by Brodi Ashton
“What’s your name?”
“Piper Baird.”
“New or not, I assume you can read?”
“Yes,” I said, not sure if the question was rhetorical.
“Then I can also assume you simply chose to disregard the numerous signs forbidding entrance to this hallway.”
“I . . .” I fell silent, not sure how to explain that I didn’t see the signs because I was glued to the backside of the tall boy in front of me.
“Welcome to Chiswick, Miss Baird. Enjoy detention.”
4
“What?” I’d never had detention before. Never ever. I started to hyperventilate. There went the bullet point on my college résumé that said I’d never been sent to detention. I loved that bullet point.
The restroom door behind me squeaked open, and the woman in front of me tugged at the bottom of her jacket.
“Mr. Amador,” she said.
Mr. Amador? I looked over my shoulder expecting to see a professor, but it was just Raf.
He gave Mean Pantsuit Lady a killer smile. “Ms. Wheaton, I’m sorry. It’s my fault Pip is in this hallway. She had a wardrobe incident that would have been embarrassing had anyone else seen her. She doesn’t deserve detention.”
I nearly snorted at his audacity, speaking to an authority figure like he had any power to change her mind.
But Ms. Wheaton nodded. “Very well. Get to class, both of you.” She walked away at a clipped pace, her sensible heels clicking on the floor. She didn’t get very far before I called out to her, “What? We both broke the rules. We should both have detention. Both of us.”
She turned on her heel slowly and narrowed her eyes. “I was prepared to let you both go. But if you want detention so badly, Miss Baird, you’ve got it. After school. The Potomac Room.” She produced a yellow notepad from her pocket, wrote my name on the top page, tore it off, and handed it to me. Then she stalked away.
My eyebrows crinkled. “What just happened?” I asked.
“I believe you were about to owe me two favors, but then you basically asked the Beast for detention.”
“The Beast?”
“That’s what we call Ms. Wheaton. She’s the assistant principal,” Raf said.
“I’m more interested in why she didn’t give you detention with me in the first place,” I said emphatically.
“So you want detention with me?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No!” I lowered my voice back down to calm levels. “I’m just saying we both should’ve received the same punishment for breaking the rules.”
He looked at me as if I weren’t too bright. “She wouldn’t punish me. She knows who my dad is.”
“Who’s your dad?”
“The Spanish ambassador to the United States.”
“Oh,” I said. That explained the security detail. “That’s impressive, but doesn’t everyone here have a powerful parent?”
He leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “My father is also scary.”
“My dad can be scary too. He can be totally scary. Especially when his union is threatened with new overtime guidelines.” I shook my head at how stupid and nonscary that sentence was.
He smiled. “My father gets people fired.”
I sighed. “We still should’ve had the same punishment.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up in a way that probably came from hours of practice, perfecting the smolder. “You’re cute.”
“What?”
He ignored me. “Welcome to Chiswick, Pip. Where some of us don’t get punished.” He gave me a confident grin, as if he didn’t grasp the gravity of my outrage.
“I have to go,” I said.
I wadded the detention slip in my fist and followed the signs to the front office. I really hoped someone would have a needle and thread. This was my favorite pair of jeans.
This was my only pair of jeans.
As I walked away from Raf, I finally noticed the school itself. I couldn’t get over the marble in this place. Clarendon High was all industrial tile and cinder-block walls. But Chiswick Academy? Marble floors, marble banisters, marble walls. Portraits of prestigious men in tuxedos and women in pantsuits, with gold plates on the frames noting their achievements. I didn’t know whether the paintings were of donors or graduates or the board of directors, but they all looked down on me and my peeling cowboy boots and duct-taped jeans.
I checked in at the office and the secretary printed up my schedule and my locker assignment, and although she didn’t have a needle and thread, she did give me a safety pin. As I left, an electronic gong sounded, which meant five minutes until class. I hurried to the bathroom, replaced the duct tape with the safety pin, and then tracked down my locker.
The one to the left of mine was open. A girl with long black hair was standing in front of it, rifling through what looked to be a series of drawers and shelves that seemed custom-made. I glanced around at other open lockers. Many of them had similar custom carpentry inside. Others had jeweled mirrors. Minifans blowing. Electronic displays of nature scenes and weather forecasts. Paintings. Real ones, not prints.
I turned the dial on my locker. What would I find inside mine? A butler, perhaps? The crown jewels? A personal masseuse?
I pulled the door open, and found . . . nothing. Just an empty shelf and metal walls.
The girl on my right had a simple calendar and a framed picture of herself and two people I assumed to be her parents hanging on her door. Nothing spectacular. “What’s with the other lockers?” I said.
She grimaced. “Locker bling. Parents get a day before school to ‘decorate’”—she used air quotes—“their kid’s locker. It’s a tradition, although it’s gotten out of hand. And usually it’s not parents. It’s servants.”
“Why isn’t your locker ‘decorated’ like theirs?” I said, using air quotes again.
“Scholarship,” she said. “I have no servants. My actual parents decorated mine. I’m guessing you’re scholarship too?”
I nodded.
“It’s not like my parents don’t have better things to do than ‘bling’ as a verb,” she said.
I laughed.
“My name’s Una,” she said.
“Piper,” I said.
“What’s your first class?”
I checked my schedule. “Chemistry?”
“Me too. I’ll show you the way.”
I sat next to Una in class. She leaned over several times during the lecture to whisper page numbers. Raf Amador was sitting at the front of the room. His hand shot up each time the professor asked a question. Rich and hot, and now smart. Some things were so not fair.
Una caught me staring at him.
“That’s Rafael Amador,” she said.
“I met him this morning,” I whispered.
“His locker is stocked with Pellegrino every day. Orange, lemon, and plain.”
“Of course it is,” I said.
Raf’s security detail, Fritz, was standing silently against the wall, looking dark and forbidding and ready to tackle students if necessary.
English was next. We’d be reading a classic book each month, which seemed daunting, given the time I’d spend on the paper and at my yogurt job.
Gym was the only part of Chiswick that seemed comparable to my old school. Same wooden floor, same expectations for coordination. Coach Lambourne dragged out a net of basketballs and told us to divide up into teams of three. Everyone seemed to immediately clump together. I glanced around nervously and then made my way toward a tall, lanky girl in hand-me-down shoes. I figured she was scholarship too. I’d recognize hand-me-downs anywhere.
“I’m Piper,” I said.
“Julia,” she said. “Basketball scholarship.”
“I’m scholarship scholarship.”
She nodded as if she could already tell.
“What position do you play?” she asked.
“I don’t,” I said.
She frowned. “Can you set a screen?”
“Is that a basketball term?”
She laughed. “Stick with me.” A blond girl joined us and we passed the ball around us until Coach Lambourne called us to attention and began the three-on-three matchups. It was a disaster, but at least I could say I’d scored for the opposite team. Twice.
I spent lunch hour in orientation, where I learned how to use the lunchroom credit cards and where not to park my crappy Corolla.
By economics, I’d started to realize something. The only people who had acknowledged my existence, or my newness, had been other scholarship students. The rest had ignored me. I hated to judge a school by its cover, but there seemed to be a pattern developing here that had nothing to do with IQ.
By the time journalism rolled around at the end of the day, my bag was heavy with books and notes, and my brain was heavy with class divide, but nothing could erase my anticipation.
The entrance to the journalism class was right by a painting of a woman named Hilda Reginald, founder of Reginald Assembly Hall, platinum donor. She glanced sideways as I walked in, as if to say, Are you sure you belong here?
“No,” I answered her, stopping in front of the portrait. “No, I’m not sure I do.”
“Did you just talk to a painting?” someone whispered in my ear.
Standing behind me was Rafael Amador. Making fun of me. Again.
“Yes,” I said defiantly. “But at least it didn’t answer back.” As if that proved my sanity.
“Whatever you say, Pip,” he said with a smirk as he walked away.
I rolled my eyes and entered the state-of-the-art newsroom of the Chiswick Academy Journal and Chiswick Academy News and instantly forgot my annoyance with Rafael Amador because this was heaven. My heaven. This was what three years of applying for the scholarship was all about. This room, with the monitors and computers and cameras and expensive equipment even the local TV stations would envy. This was my ticket to the middle class.
I tried to calm my butterflies. Just do your thing, I thought. Things were different here, but journalism should be the same. Journalism was universal.
When I walked in, the students were gathered at the conference table in the center of the room. A guy with long shaggy dark hair and headphones around his neck sat at the head of the table, while an older man with gray hair—Professor Ferguson, I assumed—sat among the students.
The professor cleared his throat. “Piper Baird?”
I nodded.
“Welcome to Chiswick. Have a seat. Everyone, this is Piper Baird. Piper, why don’t you tell us a bit about your experience.”
He was the first teacher who had acknowledged my newness. I sat in an empty chair and pulled out a notebook. “Well, I was editor in chief at my school paper for two years. We produced a weekly gazette.”
That got a couple of patronizing smiles from the room. My cheeks turned red.
“What was your best story?” the professor asked.
I tapped my pencil nervously on the table and tried not to freeze up in the face of all the scrutiny. I made sure I didn’t blink excessively. “Um, I uncovered a dognapping ring when my elderly neighbor reported her Yorkie-poo missing.”
“A dog story was your biggest break?” the guy at the head of the table said.
“It was a big ring,” I said. The table waited expectantly. “Lots of money being exchanged. Even dogs deserve justice.”
This got a few snickers. “Because dogs are people too?” someone murmured.
“Okay, thank you, Piper,” the professor said. “Here at Chiswick, we produce four twenty-minute newscasts per week, and we update the website daily, in addition to printing a weekly newspaper.” Then he turned to the guy at the head of the table. “Jesse, take us through the rundown.”
Jesse clicked a button on his laptop and a large monitor at the front of the room turned on.
“Our top story is the freak ice storm, and whether our groundskeepers were ready for it.”
I felt like raising my hand with a definitive No, they were not!
“Next we have the information for the SAT prep courses.” Jesse continued on, and after about eighteen stories, he nodded his head toward me. “New girl, the school is shutting off the water system tomorrow for an hour. I’d like a ten-second voice-over on it and two paragraphs with the information for the paper.”
Hmph. The world’s most boring story. I guess it was to be expected on my first day, but I still wanted to try for something better.
“Um, at my old school we found our own stories,” I said.
“Welcome to Chiswick, where we don’t,” he said. “And remember, Professor Ferguson says there are no boring stories. Only boring reporters.”
What I wanted to say was I believe this story proves you wrong. What I actually said was “Got it. Thank you.”
If I just did my job for the next couple of weeks, I’d get something meatier. Eventually. I found an empty desk and started to look over the information. There was no way this piece would set me apart, unless, by some unfortunate accident, a student died from dehydration.
I studied Jesse. He was wearing a vintage T-shirt that looked more hand-me-down than fashionably old. He was probably scholarship like me, which meant he probably needed the Bennington, like me. Maybe Professor Ferguson already thought of him as the front-runner for the scholarship. I tilted my computer screen away from the rest of the class and typed Jesse Monson’s name. He’d had a story published in the Washington Bugle. The Bugle was no Washington Post, but it was a sizable regional paper, and it was more than I’d ever done.
If he was the favorite, at least now I had a target.
I made a call to Chiswick’s head office and got the date and time of the water shutoff from a woman on the administrative staff, and then I called the plumbing company and interviewed one of their employees about the process involved.
It still wasn’t a satisfying story, so I used one of the computers to research tips on how to survive when your water is turned off. Maybe it was time to add some drama to all the boring angles. I researched the worst tragedies that had occurred during shutoffs. A woman in Alabama had died soon after the water department had closed her pipes due to nonpayment, but the death couldn’t totally be blamed on lack of water. Then I found a story from the Detroit Free Press about how their water department was criticized for shutting off the supply to thousands of people below the poverty line.
A good reporter will often find a story that happened somewhere else and try to make it matter locally, so I started the article off with this headline:
IS CHISWICK ACADEMY PREPARED FOR EVERY POSSIBLE OUTCOME FROM SHUTTING DOWN THE SCHOOL’S WATER? THE CITY OF DETROIT WASN’T.
I wrote two pages on the story, ending with a warning and the Alabama woman’s death. I handed it in to Jesse at the end of the first hour.
A few minutes later, he came to my desk.
“This is some interesting stuff,” he said, plopping the papers down in front of me. “I’ve never been so scared of a water shutoff.”
“Right?” I said with a smile.
“Yes. The problem is, I asked for two paragraphs.”
“Two paragraphs would’ve been boring,” I said.
“Two paragraphs would’ve been just the right length to alert students to the shutoff. But with this”—he pointed to the story—“the readers have to make it through a Detroit scandal and a dead woman before they find out the school’s water will be out.”
I glanced down. “But our water shutoff is going to happen after school’s out. When no one’s here.”
“That’s the point. We want to make sure that if someone is here, they’ll know to plan ahead. And that’s it. End of story.”
A few of the other students glanced in our direction.
“But this is a good story.” I put my finger on the headline. “This is the kind of stuff I’m used to writing. I’m not very good at fluff.”
Jesse sat down in a chair next to me. “Here we write everything. No matter how small
or unimportant we think it is. Plus you’re new. You’ve got to earn it.”
I sighed. “I’m already a senior. I don’t have time.”
Jesse ran his hand through his hair. “If you want to be on staff, you don’t have a choice. Got it?”
I nodded.
“Then give me two paragraphs.”
The electric bell rang, signaling the end of school.
“I can’t right now,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “This is important. Our reporters usually stay late. I hope that won’t be a problem.”
“Normally, it won’t. But today, I have . . . a thing.”
“A thing?”
I winced. “A detention kind of thing.” I scratched the back of my head.
“Detention? You’ve been here one day.”
“Oh, I wasn’t here even a minute when I got it. But don’t worry, it’s not a habit. It’s my first and last time.” I felt my cheeks go hot. This was not the first impression I was hoping to make.
“Then after detention.”
I bit my lip. “I have a shift at the Yogurt Shop.”
He just shook his head and walked away. I put my forehead in my hand and squeezed my eyes shut. Maybe this was a bad dream. Maybe I would wake up soon. Maybe cats and dogs would start living together. I shook my head.
I gathered up my things and made my way toward the Potomac Room, or at least I thought I was making my way there, but another annoying thing about this school was that the rooms didn’t have room numbers. They had names. The Jefferson Room. The Lincoln Room. The Avery Cafeteria. And just to make outsiders feel like outsiders, the names weren’t even in alphabetical order. If anything, they seemed to be ordered by prominence, and you had to have at least a working knowledge of American history to guess which room was where. The Washington Room was the assembly hall, so I assumed the Potomac Room would be one of the smaller ones, since it was a river and not a hero of American history, but my first few tries turned out to be dead ends. By the time I finally found it, the teacher checking the detention roster was about to shut the door.
“Piper Baird!” I said. “Sorry, I got lost.”
“You’re ten minutes late. I shouldn’t admit you.”