Even When You Lie to Me by Jessica Alcott Read Free Book Online

said. I offered him a cookie and he crunched it loudly in the silence. Frida looked at him with wet, pleading eyes. “How’s it going with work now that I’ve averted disaster?”
    “Not bad, actually. I just got commissioned to make a sculpture for Holmesdale Park.”
    “The one on the other side of town?”
    “Yep.”
    “Wow, good job. Can I offer some input?”
    “No.”

About fifteen students showed up to the first meeting of
Truth Bomb:
a mix of kids I recognized and some people I’d never seen before. The only ones I really knew were a few students from my literature class: Asha, Dev, and Frank. I exchanged smiles with them but sat at the other edge of Mr. Drummond’s classroom, since an underclassman was sitting in my regular chair.
    Mr. Drummond sat in his usual spot on the front of his desk. “Thanks for showing up, everyone, even if you were bribed to do so,” he said. “I hope at least one of you understands newspaper layouts. First of all I want to find out if you have any thoughts about what the newspaper should be, or if you’ve got any ideas for features or editorials. Keeping in mind, of course, that we cannot endorse anarchy or libertarianism. Or mayonnaise, which is the devil’s condiment.”
    There was a silence. Eventually Mr. Drummond said, “Frank? I know you have some ideas.”
    “Word search,” said Frank, and a few people chuckled.
    “Well, obviously. We need to keep people like you occupied somehow,” Mr. Drummond said in a way that I realized was deliberate. He’d used Frank to warm us up. “Anyone else?”
    “How about a profile of new teachers?” said a guy with a cloud of curly red hair that crackled out like it was full of static.
    “Fine, Scott, before you ask again, I wear boxers. Happy now?” The kid laughed and held up his hands as if he couldn’t help his curiosity. Mr. Drummond turned and wrote on the board:
Find out Drummond’s favorite baked good; use for bribes.
“Let’s also think of less obvious ideas. What have you wanted to see in a school newspaper but haven’t?”
    “Why so many bad teachers have tenure,” said a short girl with glasses.
    “Generally I’d like to stay away from topics that will get me blackballed from the teachers’ lounge, but it’s a good subject,” said Mr. Drummond. “We’ll see what we can do with it.” He wrote
Tenure jockeys—the only thing they ride out is the clock.
“No one tweet that.”
    Dev said, “What about the statistics for who gets into advanced placement classes? Like the number of nonwhite students in them versus white students.”
    “Yes, good,” Mr. Drummond said. “You might want to look into socioeconomic class as well. I have an article about it somewhere around here.”
    “Gender too,” Asha said.
    Mr. Drummond inclined his head toward Dev. “Gender too,” he said.
    Dev sighed as if he and Asha had argued about this before. “Feminists,” he said.
    Asha hit him. When she saw me watching them, she rolled her eyes toward Dev. Dev grinned at me.
    Suddenly I felt out of my depth. They knew about things like that?
What
did they know? Who had taught them?
    “That’ll be interesting,” Mr. Drummond said. He wrote
Advanced placement elaborate scam to fuel sales of graphing calculators?
“Anyone else?”
    “What about government subsidies for school lunches? Pizza sauce being classed as a vegetable because of agricultural lobbies,” said a guy in a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt. I stared at him. Where had these people come from?
    “Excellent,” Mr. Drummond said. On the board he wrote
Tomato sauce a vegetable, high-fructose corn syrup a fruit?
    I was ashamed of staying silent, but fear made my tongue thick. I listened while a few other people made suggestions and Mr. Drummond wrote them out on the board.
    “Okay,” he said finally. “I think we’ve got enough for a respectable issue. Now, who wants which story?”
    There was a murmur, and the curly-haired kid said, “I thought