The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom (4 page)

Some more silence, then a quiet “I love you, Dad.”

She hung up the phone, but she didn't move at first, just sat there with her shoulders slumped, frozen. After a few beats of silence, I watched her straighten her spine like she was steeling herself for battle. I recognized the posture. It was pretty much how I went through the world every day. When she finally turned, she caught me looking at the phone. Well, really, I'd been looking at her hand. When she'd replaced the receiver in its cradle, she'd started drumming coral-tipped nails on the baby-blue plastic. “I know you think I have a phone in my room because I'm a rich, spoiled brat,” she said. “But really, I have a phone in my room because my father has problems, and I'm afraid he'll kill himself if he can't call me when he's having a…spell.”

Jesus. Her voice shook, and she wouldn't meet my eyes.

I had no idea what to say, so I just went with “Come finish your sandwich, Rainbow Brite.” When she didn't move, I leaned forward, grabbed her hand, and tugged her back onto the bed with me. She came, and we sat side by side on her bed, our backs to the wall.

She picked up the sandwich she'd abandoned early in the story about Royce. “Thanks for rescuing me tonight.”

“I have no doubt you would have castrated that fucker yourself had I not stumbled on the scene.”

“Still. It was nice to have an ally.”

I chuckled, noticing that she hadn't denied the castration part. She yawned. It was contagious, apparently, because I did too.

W
hen I woke with a start
, I initially had no idea where I was. My first clue was the Scott Baio poster on the far wall of a room that looked like a squadron of My Little Ponies had pooped sparkly girl accessories on every flat surface. My second clue was the throbbing pain and huge bruise on my right hand.

My third clue was the fact that Rainbow Brite was going through my stuff, which, of course, jolted me fully awake. “What the hell?”

She turned, and she didn't even have the good grace to look guilty. “What part of ‘investigative reporter' did you not understand?”

I vaulted off the bed, where I had apparently conked out, but it was too late. My stencil and cans of paint were all over the floor. She had seen everything.

“You're the anti-Reagan-graffiti person, aren't you? Your stuff is all over town!”

There was no point in denying it. I started repacking my bag and gathering my shit, trying not to panic, trying to think what I could say or do to convince her to keep this to herself.

“I don't know why it didn't occur to me. Of
course
it's you. Oh my God! I love your work.”

That surprised me. But then, I had learned in the past few hours that Rainbow Brite, with her breaking and entering and her dickweed-prepster balls-kicking, had a bit of a dark side underneath all that sparkle. “Yeah, well, I'm poor. My family's poor. I come from a poor town in a poor state. But that doesn't make us stupid. And trickle-down economics is an insult to our intelligence.” I started putting the paint cans back into my backpack. “But so help me, Jenny, if you tell anyone about this, or…” Shit. She was the editor of the
newspaper.
I was fucked. What if she told on me? Would Curry drop me? Would the school call the cops?

“You just called me Jenny.”

I hadn't even noticed.

“And don't worry. Your secret is safe with me.”

“It is?” I thought her whole thing was truth over all, investigative reporting, blah, blah. “Isn't that, like, against the whole raison d'être of journalism?” Though I didn't know why I was arguing. I could be in deep, deep shit if she told anyone.

“Well, considering that not only did I tell you my humiliating Royce story last night, but you also found out my father is insane, what do you say we just call it even? Agree to keep each others' secrets?”

I remembered those tears. Her tone as she spoke to her father, as if he were the child and she the parent. Her hunched shoulders, carrying too much.

As incredible as it seemed, I could trust her. So I stuck out my hand for her to shake.

She smiled. A great big megawatt smile that lit up her whole face.

Then she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, her lips impossibly soft against a day's worth of stubble.

She pulled away before I could fully take stock of the astonishing sensation of those lips. “I gotta go. Lock the door behind you when you leave.” She grinned. “Hope your day is totally mint.”

And then she was gone, the soft, baby-powder smell of her the only sign that she'd been there at all, leaving me blinking and looking up at a picture of Charles in Charge.

Matthew shouldn't have been surprised when, at one in the morning, he emerged from his dorm room to find me sitting on the floor in the hall outside of it. I had thought he was smarter than that.

But no. He reared back, almost as if someone had hit him, and then he nearly tripped over me.

“Did you really think I was going to let this whole ‘I'm the crusading social-justice graffiti-artist man-about-town' thing go with no further discussion?” I asked as I scrambled to my feet. “I mean, just because I promised not to tell anyone about it doesn't mean
I
don't want to talk about it.”

He rolled his eyes, pulled up his hood, and took off down the corridor.

Whoa. I guess our little détente of yesterday evening had only been a temporary thing. Still, I was undeterred. “How come your roommate doesn't get suspicious?”

“I'm in a single,” he said, walking so fast I practically had to jog to keep pace with him.

“What about the other guys on the hall?”

“I'm kind of a loner.”

“You don't say.”

He was waiting for me at the door to the courtyard, holding it open for me. I shot him a grin as I sashayed through and pulled up my hood, trying to cover my surprise that not only was he
letting
me follow him, he was being kind of chivalrous about it.

Again with the eye rolling. But he said, “At least you didn't wear that horrible pink thing you can see from a mile away.”

“Give me a little credit.” I didn't bother telling him that I'd had to borrow the navy windbreaker I was wearing from Nessa, as it turned out I owned nothing suitable for skulking around alleys committing crimes. It was making me question whether I'd need to make some wardrobe changes before launching my investigative reporting career. I trotted after him as he turned from the block of dorms on to the campus proper. “So where are we going?”

“Rule number one: no talking.”

“That rule is not going to work for me.” I tried not to pant—he was still keeping up quite the pace.

He stopped then, but I had too much momentum going, so I couldn't keep from crashing into him. He growled. He actually
growled
. Then he turned and stooped so he could get right in my face. With his green eyes glowing in the streetlight and his head otherwise concealed by his hood, he looked like a supernatural creature. Or, you know, a petty criminal with really pretty eyes.

“Listen to me, Rainbow Brite. This is
my
show. If you're coming with me, you're playing by
my
rules. I've been doing this for three and a half years, and I haven't gotten caught yet. I'm not about to start now because you can't keep your goddamned mouth shut.”

Well. Okay, that was fair, I guess. Honestly, I was surprised that he had accepted my presence at all. I'd been prepared to fight to get him to let me come. So I made a show of shutting my mouth and miming throwing away the key.

It was hard, though. Oh, it was so hard! First of all, just walking in total silence for ten minutes. Who does that? All I could do was sneak glances at him as I loped to keep up with his long, determined strides. There was something about him tonight. An intensity. Well, there was
always
an intensity about Matthew, but it was even more in evidence as he led the way through the gates that marked the southern edge of campus. Then, when we arrived at our destination, which was a construction site in the town proper, and he pulled out his stencil, I wanted to lob a thousand questions at him.
How do you decide where to paint? Do you even consider it painting? How many different stencils do you have? What does this one mean?

But I kept my mouth shut as instructed. So I was shocked when he broke the silence with a whisper. “Speed is the most important thing once you start.” He was struggling a bit to keep the stencil flush with the wall with one hand while shaking a can of paint with another.

“Let me hold this in place,” I whispered, pressing my hands against the black paper cutout. I couldn't make out what it was from this close vantage point. He hesitated a moment, and I added, “Won't it be faster if I hold it?”

He must have agreed, because he moved like lightning, spraying the openings in the paper with red paint, which would show up dramatically against the gray-painted plywood fence surrounding the site. It took only a minute, and then he stepped back and nodded for me to do the same.

“Oh!” I gasped. It was Reagan again, but he was holding a lightsaber.
“Star Wars!”
He had interpreted the president's sinister plan to arm the heavens as straight out of the movie
Star Wars
. It took my breath away how a single image could make such a powerful statement. I couldn't take my eyes off it. It was silly, but I felt like I helped the tiniest bit, since I'd held the stencil, and been, like, an accessory.

“Yeah, I'm working on a matching Gorbachev, but it's not done yet.”

“It's…perfect.” It was. It was a simple image that managed to, in a matter of seconds, make you think about a wider political issue in a whole new light. Me, I talked a lot. I wrote—I wrote many, many words. But this? This was something else entirely, something beyond language.

Then it hit me all at once, a new, astonishing thought replacing the Plan B I had been so doggedly pursing. Maybe I didn't need Matthew to get to Curry. Maybe I just needed Matthew.

“Someone's coming.”

Oh, crap.
Sure enough, I could hear voices at the far end of the block, where the construction site started. I reached down to try to shove the stencil back into the portfolio, but he stopped me, pulling me around so my back was to the fence. “I'm just trying to get this out of sight,” I tried to explain. “So—”

And then he was kissing me.

Matthew Townsend was kissing me.

And, like his art, Matthew's kisses were jolting. A revelation. There was no lead-in. No windup. He just grabbed the sides of my head and crashed his mouth down on mine. I don't know if it was the shock or what, but my knees actually buckled a little. Because it felt like my lips—no,
his
lips—were directly connected to my clit, which was suddenly throbbing and achy. He responded by pressing me back against the fence, using one of his legs between my own to prop me up. When he tilted my head farther back, I let my mouth fall open, and his tongue brushed against mine. I couldn't help the moan that escaped. It was like I wasn't in charge of my own body. I might as well have been a figure he was painting, he was that in control—not in a scary way, just that what was happening felt inevitable. So I performed my role, which right now seemed to require me to twine my arms around his neck and shamelessly kiss him back. It was everything I could do not to rock myself against the thigh that was propping me up.

He made a noise that was something like a cross between and grunt and a groan and tore his lips from mine. He let his forehead rest against mine for a heartbeat before stepping away completely, leaving me feeling exposed. Cold.

“They're gone.”

I blinked, confused. “Who's gone?”

“The people who walked past us just now.”

I followed his gaze. I caught a glimpse of a couple at the end of the block just before they turned the corner. The woman wore heels and the man a suit.

Right. That had been a decoy kiss, not a real one. I cleared my throat. “Quick thinking.” But oh my God, how mortifying. I felt like he
knew
that I was wet between my legs, and that he'd made me that way. “See?” I said, trying for a casual, teasing tone. “It's good I came with you.”

He just shot me a questioning look I couldn't quite decipher.

“Because you can't make out with yourself,” I added, realizing belatedly that explaining wasn't helping. “We should go, right?”

He stooped and rummaged around in his backpack. “Yeah. I just need to sign it.” He produced a can of spray paint.

“Oh, you mean like tag it,” I said. See? I was cool. I was in the know. I wasn't a lust-addled college student. Or at least I wasn't
only
a lust-addled college student.

“No, tagging's not really my thing. I respect it, but to me, graffiti isn't about marking my territory or anything.”

“It's about saying something.”

He ducked his head like he was embarrassed.

“It's using art to make a statement. And you should sign your art.”

“Something like that.” He made a dot in the bottom right of the picture using gold paint.

“That's it? Just a little gold dot?” I made a mental note to start looking for the same mark in his other pieces around town.

“Just a little gold dot.” He shrugged. “I can't sign my actual name for obvious reasons. I had this random gold paint on me the first time I went out—this was in my hometown, years ago. I was probably eleven or twelve. It was from some Christmas project we were doing in school. I hadn't used it for the actual graffiti—because, really, who does graffiti in gold?”

“Disco graffiti artists,” I said, laughing.

“Exactly. You're basically never going to see gold graffiti—or at least it's going to be rare—so I just impulsively added a gold dot as a way to distinguish the piece.”

“Like a period at the end of a sentence.” I understood the motivation. Punctuation was my department.

He laughed then. He actually laughed, and I was absurdly proud to have been the reason he did. “Yep. Like a gold period. And then it just became a thing.” He rummaged around some more and produced another can. “Here. You sign too.”

“Really? I didn't do anything.”

“You helped.”

I could feel my skin heat. An A on a test or term paper had never thrilled me like his praise. “Okay.” I shook the can like I'd seen him do, aimed the nozzle, and deposited a dot next to his gold one. “Pink!” I couldn't help exclaiming in delight.

He just shrugged, put up his hood, which had fallen during our interlude, and turned, silently gesturing for me to follow.

“Interesting.”

The word punctured the heavy, smoke-filled silence in Curry's studio, a silence that had been stretching on as my critic circled the table on which I'd unrolled my latest crack at the “make a picture of something mundane in every medium” assignment. Curry hadn't told me to do it over. We hadn't spoken at all, in fact, since my last visit, which was pretty much unheard of. He usually called me midweek and issued mumbled instructions for what he wanted to see at our next session. The fact that he hadn't worried me.

Anyway, I was stubborn—and proud. Even though I told myself I just wanted to extract a senior portfolio from this “mentorship” so I could graduate, in truth, I couldn't stand Curry thinking poorly of my work. So, even though I technically had no assignment this week, I had taken it upon myself to perform a do-over.