Cat considered giving her sister’s text a swift, one-stroke like and shutting off her phone. Instead, she pushed it aside and read over what she’d written about Angeline wanting to “make a difference.” Nothing could have been more vanilla and predictable. Unlike Angeline’s true motivations for running for president, which would have made this story an actual story. Add in Leo’s, and the whole school, town, and then some would read her newspaper. Maybe even look forward to the next one.
Angeline: It’s just . . . I need this.
Cat sighed. Right. The Angeline show. With Cat and Gramps and Mom and even Leo as her backup dancers. It had been this way from the day they’d taken their first steps—Cat a late walker at seventeen months and Angeline an early one at eight. Two months. For two months, Cat had been ahead of her sister. She’d been playing catch-up ever since.
Angeline: Cat?
Printing the truth about Angeline might change that while simultaneously gaining Cat the readership she needed to secure new advertisers, keep her paper afloat, and give her a stellar submission for the Fit to Print award. But Cat only knew what she knew about Angeline because she was her sister. She couldn’t print such privileged information without her source’s consent. As for Leo . . . he’d said “off the record,” but only after he’d spilled the truth. Technically she could use it. Give Emmie, who’d probably be a great student council president, a better shot at winning.
Nothing stood in Angeline’s way: not rules, not morals, not anything—or anyone.
Cat: Don’t worry about it.
Angeline: I’m safe then?
Cat:
Angeline’s ambition had ruined her relationship with Leo. For the past three years, he’d been as regular a fixture at their dinner table as their mom’s garlicky mashed potatoes and—though Cat would never say it to her mom—a more welcome one. Cat liked him. And despite being sure he was better off without her sister, something inside Cat wouldn’t let her say that either.
Cat: Leo too.
Angeline: Beat me!
Angeline: That was my next text.
Sure it was.
* * *
An energy infused Cat’s step the following afternoon as she walked through the harbor to meet Ravi.
Her first issue as editor in chief was in the can. Now she just needed to ensure she could pay for the next. For which she’d go full-on Nellie Bly. One of the few female reporters in New York City in the late 1800s, Nellie grew tired of only receiving arts and theater assignments. Instead of waiting to be given access to the big stories, she took it. She got herself committed to an insane asylum, where she lived for ten days undercover, inventing a new style of investigative journalism. Her exposé on the poor conditions and questionable treatment prompted more oversight and funding. She became a superstar. Cat had read her biography in a history of female journalists over the summer.
Though she usually pulled from Gramps’s well-curated bookshelves, she looked forward to browsing Harbor Books, which sat at the opposite end of town from her apartment on a narrow street that led up from the main road. It was steeper than she remembered, proving just how long it’d been since she’d gone inside. Probably before the new owners bought it, and that was more than a couple of years ago.
The incline stole Cat’s breath, but she was rewarded with an expansive view of what made her town her town. The calendar’s gentle flip into September meant the harbor remained full of boats, lulled and spun by the tide that came in from beyond the rock jetties. The harbor answered to the Atlantic Ocean, the draw for summer tourists, the lifeblood of sea-hardened fishermen bringing in lobsters and striped bass, and the reminder of the power of Mother Nature for full-time residents.
At least up here Harbor Books wouldn’t have to toss down sandbags during nor’easter floods.
She pushed open the door, and a seagull squawked.
Cat jumped. She hated birds. All birds.
“Realistic, isn’t it?” Ravi appeared around the side of a bookshelf. “Owners grumble about it, but I think it’s important to be in harmony with one’s surroundings.”
Her pulse notched back down. “How Frank Lloyd Wright of you.”
“You know Frank Lloyd Wright?”
“Not personally.”
“Seeing as how if you did, that’d make you look damn good for your age.”
“My gramps . . . my grandfather once wrote a story about Fallingwater, the house he built that’s—”
“Sinking.” Ravi rested the box he’d been carrying on the antique desk with gargoyles carved into the legs that served as the register. “Which is why I’m not pursuing architecture. I want the freedom to draw without the paralyzing fear that my creations are going to collapse on people’s heads.” He spread his arms out to either side. “Down to business. Welcome to Harbor Books. If we don’t have it, you don’t need it. Actually, we’ll order it for you. Indie bookstores gotta pay the rent.”
Cat stepped deeper inside, taking in the bookshelves that reached to the ceiling, crammed together in a Tetris-like pattern. She walked between them, following the maze of endless rows of spines, having a hard time believing the store didn’t have every book printed in the last ten years. Winding down one path, she faced a dead end and then a choice of left or right.
“Left,” Ravi whispered from behind her, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
She weaved left and could feel the space in the converted house narrowing and widening as she went. The bookstore didn’t only take advantage of every bit of real estate but fostered a mood that matched the contents of the shelves. Cozy and candlelit by the romance section, dark and claustrophobic for the horror books, bright and covered in trailing plants and succulents in the gardening how-tos.
“And now, right,” Ravi said.
His directions took her past a shelf with a Life board game perched on top. Clever, she thought as she scanned the titles in what was the biographies section, running her finger along the spines, lingering on one of female journalists of the modern era that Gramps didn’t have. Soon she entered a rectangular area with beanbag chairs on the floor and hand-drawn posters on the walls.