TWELVE 

 

Then he went back to his desk. Maya was still facing her computer. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing right now. I mean, it’s not like I can’t find fun stuff to do on the Internet. And I definitely know how to look busy.

But … I really didn’t want to screw this job up. I might not be exactly what Harmon Holt thought I was (some super reporter girl), but I did want something more out of life than my mom got. And this seemed like as good a way to try to get it as any. Everyone kept telling me it was so great, so maybe I really needed to step up.

The video was frozen on the computer screen. I started it over. Just looking at something over and over can help me get it. That’s what I do with schoolwork.

“Could you use earphones?” Maya asked, sounding grumpy. “I’ve already watched that five times, and I’m sick of Johnson’s voice.”

“Sorry,” I murmured. I paused the video and pulled my earbuds out of my purse.

As I watched again, I wrote down my questions.

Who is JJ?

Who was he pretending to be?

Where was the camera?

Was Billy always so stupid?

Did they do anything with the plan or just talk about it?

Would the plan work?

Had the mayor done this kind of stuff ­before?

I felt really smart. Probably everyone had thought of this stuff already, but I could ask Chaz some of it when we went to the mayor’s thing today.

Looking at Maya to see if she was noticing, I quick Googled mayor DC. Melvin Watts, it said. That sounded right.

Then I googled Jeff Johnson and got his website and lots of news stuff about him.

I read Wikipedia about him. He did weird stuff. It seemed to me like he just wanted to make anyone he could look bad; he didn’t care who.

I read stuff that said what Maya had said about how he cut stuff out and moved things around in his videos. Was that what happened in the Billy Watts video? But Chaz had called it “raw tape”—did that mean it was the whole thing, nothing missing or changed?

I thought I remembered a clock thing in the corner of the video. I clicked back to it. There it was, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I added it to my list.

I watched some of JJ’s other videos on his website. They were crazy and did make people look bad. You got to see him too because JJ would talk in between parts, telling you what was happening and why it was bad. He was a scrawny white guy who barely looked older than me. Wikipedia said he was twenty-five.

I read some more about each video. Then I clicked the link for the “raw tape” for one that made this guy at a company look really stupid. I guess raw tape did mean the whole thing.

The raw tape was really different than JJ’s video. The guy had said most of the stuff, but not the way JJ made it seem. JJ had cut it up and rearranged it so it seemed totally different and way worse. And in one part, he had somehow changed the guy saying “We cannot take that money” to “We can take that money.”

I was starting to agree with Maya that JJ was a tool. And a liar. Sometimes he really did catch people doing something stupid or maybe kind of wrong. (Was it illegal to use welfare money to get an abortion? I wondered.) But a lot of it he just made up with his movie magic.

The last thing I looked at about him was a plan he had that didn’t happen. He wanted to “punk” some TV show by embarrassing them. They found out before he could do it. I was starting to wonder why he had picked Polichat for this video about Billy Watts. Was it because no one else wanted to deal with him?

“Hey, you can take lunch whenever you want,” Maya said, making me jump again. I had been thinking hard. “I just eat mine while I’m working usually, but if you want to run out to get something, you can.”

Maya was opening a Tupperware with some weird-looking thing in it.

My face got hot. I had forgotten about lunch. At school, you just ate or didn’t eat what was there. (I was still “free and reduced,” probably. I didn’t ask, just swiped my school ID.) I only had $1.50 and my bus pass. I could at least get a candy bar or Takis if I could find a place that sold them in all these big buildings.

“Hey, Destiny, ready to go?” Chaz stuck his head around the partition. “We’ll get lunch on the way.” He disappeared.

I grabbed my purse and list, my hands sweating. He was probably going to want to go to some fancy place where I’d barely be able to afford a soda. Now I wouldn’t get anything to eat, not even my candy bar. I was suddenly really hungry.

“Have fun,” said Maya.