The person responsible had never been found.
Cat looked more closely at Grady’s notes. Costa was also quoted as saying, “Leo’s like a Jedi master. He can make shit happen by force.”
A bunch of stuff followed about him orchestrating plays and outguessing their opponents and rallying his teammates from certain defeat.
The conclusion was that his skill as an athlete and strategist made things happen. The implication went wider.
Leo was hiding his real motivation for running for student council president.
Leo was hiding his writing of The Shrieking Violet.
Leo was hiding his mom’s visit to Principal Schwartz.
At the end of last year.
And ever since, things had been worse between him and his mom.
“No way!” Cat said.
She dropped her feet to the ground and loaded a blank template. Her fingers furiously hit the keyboard. This went so far beyond Leo lying about why he was running. Leo shouldn’t even have been allowed to run; he should have been suspended last year for orchestrating the spirit week incident. The Shrieking Violet wasn’t his first prank. She wrote what she was sure would be the Fit to Print award-winning story, and the apartment filled with natural light as the sun rose.
Finally, she leaned against the back of the chair and read over her article.
The adrenaline that had fueled her faded.
Circumstantial, all of it. So many questions remained. She started to delete, then paused. Because The Shrieking Violet would have an answer. A germ of truth that sprouted into whatever Leo wanted. She wondered how Angeline felt about Leo presumably learning such manipulation tactics from her. Skirting the truth was a core tenet of her YouTube channel.
Cat opened her browser and typed in “Ask an Angel.”
I Had an Elephant Dung Facial, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!
Three Out of Five Women Are Making This HUGE Gaffe Every Day. Are You One of Them?
The Alternative to Sexting That’s Got Everyone Hitting Send!
Angeline could write a good headline, if you could call the titles to her videos headlines. But Ask an Angel was entertainment, not news, despite what a high percentage of her viewers thought.
Cat backed out to her home page, which she’d set up to compile the top headlines from all the major news outlets.
Choice of Lingerie Predicts Who Women Will Vote For
What Democratic Candidate Says to This Elderly Woman Leaves Everyone in Tears
The Oval Could Be Round If Republican Candidate Doesn’t Shed Pounds per Doctor’s Orders
These were professional news outlets. Where journalists worked.
Where journalists were being laid off in droves.
And whoever was left behind was doing the same thing Angeline was. Hinting. Exaggerating. Inflaming. Scare tactics. Clickbaiting all the way. They said her generation got its news from social media. This was the alternative? Better? For how long?
She wanted to ask if anyone noticed, but perhaps the real question was if anyone cared. Maybe she really was the dinosaur Angeline always said she was . . . because she’d been taught by one. The rules she’d been playing by, ones her grandfather instilled in her, ones she saw in Nellie Bly and Martha Gellhorn and Katharine Graham and Christiane Amanpour, were no longer how this game was played.
And maybe the only path for dinosaurs was extinction.
Cat set her fingers back on her keyboard. With her heart pounding against her rib cage, she stopped thinking and simply typed, laying down her suspicions without bothering to ensure they were backed up. With every letter she struck, she had to stop herself from hitting delete. But soon, she found the story reflected the essence of what she believed to be true. So she kept going, layering in more narrative, framing the quotes.
She found herself breathing heavily with each piece that came together as something plausible, something real. It was easier than she’d have thought. To create a thread made of the thinnest of fibers. To lead a reader to draw their own conclusions . . . conclusions such as Leo being behind the sexist “cupcake” stunt and someone letting him go unpunished.
She hinted, just like everyone else.
“Leo might not be able to make things happen by force, but someone else could.”
She insinuated, just like everyone else.
“Someone else with more pull.”
She gave just enough so her readers could surmise the rest. Then she gave a little more.
“Who in Leo’s life holds such power?”
Her fingers trembled as she saved the article and followed the instructions Grady had left in the “Social Media!!!!!” folder. She published the article on The Red and Blue’s website as a breaking news exclusive.
Then she shut her laptop and stopped fighting the tears pricking her eyes.
28
When Angeline Drowns
7 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
Angeline couldn’t help thinking about the time she almost drowned.
The summer after sixth grade, she’d spent nearly every day at the beach, searching for wish rocks that she’d drop in a plastic bucket each morning and scatter back onto the sand each afternoon. The tide would steal them overnight and redistribute them in a new spot for her to find the next day. She loved walking along the edge of the water, dancing with the incoming waves, letting her feet be buried by the sand until all she could see were her ankles and all she could feel was a heaviness pressing down against her feet. She’d yank herself free, delighting in the release of suction and dipping her toes in the pools left behind. And then, one afternoon, she pulled, and the sand pulled back.
At first, she relished the game getting harder. But as more waves rolled in, the sucking power of the sand increased, and she was buried deeper and deeper until her heart thundered in her ears and panic set in. She’d made it more difficult by refusing to drop her bucket, holding on to those rocks and those wishes yet to be made. It was bad luck to drop a wish rock without tracing the line around the middle.
Her struggle exhausted her so that when a wave twice her height barreled through, she had no strength left to resist its riptide. An invisible force pulled at her, the ocean a magnet and she the object in its orbit. She knew what to do, to float on her back and wait it out, swim parallel to shore until she could head back in. She had to let herself be bent to its will.
But her will was all she had left with her father moving out at the start of the summer. Her mom didn’t seem to miss him; neither did Cat. Angeline became intent on training herself out of it. She could do anything she set her mind to.
So when the riptide tried to control Angeline, she’d been determined not to let it. Her legs kicked and her arms stroked and her head bobbed over, under, over, under the water until the salt stung her eyes and the echo of the waves muffled her ears and she swallowed so much water her stomach cramped. All along, her sandcastle bucket floated beside her, just out of reach.