I stood to walk into the verbal hail of bullets that surely awaited me. But Perry didn’t wait for me to come to him. He stormed out of the back office toward me, gesturing for quiet. Maddy and James used it as an excuse to say goodbye and hung up on their mothers. “Lois,” he said.
So I was in big trouble. Definitively. He’d called me Lane earlier when we were talking. And he was speaking softly. Something I’d never heard him do before.
My phone rang again on my desk, HOME flashing. I reached over to hit ignore. Then I turned back to Perry.
He stared at me, pressing his hands together like he was praying. Maybe I should be—for divine intervention. Because he took a few menacing steps closer to our desks. Closer to mine. I resisted the urge to flee.
“You did vet all your quotes in the story . . . The sources are all confirmed, correct?”
That wasn’t what I expected him to ask. I went through the piece mentally before I answered.
“Lois?” he prompted.
“Well, Principal Butler might not have known he was going to be quoted . . . exactly.” I didn’t know what Perry was getting at. “But he did provide the responses to direct questions. They weren’t out of context.”
“And the girl? This Anavi Singh, she corroborated all the allegations?”
The boulder returned to my throat, growing in size. I swallowed, my foreboding transforming into fear. “Is she okay?”
Perry didn’t answer for a long moment. “If by okay you mean requesting a retraction of the entire article, saying that she hasn’t been bullied a day in her entire life, then yes, she’s fine. We here at the Scoop, however, are on life support if you can’t make this story stick.”
“A retraction?” I was choking again. “But it’s true. You saw Butler dismiss her. All the rest is true too. I saw it myself. She told me to use her name.”
Perry stalked toward the door. “The paper has a strict correction policy. No request hangs out there for longer than three business days, not unless Legal gives the thumbs up. Tomorrow’s Friday, so I’ll give you until Monday after school—at the very latest—to get her to withdraw the request. Or we’ll probably be shutting this whole thing down. The Daily Planet’s reputation is too important to risk.” He stopped in the door’s threshold, not bothering to turn and look at us. “Maybe the Morgue was too symbolic a place to house this little experiment.” The way he spat the word “experiment” made me cringe. And then he slammed the door behind him.
So much for me being a reporter like him. At least he and his accusations were gone.
But the silence that he left in his wake didn’t last long.
“We have detention!” Maddy said.
Devin said, “So it is all of us.”
James nodded. “Assuming Lois has it too.”
“I’m sorry I got you all caught up in this.” I tugged on my lip. Trying to think. But there wasn’t an easy way out. I gave up. “Please blame me. It’s my fault.”
Why would Anavi lie like this?
“It is your fault,” James said. “I wasn’t even credited on your apparently way overblown story. This job is important to me. You better fix this.”
“I will,” I said.
If I can.
The last remnants of the plan were falling apart all around me. My promise to Anavi wasn’t working out that well either. I should have known better than to hope things would be different—be better—here.
“You have to,” James said. “I don’t want my reputation to take a beating like my—”
I could have finished the sentence: like his dad’s. But I didn’t. I’d done enough damage for one day.
Instead I went to my desk to collect my things. Gathering up my messenger bag, I slung the strap over my neck and proceeded to the door.
“Where are you going?” Maddy asked.
“Home,” I said, “to face the General’s music.”
CHAPTER 15
And that angry music was already cranked to maximum volume when I crept through the front door, attempting to sneak past the real firing squad, aka my parents. I barely noted the garlic-infused smell of lasagna—my favorite—because dinner was going to be the opposite of fun.
“You do not ignore calls from me,” Dad said, meeting me. He was decked out in his full dress uniform. Which meant he’d left work earlier than he planned, almost certainly because Mom had called him to tell him about the detention.
He waved me toward the kitchen.
Oh no.
“Now, get in here,” he said. “We need to have a talk over dinner.”
I’d been crossing my fingers, if weakly, for actual yelling when I got home. Talks over dinner were what my dad used for serious business. Every move we’d ever made was announced at a “talk over dinner.” Every grounding I had endured, every phone privilege lost, every punishment that had ever been meted out to me had started this way. The situation had already been bad and now it was getting worse.
I couldn’t afford to be punished. I had to do my job—or it would no longer exist. I wouldn’t have just wrecked things for me, but for Maddy, Devin, even James.
I barely had time for dinner.