Fallout (Lois Lane)

by Gwenda Bond

  She didn’t shrink away at being busted. “You should look up Nellie Bly,” she said.

  Could she be friend material? Because making a friend here was part of the plan too.

  I slid my notebook over. “Can you write it down? I’m one of the top five worst spellers you’ll ever meet.”

  With a laugh, she took the notebook and wrote the words. The T-shirt she had on was for a band—Guerilla Bore. I’d never heard of them.

  “I’m Maddy,” she said, and we both noticed that Mrs. Garret was watching us chat. Maddy pushed my notebook back.

  “And I’m letting you work on the assignment so you don’t get in trouble,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I typed in the new search term.

  *

  After school, I flagged over a taxi driver and flashed him the business card Perry White had given me.

  “I need to get here,” I told him as I got into the backseat.

  “So you will,” he said, adjusting the collar of his white tracksuit as he checked the rearview mirror. The car lurched into traffic.

  I’d intended to track down Anavi and try for some observation of the Warheads during lunch, but after third period Ronda had been waiting outside the library to take me back to the office to fill out paperwork we’d neglected to do that morning. I ate from the vending machine, and my afternoon classes seemed to crawl by in slow motion. Because I could hardly wait for this—going to my first staff meeting at the Scoop.

  I fidgeted, antsy to get there, and watched Metropolis speed by outside the window.

  Most of the places where my decorated Army general dad got stationed—and our family then moved to, careful not to put down too many roots—were military towns. Places with wire fences around bunker-like buildings and clusters of three-bedroom homes that all had the same floor plan. The cities and schools were usually small, a low sprawl surrounded by desert or woods or strip malls.

  Metropolis, so far, was all tall, shiny buildings and sleek, crowded subways, with the Daily Planet sold at every corner newsstand. I’d never lived anywhere like this before. Metropolis was different. It was supposed to be different. My plan was intended to make sure that it would be.

  It wasn’t like I had wanted to not fit in at my other schools, to never come out of them with true friends . . . but I’d always been able to pretend that it didn’t matter. Soon enough we’d be headed somewhere else, and fewer goodbyes to say made leaving easier. My problem was that I had bad luck. And I spoke up when I saw something wrong. I did it because I could, without having to worry about the fallout lasting years. And yes, there was always fallout.

  But this time, we weren’t leaving. We were here to stay. And I had a job. And a plan. The plan consisted of four things:

  1. Pretend it’s a tea party. Be on time, polite, and go by the schedule without protest. (In other words, not like what happened in Iowa . . . or Kentucky . . . or Minnesota.)

  2. Don’t swim with sharks. No need to make enemies right off the bat. (Even if they’re jerks, and you’re just standing up for someone they’re tormenting, like in California. And Germany. And Michigan.)

  3. Make like an invisible girl. Stay on the right side of the teachers and the principal. (And the best is if they barely notice that you exist. Again, even if they’re jerks, or wrong about something, or completely unfair . . . like in New Mexico, Arizona, and Alabama.)

  4. Make a friend.

  As the shiny, hectic blur of the city passed outside the taxi window, I spun a whole scenario of life here: a perfect set of non-jerk friends chasing down stories together, vanquishing the villainous, and then heading to the movies, where we’d crack in-jokes and share popcorn coated in delicious, chemical-filled faux butter.

  The taxi pulled up at the curb of the Daily Planet Building. I’d seen pictures of it on TV and in magazines re-covering stories the Planet had gotten to first. It had always struck me as larger than life, but here it was.

  “You have to pay me and get out before you can go in there, you know,” the cab driver said, not unkindly.

  “Right.” I passed him some money and climbed out. My eyes traveled up and up the many, many floors and landed on the globe at the top.

  I looked down at the card in my hand again. And that was when it hit me—I was going to be working at the Daily Planet. I added to my fantasy: me and my friends staring out over the city from high in the skyscraper, drinking coffee and rubbing elbows with real reporters, people who pressed politicians and mobsters and people like my dad for answers.

  Before I even realized I’d started walking, I was at the bank of revolving doors and then inside one, my fingertips pressed to the glass panel like I could make it turn faster, until I spilled out into the lobby. The buzz of conversation echoed off the marble floor, people clicking across on their way in or out, in the middle of no-doubt important conversations with each other or on their phones.

  A fresh-faced, freckled security guard waited behind a desk. I approached, the card still in my palm.

  “I’m Lois Lane. Here for Perry White,” I said.

  My heart was beating embarrassingly fast, but he couldn’t know that from looking at me. He gave me a sweep of the eyes up and down like he could, though. “For the Scoop, I take it?”

  “Which floor do I go up to?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You’ll need the service elevator. Go past the main ones there, and then take it down to level B.”

  “B as in ‘Baby, this view is to die for’?” I asked hopefully.

  The guard raised an eyebrow. “B as in ‘basement,’” he said.

  So: not exactly my fantasy. But, like a good soldier, I marched past the nice elevators, the trademark globe traced in white like icing across their fronts. I stopped at a set of narrow, grim, gray elevator doors.

  Turning, I saw the guard watching me. He nodded.

  I pressed the call button, and the service elevator doors creaked open so slowly I was tempted to help them out. I admit it. I was a little bummed that the Scoop offices weren’t far above the city streets with a great view through the gleaming windows. But even the basement at the Planet must be pretty awesome, right?

  Not so much to look at, I discovered. I exited into an even grimmer sub-level, the walls painted a dismal gray. My boots echoed on dingy tile as I passed tall frames that held yellowed front pages, their headlines shouting about murders and corruption, stock market crashes and deadly fires. The sound of muffled voices, hollow and indistinct, came from the same general direction as a dim glow at the end of the long, dark hall.

  Past the bend in the dark hall was an open door. As soon as I went inside, I recalled my fantasy vision of working here and pressed the mental self-destruct button to erase it.

  There were three staffers my age, a girl and two boys, all of them frowning at Perry White, whose back was to me.

  The girl was Maddy from my English class, so at least that was an excellent sign for the making-a-friend part of the plan. She and one of the two guys sat at big slabs of desks—not unlike coffins—which housed computers that appeared to be the only things in the room that weren’t holdovers from history. The ancient variety, recorded in lost decades of decaying newsprint. The third staffer was a preppy boy perched on the corner of his coffin slab.

  A fourth desk was empty.

  The three noticed me at the same time, aiming their frowns past Perry to where I stood.

  “Lois!” Perry turned and greeted me with a suspicious level of enthusiasm. “Welcome to the Morgue!”

  I frowned, and he added, “This room still has all the last old editions that haven’t been turned into pictures and ones and zeros. And the ones that are too rare to throw out.”

  Around the walls of the long room were cabinets that went all the way to the low ceiling. They did in fact look like every line of morgue drawers I’d seen in movies or
cop shows.

  “You’re sure there are no bodies?” I asked.

  “Bodies? Nah, the obits were the first things we digitized, don’t worry,” he said. “This place is part of history. That’s why we thought it was perfect for the Scoop, you know? A past-meets-future kind of thing.”

  The cabinets appeared to be labeled with dates instead of names or random numbers. So the odds were good that he was telling the truth about the place being corpse-free. Still, when I raised my eyebrows, he admitted, “And we were out of space upstairs. Come on over and meet everyone. I was just telling them about you.”

  Uh-oh. The other three were frowning, and he’d been talking about me?

  “Go on,” Perry said, “introduce yourselves.”

  He gave a pointed look to Maddy. She’d added a layer of dark eyeliner and bright pink lipstick since class.

  “Lois and I already met,” she said. “I’m style editor. Not by choice. Mr. White here thought a girl would be better at style than these two. I wanted to be the music critic.”

  “Perry,” he corrected her. “I told you to call me Perry. And you’re . . . stylish.”

  Maddy regarded him.

  Nice try, Perry. “Hi again,” I said.

  “Too bad your sister wasn’t interested,” said a lanky boy in a crisp button down. He was the one on the edge of his desk rather than sitting in the chair behind it. He had a glossy crown of brown hair and blinding white teeth, like he’d been bred for them.

  “I needed a job; the perfect one didn’t,” Maddy said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Aha.

  The preppy boy with the posh enunciation might think Maddy was being sarcastic, but she wasn’t. The makeup she’d added before work was one giveaway, but so was the complete sincerity of her tone and how she looked at him when she said it, waiting for him to look back. He didn’t.

  Maddy truly was disappointed—that the boy would rather work side by side with her sister than her.

  “Maddy has a twin sister,” the guy said to me. “You’d never know they were identical.”

  There probably were things worse than the guy you had a crush on saying that kind of thing about your sister, but not many. Maddy could do way better than teeth-and-hair guy.

  Teeth-and-Hair extended his hand, and I had no choice but to take it.

  “James Worthington,” he said. “News writer.”

  Over the years, my dad had dragged the family unit to tons of social functions, and I had met enough silver-spoon scions in tow of their politician parents that I could easily spot a seriously rich boy. And all of the seriously rich boys were dead ringers for James.

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” I said. His name was familiar. “Your dad’s a . . . state senator?”

  James released my hand and his frown returned. “No!” He sounded like I’d implied he worshipped Satan by the light of a full moon or, worse, was from new money. “He’s—he was the mayor. He’s . . . taking a break. To decide what his next move is.”

  The remaining staffer, a cute boy with a short afro and an air of casual cool, failed to hide a low snort. His desk had two giant monitors and several other gadgets scattered on it.

  James was scowling. Yet somehow he managed to throw off an “I’m superior” vibe while doing it.

  “Remember, Lois is new to town,” Perry put in dryly.

  “Your dad is that James Worthington?” I asked, before I could think better of it. I’d read about the charges against the ex-mayor of Metropolis. Multiple charges, including embezzlement. He’d gone to jail, but the family fortune supposedly remained. Why would his son work here, especially if he didn’t have to work, period? “Didn’t the Planet cover the scandal?”

  The boy who’d snorted before spoke up. “Perry here was nominated for a Pulitzer for breaking the story.”

  James gritted his teeth as he answered. “Dad was editor of the Crimson in college. Wants me to follow in his footsteps.”

  “Probably not exactly. Not all of them,” I said. “He’s James Worthington Jr., right? So that makes you the Third?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Yes.”

  But he’d held on to his manners, more or less, which I couldn’t help but respect. Even if he was a “the Third.”

  “I’m Devin, master of all things computronic,” the last staffer said. “Also on the news staff, and web designer. James will let us know when his dad’s back in office.” He added a word silently, mouthing to me: NEVER.

  “People come back from worse all the time,” Maddy said.

  “Thanks,” James the Third said to Maddy. Who soaked in the millisecond of attention he gave her like it was sunlight.

  “So,” Perry said, “now that you’ve all met, you can stop bickering about disgraced politicians—sorry, James—and take a lesson from Lois. I asked her to join the staff because I could see right away that she has the instinct. The killer instinct. The nose for news. The thing that makes you ask questions and not stop until someone answers them. That makes you chase the great stories. Lois didn’t even know who I was, but she jumped right into a conversation, not afraid to challenge the principal with a tough question or two, even though it was her first day. If you watch Lois, you might learn how to do what you haven’t so far: report actual news that matters to your audience.” He looked at the staff and shook his head. “You were all the top of the applicant pool, but it’s time for this experiment to yield some results. Soon. I’ll leave you to it.”

  I gaped at his back as he left. Did he not realize that he’d practically guaranteed they would hate me? Guess I had my answer about whether my plan for our new city was going to work.

  I shifted my attention from the door back to the others.

  Maddy narrowed her eyes. James lifted his brows, skeptical. Devin shook his head, like he was almost sorry for me. Almost.

  “Are you going to let him talk to you like that?” I asked, unwilling to concede. I would make this work. “Are you going to let him be right?”

  “He is right,” James said. “But he won’t help us.”

  Devin sighed. “He keeps telling us that we should be able to find stories without being assigned them. That we’re, and I quote, destroying his faith in the next generation.”

  “You agree with them that you guys suck?” I asked Maddy, hoping it wasn’t too blunt.

  “Well . . . we haven’t been doing many stories,” she said. “No news noses or whatever.”

  I went to the fourth giant hunk of desk and leaned against it. “Okay. I do think I might have a story for us.”

  “Of course you do,” James said.

  “Let’s hear her out,” Maddy said.

  James’s mouth opened to say something else, but Devin said, “All right with me.”

  Buoyed by the vote of semi-confidence, and not wanting James to have time to object, I pressed on. “We all go to East Metropolis?”

  They nodded with varying degrees of reluctance.

  “What do you know about the Warheads? I think they might play some kind of video game.”

  “They’re those creeps, right? The black shirts?” Maddy asked.

  Devin leaned forward and picked up one of the techy gadgets that littered his desk. It was a small black shell, curved to fit over an ear. Holosets were the biggest thing in gaming. They’d been rolled out two years ago, state-of-the-art reality-simulation tech and a handful of multi-player games to go along.

  “They’re into Worlds War Three,” he said. That was the first game that had been released for holosets, and still the most popular. “I have second period comp sci with them, and I’ve seen them in there. The kind of players we call cannibals.”

  “Cannibals?” I asked.

  “They seem like they’d eat not only each other but their young. Tight unit lately, though. Racking up lots of kills.”

 
; I reached out for the holoset, and Devin hesitated. “You want to try it?” he asked.

  “You mind?”

  After another moment, he stood and handed it to me. I slipped it over my ear. I understood how holosets worked in theory, but had never used one myself.

  I asked, “Now what?”

  He mimicked touching a spot at the top of the shell, and I pressed the button I found there. The office faded from view and a 3D holo-scape took its place, right in front of my face. It didn’t blot out the entire world around, not exactly, but it was impossible to look anywhere else. It felt like I was inside it.

  I saw a landscape with a red sky and smoke and fire, human forms picking their way through it. Someone was riding a big scaly dragon, but there was a round metal spaceship cruising above too.

  Devin was speaking, and it took effort to focus on his words instead of the ambient sounds from within the scene. “The worlds warring are ours, plus alien and fantasy ones. Elves and monsters. Rayguns and Martians. You can play solo or in teams like the Warheads. It’s multi-player, live action. Anyone you see is playing right now.”

  A missile fired from beneath the dragon’s right wing, racing toward me. Coming straight at me, actually, a blazing streak—

  I reached up and hit the off button, handed the holoset back to Devin. I shook my head to clear the scene from it. It took a few seconds.

  “You called them creeps,” I said, turning to Maddy. “Have they done something creepy that you know about?”

  “Not really,” Maddy said. “It’s just the way they are. Always in a pack together.”

  “I ran into them at school,” I said, “and yeah, they’re creeps. And they’re bullying this girl named Anavi. I think in the game first, and it sounds like outside it now too. She must be in your class, Devin. Former spelling bee champion of the world or something?”

  “I know her,” Devin said. “Solid player, and scary smart in class.”

  “The thing is, Principal Butler didn’t do anything when she reported it to him. Except tell her to get over it. I don’t like it. Not with stories about bullying all over the place. No principal should be waving it off, not for some great student like Anavi. That’s our first story.”