Because I have not suffered enough, Jess is on my bus the next morning.
“You are totally on the paper,” they say, sliding into the seat next to me and holding their phone up to my face. “In fact, you’re the editor next year. What are you doing here?”
Ms. Lim needs to update the website. “Going to school, like you I assume.”
“School’s out.” They grin, flipping glossy black hair out of their eyes. “Ever the devoted, helpful student, I might also be hoping to score brownie points with Ms. Federighi by helping clean out the theater for the summer, and thereby increase my chances of being cast as Puck in the fall. How about you?”
I sigh and tuck my notebook into my bag. “Basically same. The paper staff is cleaning up the newsroom.” Only difference is I’m way past scoring brownie points.
“See! You are on the paper!”
“Not next year. Don’t believe everything you read.”
“Oh.” By some miracle, they’re quiet for a minute. “I never read the Oracle before you started writing those profiles.”
“Really?”
“It’s just, like, sports, ugh. We’d read when the plays got reviewed. But that was it. One day, though, Summer couldn’t put it down and I could tell it really mattered to her . . . Anyway, you did a good thing. Writing those. Your sister—”
“Thanks.” It’s nice of them to say, but not nice enough that I want to talk about Nor. “What do you know about Marguerite de Bressieux?”
Jess blinks long, glittery lashes slowly. “Um . . .”
“On the bus yesterday? With Summer? You said—”
“I remember.” They study me in silence while the bus stops. People get on, people get off. “I get it if you don’t want to talk about Nor. Sorry.”
Only her closest friends call her Nor. I’ve been acquainted with Jess for years, but they were never in Nor’s inner circle.
“So about our lady knight,” they say. “Eavesdrop much?”
My cheeks flame.
“Kidding! I like to think everyone’s always hanging on my every word. Marguerite was pretty badass. I mean, there’s not much actual history about her—”
“Yeah, I looked.”
“Then you probably know as much as I do. Are you into medieval shit? I’ve been wanting to start a club forever, but Mr. Lopez says a club needs at least three members to be official. I’ve only got Summer.”
“I’m . . . no.” Their disappointment is so palpable I muster some sort of interest. “What would you even do in a medieval club?”
They brighten. “Well, the obvious is Dungeons and Dragons. I’m not so into that. I’m more into real history. Which, it would be awesome if dragons were historical, but not a lot of paleontology to support that. But we could research things—like de Bressieux!—and make foods and costumes. I’m trying to get a cosplay together for the medieval faire in the summer, out on the peninsula.”
I am less interested in making costumes with a medieval history club than assisting my dad on his next toilet explosion. I shouldn’t have even brought Marguerite up; I only wanted them to stop asking about my sister. Elinor. Which is how they should have referred to her because nobody else is taking anything of Nor’s unless she has expressly handed it to them.
That’s when Summer gets on the bus, exasperated when she sees there’s no seat next to Jess.
“Oh yay!” Jess says. “I won’t be the only suck-up in the theater!”
“Go sit with her,” I say.
Their face falls a little, but then they jump up and dive into the row Summer occupied. “Summer, my love!”
Someone across the aisle snickers and mutters something rude. I don’t even have to hear the words to know the gist. They might think they’re judging how Jess looks, or how Jess is different, but what they’re really judging is the fact that Jess cares. About everything. With their whole heart.
Like I used to.
At school, Jess and Summer split off for the theater, where at least treachery and plot twists are expected. Inside the main building, Fremont High feels like a foreign land. School’s been out less than a day and suddenly it’s a ghost town.
As I draw closer to the newsroom, though, Sam’s familiar cackle floats toward me. Nothing’s changed for my friends. They texted their support, tweeted their outrage at the sentencing, cussed out the judge for a few days. It’s not that they weren’t genuinely upset. They were. But now they’re off to Denver to geek out with other student journalists all summer. They’ll come back and keep putting out the Oracle, like it matters. They’ll go off to college. Some might even become journalists. Whatever that means.
I pause in the doorway, taking it in. I’ve spent more hours in this room than I can possibly remember. Even before I was in high school, Nor was on the paper. I used to walk over from the middle school and hang out on the slouchy couches in the corner while I waited for Nor to be finished and ready to walk home together.
Come freshman year, I already felt like I belonged and I made myself a permanent fixture until Ms. Lim put me on staff.
We didn’t only put out a school paper in this room, either. We spent lunches here, gossiped, stressed, debated politics, railed against our parents, all of it. Ms. Lim always struck the right balance of being a presence we could rely on but also giving us a space where we didn’t have to think about adults.
“Em!” Sadiqa looks over from where she’s wiping down the white boards. “Hey, we missed you at Roxy’s yesterday.”
“Get over here, you!” Francie’s personality has always been huge, but now it grates on me. When I don’t bound over to where she and Sam are pulling things off the bulletin board, she comes to me, throwing her arms around me like we didn’t have Spanish together less than twenty-four hours ago. “I was worried you weren’t coming!”
“You would have survived.” The room actually looks pretty good. Marco gives me a silent wave from the counter where he’s washing out the coffee maker. “Where’s Ms. Lim?”
“Ran to the office.” Sam hands me a file box, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.
I set the box down and drift past the wall covered in framed photos of each year’s newspaper staff, stopping at the one where I’m a freshman and Nor’s a senior. The first freshman on staff, and her sister, the lead photographer.
“Marianne, hey.” Ms. Lim bumps my shoulder as she scoots past me toward her office, arms full, as always. She flips on the lights, dumps her stuff on her desk, and motions me in. “How are you, hon?”
Enraged. Helpless. Consumed by guilt. “Fine.”
“Yeah? I’m glad you came by today. I thought we might not see you.”
“It’s required to finish the class.”
She stops what she’s doing and sits, motioning for me to sit too. I don’t. “You’re upset about Summer Intensive.”
“No.”
“Look, I get it. You worked hard for it all year. Harder than anyone would have asked you to, and you earned it. Right up until you posted that unauthorized article on the paper’s website.”
I don’t want to rehash this again. I don’t even want to go to Denver.
I’m also not sorry about the op-ed I posted on the Oracle site. Ms. Lim wouldn’t let me write about my own sister’s case because of conflict of interest and journalistic ethics or whatever. I get it, in theory. But nobody lacks conflict of interest when it comes to sexual violence. You’re either biased by a constant awareness it could happen to you at any moment or you’re biased by your privilege. Not to mention everyone knows someone who’s been sexually assaulted.
So does that mean no one should write about it ever? That seems like a good way to maintain the status quo.
“You’ve had a nightmare year. And you’ve done amazing work throughout. That piece on sexual violence against trans people? I’m so proud of you. I hope we can move forward and have a great final year together, even if you’re not editor. Quite frankly, that decision wasn’t mine. The administration . . . But you’ll still have loads of freedom to pursue the stories you want—”
“I’m quitting the paper.”
Her movement stutters for a moment, and then she begins sorting through the pens in the mug on her desk, checking them for ink. “No, you’re not,” she says, calm as anything.
I clear my throat, try to remember the speech I planned. “I’ve given this a lot of thought. Journalism isn’t what I want anymore. I need to take this year to . . . explore other things. Regroup. Figure out what I want to do in college. If I even want to go to college.”
Ms. Lim’s eyes flash as she struggles to maintain her composure. “You’re not a quitter. I’ve been so impressed with you from the moment I met you, this indignant middle schooler invading my newsroom. But especially this last year, your fight has been extraordinary—”
“And it’s amounted to nothing! There was no point to any of it!”
“I understand how you feel.”
“I fucking doubt it, Ms. Lim.”
“Marianne?” There’s a harsh edge to her voice, more ragged than I’ve ever heard in three years of working on her paper. “Hear me when I say I understand how you feel.”
Fact: One in three women in the United States experience sexual violence.
“Then you can understand why I’m done with the paper.”
“I can’t, actually. If you need to take a leave of absence—”
“I’m done.”
It’s not like it doesn’t hurt, like I’m not flayed open here. But I’ve been flaying myself open all year long and it hasn’t accomplished anything. At a certain point, quitting is mercy.
“Thanks for everything, Ms. Lim.”
I hurry through the newsroom, avoiding the curious eyes. They’ll have heard the raised voices. Sam and Francie will text before I’m out of the building. I’m barely out of the classroom when Ms. Lim calls out from the doorway, “Marianne? You do know how to use a sword.”