“So do we.”
“Do we? Or have we ruined it?”
“Not yet.” He sighed with the same relief she felt. “I won’t say anything, but he has to stop.”
Keeping the secret wasn’t just for Leo or Sammy. She wouldn’t risk Maxine getting into trouble for hacking into a student’s email—even a student publishing that. But it meant she’d have to keep the truth from Cat. With how much Cat hated The Shrieking Violet and her annoying adherence to right and wrong, Cat might push to tell Ms. Lute to make sure it didn’t happen again. So long as the paper disappeared, Cat would get what she wanted. She’d be happy.
While Angeline carefully dried her feet, Leo went to get her a pair of shoes.
She reached the living room first, where Leo’s mom eyeballed her from the giant poster propped beside the stone fireplace, that same single photo of the family on Los Roques Beach, where they’d vacationed with both sets of Leo’s grandparents two summers ago. Smaller yard signs rested in the corner, flyers on the coffee table, an extra TV on a stand where the rocking chair used to be. Though his mom had a campaign office, naturally things would wind up here too, which meant Leo couldn’t escape it despite the deal he’d made with her.
A deal he’d break if he dropped out.
“She never wears these.” Leo held up a pair of black canvas sneakers. “You can keep them, so you don’t have to come by and return them.”
“I’ll return them.” She relished the softness of the socks he gave her despite how weird it was to wear his mother’s shoes, which were exactly her size. “On one condition. You don’t drop out. I want to win, but not by default.”
He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “That really what you want?”
She nodded. “Besides, it’ll be hard enough on Sammy when you confront him about The Shrieking Violet. Let’s not make it worse by you dropping out of the race too.”
Silence held them together until the sound of a car interrupted. It stopped just past the house, so that only the back quarter was visible, along with its VOTE TORRES bumper sticker.
Angeline’s heart thudded. “Did your mom get a new car?”
“No. It must be someone from the campaign dropping off Sammy. He went straight from school.”
With a shout of “Much obliged, as always!” Sammy appeared from the passenger side.
“Uh, maybe I’ll go out the back.” Angeline picked up the shoes that might have forever ruined her for loafers. “Better if he doesn’t think I pressured you into this.”
“You didn’t, you know.”
“I know.” She let Leo’s hand graze hers as she moved past him, heading toward the back door, thinking of Sammy. He was a good kid. Which meant Angeline had become the type of person to make a good kid like Sammy do what he did.
27
When Cat Clicks and Baits
7 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
The five o’clock alarm trilled in Cat’s ears. She tugged out her headphones and quietly extracted herself from bed. She grabbed her backpack with her computer already inside and snuck out without waking Angeline.
Thanks to the floodlight in the adjacent parking lot, the apartment was bright enough that she didn’t need to turn on any lights. She settled herself at the dining room table, opened her link to The Red and Blue’s server, and clicked on the file named “Grady’s Secret Interviews.” Nellie Bly would have been so disappointed. No more enlisting Grady in undercover operations without some serious training.
She’d sent him to conduct interviews with Leo’s teammates and friends under the guise of a deep candidate profile. Meanwhile, she’d been reviewing every Shrieking Violet story and social media post. She needed to uncover at least one piece of evidence to back up Maxine’s finding. That way, when she reported the story, no one would be able to deny that Leo had created The Shrieking Violet to take his rival down. So far, she had nothing.
She’d been hoping Grady had better luck, but standard blowhard “Leo’s the best, man” quotes filled her screen.
“There’s got to be something,” Cat muttered. She tucked her legs underneath her on the dining room chair, the beige microfiber flattened from use smooth against her bare skin.
She jammed the down arrow on her keyboard, skimming until she came across a quote from Andreas Costa.
“Leo’s a big fan of cupcakes,” Costa winked.
Cat resisted the urge to correct Grady’s notes since one couldn’t “wink” actual words. But Costa had winked. Why wink at Leo liking or not liking cupcakes?
Cupcakes? Really?
She was about to hit the down arrow when she remembered something: Leo didn’t have a sweet tooth.
Which meant . . . was Costa not talking about the frosted kind?
The final spirit day at the end of the previous year began like always: lights out, music low, cheerleaders positioned in the center of the gym. Up went the volume and on came the lights to signal the start of their routine. Yet the lights had been replaced with black bulbs that revealed the word “cupcake” written in invisible ink across the back of the cheerleaders’ uniforms.
The person responsible had never been found.
Cat looked more closely at Grady’s notes. Costa was also quoted as saying, “Leo’s like a Jedi master. He can make shit happen by force.”
A bunch of stuff followed about him orchestrating plays and outguessing their opponents and rallying his teammates from certain defeat.
The conclusion was that his skill as an athlete and strategist made things happen. The implication went wider.
Leo was hiding his real motivation for running for student council president.
Leo was hiding his writing of The Shrieking Violet.
Leo was hiding his mom’s visit to Principal Schwartz.
At the end of last year.
And ever since, things had been worse between him and his mom.
“No way!” Cat said.
She dropped her feet to the ground and loaded a blank template. Her fingers furiously hit the keyboard. This went so far beyond Leo lying about why he was running. Leo shouldn’t even have been allowed to run; he should have been suspended last year for orchestrating the spirit week incident. The Shrieking Violet wasn’t his first prank. She wrote what she was sure would be the Fit to Print award-winning story, and the apartment filled with natural light as the sun rose.
Finally, she leaned against the back of the chair and read over her article.
The adrenaline that had fueled her faded.
Circumstantial, all of it. So many questions remained. She started to delete, then paused. Because The Shrieking Violet would have an answer. A germ of truth that sprouted into whatever Leo wanted. She wondered how Angeline felt about Leo presumably learning such manipulation tactics from her. Skirting the truth was a core tenet of her YouTube channel.
Cat opened her browser and typed in “Ask an Angel.”
I Had an Elephant Dung Facial, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!
Three Out of Five Women Are Making This HUGE Gaffe Every Day. Are You One of Them?
The Alternative to Sexting That’s Got Everyone Hitting Send!
Angeline could write a good headline, if you could call the titles to her videos headlines. But Ask an Angel was entertainment, not news, despite what a high percentage of her viewers thought.
Cat backed out to her home page, which she’d set up to compile the top headlines from all the major news outlets.
Choice of Lingerie Predicts Who Women Will Vote For
What Democratic Candidate Says to This Elderly Woman Leaves Everyone in Tears
The Oval Could Be Round If Republican Candidate Doesn’t Shed Pounds per Doctor’s Orders
These were professional news outlets. Where journalists worked.
Where journalists were being laid off in droves.
<
br /> And whoever was left behind was doing the same thing Angeline was. Hinting. Exaggerating. Inflaming. Scare tactics. Clickbaiting all the way. They said her generation got its news from social media. This was the alternative? Better? For how long?
She wanted to ask if anyone noticed, but perhaps the real question was if anyone cared. Maybe she really was the dinosaur Angeline always said she was . . . because she’d been taught by one. The rules she’d been playing by, ones her grandfather instilled in her, ones she saw in Nellie Bly and Martha Gellhorn and Katharine Graham and Christiane Amanpour, were no longer how this game was played.
And maybe the only path for dinosaurs was extinction.
Cat set her fingers back on her keyboard. With her heart pounding against her rib cage, she stopped thinking and simply typed, laying down her suspicions without bothering to ensure they were backed up. With every letter she struck, she had to stop herself from hitting delete. But soon, she found the story reflected the essence of what she believed to be true. So she kept going, layering in more narrative, framing the quotes.
She found herself breathing heavily with each piece that came together as something plausible, something real. It was easier than she’d have thought. To create a thread made of the thinnest of fibers. To lead a reader to draw their own conclusions . . . conclusions such as Leo being behind the sexist “cupcake” stunt and someone letting him go unpunished.
She hinted, just like everyone else.
“Leo might not be able to make things happen by force, but someone else could.”
She insinuated, just like everyone else.
“Someone else with more pull.”
She gave just enough so her readers could surmise the rest. Then she gave a little more.
“Who in Leo’s life holds such power?”
Her fingers trembled as she saved the article and followed the instructions Grady had left in the “Social Media!!!!!” folder. She published the article on The Red and Blue’s website as a breaking news exclusive.
Then she shut her laptop and stopped fighting the tears pricking her eyes.
28
When Angeline Drowns
7 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
Angeline couldn’t help thinking about the time she almost drowned.
The summer after sixth grade, she’d spent nearly every day at the beach, searching for wish rocks that she’d drop in a plastic bucket each morning and scatter back onto the sand each afternoon. The tide would steal them overnight and redistribute them in a new spot for her to find the next day. She loved walking along the edge of the water, dancing with the incoming waves, letting her feet be buried by the sand until all she could see were her ankles and all she could feel was a heaviness pressing down against her feet. She’d yank herself free, delighting in the release of suction and dipping her toes in the pools left behind. And then, one afternoon, she pulled, and the sand pulled back.
At first, she relished the game getting harder. But as more waves rolled in, the sucking power of the sand increased, and she was buried deeper and deeper until her heart thundered in her ears and panic set in. She’d made it more difficult by refusing to drop her bucket, holding on to those rocks and those wishes yet to be made. It was bad luck to drop a wish rock without tracing the line around the middle.
Her struggle exhausted her so that when a wave twice her height barreled through, she had no strength left to resist its riptide. An invisible force pulled at her, the ocean a magnet and she the object in its orbit. She knew what to do, to float on her back and wait it out, swim parallel to shore until she could head back in. She had to let herself be bent to its will.
But her will was all she had left with her father moving out at the start of the summer. Her mom didn’t seem to miss him; neither did Cat. Angeline became intent on training herself out of it. She could do anything she set her mind to.
So when the riptide tried to control Angeline, she’d been determined not to let it. Her legs kicked and her arms stroked and her head bobbed over, under, over, under the water until the salt stung her eyes and the echo of the waves muffled her ears and she swallowed so much water her stomach cramped. All along, her sandcastle bucket floated beside her, just out of reach.
Then she caught sight of a bright orange bathing suit in the distance.
Dad.
Orange to match his hair, he would say. It made him stand out, so no matter how far Angeline and Cat ran, they’d be able to turn around and always find their way back to him. She realized now that meant he didn’t have to look up from whatever he was doing and find them.
But that day, she’d let her legs drift up and spread her arms wide. Head back, eyes on the puffy white clouds above, she’d floated and waited for him.
All that came was the cornucopia of rocks that lived at the end of the beach, right before the shoreline curved back out to sea. A rock scraped her arm, and she knew where she was. She knew how to save herself. So she did.
She hugged the next rock that came, her fingernails scraping against the slime of the seagrass and algae coating it. She steadied herself, reached for another and another until she was able to stand. She dragged herself all the way to the sea wall and lay down on top, running her tongue along her lips to rid them of the caked-on salt. When she’d caught her breath, she sat up, searching for her dad. But the beach had been empty.
That had stung deeper than all the rest of it.
She should have learned from all those wishes made on all those rocks that she couldn’t will something into being.
But then Cat had appeared, a small float shaped like a flamingo clutched under her trembling arm.
That was what she remembered now, as she stood in front of her locker reading the story Cat had written about Leo.
Angeline’s heart thundered, her ears muffled, her eyes burned, just like that day in the ocean, but here the riptide tearing at her was her sister. And still their dad was nowhere in sight to save either one of them.
Cat had betrayed her. Outright.
Angeline didn’t care that the bell for first period was ringing. She barreled into the newsroom and flung her tote bag to the ground. “How could you do this? How could you use what I told you? How could you lie to me? How could you lie to yourself?”
How, how, how, how, how?
Cat held up her hands. “Take a breath, Ang. What are you talking about?”
“What am I . . . This.” She lifted her phone. “I’m talking about this.”
Cat skirted around Angeline and shut the door. “If you’ll just calm down and let me explain—”
“Explain?” Angeline’s fury nearly blinded her. “Explain away giving up everything you’ve claimed to believe in? Everything you claim I don’t? For a story? To win some award that doesn’t actually matter?”
Lines puckered around Cat tight lips. “This story is a story, Angeline. It deserves to be told not for me or for an award that does matter, but because it’s the truth.” The word broke as she said it. “Something’s going on here. What Sammy told you proves it.”
“But you don’t know what.” Angeline began pacing the room. “So you just guess? Speculate? Instead of finding the truth? What would Gramps think?”
Cat’s hands shook, and she pushed them down into the pockets of that skirt she shouldn’t even have one of but had three.
“It’s just a line of inquiry to prompt the reader to think,” Cat said. “It’s no different than what everyone else is doing.”
“And that’s supposed to make it okay?”
“I don’t get you. I can’t win with you.”
“No, you can’t turn this around on me, not this time.”
“But why do you think I did this? I did it for you.”
Angeline snorted. “Yeah, you know, you really are a shitty actress.”
“No.” Cat’s voice trembled. “Don’t do
that . . .” Her eyes welled with tears that were like a sucker punch to Angeline’s gut. She couldn’t remember the last time she saw Cat cry. Not even after their dad left. “I started writing the story because I wanted to help you. Leo . . . The Shrieking Violet, everything he said . . . did to you . . . to us . . . We couldn’t just let him get away with it.” Her voice weakened as she said, “It was mostly there.”
“Leo? What Leo did . . . oh . . . oh . . .” Angeline felt that pull of the ocean, and she needed to sit.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I-I-I didn’t mean to be. Tartan had your ribbon, and Gramps had just said . . .” She focused on the cartoon version of herself on the wall above the computer. “I was heading to our room when I heard you and Maxine . . . I’m really sorry, Ang. I mean . . . it’s Leo.” Cat reached out as if to take Angeline’s hand but stopped just before their skin touched. “He was like family.”
“Is. He is.” And once again she’d hurt him. “We were wrong. Maxine . . . well, she was right. The IP address does match his, but it wasn’t Leo. It was Sammy.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Sammy couldn’t possibly know all of that. Unlike Leo. I know how much it must hurt, but it’s okay. I’ll handle it. I’ll go to Ms. Lute, and I won’t involve you or Maxine.”
“No, Cat, you can’t. I went to see Leo last night. Sammy’d been snooping on his phone. He learned enough of what he didn’t already know.”
“You’re sure? Absolutely positive?”
Angeline nodded.
“That means I . . .” Cat retreated until her back hit her “EIC” chair. “I’ve turned into—”
“Me?” Angeline said. “Irish twins. Wouldn’t Mom be proud?”
Angeline rested her head in her hands, trying to figure out if she was madder at Cat or Sammy or Ms. Lute for pushing this whole election thing or whoever posted the Frankengirls or herself . . . mad at herself.
The door to the newsroom opened, and Cat’s eyes widened at the sight of Leo. Angeline started to speak, but he pressed the screen of his phone with one finger, and sound emerged from the speaker as a video began to play.
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