In total there were four candidates for the presidency. One was Samantha Gilmartin, a fiery, pathologically focused sociology major who was also the current SFSS university relations officer and, until a few months ago, a shoo-in years in the making. One was Piotr Ivanov, a 3rd-year transfer student who was running on a platform exclusively devoted to getting calamari added to the Pub’s menu. One was a mysterious woman known only as Kennedy, who’d filed all of her paperwork through the mail. And one was Duncan Holtz.
These were the faces and statistics running laps through Rachel’s head as she swapped tapes in her recorder, last-minute prep before her interview with the head of the Independent Electoral Commission. This was going to be a teaser story, part of her lead-up to the big debate spread later on. The IEC was the official election watchdog, its members charged with the thankless task of refereeing the proceedings and keeping all mud-slinging down to a tolerable level. Inevitably, they were given shit from all directions, and roundly criticized for failures both real and imaginary—even though voter turnout always stalled somewhere around 10 percent.
Rachel took the stairwell two steps at a time. Over the weekend the walls had been stripped of their election notices and replaced with a fresh coat of individual campaign posters. Each candidate was assigned an official colour, meaning that every bare surface on campus was now a pixelated rainbow of lofty promises and almost-catchy slogans. Amidst the chaos, Rachel’s eye was drawn to the purple posters of Duncan Holtz, which seemed to outnumber everyone else’s 2:1. The guy was clearly making a serious go of it. And you couldn’t help but be drawn to the pure Hollywood-ness of his face. Walking across Convo Mall, she passed other candidates shaking hands and handing out even more flyers.
Rachel repeated the names, slogans, and campaign promises until they were committed to memory. Usually she’d have had this stuff mapped out weeks in advance, but this year’s temporary Holtz embargo had thrown her off. She cursed herself for walking into an interview so unprepared.
Wanting to appear as neutral and unbiased as possible, the IEC had set up its office this year in the Rotunda, far from the prying eyes of SFSS headquarters. A circular study area that sat directly above the lower bus loop, this was once the epicentre of the entire campus—The Peak’s original office had been in there, little more than a typewriter and bucket in a windowless room, way back in ‘65. Now it housed the women’s and LGBTQ centres, CJSF 90.1 FM, and a bunch of other advocacy and research groups. A table on one side of the common area was piled high with old clothes and ragged books, free for the swapping.
The defining feature of the Rotunda, though, was the glass column in the middle, around which all of the desks and tables were organized. That’s where Rachel spotted Lana Murphy, this year’s IEC head watchdog, standing on a chair and applying a strip of scotch tape to the cardboard walls of her makeshift office. She nodded at Rachel over her shoulder and wearily invited her to take a seat.
Right away Rachel could tell she was a kindred spirit, and an ally in the war against idiocy that was being fought on campus every day. SFU: A Sphincter Says What? Since 1965. The giveaway was Lana’s fingernails (polished to within an inch of their lives) as well as the skin around them (ravaged to same). Rachel thought of her own mangled split ends with pride.
“Rachel,” Lana said. “Nice to see you. Sorry about this.” She stepped off the chair, which wobbled as her weight shifted. Back on the floor, she regained her poise. “It’s embarrassing, I know.”
“What, specifically, is the embarrassing part?” Rachel put her recorder down on one thigh and got out her notebook.
“Look at me,” Lana said. “I’m surrounded by pieces of a refrigerator box. My staff has been wiped out. Our budget this year is less than zero—the SFSS is claiming we owe them money.” She pointed at Rachel’s recorder, whose dusty tape made a faint whirring as it spun. “I guess you guys know a thing or two about cutbacks, too, huh?”
“Actually, that’s the same one we’ve always had,” Rachel said. “But yes. Things are rough in our office as well. We just pawned our printer. We’re getting lectures about leaving too many lights on.
“You know,” she added, the idea just coming to her, “we could put a fiscal spin on this story, if you wanted to. Budget cuts, personnel being stretched thin, that kind of thing. Recession stuff plays really well right now.”
Lana shook her head, her smile veering toward the condescending. “No. Thanks, but no. The last thing I need right now is to come off as whiny, or that I came to you guys to vent about my problems.”
“Fine by me.” Rachel felt a little slighted. Maybe they weren’t going to be pals after all. “Let’s get started, then. What do you think of this year’s crop of candidates?”
“As I’m sure you know, Rachel,” she said, slipping into her on-the-record persona, “it’s not up to me to say. Obviously it’s encouraging to see so many names on the ticket, but I can’t speak to the individuals’ relative merits. I’m a disinterested third party. The IEC will remain fair and impartial throughout.”
“And what do you see as your group’s main duties leading up to the election?”
“The IEC’S mandate is simple: to ensure that all of the protocols, as laid out in the student society’s bylaws, are followed to the word and to the letter. Candidates have strict limits on how much they are allowed to spend and how they are to conduct themselves during campaigning. We’ve already conducted a thorough inspection of the posters that have been put up, verifying that they fall within set parameters.”
Rachel sensed a soft spot. “Have there been any violations so far?”
Success: Lana went briefly marble-mouthed before replying, “Actually, yes.”
Rachel was about to keep pressing when another IEC member burst through the Rotunda doors. His face was drained of colour. “We have a problem,” he said. “Down at the printer’s.”
Lana hopped to her feet. “Coming,” she said, then looked to Rachel with a sly, relieved smile. “Sorry. Looks like we’ll have to wrap up early.”
“You know,” Rachel said, “I think I’ll come along. Just for fun.”
The trio hustled along the main drag of the Maggie Benston Centre to Quad Books, the SFSS-owned and -operated copy store from which all elections materials had to be printed. But rather than follow Lana and her IEC cohort inside, where a group of people had already gathered, arms crossed, at the full-service desk, Rachel fell back to chat up the lone guy leaning against one of the grubby old copiers in the hallway.
“Hello,” Rachel said to him. “I’m the news editor at The Peak.” She gestured with her thumb back at the door, as if to say, Those dummies don’t know anything. “Do you know what’s going on?”
The guy looked around for a second. “It’s all this election stuff,” he said. “Every year it’s like this. I’ve been here for three of these things now, and it never changes.”
Rachel’s recorder whirred away inside her jacket pocket. “What do you mean?”
“Well, everyone gets fifty dollars to spend on their campaign materials. No matter what. And they have to get their stuff printed from our shop. It’s first come, first served. Those are the rules.”
“Right. I knew this.”
“Yeah,” he said, “except you probably also noticed that a certain presidential candidate’s got his posters in all the best spots around campus.” The guy looked around again. “Guess what time Duncan Holtz’s posters were supposed to be printed at?”
“Pretty early, I’d have to guess,” Rachel said.
“You’d think so.” The guy’s gaze wandered down to the floor for a few seconds. “Except I’m the one in charge of the wait list. Duncan Holtz was the last person to sign up.”
Rachel’s eyes lit up. “Which means …”
“His posters are still technically in the queue. They shouldn’t have even started printing until 4:00 p.m. today.”
Oh, blessed dumb luck.
Even Rick was impressed, and he told Rachel as much when he came by the office the next week to pick up his paycheque and—in flagrant violation of his doctor’s orders—take a quick look around to see what kind of shape the place was in. Due to budget cutbacks, the board hadn’t yet hired his temporary replacement. She held the cover story right up to his face.
“It’s good, Rachel,” he said. “Real good.” He still looked dazed and overtired, as if he ought to have a cartoon bandage wrapped around his head. “Were you able to get any comment from Holtz?”
She shook her head. “I got his manager on the phone, but he said he couldn’t comment on the—oh, what was the phrase? The ‘efficacy or lack thereof of a business run by the current administration.’”
“Yuck.”
“Yep,” she said, grinning. “So I just ran that.”
“Good girl. Did anyone else up here cover it?”
Alex jumped in from two chairs over. “I heard CBC mentioned it. And the Metro got it the day after we did. Just a short thing at the back, though—and Mack Holloway didn’t have our source from Quad Books. He was basically cribbing from us.”
“Nicely done.” Rick started moving toward the door. With his health still fragile, he couldn’t afford to be around these kids for more than a few minutes. The way they carried themselves, with an air of independence, but so obviously looking for a parental figure to latch onto and suck approval out of—it put Rick in constant fear of relapse. He was a PhD student, for crying out loud. How had he ended up with a job that was such a terrifying simulacrum of middle age: the equivalent of eleven clingy kids and a mortgage he couldn’t afford?
At the door, he turned back and saw, with a wince, the naked expectation on the editors’ faces. They had no idea how bad the situation really was. Well, he thought, at least there are some moments you get to relish. “It’s a victory, guys.” Then, reaching for the right combination of inspiration and tough-love inflections borrowed from an old soccer coach: “Keep it up. There’s lots more work to be done.”
Rachel looked down at the cover again in wonder. “Yeah, there is,” she said.
Lately Alex had been feeling weirdly optimistic. He’d banked a few of the better features from the CUP newswire and so was on easy streak at work, and his classes were as mindless as they’d ever been. The film course was a particularly good wheel-spinner. His professor began every lecture by quoting from that week’s film’s IMDb page. She had an ongoing pop quiz where students had to identify that particular movie’s plot keywords; among the correct answers for Antitrust, a 2001 tech-thriller starring Ryan Phillippe, included One Word Title, Racist Comment, and Babe Scientist. One week they’d walked around campus for all three hours, re-enacting scenes from the syllabus and comparing celebrity sightings.
And it turned out that the week of the debate was also the week that Holtz was scheduled to drop by FPA 137 and give his hotly anticipated guest lecture. Thinking this might be an opportunity to pin the celebrity to the wall about the photocopying scandal, Alex offered to sneak someone else from The Peak into the class. There was an allotted time for questions following the lecture. Holtz would have nowhere to hide, and several hundred witnesses would be there in case he said or did anything stupid and tried to lie about it later. Rachel was ecstatic, until she realized she had to give an in-class presentation at that exact time. She groused about having to find a competent replacement, until, to everyone’s surprise, Tracy volunteered.
“Copy editors,” Rachel muttered. “You people think you can do everyone else’s job better than they can.”
“‘You people’?” asked Tracy.
“Okay. Let’s give it a shot. Do you know what you’re doing out there?”
“I’ve been reading your stuff all this time, haven’t I?” Tracy replied. “You think I didn’t pick up a thing or two? And besides, Alex here will be my co-pilot.”
Rachel chewed on a piece of her hair, then nodded. “Take as much space as you need. Just make sure you get a good question in, okay? That pretty boy won’t even know what hit him.”