Chapter 4

ON THE RARE Mondays Dad takes a night off from Verde, you’d think he would want a break from worrying about the restaurant and we’d order takeout or something. But you’d be wrong. He likes to use these nights to try out new ideas, using me as a guinea pig.

You’d also think me sitting at the table, silently eating a cheese enchilada, would be impossible for Dad to criticize. You’d be wrong about that, too.

“You can’t even taste it when you eat that fast,” he complains.

I swallow a bite. “Yes, I can.”

“Well, how does it taste?”

“Um. Good?”

“‘Good’ doesn’t tell me a lot. What does it need?” He pushes forward the salt and pepper stand. “Does it need salt, does it need spice, is there too much lime?”

“I don’t know.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat. “Could you think about it for more than a second?”

It’s food. It tastes like food. I don’t know how to be helpful. “More salt, I guess?”

He nods. “Okay. Good note. I’m thinking about adding it to the menu.”

“You should. It’s good.”

“If you like it,” Dad says, then hesitates. “I could show you how to make it. It isn’t hard.”

I take another one off the plate. “You’re always going to make it better than I would, anyway.”

His eyebrows knit together, like he’s somehow more annoyed now. I don’t get it. That was a compliment.

“So.” Dad puts his fork down. “I’ve been talking with Mario—he’s my general manager, you remember?—about where we might be able to fit you in.”

“Fit me in where?”

“At the restaurant.” And then before I can say anything, he’s already launching into it. “I told you, you can’t stay in that room every day, and if you didn’t think I meant it—”

“I found something,” I interrupt him. Which he doesn’t like. But it does stop the lecture.

“You found something,” he repeats.

“Something to do. That isn’t in my room.”

He looks skeptical. “And what is it?”

I hadn’t thought this far. It’s not like I can tell him I’m investigating again. Not after how that all ended. But I have to say something, so I blurt out the first thing I think of:

“I joined the newspaper.”

He looks even more skeptical. Which I understand, because I have also met me.

“The newspaper.”

“Yeah.”

“You. Joined the newspaper.”

I wish he’d stop repeating everything. It makes me feel like he thinks I’m lying. And fine, I am lying, but only because he backed me into it, and that will be my defense strategy if I get caught.

“Lily asked me to.” This is what you’re supposed to do, if you’re being interrogated by the police or the CIA or your dad, who knows you almost failed ninth-grade English and would never join a newspaper. You tell as much of the truth as you can, lying only about what’s totally necessary.

“Lily?” Dad’s eyebrows shoot up. “I didn’t even think you still talked to her.”

“Yeah, I didn’t, until last Friday, when she came up to me and asked me to join. She’s an editor. For . . . Features? Anyway, I guess they’re super understaffed and kind of desperate and since you said I had to do something, I thought . . .” I shrug. “Why not, right?”

“Well. Okay.” He sits back. “Sure. I bet that looks great on a college application.”

“Yeah.”

“No, you know, it’s a great idea. Especially if you’re doing it with Lily.” He picks up his fork again. “She was always a good influence on you.”

It takes me forever to find Lily the next day after school. It’s not like I know her schedule, and I don’t even have her number, so I can’t text, either. I finally spot her in one of the locker bays.

“So, where are we going?” I ask her.

She frowns. “Going?”

“Yeah. To investigate.”

“Oh,” Lily says, turning away. “Well, we can’t really do anything until the weekend.”

“Why?” I ask, hurrying to catch up with her as she sets down the hallway at a rapid clip. “You said this was important.”

“It is, but so is Late Night.”

“Late Night?”

“Production week,” she explains impatiently. “For the paper. All the editors stay late the whole week, so—”

“You’re going to think this is funny,” I cut in. “I actually told my dad I joined the paper.”

She stops midstep. “You did what?”

“I had to give him some reason I wasn’t going to be at home, while you and I are investigating, if we ever actually start—”

Lily gasps. “That’s perfect!”

“I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect lie, but—”

Before I can finish the thought, Lily has snagged my coat sleeve and is already dragging me down the hallway. “I spend all my time in the Herald office and if you’re there, too, it’ll be so much easier to work together.”

It takes me a second to work out what she’s already decided: I should join the newspaper. Not as a lie or a cover but actually join. It takes me another second to start panicking.

“Wait, Lily—”

“And you’d learn stuff, because it doesn’t seem like you’ve got a clue about journalism or writing or anything that isn’t detective movies, no offense.”

“Yeah, some taken, actually—”

“This might be the smartest idea you’ve ever had.”

“I’ve had good ideas before.”

She counts off on her fingers as we walk down the hall. “Trying to make ginger ale out of seltzer water and powdered ginger from your dad’s spice rack.”

“It didn’t taste that bad.”

“Sprayed PAM all over my mom’s kitchen floor so you and I could go ‘indoor ice-skating.’”

“If you’re going to try and tell me you didn’t have fun, you are a liar.”

“The time in fifth-grade math when Ms. Miller was super mad at everyone, asked us when exactly we’d all stopped listening to her, and you told her: ‘Around October.’”

I throw my arms up. “It was true!”

“But not smart.” Lily stops us in front of two large double doors. The sign on the wall reads: “H102: Newspaper/Yearbook.” “Here we are.”

She pushes open the door and ushers me through.

If my life were a noir, the only way to capture the chaos we walk into would be one long, continuous pan shot. Like:

INT. HERALD ROOM—DAY

A large, busy classroom, bursting with the noise of computer keys clacking, the voices of a dozen kids talking and laughing and arguing, someone’s phone going off somewhere, and the whir of an ancient printer spitting out pages by the wall.

A bank of desktop computers sits against one far wall, while a sagging beige couch that looks like it was pulled from the municipal dump occupies the other, with a collection of six big wooden tables in the middle. The HERALD STAFF (various, teens) sit mostly in pairs, working around laptops. And at the table in the center—

CLOSE ON: A dark-haired GIRL with holes in the knees of her jeans and a T-shirt with the UCSD triton in the center stands over a set of printouts, neatly lined up, so she can see them all at once.

LILY

(V.O., calling out)

Hey, Tess!

STILL ON: the GIRL—long-limbed, clear-eyed, and not that it matters but also very pretty—looks up from the table and across the room.

LILY waves her over. GIDEON wonders why his palms are suddenly sweating.

When the girl reaches us, she looks me up and down, then she sticks out her hand and says, “Hi. I’m Tess Espinoza.”

For a half second, I can’t remember why I know that name. Then I do. And before I can stop myself, I look down at her other hand, the one she didn’t offer. Her left hand, with a woven bracelet around the wrist, and empty air where her index and middle fingers would be.

“Were you hoping for the Tess Espinoza with ten fingers?” she asks lightly.

My head jerks up, and I can feel all the blood rush to my face. That was so stupid. I’m so stupid. Why did I look?

“I’m sorry,” I say, rushing the words out as fast as I can. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It happens. What’s your name?”

“Seriously,” I say, “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s a very unusual name,” Tess deadpans.

I swallow. “Gideon. My name is Gideon.”

“Nice to meet you, Gideon.” She flicks her eyes to Lily. “And why am I meeting you?”

“We need a new copy editor, right?” Lily asks.

“Eternally.”

Lily pushes me forward an inch. “I thought he could take the test.”

I swivel around to stare at her. “What?”

“Have you ever edited something before?” Tess asks.

I shake my head.

“Do you like English class?”

I shake my head again.

Tess sighs deeply. “Do you know what a copy editor is?”

I think it’s obvious from the way I look at her that I don’t. She throws up her hands. “Lily, come on.”

“A copy editor looks for problems,” Lily tells me. “Typos. Tense switches. If someone’s name is spelled with two r’s in the first paragraph but then one r in the second. They detect things that aren’t right.” She pauses. “Get it?”

I get it. Lily doesn’t just want me close by—she thinks I might actually be good at this.

I look back to Tess. “I’ll take the test. If that’s okay with you.”

“Your funeral.” She turns on her heel and heads toward the back of the room.

Once she’s out of earshot, I drop my voice and say to Lily: “You should have told me it was Tess Espinoza.”

“She’s the only Tess at this school,” Lily hisses back.

I hadn’t even realized she went to my school. I think she’s a year ahead of me and Lily, and I know she didn’t go to our elementary school, because that’s when it happened. It was all any of our parents talked about that whole summer, how a little girl got hold of a firecracker at a Fourth of July party and it blew up in her hand. I don’t know how many times Dad reminded me of the story over the years, how careful you had to be with explosive things.

I saw a picture of her in the newspaper once—a real one, not the Herald—a few years ago. She was at the beach, with wet hair and a surfboard. I can’t remember the headline.

Tess returns with two stapled sheets of paper and slaps them down on the table. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” She points to Lily but talks to me. “If she tries to help you—”

“I wouldn’t let her,” I promise.

“Good instinct.” Tess smiles conspiratorially. “She’s the worst speller on the staff.”

I laugh. Lily glares at me. I concentrate on the test.

The instructions are simple: Identify all errors. Or as Lily said: Detect what’s wrong.

The typos are easier to spot than I thought they’d be—dessert when it should be desert, manger instead of manager, lose instead of loose. I don’t know a lot about grammar or baseball, but I do know you need an apostrophe after the s when talking about the Padres’ starting lineup. And I notice tons of little things—numbers spelled out in one paragraph but left as numerals in another. A quote that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. An acronym with no explanation for what it means.

When I’m done, Tess scores it, her eyes flicking back and forth between my test in one hand, the answer key in the other.

“You missed every single comma splice,” she says. I don’t argue, mostly because I have no idea what a comma splice is. “But whatever, that’s teachable.”

“Sounds like he’s in,” Lily says, and when Tess nods, Lily grins and punches me in the shoulder.

“Ow, Lily, God.” Then I look to Tess. “Really?”

“Yeah, congrats,” she says, “you just narrowly beat out the other candidate: absolutely nobody.”

“That’s a very unusual name,” I say.

Then we just look at each other for a while, both sort of smiling, until Lily steers me away by the elbow. “Why don’t I introduce you to everyone?”

I’m annoyed at her and have no idea why. “Okay.”

“Maya and Araceli are the News editors.” She points out two girls huddled around the same computer, heatedly debating something on the screen. Next to them is a thin guy with glasses and a serious look on his face. “And Jason is in charge of the Opinion section.”

It’s a blur of names and faces and sections as she introduces me to everyone. I had no idea a newspaper this short could need so many people. Finally, she walks me over to the far corner and the old, extremely gross couch. Two guys are sitting on it, arguing over something on their shared computer. One of them is blond and tall and I don’t recognize him, but the other—short, stocky, wearing a band T-shirt with THE RABID PANDAS on it—I’ve had classes with before. Ryan.

“Hey,” Lily cuts in. “Guys, this is Gideon, he’s the new copy editor.”

“What’s up?” says the blond one.

“Welcome to hell,” Ryan says.

“Stop,” Lily says.

“We do the Entertainment section,” Ryan says. “That’s Noah, and I’m Ryan.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say, “we have a class together. Last year we had two.”

I can feel Lily cringe beside me. That probably wasn’t the right way to say it.

Ryan seems unfazed. “My bad, dude. Don’t know why I didn’t recognize you.”

The answer is I sit in the back of every class and never talk, but Noah jumps in with an alternate theory. “Probably because you’re always high.”

“Slander,” Ryan says. “Vicious slander.” He looks back up at me. “Wait, which class?”

“Chemistry.”

“Shit,” he says. “I am always high in chemistry.”

“And then Will does Sports, but I don’t see him.” Lily looks around. “He must be moving his car.”

“Shouldn’t there be like . . . an adult here?” I ask.

“We have a staff adviser. Ms. Flueger.”

“So where is she?”

Tess sidles up alongside us. “If I had to guess, having sex with her husband in the back room of his Honda dealership.”

“Tess,” Lily groans. “Don’t say that, you’re going to scare him.”

“Why would that scare him? He’s not the one trying to sixty-nine on a bed of defective car keys.”

“Ugh,” Lily says.

“I’m not scared,” I say. And I’m not. That isn’t the right word for it at all.

“Ms. Flueger and her husband are trying to have a baby,” Lily explains.

“Yeah, so, whenever she’s ovulating, she finds some ‘errand’ to run, disappears for the whole afternoon.” Tess, reading the question on my face, adds: “She left her Google Calendar up one day. Ryan took screenshots.”

Noah walks past, calling over his shoulder to Tess and Lily: “Hey, my mom’s here with the food.”

Tess checks her phone. “Already? It’s so early.”

“I don’t know, she’s got other shit to do today.”

“I’ll help bring it in,” Lily offers, and goes off with him, leaving me and Tess alone in the center of the room.

“So what do you think?” she asks. “Maybe you’ll stick around longer than our last copy editor. Or last . . . several.”

“What’s the record?”

“Longest?” She thinks about it. “Three months.”

“I can beat that.”

Dad’s always saying my mouth moves faster than my judgment, and I should give it a chance to catch up, occasionally. This has to be one of those times, because why would I say that to her? No way I’m sticking around longer than three months. This whole thing is just a cover. But for some reason . . . I feel like I mean it.

She brushes hair out of her eyes with her hand—her right hand, the one I didn’t stare at—and I’m seized with shame all over again.

“I just wanted to—” When Tess looks at me, the embarrassment only gets worse. “Um. I shouldn’t have stared that way. Before.”

She shrugs. “Like I said, it happens.”

“I’m sorry, though.”

“You mentioned,” she says. “Look, I’m not planning to dwell on it. And neither should you, or this is going to be a really awkward dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“Yeah, and if you want any fried rice, you’re going to have to shoulder-check Ryan for it.” She starts to walk away. “Fair warning.”

There’s the sound of a door being kicked open, and then Lily and Noah are at the front of the room, arms filled with paper grocery bags. They set them down on the center table, and everyone else rushes to unpack the cartons of takeout food and six-packs of soda.

Huh. Lily did say this was a “late night” for the paper. I don’t know how long they’re staying, but it must be late enough to need dinner. And they’re eating it together.

I could leave, if I wanted to. Nobody would notice, except Lily, and this whole thing was so unexpected I don’t think she’d hold it against me. I should leave. If you asked me to list the things that made me most uncomfortable, numbers two through four would be hanging out with people I don’t know, hanging out with people I do know, and eating food I didn’t pick myself.

Number one would be bears. That’s not important.

I think about how awkward it would be, to eat with all these people I’ve just met, whose names I can barely remember, who are voluntarily giving up their night for a school newspaper I’ve never even read.

I think about the dinner I’d have at home. In my room, with a movie on. Alone.

I could go. But I don’t. I walk over and sit down at the table.