super quiet. Even after weeks of hanging out in the barn—I mean, newsroom—I still didn’t know her well.

I sighed. Annabelle lived a couple blocks from the newsroom in a little Cape Cod house where everything looked even neater and cleaner than Min’s house—and Mrs. Kim-Franklin vacuums every afternoon at three o’clock. Of course, Annabelle tended to be pretty dirty and covered in food. That’s because she’s a pig.

Annabelle had a habit of rummaging through neighbors’ gardens. In fact, on the day that The Cub Report became a real newspaper, with issues being given to everyone in Bear Creek, all police were called to the scene of a break-in… which ended up being Annabelle pushing through the front door of a neighbor’s house to get to a freshly baked pie.

“No one’s going to take The Cub Report seriously if our top-of-the-fold story is a pig pie theft.”

“But we don’t fold our newspaper. We roll it.” Min still was waving her twenty-dollar bill.

I sighed again.

“The Wrinkler family was at the diner last night,” Gloria said. “They told me Annabelle helped herself to their garden carrots last night. And then the Thompsons said she ate all their lettuce. But the Thompsons aren’t all that reliable. When they went to pay the tab, Mr. Thompsons couldn’t find his wallet and Mrs. Thompsons forgot her purse, so Dad had to put their meal on a tab. Again.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ve got to follow the news, even if it’s boring. Thom, how about you cover the Annabelle story? Remember, keep it to the big six.”

Every news story had to cover who, what, where, when, how, and why.

Thom nodded and walked toward the barn doors.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To interview Annabelle,” he said.

“You can’t interview Annabelle.”

“Why not?” Thom asked.

“Well, for starters, because she’s a pig. Besides, you don’t even have a notebook!” I always have a reporter’s notebook and two pens in my back pocket. Thom’s cut-off jean shorts had a huge hole in the back pocket. I handed him a notebook from my backpack, and a blue and red pen. He tucked a pen behind each ear, pulling back the sides of his shaggy blond hair, and headed out.

Thom’s different than anyone I had ever met. I was pretty sure he would’ve interviewed a pig. He was a careful writer and he noticed things a lot of people overlooked. I’d make a journalist out of him yet.

Gordon pushed off the side of the barn. He kicked on the edge of his skateboard, popping it up so he could grab it with his outstretched hand. With the other, he shifted the camera hanging on his neck. “I’ll catch up to Thom—maybe get a shot of Annabelle in action.”

I looked down at the budget list. So far, it only had Annabelle on it.

My heart hammered as I thought about The Bear Creek Gazette, the town newspaper that had closed for good earlier this month. Now The Cub Report was the only independent press in town; if we couldn’t make this newspaper work, no one would have access to local news.

“Did you hear what happened in Burlington Meadows?” Gloria asked.

Burlington Meadows was a town about two hours south of us. Mom and I had spent the night there when we moved from the city. I remember thinking it was a teeny tiny town only to discover it’s twice the size of Bear Creek. But surely even exciting things happen in teeny tiny towns, right? Things other than pie-stealing pigs?

“What happened?” Min asked, bouncing on her toes. She had a tendency to bounce. Sometimes she even skipped. Despite this, she was a good friend, even if she did argue with me way more than necessary.

“Well, you know how there’s a prison in Windham?”

“Yes!” Min and I said at the same time, though I was pretty sure neither of us had known that.

Gloria leaned forward, her elbow on her knee. Her eyebrows peaked and her mouth twitched. Gloria always knew everything going on in town thanks to the diner, and she loved dishing it out. Her writing would benefit from fewer exclamation points, though; I could hear them when she talked, too. “Well, some prisoners were being transferred to another location, right? And the van stopped in Burlington Meadows for gas. Somehow a prisoner escaped! He’s been loose ever since! There are, like, a million police officers in Burlington Meadows. They even have hound dogs searching for the guy’s scent!”

“Wow,” Charlotte whispered.

The four of us looked at each other, all thinking the same thing: Why couldn’t anything like that happen here in Bear Creek?

An escaped prisoner? That was a top-of-the-fold news story for sure.

There’s never a shortage of news, just a lack of insight. This was one of my dad’s favorite sayings. He’d tell it to any reporter who complained about not having a story. Go out and find one. Everyone has a story.

“Everyone has a story,” I said aloud. “There are lots of interesting stories right here in Bear Creek, I’m sure. We just have to leave the newsroom, meet people, and scout out their stories.”

“I’m not allowed to talk to strangers,” Min said. She waved her money again. “I am allowed to get ice cream.”

Gloria tilted her head toward Min and nodded. “Same.”

“Min, it’s not talking with strangers if you’re a reporter. It’s literally the job,” I said.

“It’s literally going to get me in trouble,” Min said and crossed her arms. She looked a lot like her mom when she did that.

Gloria fanned herself with the back of her hand and blew air up on her bangs again. “As someone who works with the Bear Creek public on the regular, I can tell you that some people’s stories are that they’re boring and need to get a life. Kind of like we need to get ice cream.”

I stood and put my hands on my hips. “I could go anywhere in Bear Creek, meet anyone, and have a story by tonight. It’s all in the questions.”

“Prove it,” Charlotte suddenly said. She strolled over to the map of Bear Creek on the barn wall and studied it for a second. “If everyone has a story, like you say, go here”—she pointed to an intersection on the far western corner of Bear Creek—“and find the person who lives there. Get their story.”

Quiet Charlotte suddenly looked fierce. “Prove it.”