Her fear of birds increased in direct proportion to their size. The jagged movements of their heads and their black cold eyes freaked her out. They clucked. She clucked back. She jumped up and scrambled over the bent chicken wire. Long scratches ran down her hands and forearms, and something on her head felt sticky, and she tried not to imagine if it’d come from her or the chickens.
Her bike lay twisted on the ground. She stood at the bottom of the embankment, looking up, expecting to see her dad.
But he wasn’t there.
He hadn’t seen her. His focus had always been somewhere else.
She untangled her bike from the brush and walked it straight to the house beyond the chicken coop, where she’d called her mom to come pick her up.
The next day, she’d written her father a letter with all the things she’d planned to say to him. She’d never sent it. She hadn’t needed to. Turned out, he did the main thing she’d asked all on his own: stopped disappointing them. She hadn’t expected him to do it the way he did, by running off to LA with his new wife, playing the music he loved more than them in any club that would have him and simply opting out. But that worked too.
She’d watched Angeline struggling with it, but that day, when he hadn’t appeared on the road above her, Cat knew she wouldn’t. Sometimes the thing you wanted didn’t want you, and that was okay. Forcing it meant getting less than what you wanted, far less than you deserved.
She wanted this. The Fit to Print award. But she didn’t deserve it. She closed the email with the submission instructions and once again watched the story about Leo’s mom. She still couldn’t believe her article had basically reached the local news. They hadn’t attributed anything to The Red and Blue or her. They’d simply reported what she’d reported, with no effort to verify anything. This was how easy it was to make suspicions and rumors fact.
She began typing an email to the news station, directing it to the retraction she’d just posted online. But she knew they wouldn’t pick it up. They’d moved on.
She shut off the lights in the newsroom and headed for the parking lot. When she passed the front office, she saw more packages of angel wings had arrived. As had Leo and his mom. His face was somber, hers wasn’t angry exactly . . . defeated, that was it.
Or maybe Cat was projecting.
Acedia Confronts Its Inner Sloth:
Controversy Surrounding Student Council Unprecedented in Charter School History
A SPECIAL REPORT
Part 4 of 6
No deaths occurred save for The Shrieking Violet. In the last days leading up to the election, the online paper went dark, perhaps resting on its tadpole laurels (the petition and parental calls forced the administration to conduct testing, and it would be another two weeks before the water fountains were cleared for use). The void was filled by active engagement within the walls of Acedia as well as out. While Quinn maintained a steady lead in Maxine Chen’s online polls throughout the campaign—a point of contention by many, considering the friendship between Chen and Quinn—with five days remaining before the election, Quinn and Torres entered a dead heat.
Whether accusations of Quinn being a witch were truly to blame, her supporters were more outraged than ever. The pacifist kisses they’d been planting on her posters were replaced with aggressive graffiti on Torres’s. Using what students reported smelled like nail polish, those behind Quinn painted in bright red things like “Nepotism’s not my prez” and “Fakers can’t be allowed to prosper.”
Despite The Red and Blue’s retraction, the story about Torres receiving preferential treatment brought direct attention to Acedia. Twice, teams from news stations in Boston camped outside, interviewing students about the climate inside the school, seeking to uncover whether those students with influential and wealthy parents seemed to receive perks not available to the full student body.
“I didn’t tell them this,” Andreas Costa said, “but always seemed fishy to me that Marcus didn’t have any classes after noon on Friday. Stacked up three study halls one after another, where he got to nap for, like, three hours before every Friday-night game, while I had P.E. last period. I begged for just one study hall before game night. So, you do the math.”
Costa wasn’t the only one with a story like that to tell, but with one or two exceptions, the focus remained on Torres and Quinn. Yet what had once been platforms with concrete goals largely devolved into a male versus female fight.
As memes of each—Quinn, an animated Frankengirl riding a broomstick, and Torres, a robot programmed by his mom—went viral, attention-seekers on the lookout for the next cause to exploit picked up the “Battle of the Exes” to further their own agendas.
On Twitter, a vocal male-rights proponent started a hashtag, #UnleashTheTorres, supporting Torres, and in response, a prominent feminist continued urging followers to knit angel wings in support of Quinn. By election week, seven hundred pairs of angel wings had arrived, and more continue to arrive daily from as far away as Alaska and Singapore, where year-round temperatures above ninety degrees would seem to make knitting a less than popular pastime.
Despite this being a high school election, the “he said, she said” narrative struck a chord with a nation that had been having the same debate on a grander scale for the past few years, culminating in a presidential election where issues of minorities—especially women, LGBTQIA+, immigrants—had taken center stage.
Yet Acedia might have faded behind the next viral flash in the pan had it not been for what started it all: the Frankengirls.
“They’re baaaaaaack!” Baker reportedly was the first to cry, directing students into the cafeteria during the exchange of classes four days before the election.
Huge blowups of all three original Frankengirls blanketed the lunchroom like tablecloths. Quinn arrived before Torres, leading some to question his dedication to the cause of investigating the responsible party.
While two female students from the junior class were seen ripping a poster to pieces, Quinn strode to the center of the cafeteria and carefully rolled the one on the table in front of her into a long cylinder. Even before Quinn spoke, witnesses say other girls were already mirroring her action and, instead of shredding the posters, calmly turning each into a large scroll.
Quinn’s words were equally restrained. Instead of posturing and campaign promises, she simply said such action hurt.
Goldberg relayed Quinn’s impromptu speech. “She said—and I remember it exactly because I got chills. And, well, yeah, because I videoed it: ‘Imagine actually doing this to us. I mean, actually tearing us limb from limb and stitching us back together. Because that’s what this feels like for us—all of us. If you still think this is one big joke, go ahead and laugh. And see if anyone’s laughing with you. Respect us. Respect one another. What we need in this world is empathy. Because we are all so much More Than Our Parts.’”