by Beth Vrabel
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Beth Vrabel
Interior and cover illustrations copyright © 2020 by Paula Franco
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected].
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Running Press Kids
Hachette Book Group
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www.runningpress.com/rpkids
@RP_Kids
First Edition: March 2020
Published by Running Press Kids, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC,
a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Running Press Kids name
and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
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that are not owned by the publisher.
Print book cover and interior design by Marissa Raybuck.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934245
ISBNs: 978-0-7624-9685-3 (hardcover),
978-0-7624-9687-7 (ebook)
E3-20200113-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GLOSSARY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A PREVIEW OF THE CUBS GET THE SCOOP
TO KAITLYN, AARON, TAYLOR,
HAYLEY, BRAYDON, AND AVERY
I STOOD IN THE middle of the newsroom, trying to ignore the fact that it was actually my neighbor Thom’s barn.
“Listen, everyone! Let’s hash out the first issue,” I said.
Thom smiled at me. I did not smile back. I needed to look serious. At least I had sounded serious. I had practiced calling the meeting to order in front of the bathroom mirror all morning. The trick was to square up your face so your eyes felt like pried-open windows. Next, you had to make your voice a rumble, like it started down in your toes and was being forced out of the grout stopping up your mouth.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” asked my other neighbor, Min Kim-Franklin. She didn’t look up from where she was adding her name to the sign-in sheet by the open barn doors.
“Nothing,” I said. I looked down at her name and shuddered. I didn’t like a lot about Min Kim-Franklin, but what I liked the least of all was her tendency to sign her name with a heart instead of a dot over the i’s.
“Something is wrong with your voice, I’m sure of it,” she said. Min’s only a year younger than me, but the word baby flashed across my mind every time I saw her. Maybe it was the ruffles. The headband holding back her smooth dark hair had little cream-colored ruffles. They matched the cream-colored blouse, also with ruffles, and her orange shorts, which had—you guessed it—ruffles running across the trim. “Are you getting a cold?” she asked.
“No,” I barked.
“There, that’s it again.” Min pointed at me. “Your voice is all gruff and mean sounding. Maybe you should clear your throat.”
“Maybe you should take journalism more seriously,” I snapped.
“That’s better.” She skipped—for real—toward the back of the barn.
Thom and I had put up the flyers in the library, at Wells Diner, and in the ice cream shop announcing the formation of a newspaper club in Thom’s barn. A part of me hadn’t wanted Min to find out, but of course she had. Min always found out.
No time to think of that now. I had a newspaper to run. I looked across the rest of the sign-in sheet. It’d be a bare-bones staff to start, but that was true for most modern newsrooms.
All these thoughts rumbled through my mind in the same grout-mouth voice, which was a lot like my dad’s when he was on super deadline. Or when I was in trouble, like that time back when we lived in the city and the family in the apartment next to ours lost their pet snake. I had sifted a very thin coat of flour across the entire kitchen floor to see if we’d have any tracks.
First on the sign-up list should’ve been Thom Hunter, since we were meeting in his barn. Thom lived across the street from me, and both of his parents worked from home, so they had super wi-fi connectivity that stretched right out to the barn. My new house, on the other hand, only got wi-fi in the attic bedroom, where my mom was all of the time, writing a novel or turning into a bat, whichever happened first.
Yet Thom hadn’t signed in. I sighed as I watched him wander around the barn. His long floppy blond hair fell nearly across his eyes as he bent over, picked up a greenish strand of hay, and sniffed it. Then he stuffed the hay into a plastic baggie. Also in the baggie were what looked like half of a red crayon, a purple ribbon, a sprig of catnip, and a long, black feather.
I cleared my throat. “Are you ready for me to call the meeting to order?”
“Yeah, Nellie,” he said. Thom’s voice was the opposite of gruff. Instead, it was soft as the cotton ball I also spotted inside the bag. “I’m just adding to my bag of smells.”
Thom shook the plastic baggie. I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again. I had a meeting to run. No time to ask why he carried around a bag of smells. Thom could be a little odd, I guess. Not dot-your-i-with-a-heart odd, but odd in different ways. I once saw him follow a butterfly around his yard for a whole hour.
I know that sounds a little like I had been spying on Thom for an hour, which is not at all what happened. I was simply looking out my window, from which I could see only Thom’s farm, and I had seized the opportunity to work on my observation skills.
I shook my head, trying to focus my thoughts on the newspaper, and stepped backward, almost onto a pile of something the goat left behind and that probably would’ve been a yuck addition to Thom’s bag of smells. I sidestepped and cleared my throat again.
Thom settled onto a hay bale next to Min at the back of the barn. I had really hoped someone aside from Thom and Min would show up. Just then I heard rustling near the front of the barn.
“Um, hey,” called out Gloria Wells, the twelve-year-old daughter of the diner owner in downtown Bear Creek. She was a year older and way cooler than me, and I was so happy to see her I could’ve hugged her if I was the kind of person to give people hugs (which I am not).
Gloria looked a lot shorter when she wasn’t behind the counter of the diner, where she usually perched by the cash register. She stood on her tiptoes and peered toward the back of the barn. “Hello? I’m not sure I’m at the right place. I wanted to, um, write…”
“Yes,” I answered.
Gloria smiled when she saw me, a smile that vanished when she spotted the goat droppings. “This is the right place.”
Min shot me another eyebrow-popped-up look at my grout voice. Gloria’s eyes widened, too. Maybe I was overdoing it a little. “Come on in,” I added a little softer.
Gloria strode past me. As she walked, some of her usual confidence snapped back into place. Leaning against the barn wall, she lifted her chin and smiled at Thom. Her forehead wrinkled when she saw his bag of smells. Thom’s cheeks turned a little pink as he smiled back at her. Gloria’s really pretty, with brown skin and darker eyes and soft curly hair that’s even deeper brown. I grinned when I saw the notebook poking out of Gloria’s shoulder bag.
I felt a little silly when I realized I was bouncing on the balls of my feet, but then I remembered Dad doing the same thing every time I saw him address his newspaper staff about a cool new project or some breaking news. And what could be more exciting than kicking off a brand-new newspaper—one that we would create entirely on our own?
We had nearly everything we needed to do just that, especially now that Gloria was here. Thom had already told me he wanted to be a writer, too. And Min, despite the hearts fascination, was a pretty incredible artist. I bet she would take on the design of the paper. The only thing missing was a photographer.
“Sorry, I’m late.” I whipped around and this time didn’t hold back on the toe bouncing. Because there in front of me was Gordon Burke, twelve years old like Gloria, son of the Bear Creek School District superintendent—which meant he had handy neighborhood connections—and, best of all, a photographer. A real camera swung from a strap around his neck. “I’m not too sure I really want to do the whole newspaper thing,” he said, scratching the back of his neck where the harness probably rubbed against his skin. “But I thought…”
“Come in! Come in!” I clapped my hands. “Okay, everybody. Let’s get planning.”
“Wait,” Gordon said. He leaned backward, peeking around the side of the barn. “Are you coming?”
Stepping forward, head hanging low with a curtain of red hair falling around her face, was a girl I had spotted when I stopped to hang up a flyer at Wells Diner. “I’m, um, Charlotte,” she whispered.
Copy editor. I immediately pegged her.
And that’s how the Newspaper Club came together, right in Thom Hunter’s old barn. But maybe I’m burying the lede a little. That’s what Dad calls it when a reporter puts the most interesting part about an article down in the middle or toward the end.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
STARTING A STORY DOESN’T take a lot of creativity.
That’s what Dad tells me all the time. He says it’s easy to spot cub reporters (cub means “new” in newspaper speak) because their articles are trying too hard.
Good stories have to answer just five questions: Who? What? When? Where? and Why?
“People pick up a paper because they want the news, and your job as a reporter is to give it to them as quickly and clearly as possible,” Dad says. “Don’t make it complicated for the reader. Just lay the story out there.”
Most of the time, reporters have to answer all five of those questions in one paragraph. Before I even dreamed of the Newspaper Club, I thought this would be how an article about my life in Bear Creek would begin:
Nellie Murrow, 11 years old, is spending her first month of summer break before becoming a fifth grader at Bear Creek Park hiding from her nemesis, Min Kim-Franklin.
Min is the reason I was festering away in little Bear Creek, Maine, instead of enjoying the city, where there are proper parks, with way more slides and swings and climbing walls, and especially way more kids and fewer squawky birds and huge trees.
Min. She’s responsible for all of my heartache. The reason I’m in a town with only one diner, one gas station, and, worst of all, only one newspaper. Everyone knows the best towns are two-newspaper towns—where every reporter has to fight to be first to share breaking news. (“Nothing motivates a journalist like a scoop,” Dad said. I mean, says. I haven’t actually spoken with him in a few days.)
While we’re being technical, I guess it wasn’t really Min’s fault that such a fate has befallen me. Really, it was her mom’s fault. Min’s mom, Mrs. Kim-Franklin, is my mom’s best friend from college. They were sorority sisters and always did the super-secret sorority handshake when they saw each other, even though now we’re neighbors and we (unfortunately) see the Kim-Franklins every stinking day. When the newspaper where my parents worked—Mom on the crime beat and Dad as the news director—folded six months after Dad left for a new marketing job in Asia, Mom called Mrs. Kim-Franklin crying.
Mrs. Kim-Franklin went ahead and ruined our lives by talking about the old farmhouse for sale next door to her house and how amazing it was to raise Min in Bear Creek. Then she threw in that Min could be my very best friend in the whole world, just like she and Mom were best friends. The next thing you know, Mom was having huddled phone conversations in the pantry behind the closed door. And then? We bought an ugly farmhouse without even seeing it, and Mom announced that she was going to take a year “sabbatical,” which meant holing up in her attic office and writing a novel.
I couldn’t even complain to Dad about it, not when he was at a job with a firm in Asia. I was betting he’d come back later this summer. He had to spend a few months immersed in the culture at the firm, but I was sure he’d start telecommuting next year.
All I could say was, this was not the family that raised me. Working for corporations? Writing a novel? Puke and double puke.
Everyone else changed, but I stayed the same.
And I wasn’t about to be assigned a new best friend. It was bad enough being the kid who always ate lunch alone or spent it talking to a teacher. I knew other people made friends easily. But having to endure my summer knowing Min was required to spend time with me was too much to bear. I knew that’s what was behind her trailing me all the time. If it weren’t for her mom and my mom forcing it, I was sure Min would be like everyone else and leave me alone.
Not that I cared.
Mrs. Kim-Franklin watched over every single thing Min did as if at any moment she could burst into flames or break out in hives. I was accustomed to a certain amount of freedom. Mom used to say I was her free-range city kid. I even had my own subway pass!
But Min wasn’t allowed to go exploring, not without her mom lagging behind us. All summer my plan was: slip out of the house first thing in the morning and get to the park alone. Then I could slouch on the swing and hear myself think without Min’s chirp-chirp-chirping.
The swings at the park were the only thing I liked about Bear Creek. Maybe everything else was different, but the playground swings were just the same as the ones Dad used to push me on back in the city.
Dad and I used to go to the park right outside our garden district apartment every single day of the summer. Dad had worked at the newspaper in the evening, so we went first thing in the morning. Hardly anyone was there, or maybe they just knew the swings were for us, because we always had the two on the end ready and waiting. After giving me a few good pushes, he’d sit in the swing next to me and we’d compete to see who could go the highest. Eventually, though, we’d both stop pumping our legs and just be there next to each other. We talked a lot, me and my dad. Or, at least, we used to.
It was sometimes hard to reach him now. Kind of funny, isn’t it, that the swings were the only place in Bear Creek with good enough reception for me to reach Dad? We have had the best conversations on those swings. Maybe you’d think it’d be scary to talk with someone while flying higher than probably anyone ever has in Bear Creek. But it wasn’t scary for me.
I liked to pump my legs until I was soaring so high, I was just about horizontal to the ground. I didn’t see anything down there, not one bit of Bear Creek. That’s how I liked it. Plus, there was always one second when my body lifted straight up off the rubber seat and the only thing keeping me on Earth wa
s the metal loops of the chain in each hand. And I wasn’t even scared.
Maybe that’s because I’m named after Nellie Bly. She was
the bravest person. Nellie Bly once traveled around the whole world in seventy-two days just to get a story. Another time, she heard that people sent to institutions were being mistreated
there. She wanted the scoop, so she pretended to be a patient in order to be sent to an institution, even though it meant being abused. She did whatever it took to get the story and share the truth.
Journalists have to be brave. I know this because I’ve lived my whole life in a newsroom, thanks to my parents. My mom is super brave. Before her sabbatical, she’d step right up to the yellow caution tape at crime scenes so she could interview police or sources (that’s newspaper speak for someone who can provide information on the record. “On the record” means the source says it’s okay to print what they say).
Once, Mom was filling in for a features reporter, covering a story about a new skydiving place. The company offered to give her the real experience so she could write her story with authenticity. Mom and the photojournalist she was working with each strapped on parachute vests. And then she jumped right out of an airplane, her arms spread wide like she was leaping into a ball pit. The photojournalist snapped a shot of that moment and sent it to my dad, who, for Christmas that year, gave Mom a framed portrait of the photo. We hung it in the dining room. But that was in our city apartment. I’m not sure where the picture is now, probably in one of the dozens of boxes stacked on top of the table.
Loads of times I’ve helped Mom write her stories or helped Dad edit other stories. I was a journalist, too, even though my stories hadn’t been published yet. I guess, technically, I was still a cub.
But now Mom wouldn’t even let me read the novel she was working on. She said it was inappropriate. And who knew if Dad was even able to write at his new job? Bleh.
Maybe if I could reach him, I’d ask him if he’d written anything. That’s what was most important about the park being a Min-free zone. I could sit on the swings alone and really talk