V for vanquished was more like it.
A knock on the window. It was Zack. He climbed into the truck.
“I’ve been looking for you. I heard what happened.”
My hands gripped the wheel.
“This might be the wrong time for me to say this to you, Hildy, but I’m really hoping you won’t let this stop you.”
“It’s over.”
“There are other ways to—”
“I quit. Okay? I quit reporting.” I slammed on the horn. “It’s too hard! The rules aren’t fair! Don’t try to talk me out of it!”
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m completely and totally done.”
“I can hear that.”
We sat there in silence.
“I’m probably the wrong person for you to talk to about this,” Zack said quietly.
“Why?”
“Well, to begin with, I believe in you.”
Bad time to start crying, but I did.
“And the other thing is, Hildy, I don’t believe in quitting.”
“I guess it’s not scientific.”
“No, it’s not. Scientists change the variables until we find the answer.”
I glared at him. “I’m out of variables, Zack. The experiment failed!”
I wasn’t expecting to go to the cemetery. I hadn’t been to Dad’s grave since spring. Nan came once a week and planted flowers around the headstone. For fall she’d planted ivy and yellow mums.
I was standing there now, looking at my father’s headstone.
MITCHELL BIDDLE
That’s all it said. I wished we’d thought of something special to put on it. We were all so shocked, no words seemed right.
I sat on the cold ground, remembering the funeral.
The long line of harvest workers driving their trucks in the procession.
MacIntosh running up the center aisle of the church to Dad’s casket.
Nan’s voice breaking with power and sadness as she closed her eyes and sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
Uncle Felix weeping—the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.
Elizabeth handing me a picture of Dad laughing inside a photo frame she’d painted.
Tanisha sitting with me in the silent bond of friendship.
Mom, in the midst of her impossible grief, saying, “I don’t know how, but we’re going to keep going.”
Darrell writing the obituary for the middle school newspaper, calling Dad “a courageous reporter you want to read all the way through.” Most people only read the first few paragraphs of a newspaper article.
I touched the grass over his grave.
“I don’t know what to do, Dad.” I couldn’t say any more because I was crying.
My father always knew what to do. In my mind, I could see us walking in the woods together. Dad could find his way back on any trail. It was impossible to get lost with that man. He’d remember bends in the road, landmarks on the horizon.
I felt so lost right now. I felt like everything I’d worked for had died. I touched Dad’s headstone. How could a man with so much heart die from a heart attack?
It was getting dark. I hated November. It stole the late afternoon light and brought night too early. I headed to the pickup and drove down the old cemetery road. I could almost hear Gwen, my old therapist, saying, “Hildy, remember, you know how to see in the dark.”
I stumbled through the blue door of Minska’s Cafe, walked to the counter, and ordered a beef brisket sandwich on an onion roll with creamy horseradish sauce, curly spiced fries, and hot cider.
I ate my food in the back room at one of the round tables. Minska walked to my table and put a piece of her famous apple strudel in front of me. “Free this week for young woman reporters.”
“I’m not a reporter anymore.” I looked down and told her what happened. “It’s over, Minska. All the hard work. The bad guys won.” I ate a curly fry in grief.
She considered that. “You want to know something about bad guys?”
I know enough, thanks. I sipped my cider.
“They never win, Hildy. Not really. Come with me.”
We walked out the front door, down the steps to the street. Minska stopped at The Bee’s corner paper box and frowned with disgust. I saw the headline:
“I CAN’T SLEEP AT NIGHT,”
LOCAL CHILD CRIES!
“Help me turn it,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She put her hands on the paper box. “Help me.”
What was she doing?
“I don’t want to see it,” she explained. “It gives me a headache. So we turn it.”
Inch by inch we turned the heavy metal paper box in protest.
“Okay,” Minska said. “That’s a start.”
I followed her back inside the restaurant past the big bookcase, past the couches and chairs in the main room, and into the back with the round tables and the framed photographs of Solidarity’s march to acceptance. She stopped at a photo of women standing at a closed gate.
“My mother, she was back here.” Minska pointed to a head in the crowd. “She went every day for news of my father. The authorities would give her nothing. They said he was being detained for questioning. They told us this for two years.” She turned away from the wall. “They didn’t know who they were dealing with. You know who worked day and night to keep Solidarity going?” She watched me steadily. “The women.”
I gulped.
“Back then in Poland, the Communists didn’t see the women as much of a threat, except for a few, like Anna. When they arrested the men, they thought Solidarity would tumble.” She laughed. “Women know how to keep the candle burning.” She lit a tea light candle on the table. “Yes, we are very good at that.”
My heart sped up. “What do you think I should do?” I asked her.
“I think you should celebrate living in a country with a free press.”
“I was thinking about retreating, actually.”
Minska shook her head. “Not you.”
Yeah, me.
“Your school paper is suspended, yes?”
“Yes.”
“It sounds perhaps as though you need another one.”
What was she saying to me?
“You mean like an underground one?” I whispered.
She surveyed the back room. “We print our own menus here. I suppose we could publish a paper.”
“I can’t publish a newspaper! I’m only sixteen and I have no idea where to start and I doubt that I even have enough brain cells for this and, honestly, the Polish thing was then and we are here now, and let’s not forget that there were thousands of you—”
“Over a million,” Minska said.
“Even more reason to quit.”
“But it began with one, you see, and then a few joined and a few more.” Minska handed me a cup of tea. “You don’t understand how much light you’ve got until the lights go out. My grandmother told me that.”
I buried my head in my hands.
“They called the women in the underground press the Dark Circles,” she said, “because they didn’t get enough sleep; they wrote night and day. When you have something so important, something that you’ll stay awake for, something you know that you were designed to do, well, it’s worth getting a few dark circles, don’t you think?”
Maybe.
“Call your friends. You can’t do this alone.”
As soon as I got home, I sent the e-mail:
M @ M (Meet at Minska’s)
8PM
Back room
Major Need for Silence
On Tanisha’s e-mail I added CODE RED.
Chapter 21
Zack, Tanisha, Elizabeth, Lev, T.R., and Darrell sat at the round table in the back room at Minska’s, spitting mad about The Core shutting down.
“Cop-out Kutash is going to regret this,” Darrell shouted. “You know what it’s going to be like in this town with only The Bee as the newspaper of record? Give me a b
reak!”
“We should get a lawyer,” T.R. said.
“You know one who works for free?” Tanisha asked.
“We’ve been working for free!” T.R. snapped back.
“I think we can be proud of what we’ve done,” Elizabeth said softly. “I think the school is really going to miss us.”
Lev balled up a napkin. “Don’t count on it.”
Zack said, “The thing we’ve got to remember is that Piedmont wouldn’t have threatened us if we didn’t threaten him.” He turned to me. “So why are we here, Hildy?”
I closed the white window shutters, shut the back door, and laid out the idea for the underground paper, beginning with how just standing at the gate can bring the gate down, and ending with how women kept the candle burning during Solidarity.
Zack laughed. “Can guys be part of this?”
“We’re indispensable,” Lev said, smirking.
Elizabeth lit a tea candle on the table. “This is just so totally amazing,” she whispered, “and I, for one, am way inspired that Minska would think we could even do this.”
“We haven’t done it yet,” Tanisha warned.
“This only works if we’re in solidarity,” I said. “We don’t tell anyone—not our parents, not our dogs. I don’t know if Piedmont would try to sue us. I don’t know what he’d do.”
T.R. nodded. “He had to be desperate to want to sue the school.”
I told them what I’d found out about Martin Midian and D&B and their Boston connection.
“So that means Martin Midian could have hired Houston Bule and Lupo to break into the Ludlow house,” Darrell said.
“Right,” I told him.
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet, Darrell.”
“But a theory could be that they wanted to make the house seem scarier, right?” Zack asked.
“How do we prove that?”
“Why do we have to prove everything?” Lev sneered.
“We can’t print anything we don’t know for sure,” Tanisha told him. “We’ve all got to agree on that. If we’re not credible, this won’t work.”
Lev sighed.
“So understanding that,” I said, “what do we want the paper to say? What’s the purpose of it?”
“To crush Piedmont,” Lev said.
Zack’s eyebrows furrowed. “It’s tempting to do that, but the purpose has to be to educate the public about what’s going on. They have a right to know. I think we debate Piedmont with the facts.”
Darrell was doodling on his notepad. He looked up. “What’s the debate? We’ve got to define it.”
“Banesville is being lied to,” I began. “We need to separate fact from hearsay.”
“And expose Piedmont as the fearmonger he is,” Zack added.
“That’s kind of broad,” Darrell said. “Can you narrow it down?”
I smiled at him. “You sound like Baker.”
“We sure could use Baker now,” T.R. complained.
“We haven’t got Baker anymore!” Darrell snapped. “It’s not fair, but we’re it. So let’s do the job right.”
Lev leaned forward. “Don’t you think everyone will know it’s us if we put out an underground paper?”
“We just can’t admit it,” Tanisha warned. “We have to look innocent.” She smiled at Elizabeth. “Like her.”
Elizabeth beamed.
“Why not do a blog?” Lev persisted.
Zack shook his head. “The readership is too selective. A paper can be distributed to the whole community.”
Lev laughed. “Okay, here’s our first issue. Hildy interviews the ghost.”
“No hype,” I said.
“You can’t live without hype, Hildy,” Lev argued. “Hype is necessary. Nobody will buy anything or read anything if it doesn’t promise something big.”
I looked across the table. “How many of you say no hype?”
All hands went up except Lev’s.
Lev groaned. “Okay, I’ll work with it, but as a concept it’s got holes.”
There were a thousand things to do and only us to do them.
“Has it occurred to anyone,” Lev asked, “that we don’t have a name for the paper?”
We ate Minska’s thin-crust personal pizzas late into the night and brainstormed ideas.
Veritas
The Real News
The Unvarnished Truth
Truth Unlimited
The Oracle
The Voice of Reason
The Real Report
The Banesville Bell
Cored—that was pushing it, but I liked it.
We kept thinking. What were we doing on this paper?
“Trying to show what’s behind the façade,” Tanisha said.
“Peeling away the layers so people can see,” Elizabeth added.
“Peeling,” I said, playing with the concept. “Pared. Peeled.” I laughed out loud. “I’ve got it, you guys. The Peel.”
Elizabeth set to work designing the front page.
“We need to publish,” Darrell urged. “Let’s go with what we know for sure. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
What we had filled only the front and back of a menusized sheet.
“I don’t think we have enough,” I told everyone.
Zack and Tanisha showed the layout to Minska. She held the paper, turned it over. “What’s not enough?”
I looked at it. “It’s not a newspaper.”
“So what am I holding here? It’s got news and it’s on paper. What else do you need?”
I gulped. “Courage?”
She laughed. “That you’ve got!”
Courage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I always thought it came with some big rush of confidence and adrenaline.
Instead, I just kept moving forward, wondering.
What am I doing?
Is it the right thing?
Would I even recognize the right thing with so little sleep?
Lev, always cocksure, entered full promotional focus.
“Okay, everybody. We’re small, we’re broke, and we’re in way over our heads. But what have we got?”
“Ulcers?” Tanisha offered.
“Clinical depression?” T.R. said.
Lev looked at us with disgust, reached into his shopping bag, and pulled out a vegetable peeler. “We have a symbol!” He gave a peeler to each of us. “Who are we?” he shouted.
We looked at each other.
“Who are we?” Lev demanded.
“The staff of The Peel?” I said.
“And what does that mean?”
T.R. leaped up. “It means we’re on the cutting edge.”
That got Zack standing. “Which means we’re on the frontier of progress!”
“We get to the core of things!” Elizabeth added.
“It means,” Lev shouted, “that together we can peel them!” He raised his peeler high. “Peel them! Peel them!”
I so didn’t want to do this, but T.R. was standing now, slashing his peeler like a light saber, and he, Lev, and Zack were shouting, “Peel them! Peel them!” They even got Darrell up and saying it. Guys need rallying cries, I know, but—
Peel them!
Peel them!
Tanisha shrugged and joined in, and Elizabeth followed. I raised my peeler.
Was this how real revolutions began?
“We’re going to put posters up all over town late Thursday night so no one can see us,” Lev explained. “We’re going to put them on the community billboards and in the park. We’ll put them on parked cars in driveways. We’ll tape them on store windows. Everyone will know and then on Monday the paper will come out.”
“Where will the paper be distributed?” Tanisha asked.
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
“That would be good to know, Lev.”
Zack tapped his peeler on the table. “We can look at traffic patterns in town, get human density factors.”
Lev flipped his pe
eler in the air.
Elizabeth went to work and created a graphic of an apple with the skin peeled partway off to use as our header.
Her design just popped.
I hugged Elizabeth when I saw it. “How come you got all the artistic talent in the family?”
She smiled and looked down.
We printed five hundred fliers and distributed them around town.
GET THE PEEL
BANESVILLE’S ALTERNATIVE NEWS SOURCE
PARE DOWN TO THE TRUTH
We were still working on how to get our paper out to the people without being seen.
“We could,” T.R. suggested, “just leave them in piles where lots of people go.”
“They could get stolen.”
“They could also get read.”
Zack had identified three key areas—the farmers market, friendly small businesses, and the high school. We compiled a list of the people we would most like to distribute The Peel. It ranged from Minska to Lull’s Cheap Gas to every farm stand at the market and most kids in the high school.
Everything was clandestine, which, trust me, isn’t easy in a small town. We moved from place to place to have our meetings. We wrote at home, e-mailed late at night.
We were constantly getting questions like “You put those posters up, right?” or “You guys are writing the paper, right?”
“We’re glad someone’s doing it,” was how we responded.
“But it’s you, right?”
And then we smiled and walked away, remembering the First Amendment to the Constitution that protected freedom of speech and the press.
“Does that work for teenagers?” Darrell asked.
I guess we were going to find out.
On November 15, The Peel came out on menu-sized paper—it was still warm from Minska’s printer when I first held it. Our headline read:
GOOD BUSINESS IN FEAR
The Bee has gone from a 24-page paper to a 64-page paper published three times a week, with special editions. There is good business in fear. The A to Z Convenience Store now has lines outside as people buy Safety First products. More self-help books are selling. Headache and sleep medicine are flying off the shelves in Banesville. The security business is booming. Madame Zobek’s psychic storefront is open late into the evenings.