“You quit?” Brielle said at lunch.
“Yep,” Ash said as she dipped a piece of spiral rotini into tomato sauce. “It was too hard to watch from the booth, especially with the show being such a disaster.”
“Hey!” said Brielle.
“Oh my gosh, Brielle, no offense to you,” Ash said. “You’re an awesome director, and you did such a good job today, especially considering what you had to work with.”
Brielle still gave her the side-eye, but Maya nodded vigorously as she finished a big sip of milk.
“You were like the captain on the Titanic,” Ash said.
Brielle crossed her arms. “Steering the ship into an iceberg?”
“No,” Maya said with a giggle. “Doing your best to avoid the iceberg, but it’s just too big.”
“The ship was sinking,” Ash tried, “and you directed everyone into lifeboats.”
“You saved the women and children,” Maya added.
Brielle rolled her eyes behind her red glasses. “Okay, okay,” she said. “No need to be extra.”
Ash and Maya suppressed smiles. If anything was extra, it was Brielle’s use of that word, which she’d picked up over the summer and had taken to saying constantly.
“Are you going to quit The News too, Maya?” Brielle asked.
“I don’t know,” Maya said. “I don’t know what else I’d do after school.”
Ash chewed on that along with her spiral rotini. The News at Nine crew met after school every Monday through Thursday to do their research and plan the next show. Maya’s mom worked late, and Ash knew she wouldn’t let her stay home alone all afternoon. Ash wasn’t sure her own parents would let her do that either. She hadn’t thought about that before quitting. She hoped her dads wouldn’t make her join the after-school program, or worse, stay with her siblings and their babysitter, Olive.
“I don’t really like writing reports, though,” Maya said with a frown. “I’d rather operate the camera.”
“I’d rather have you operate the camera too,” Brielle said through bites of her turkey sandwich, “instead of Khalil. I need the show to be good if I’m going to get into the filmmaking program at Baltimore School for the Arts next year. And with Harry and Damion as anchor and co-anchor . . .” She trailed off, her head turning to the table where all three of those boys were sitting. “I mean, look at them.”
Ash looked. They’d piled all of their sandwiches together to make an enormous bread-turkey-bread-turkey-bread tower, and now they were trying to see whose mouth was big enough to bite it.
“This should be one of our Games with Guests!” Damion said.
Ash felt like Damion had stabbed her with his plastic fork when he mentioned Games with Guests. It was a special News at Nine segment that aired every Friday in which teachers and other school staff competed in funny games.
“Damion, that’s genius,” said Harry. “Which teacher can eat a bigger sandwich?”
“We can keep adding layers and having them take bites,” Damion said.
“Yeah!” said Khalil. He tried to take a bite of the monstrosity they’d made, but his mouth wasn’t wide enough to fit the whole thing. The tower got squeezed into a triangle. Turkey, mayonnaise, and mustard came oozing out the side, dripping through Khalil’s fingers and plopping onto the table.
As immature as the boys were, Ash thought their idea would make a funny Game with Guests. Hilarious even. And she knew her face betrayed it by the expression on Harry’s when he happened to glance over at that exact moment. He gave a little smirk at Ash, then looked back at the boys. “The show is going to be so-o-o good this year,” he said loudly. “Especially without a certain roving reporter.”
Ash turned away, forcing back tears for the second time that day. Harry E. Levin thought he was so cool, with his shark-tooth necklace and his ability to speak Chinese and his name that told his age. (So what? Ash’s name was cooler, since A.S.H. were also her initials, and that would be true her whole life, not just the year she was eleven.) But Harry was a good student and a good drummer and the best maze-drawer in all of sixth grade. What if he was right, and he ended up being the best news anchor too? Maybe Harry and Khalil would do a better job than she and Maya ever could have done, and Ms. Sullivan would create a special award for them, and the sponsors at Van Ness Media would be so impressed, they’d decide to sponsor a new TV show called, like, Live at Eleven with Harry E. Levin. What if Live at Eleven with Harry E. Levin got picked up nationally, by a real television network? And Ash would be stuck at home with her little sister and her baby brother and their babysitter, watching her classmates deliver breaking news while her own newscasting dreams shriveled up and died. What then?
“Don’t listen to them, Ash,” Maya said.
“Yeah,” said Brielle. “The three of us could make a better news show in my basement.”
Ash chuckled. That was a funny thought. She picked up her fork and held it like a microphone. “I’m Ashley Simon-Hockheimer, broadcasting live from Brielle Diamond’s basement, where you can see that her school uniforms are being washed as we speak.”
“Laundry report in three . . .” said Brielle, “two . . . one.”
Maya picked up her lunchbox and held it like a camera.
“We’re currently in the spin cycle,” Ash reported, “with the final rinse ahead. But if you’ll follow me over to these storage shelves, you can see that the Diamond family is running dangerously low on toilet paper.”
Brielle snorted and said, “Cut to commercial.”
Ash grinned. “After the break, I’ll interview Brielle Diamond herself about the shockingly low toilet paper supply. Stay with us.”
Maya pressed an imaginary button on her lunchbox camera, then put it down on the table. “See? If I had a camera, we could totally record our own show.”
“Except no one wants to watch a report about a washing machine,” Ash said.
“Obviously,” said Brielle, opening a bag of baby carrots. “We’d have to do real stories. Real news. Want one?”
Ash took a carrot and chewed it thoughtfully. She and her friends had four years’ experience working on a news show. Between the three of them, they knew how to do in-depth research and make professional-quality recordings. They didn’t have fancy Van Ness Media cameras and microphones, but did that really matter? Kids got famous online with far less. Come to think of it, Ash was already famous online—the dancing gym teacher video had millions of views—so they’d have that going for them too.
“What if we did do our own show at home?” she said slowly.
“Is that allowed?” Maya asked.
Ash gave a slow shrug. “Why not? Ms. Sullivan and Van Ness Media can’t control what we do on our own.”
“There’s no chance they’d air it here at school, though,” Brielle pointed out.
“They wouldn’t have to,” Ash said. “We could just put it online ourselves.”
“But who cares about school news outside of John Dos Passos?” Maya asked.
“No one,” Ash granted. “That’s why we’d do other stories, like Brielle said.” The idea was coming together as she spoke, spiraling outward and taking shape like a ball of cotton candy. It was just as sweet too. “Think about it. If it’s not an official Dos Passos activity, we wouldn’t have to stick to reports about school. We could report on anything, anywhere.”
“Anywhere?” Maya asked nervously.
“Well, anywhere we’re allowed to go alone.”
“My granddad might come with us other places,” Brielle said coolly. “He’s around after school.”
“Or my babysitter,” Ash added.
“What about a camera?” Maya asked.
“You can use the camera on my phone.”
“The quality won’t be nearly as good,” Maya said, but her tone suggested that she was coming around to the idea. “Especially the sound.”
“Yeah,” Brielle agreed. “The footage will be rough.”
“But it’ll be real,” Ash said. “Raw. That can be our image. Forget about roving reporters, we’d be rebel reporters—renegades!” She was getting excited now. She didn’t need The News at Nine or even a sponsor like Van Ness Media to keep reporting the news. She had the best camerawoman and director in Baltimore City and an unlimited number of afternoons with nothing to do (except homework). “Picture it,” she said. She put on her newscaster voice. “Remember the renegade reporters who recorded the Dancing Gym Teacher? They got kicked off their elementary school news crew, but that didn’t stop them. Now they’re back, hitting the streets of Baltimore, and they’re reporting on much more than birthdays and lunch menus.”
“The Renegade Reporters,” Brielle said, nodding. “It’s got a ring to it.”
Maya gave a little squeal. “It’d kind of be like we’re underground.”
“Literally,” said Brielle, “if our studio’s in a basement.”
Ash inhaled sharply, almost choking on her last bite of rotini. “Yes,” she said once she’d swallowed. “Yes, that’s it.” She cleared her throat, picked up her fork, and held it to her mouth. “We’re the Renegade Reporters, and you’re watching The Underground News.”