The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom (9 page)

So why, said a little voice inside my head, didn't I think that I did, too?

I watched Nessa take in the scene. She used the arm that was already linked with Jenny's to pull her friend closer and began marching down the sidewalk. They'd been headed my direction, but Nessa rerouted them, sending them the long way around the circle so they wouldn't have to pass me. When they were a good ten yards away, Nessa looked over her shoulder at me. I couldn't hear, but I could read her lips clear as day: “Asshole.”

Jenny, by contrast, did not look back.

I had to fix this. I had to fix a lot of things.

I made for the art building. There was that door again. What the hell? Why had I assigned so much bullshit symbolism to it? I dropped my bag and pressed both hands against the wood, like I wanted to make sure it had no miraculous powers. Nope. Just a fucking door.

Which I pushed open, a new mission crystallized in my head. I needed to find someone with a camera.

I
woke
the next morning to pounding. At first, I thought it was just my head, because after seeing Matthew on the circle, Nessa had taken me straight to a bar—not the one Matthew worked at—and gotten me drunk, and we'd stumbled home after last call.

But it hadn't been enough. I had wanted to forget him, just for one night. To numb myself. But it hadn't been possible. My mind couldn't let go of the images assaulting it. It was the contrast between them that slayed me. Him laughing as we fell together onto his bed. Him kissing me like he would die if he stopped. Then, just as vivid: him staring at me as I got off the bus, wearing that same, horrible, blank expression he'd turned on me earlier that morning. As if he didn't even
know
me.

But as Nessa stumbled toward the door, groaning—she'd had her own heartbreak to nurse last night, after all—I realized the pounding was coming from outside.

“What?” she snapped, opening the door. Then her voice softened. “Tony?”

“You have to come,” he said, barging into the room, aiming the order at me.

“I'm not going anywhere today, Tony,” I said, turning over to face the wall. “Tell Beth to run the editorial meeting.” I'd been planning on recommending to the paper's board that Beth get the editor-in-chief job next year, so it couldn't hurt for her to get some experience now.

“Jenny, get out of bed,” he said. “There's something you need to see.”

Something about the tone the usually mild-mannered photographer used to deliver his directive got me out of bed. I sent him outside to wait while I threw on some sweats and brushed my teeth. Just like two mornings ago in the bathroom at Matthew's dorm, I didn't look in the mirror. I didn't want to see what he had reduced me to.

“I was in the darkroom late last night,” Tony explained as he and Nessa and I set off across the quad, “when the door opened.”

Nessa looked at me warily. I knew what she was thinking: Royce.

“It was that Matthew Townsend kid.”

“What?” Nessa said, her voice indignant.

“Yeah, and he ruined an entire box of photo paper.”

“What did he want?” I couldn't help it. I wanted to not care what Matthew did, but if Tony didn't keep telling the story, I would drag it out of him.

I needn't have worried, because obviously whatever happened had been weighing on Tony, and he was anxious to unburden himself. He wrung his hands as he walked. “He begged me to help him with his senior portfolio. He said he had all the art done—installations, he said. He just needed someone to walk around with him and take photos to document them.”

I sucked in a breath. He couldn't mean… “The graffiti?” I whispered.

“Yeah,” said Tony. He's the guy whose been doing all that political graffiti all these years. And his stuff—it's amazing.”

So why was Tony so worked up? He didn't know about Matthew and me.

“So we walked around,” he continued. “It wasn't quite dark yet, so we got some good shots. There was more to do when night really fell, so we walked back to the circle and parted ways there, agreeing that we'd meet at the art building this morning to photograph the rest.”

“It was nice of you to help him,” I offered weakly, not sure what else to say.

“I did it for you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, for the art building,” he clarified. “I thought if I did him a favor, maybe I could get him to use any pull he had with the department, or that Curry guy, to protest the demolition.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. Why couldn't I have fallen for a guy like Tony? He was a Goth, which was not at all my type, and came off as kind of a playboy, but he was always doing these sweet, thoughtful things.

“But, really, once I saw what he was doing, it felt, like…important to help him.” He seemed anguished, like he was apologizing to me for something.

“I know,” I said, nodding, feeling like he needed me to dispense absolution for some reason I couldn't understand. “His work could be really significant if he would just…allow it to be.”

“Well, I'm exposing the film when I get back to my room,” Tony said angrily as we rounded the corner that would put us onto the circle. He'd taken us along a path that came up along the side of the art building and deposited us right in front of it.

Nessa saw it before I did and gasped. I looked at her first, saw the horror on her face as she clasped a hand over her mouth.

“I'm sorry,” Tony said. “I thought you should see it. I'm going to leave you here and go get some of the newspaper people together to see about getting it removed.” He patted my arm awkwardly and left.

I let my eyes slide over the lettering, biting down on the inside of my cheeks to keep from wailing.

FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL JENNY. 867-5309.

In gold spray paint.

You're basically never going to see gold graffiti.

“Let's go,” said Nessa, tugging on my arms. But I planted my feet. I couldn't stop looking at it. “You've seen it,” she added. “So please, let's just go.”

“He didn't even make it look good.” In some ways, that was the bigger blow. He could create the most stunning works of art, was capable of such breathtaking, exacting work, even when in a hurry, as I had witnessed when we'd done the Reagan
Star Wars
piece together. But these were crude letters that looked like a kid had drawn them.

But perhaps that was intentional. Crude letters to match the crude sentiment.

“How could I have been so wrong about him?” I whispered, recognizing even as I spoke the words that they had been a feminine chorus since time immemorial. I'd chosen him because I thought he was different. More evolved. But he was no better than Royce.

The very worst part about all of this was that he had made me question not just my romantic judgment, but
everything
about myself. Could I ever trust myself again? And if not, how was I ever going to have the guts to move to New York and will my way into a career I now wasn't sure I was constitutionally capable of? An investigative journalist had to have, above all things, good judgment. She had to be able to trust her intuition.

He had taken that from me, too. He had taken everything that mattered.

“I need to get out of this school,” I said, though I wasn't sure to whom I was speaking.

“Just a month left,” Nessa said. Then she took my hand and squeezed it. “Three weeks of class. That's six more newspapers. Then some exams. Then you're free.”

The pressure on my hand and the truth of the words functioned like anchors. Something to hold onto while a hurricane raged around me—and inside me. She was right. I couldn't let him have everything. I had my friends. I had the newspaper—and Dawn had a huge story brewing that was going to run in the last issue of the school year. It was going to cause a lot of controversy, and I needed to make sure my head was in the game.

I nodded. Nessa, the eye of my storm, wrapped her arms around me and gave me a quick, fierce hug. Then she tugged my arm again, and this time I let her lead me away.

What else could I do except start counting the days?

I hadn't seen it because I had been in Boston. My plan had been to meet Tony as we'd agreed the night before. I was going to try to badger him into developing all the film right after we got back from our second outing, and then take it to Curry.

But in the end, once I had decided, I couldn't wait.

You have to let yourself care about something.

I'd hopped the 6 a.m. Boston bus and gone to Curry's house, where I pounded on his door until he woke up and answered it, cursing and smoking simultaneously.

“And why didn't you go to this girl first?” Curry asked as we cruised down the highway back toward Allenhurst in his late-model BMW. For all the ramshackle shabbiness of his studio, it seemed he did pretty well. “Why didn't you follow her last night after you saw her get off the bus?”

I had told him everything—about the graffiti and about Jenny. Because it was all mixed up so badly there was no point in trying to untangle it. If I had decided to do what Curry said and finally care about something, it was because of her. Because she made me not need to go out and do graffiti to feel okay. Which was confusing, because I was trying to argue to Curry that the graffiti should be my senior portfolio.

“I needed to get my shit figured out first,” I said. “I didn't want to come to her all…damaged. Without having changed anything.”

“Because from my vantage point, it sort of looks like you're leaving her hanging while you fart around with your senior portfolio.”

I could see how it looked that way. What I wasn't telling him was that I was going to move to New York when I graduated. I hoped with Jenny, but even if she wouldn't have me, I'd go. But first I needed to show her—and myself—that I could do something that mattered. That I had a
reason
to move to New York and say, “I am an artist.”

Curry razzed me pretty well all the way back to Allenhurst. But then when I took him to the first site and he got out of the car, he shut up. “And you're saying there's more?” he asked, turning to me.

I almost laughed. “So much more.”

“Well, let's go, then.”

After we'd been to a dozen or so sites, we headed back to the art building. He hadn't spoken much during his perusal of my vandalism-turned-art, but on the way back to the car he insisted that we find Tony and get him to develop the film he'd already taken. He was even talking about hiring a professional to shoot the rest. “Although we
could
just ask your goddamned advisor to meet us in one of your alleys.” He snickered.

I didn't know whether to laugh, because I didn't know if he was serious. I didn't know if he knew that my “goddamned advisor” would do whatever Curry told him to do.

We parked in a lot a block or so away from the art building, and as we approached, I saw a small crowd of people gathered, and I could hear them buzzing, though I couldn't make out any of what they were saying. My heart leapt, because what else could it be but some kind of protest led by Jenny?

My body ached for her. I wanted to see her so badly, yet I clung stubbornly to the notion that I needed to sort out the portfolio first. I needed to do what both she and Curry had been telling me to do. I needed to become the sort of man who was worthy of her.

“Oh, look, here's her little fagboy boyfriend.”

Unfortunately, I would have known that voice anywhere. I looked around, trying to spot Jenny or Nessa or any of the newspaper people. But it was all frat-boy types in their baggy khakis and pink shirts with upturned collars like they were dressed for cricket or polo or some shit.

“Royce,” I said as the crowd parted and opened a path between me and him. I wasn't afraid of him. Curry's presence helped, but mostly, I stood straight and proud in the private knowledge that, no matter how terribly and possibly irrevocably I'd bungled things, for one crystalline moment, Jenny had chosen
me
. Royce would never be able to say that.

He just sneered and glanced over his shoulder. I followed his gaze, and—

No
. No, no, no.

“No.” I said it out loud, as if that would somehow change what I was seeing.

The bag. I'd dropped the bag yesterday, after Jenny got off the bus and I'd been annihilated by the truth of how fucking much I loved her. For some moronic reason, I'd become momentarily obsessed with touching the door to the art building and I'd needed to free up my hands.

And, I only now realized, I'd never picked up the goddamned bag again.

It wasn't just the ugly sentiment, but the fact that he'd painted it on her beloved art building. He might as well have spit in her face.

This couldn't stand. Something shifted inside me, and it must have been reflected in my outward being, because Royce flinched, and as he did so, a murmur rippled through the crowd. He thought I was going to hit him, but he was wrong. I held his gaze a moment longer, but I wasn't even tempted. I was done with Royce.

I swiveled to face Curry. “Change of plans.” He raised his eyebrows. “I have something I need to do, but I can't do it by myself. I need help. Will you help me?”

Jesus, if only he knew how hard it was to choke those words past the fear lodged in my throat.

One end of his mouth quirked up slightly. Maybe he
did
know. “I thought you'd never ask.” Then the other side hitched up too. “I have no idea what you have in mind, but I think I might need to go back to the car for my cigarettes.”

Enough with the pounding already. I was taking a nap. Well, I was
trying
to take a nap. Nessa, having capitulated to my insistence that she go oversee the production of tomorrow's paper, had extracted from me a promise that I would try to sleep. Ever dutiful, I was lying on my bed in the dark. My head felt less awful than it had earlier, but that was about all I could say for myself. The only reason I'd succumbed to Nessa's demand was that I knew promising to rest was the only thing that would get her out of the room. Though I appreciated the loyalty, I wanted to be alone so I could cry. And I had. Cried until I felt like an empty shell. Like he'd broken not just my heart but my lungs and guts and marrow, too.

“Jenny!” called the voice at my door. “Jenny, it's Beth! Open the door!”

I groaned. Beth was supposed to be overseeing the planning for Thursday's paper. I had thought she was the type who could rise to the occasion and not need hand-holding, but apparently I was wrong.

I heaved myself out of my cocoon and hobbled over to swing open the door. “What's wrong?”

“I tried to call, but it keeps ringing and ringing.”