by Beth Vrabel
“Look around you, Arlene,” Chief Rodgers said. “The whole town, down to its birds, cares.”
Gloria nudged me. That’s when I saw Charlotte standing half hidden behind a tree at the edge of the park, watching us. I waved to her, but she ducked behind the trunk. “What do you think is going on with her?” Gloria asked.
Kind of odd, wasn’t it, that I always felt so left out because it seemed like everyone else made friends so easily. But now that I was in Bear Creek, where I had a whole club of friends, I was realizing that lots of people struggled to make friends. Even Mrs. Austin thought no one noticed her, when really a whole murder of crows thought of her as their friend. (If, you know, you bought the whole animals-have-feelings idea.)
I glanced again at Mrs. Austin and saw a crow land at her feet. It let out a soft call that sounded a lot like a purr.
I smiled. I guess I did believe.
Charlotte peeked out from behind the tree again. Maybe making friends was a brave thing that only looked easy for some people.
“What should we do?” Gloria asked as Charlotte disappeared behind the tree again.
I thought about how Dad had made being at that birthday party easier for me by giving me the job of acting like a reporter. Maybe it’d be easier for Charlotte if the other Cubs and I gave her a job. “Follow me,” I whispered.
Slowly, Gloria, Gordon, and I made our way toward Charlotte, throwing pieces of food to the crows as we went.
“Hey,” I called out as we neared the tree. “We have lots of peanuts in here. Can you help us?”
Gloria held out her basket. “C’mon,” she said, “we can start thinking about the next issue.”
Her face flushing red, Charlotte came out from behind the tree to join us.
That afternoon, we met in the newsroom.
Thom and Min sat by Stuff. Gloria and Gordon arrived together. Charlotte was last to come through the barn doors. “Everyone should file their stories by the end of the day,” I said, ignoring the groans. “Remember what I told you about who, what, where, when, and why.”
Thom and Gloria nodded. “That’s true for you, too,” I said to Gordon. “We’ll need complete info on the photo captions.”
We made a plan for everyone to email me their stories first, which I’d edit and then pass on to Charlotte. Then they’d go to Min to lay out.
Min’s dad had given us permission to make fifty copies of the paper using his printer, which had better color ink than Mom’s. We’d divvy up Bear Creek into routes to distribute the paper on Saturday morning. “Eventually, we’ll get some advertisers,” I said with a shudder.
“We’re really doing this!” Min bounced on the hay bale. Stuff shoved her with his head, making her slip off. I quickly turned my chuckle into a cough. “We’re making the newspaper.”
Then she danced a little. Or maybe we both did.
THE FIRST STORY TO come in was from Gloria.
Bored with the same old, same old? So are some people at Wells Diner!!! So we’re hosting a recipe competition for diners to try out new dishes!
Send in your favorite dinner or lunch recipe, and we will make it one of our daily specials! Seriously, people, put down the turkey sandwich! Put down the plain cheese pizza! Get over your tomato soup! Give me some jambalaya or curry or something other than what’s on the menu at every other diner everywhere in the world!!!
Staff and patrons will vote on the best recipes, which will be a permanent menu item this fall! Save your palate! Save your servers from death by boredom!!! Send us your recipes!
For being such a serious person, Gloria sure did like exclamation points. I deleted all of them, replacing them with periods, and then made a note to her to add more details. Maybe include some current favorites?
Soon she wrote back that the current favorites were all boring and flavorless. But she did add: Chef Wells would like to inform readers that current menu items will continue to be offered despite the plentitude of exciting new recipe options we hope to have available soon.
Mom read over my shoulder as I edited. She suggested asking Min to create a little box with all of the most important information (when and how to enter) as a graphic. I included a small picture of Gloria, too, to run with the column, since it was an opinion piece.
Gordon sent me a bunch of pictures of Mrs. Austin with the birds and the shot of the bird with the wiper blade rubber to run with my article. I opened a blank page and stared at it, trying to figure out where to start with my park article. Soon I heard, “Starting a story doesn’t take a lot of creativity.” Mom squeezed my shoulder. “Just answer five questions—Who? What? When? Where? Why?” I wondered if she had thought the words in Dad’s voice, too.
I turned back to the blank document. Bear Creek Park is reopened after closing for a few days due to a streak of mischief and possible vandalism that turned out to be—here Dad would say to hook the reader with something clever—a murder case. A murder of crows, that is.
Mom squeezed my shoulder again. “Perfect! But can you one hundred percent for sure say it was just the crows?”
I backspaced and swapped that seems to have been for that turned out to be.
I was just finishing my article and about to send it and Gloria’s column to Charlotte when my inbox pinged with Thom’s
piece on Miss Juliet.
I had eaten dinner at Thom’s house last night (shepherd’s pie with brownies for dessert), and he hadn’t wanted to talk about the article. He said he had to “think on it” awhile. His moms told me that he had spent the whole day sitting in the dining room with their laptop, clacking away.
I took a deep breath. Who knew what ole Bag of Smells would put in an article? I read it. And I read it again. Then again.
“I’ll be back,” I said to Mom, who was reading on the couch behind my desk. “I need to talk with Thom.”
“Everything okay?” Mom asked.
I didn’t answer—just told her I’d be back soon.
The night was clear with the stars so bright it reminded me of an old game, Lite-Brite, at my grandparents’ house. It was a light screen that I covered in black construction paper and then poked pegs in so yellow light could shine through while I created my own constellations. I didn’t bother calling out Thom’s name. I had a feeling where I’d find him.
Gathering up all my courage and swallowing it down inside, I scrambled up a hay bale and then stretched for the low awning of the barn roof where it sloped down in the back. Letting out a giant breath of panicky air, I lay on my back and slid over to where Thom was watching the stars with Stuff.
If you didn’t think about how a fall from eight feet high would certainly result in a broken bone or worse, I supposed it wasn’t bad up there. We lay side by side not speaking for a long time, just watching the stars.
“I read your article,” I finally said.
Thom’s piece focused on when Miss Juliet had been a kid, when she and her mom would make ice cream together. He wrote about how her mom had taught her to make ice cream the same way that her grandmother had made it with her mother—generation after generation of women making sweet treats together.
He wrote about all the people who went to the creamery to celebrate or to be with friends. The article only mentioned the happy, not the sad. Just one sentence mentioned that her mom had died five years ago and that now she made the ice cream alone.
Thom kept his chin pointed toward the sky, his shaggy hair falling around the sides of his face.
“You didn’t say that she’s sad,” I said.
“That’s because I don’t want her to be anymore,” Thom said. “She should remember the happy, too.”
Next to Thom and Stuff, I watched the Lite-Brite sky without saying anything for a long time. Then, I whispered, “My dad’s not in Asia.”
“I know,” Thom whispered back.
“I miss him.”
Thom shuffled a little closer so our arms were resting against each other from shoulder to pinky finger, b
ut neither of us talked. Not even when I cried.
The next morning, I knocked on the door of Bear Creek Creamery ten minutes before it was supposed to open. When Miss Juliet opened the door, pausing to flip the sign hanging inside of it from Closed to Open, I said, “I’m Nellie Murrow—”
“I know who you are,” Miss Juliet said. “We talked last week.”
“I’m the editor of The Cub Report,” I finished, making sure she knew this was official business. “I want to double-check a few details about the profile we’re running on you.”
Miss Juliet didn’t smile, but she let me into the shop.
“How come all your flavors sound so happy?” I blurted.
“This is for the article?” she replied as she positioned a hairnet over her ponytail.
I nodded, even though it was a lie.
Miss Juliet looked at the framed picture by the register, the one of her with an older woman, both smiling as they held ice cream cones. “I’m trying to taste it.”
I looked down at my shoes and tucked my notebook back into my pocket. “Can you?”
I didn’t need to look up to know she was shaking her head. “The more I try to cover up how I really feel, the more bittersweet stuff tastes. I had a moment the other day, talking with Thom, where I almost had it.”
“How long has it been gone? The happy, I mean.”
Miss Juliet stared down at the floor for a long moment. I started to think she wasn’t going to answer me. “Five years.”
My breath sucked into my mouth.
We stood there silently for a moment, then Miss Juliet handed me a hairnet. “Let’s try something different today.” She flipped the sign hanging in the front door back to Closed.
A few hours later, Miss Juliet and I sat down at one of her bistro tables. In front of us was a bowl of Melancholy Mango sorbet and Sour Cherry Sorrow. We didn’t speak as we dipped our spoons into the bowls, tasting both flavors.
I gasped at how sweet they tasted, even though while we mixed ingredients, Miss Juliet had talked only about how she still sometimes called her mom’s cell phone before going to bed at night.
I told her the truth I had been hiding from everyone, especially myself. Dad had been hit by a car while crossing one of the busy city streets. I told her how it had happened more than a year ago, but that I could still hear his voice. I still felt him with me when I did something we had always done together—like hang out at the park or work at the newspaper.
“I pretend I can talk to my dad when I’m on the swings at the park,” I said, then let a little of the ice cream melt on my tongue before finishing. “It works best when I fly so high I feel like I’m going to crash into Heaven.”
“That makes sense,” Miss Juliet said. “I talk to Mama when I’m in the car driving back from the shop. I pretend she’s on the phone and I’m just updating her the way I used to, even on days we had worked side by side.”
“My mom talks to Dad all the time,” I whispered. “I hear her. Sometimes it hurts, knowing she can talk to him all the time.”
We ate more ice cream. Miss Juliet laughed when our spoons knocked with a clang. She was beautiful when she smiled. “Maybe we could talk to each other. Anytime you want.”
“I’d like that,” I said as I finished the bowl of Sour Cherry Sorrow. It was sweeter than it sounded, but not as sweet as the Hopeful Honey sample she shared with me before I left.
Maybe that Hopeful Honey had filled me up more than I thought, because when Min skipped down the walkway toward me on the way home, I skipped back toward her.
“Charlotte’s on her way over,” she said. We had planned a design/editing meeting to go over the details of the newspaper to make sure we hadn’t made any mistakes.
The headline across the top was Park mischief key to helping Bear Creek woman. Gordon’s picture of the crows surrounding Mrs. Austin took up a large space. A smaller photo of the crow with the wiper blade in its mouth was beside that image. Along the side of the newspaper was Gloria’s now-exclamation-point-free column and graphic. The profile of Miss Juliet was a box under the fold. Next to it was a how-to on making a bag of smells, including another graphic by Min (Step one: Get a bag. Step two: Find smelly stuff. Step three: Put smelly stuff in bag. Step four: Keep in pocket.), but I tried not to think about that article too much. On the other side was a small column, this one by me, all about The Cub Report and how readers could contact us for future stories.
Min, Charlotte, and I sat at the Kim-Franklins’ dining room table, our heads sometimes bumping as we stared at the design on Min’s giant computer screen.
After about an hour of combing over the newspaper, with Charlotte quietly pointing out lots of missing commas and all three of us double- and triple-checking spellings, we leaned back in our seats.
“It’s a real newspaper,” Charlotte said. Min texted Thom, Gloria, and Gordon to see if they wanted to be present for the first printing. Soon, all three were in the kitchen with us.
Min squealed and clapped, then pressed the “publish” button so the paper would appear on the website she and Gordon had created the day before. Then she hit print to make the physical copies we’d distribute in the morning.
As soon as the printer started to churn, I screeched, “Stop the presses!” Both Min and Charlotte yelped so loudly that I laughed until my stomach ached. “Sorry! I have always wanted to say that.”
I took the first copy of The Cub Report from the printer. Gordon snapped a picture of me holding it in my hands. He showed me the image and then passed the camera to the others to see, too.
“You look different,” Min said as she peered at the image.
“I know,” I said, and my voice was Hopeful Honey. “I look like my dad.”
“EXTRA! EXTRA!” MIN SHOUTED as we scootered through Bear Creek. She stopped at each house to stick a rolled-up paper in the mailbox. “The Cub Report is a real newspaper! Read all about it!”
“Min!” I shouted from across the street, where I was also distributing the paper. “You don’t have to say that it’s a real paper. People will think that it’s not real if you’re constantly saying it’s real.”
“Extra! Extra!” Min shouted louder.
We both paused outside of the ice cream shop. Last night, after I showed her the first copy of The Cub Report, Mom had taken me to the creamery to celebrate. Miss Juliet was so excited about her profile that she taped the whole paper in the shop’s window. At some point that morning, Miss Juliet had moved the photo beside the register to hang in the window next to the newspaper. Min and I waved at Miss Juliet through the window before continuing toward Wells Diner.
The whole staff had planned out our routes so we could meet at Wells for lunch. Chef Wells had a stack of The Cub Report on the counter; the servers slipped one onto each person’s tray.
In the corner of the diner was Mrs. Austin, eating soup and bread. Nearly everyone stopped by her table to say how glad they were to see her back at the park. The hardware store owner said he’d make sure there was always a bag of birdseed for her behind the register. She winked at me as I walked by.
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket while I waited in line for a turkey sandwich. I almost ignored it but then heard a ping at the same time coming from Gordon’s phone as he stood in front of me in line. I remembered the email we had set up for The Cub Report and how each staff member had access to it.
Quickly, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The message was from Mr. Tran, the ornithologist. Hey kid! it began. How rude. But I let that go as I continued reading. Great job with your article. Saw it online. Glad to hear the murder was trying to tell you something.
“Nellie!” came a gruff voice behind me, followed by a slurp. Chief Rodgers. I turned to see him sitting with a copy of The Cub Report in one hand. His soup spoon was in the other. “You done good, kid.”
“Thank you,” I said in my grout voice. “Just doing my job.”
“Almost sorry to hear this is all wrapped up. I was
getting used to seeing you around,” Chief Rodgers said.
“Oh, we’ll still be around. We’re publishing monthly,” I said before remembering to use my official voice. Much lower, I added, “I have an associate”—that would be Mom—“who has provided us with a police scanner. The Cub Report will be ready and on the scene for any Bear Creek breaking news.”
Gordon turned toward me as Chief Rodgers grumbled into his napkin.
“What are we going to cover in the next issue?” Gordon asked.
Thom pushed his bag of smells into his back pocket. I noticed it now had a corner from The Cub Report tucked inside. “Well, Mom says Annabelle keeps going on rampages, destroying gardens in town.”
“Annabelle?” I asked, already taking notes.
“The potbelly pig,” Gordon finished.
I stopped taking notes. “Well, hopefully something more exciting than an escaped pig will happen in the next couple weeks.”
Just then Chief Rodgers’s walkie-talkie buzzed. “All units, all units! Possible burglary on Olson Avenue. Who can report?”
“Me!” I yelled as Chief Rodgers responded that he was on his way.
“Not now, Nellie,” Chief Rodgers growled as he threw money on the table and gathered up his things.
“You can’t stop the press!” I told him. He sighed and didn’t even offer me a lift. That’s okay. I can make my scooter go nearly as fast as I can swing.
But by the time I got out to the curb, Gordon was sailing down the sidewalk on his skateboard, following the police cars. Already his camera was snapping pictures.
The Cub Report was ready for its next assignment.
GLOSSARY
AP/Associated Press: a nonprofit news agency headquartered in New York City. American newspapers and broadcasters are members. The AP shares news articles among its members and sets the standard for newspaper style, or how newspapers consistently phrase and order items in articles.