Peeled (19 page)

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.

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 break!”

“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 peeler 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.

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:

Six high school kids sworn to secrecy distributed it early Monday morning.

Then we waited.

That morning Darrell came to school wearing a fake beard.

“Aren’t you taking this a little too far?” I asked him.

“I sense they’re on our trail, Hildy. I just want to throw them a little.” He pulled the beard down and scratched his lip.

By noon the word was out.

Banesville was half abuzz about
The Peel.

Between Minska’s and Lull’s Cheap Gas, we had two places in town where lots of people went and could get the paper. But we needed more.

Thankfully, one thing we needed showed up.

“Well, well,” Baker Polton said as he walked into the back room at Minska’s. He was carrying a plate of strudel, a mug of coffee, and a copy of
The Peel.

I was sitting at a window table. The rest of the kids hadn’t shown up yet.

Baker sat down. “How have you been, Biddle?”

“Okay.”

He looked at
The Peel.
I was dying to know what he thought of it. “How’s your writing coming?” he asked.

I didn’t make eye contact. “I get to it when I can.”

He took off his Yankees cap. “You must have a lot of time on your hands now that
The Core
is kaput.”

“Are you serious?” I asked him.

He shook
The Peel
at me. “You want to know the problem with it?”

“What?”

“Your writing sounds tired.”

“That’s probably because
I’m
tired!”

He took out his pen, slashed through my copy, groaning. “Flying off the shelves—you actually wrote that? Have you forgotten everything I’ve told you?”