The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom Read online

  I thought I saw a flash of hurt in her eyes, which was too bad, but I couldn’t help it if she couldn’t take a hint and had to be outright told to leave.

  She huffed out a little breath and turned to go.

  Guilty, and simultaneously irritated that I had let her get to me, I called after her. “Thanks for the pizza, Rainbow Brite.”

  Chapter Two

  Jenny

  Matthew Townsend was an arrogant jerk. I hadn’t been counting on that. I’d expected that we would chat like civilized people, agree to join forces, and then I’d be off on Art Building Rescue: Plan B. Instead, I’d been insulted by a jerky boy who couldn’t even manage to keep his mouth shut as he inhaled the food I brought him. It had been all I could do not to gather that chin-length black hair that kept falling in his face, force it back with a brightly colored hair clip that would break up his uniform of uninterrupted black, and scream, “Wake up!” It was maddening how blind some people were to the world around them.

  But okay. I was not a quitter. Quitters didn’t get into Columbia J-school. I just needed a different tactic—namely, persistence. It was just like with Dad. When he was having an episode, you couldn’t ask him once if he wanted to get out of bed and go outside. You had to ask him a hundred times. Wear him down. Till he was mad at you, even, but someone had to care about things like sunshine on his face, or movement for his limbs.

  Just like someone had to care about the art building. And despite the fact that its salvation would be good for my résumé, I did actually care.

  So, armed with Matthew’s class schedule, dorm room number, and intel about his work shifts at the Allenhurst Tap Room—I hadn’t aced Foundations of Investigative Reporting for nothing—I started inserting myself into his orbit and tried not to take it personally when he did things like, oh, stand at his full six foot two and snarl down at me like I was an annoying puppy.

  “Rainbow Brite. Do I need to take out some kind of restraining order against you?” he said as I ran to catch up with him after his anthropology lecture let out.

  I held up a sandwich. The first time I’d cornered him, after he came out of his dorm the morning after we met, I happened to be carrying a muffin I’d intended to eat later. When he’d eyed it with unmistakable interest, I’d handed it over and watched him wolf it down. That, together with the pizza he’d devoured, suggested that the way to this secure this guy’s help might be through his stomach.

  And, God, the way he looked at that sandwich, with so much intensity in his green eyes. With longing. If only I could get him to look at my…cause that way, too. I handed it over. “So you won’t even ask Curry what he thinks about the art building?”

  “We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “You mean the kind where you talk?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” he said, mouth full of turkey and cheddar. “He lectures me about my art being flat and passionless, and I nod and vow to do better. Rinse and repeat.”

  “But can’t you even—”

  “There’s also the part where I don’t give a fuck about the art building.”

  His excessive swearing still shocked me a bit, but I tried not to show it. “You don’t care about the legacy your alma mater leaves to future generations?”

  “You need a new tactic, Rainbow Brite. I told you, that shit doesn’t work on me.”

  I had pretty much given up on correcting him when he called me Rainbow Brite. I didn’t even bother pointing out that today I was wearing white jeans and a black-and-white-striped off-the-shoulder T-shirt, so I was about as far from a rainbow as it was possible to be. Usually, I wore this outfit with a red belt for a pop of color, but I purposely hadn’t done so this morning in anticipation of seeing him.

  “I’m actually employing two tactics simultaneously,” I said, glancing pointedly at the nearly gone sandwich. “That’s why I ply you with food. It’s like you’re starving to death or something.”

  He stopped chewing, and though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, his ever-present scowl deepened. Wait. Was he starving? I had his schedule down to a science—I’d pretty much been trailing him for two days, minus a few breaks for classes and newspaper stuff, and now that I thought of it, I’d never seen him in a dining hall.

  “I work at the Allenhurst Tap Room. I get to eat all the deep-fried garbage I can stomach.”

  Yeah. He worked at the infamous campus pub three days a week for six hours. (I was nothing if not thorough.) That wasn’t enough for a tall guy like him. I was pretty sure I’d inadvertently hit on an uncomfortable truth. Should I apologize?

  “Jennifer.”

  My stomach dropped. I would have known that low, entitled, almost-sneering voice anywhere. If only I could have recognized the entitled, sneering part when we were freshmen. And Royce Waldorf all up in my face was not what I needed right now.

  “The name’s Jenny, Royce.” Why couldn’t anyone call me by my name? And why was Royce falling into step beside us as we crossed the quad? Our mutual disdain was a well-established thing.

  “Jenny’s a nickname. You can’t just be named Jenny.”

  “And yet she is.”

  Whoa. I don’t know who was more surprised that Matthew was leaping to my defense, Royce or me. But sure enough, Matthew was staring at Mr. Big Man on Campus like he was nothing more than an inconvenient insect being momentarily tolerated. His expression, I noted with interest, was actually much more severe than the annoyed look he usually gave me.

  “If you’re looking for Nessa, she’s probably in our room,” I said, hoping to shake Royce. I was perfectly safe out here on the quad in the middle of the afternoon, but he still made me nervous.

  “Why would I be looking for Nessa?”

  “Um, because she’s your girlfriend?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” He sidled closer to me. So did Matthew from the other side.

  “Well, Nessa would. So maybe you two need to have a little heart-to-heart.” And break up. With Royce, the shit was going to hit the fan one way or another. It was just a matter of time. To my mind, the sooner the better. If only I could get Nessa to see it.

  I sped up, hoping he’d take the hint.

  He did not, just kept walking beside me—way too close.

  “Was there something you wanted?” Matthew said, raising his eyebrows at Royce. When Royce didn’t say anything, he added, “Because we’re in the middle of a conversation here.”

  Royce stopped walking and held up his hands like he’d been shot. “Hey, man, don’t have a cow. This frigid betty is all yours.”

  As we got a little farther away from him, Matthew muttered, “Preppy dickweed.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty much my nemesis. Has been since freshman orientation.” I tried to make light of the situation, but even I could hear the shakiness in my voice. I hated that Royce could make me so vulnerable.

  “What did you do to him to get his undies in such a bunch?”

  I contemplated telling him. I wasn’t above playing on his sympathies to get what I wanted. But I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to tell Nessa, who actually deserved to know, so I settled for a vague version of the truth. “I didn’t give him something he wanted. He’s never gotten over it.”

  “And your roommate is dating him? That’s harsh.”

  I almost told him that I feared the only reason Royce was hanging around with Nessa was to mess with me. What was it about this kid that made me want to tell him all this stuff I’d never told anyone? “Yeah, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to come away with a broken heart.”

  “If she’s lucky, that will be it. I don’t trust that guy.”

  I struggled every day with where my responsibilities lay in this whole situation. Quiet, pretty, sweet Nessa was madly in love with Royce. She saw only the stylish, rich, popular athlete—the campus golden boy. Never mind that he was a second-year senior, aka too dumb and/or wasted to graduate in the normal amount of time. Though he did seem to treat her w
ell enough when they were together. Maybe he had really changed. But then I thought back to his hands, groping me. To his drunken laughter when I pushed him away. Did guys like that ever really change? But I didn’t want to think about that now, much less talk about it. I was supposed to be working on Plan B.

  “I don’t trust him, either,” I said. “Untrustworthy and entitled. A charming combination.”

  “You gotta watch out for people born with silver spoons in their mouths,” he said. Then he glanced at me. “No offense.”

  “What makes you think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?” It was kind of true. It was a small silver spoon—my mom had been a really successful real estate agent before she died, and my dad did okay as an architect when he was able to work—but still. I worked hard, and I hated the implication that I was undeserving of my success.

  “I can just tell.” He held up the wrapping of the sandwich I’d gotten at an off-campus deli. “This was a fancy sandwich.”

  It occurred to me that this was the longest exchange we’d ever had, even if the topic was making me kind of uncomfortable. Maybe I could turn things around with him after all. I brightened, thinking about the art building and Columbia. “Matthew Townsend, are we having a real conversation?”

  We’d arrived at his dorm. “Nope.” He pulled the front door open and called over his shoulder, “Thanks for the sandwich, Rainbow Brite.”

  I waved. I was totally making progress.

  Matthew

  I was always in a bad mood after a session with Curry, and tonight, as I got my graffiti stuff together to head out, was no different. That the man was a genius, I understood. He had never agreed to take on a senior portfolio student before. It was a huge honor, blah, blah, blah. What my faculty advisor failed to inform me was that Curry was also an asshole. And while my usual MO when dealing with assholes tended toward “go fuck yourself,” I needed this particular asshole get my senior portfolio accepted, and hence to graduate.

  “What is it you want?” he’d asked, earlier, at his studio, after taking one look at my studies of the telephone, pronouncing them “horseshit,” and lighting a cigarette. The man smoked like a chimney, and the studio attached to his house was tiny (which was weird, because he was so famous), so the place was always hazy with smoke.

  “I want to be an artist.” He didn’t know what a big deal it was for me to say that out loud. People from my background didn’t become artists. They were considered wildly successful if they got steady jobs dealing cards at the casino or working at the gas station. The fact that I had gone to college at all, much less to an elite liberal arts school in a posh Massachusetts town eight hundred miles from home, was almost unheard of. So what I should have done to fulfill the whole “poor boy made good” thing was to pursue an actual career, something lucrative. Like a doctor or a lawyer. But, hey, I figured I was already used to being poor, so art it was.

  “What you have here”—with a flick of his wrist, he brushed my paintings and drawings off the table they’d been spread out on—“are some pictures. What you have shown me so far this year is that you are a person who makes pictures. You are not an artist.”

  I swallowed my frustration. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Yes, you do. Your entrance portfolio was better than this shit. That stuff was why I agreed to take you on. There was a spark in that work. Feeling.”

  He was talking about the works I had submitted to be accepted to Allenhurst as an art major. And they weren’t better. They were amateurish and naïve, and, nearly four years later, I was embarrassed by them. I had learned so much in my classes, had my eyes opened to technique and to the canon. It was why I endured the preppy cult-fest that was Allenhurst College. Why I killed myself getting A’s and logging twice the amount of studio time I needed to. Why I shut out everyone and everything that wasn’t getting me closer to my goal. Because I was getting better. Not good enough, I feared, but better. But Curry hadn’t even glanced at that phone cord that had given me so much trouble.

  “The assignment was to depict a mundane object,” I said, wondering why I was bothering to argue. Experience had taught me that arguing with my so-called mentor never yielded anything but aggravation. “I don’t know how much feeling a telephone can generate.” For some reason, my mind had flashed back to all those phone messages from Jenny on my door. Maybe I should have drawn those little pink slips of paper—they had irritated the hell out of me. That was a feeling, right?

  Curry stood. “We’re done.”

  I had taken two buses to get into the city to meet him and missed a much-needed shift at the pub. And he had spent five minutes with me—and less than thirty seconds of that looking at my work. As the weeks slipped by and June drew closer, I was worrying more and more about my fate. The senior portfolio was supposed to be a big work, or a collection of smaller works, that functioned as an emblem of what the about-to-graduate student had learned. Our mentors and faculty advisors would jointly review and grade our efforts. It was the first week of April, and Curry and I hadn’t even started talking about the actual portfolio. He just kept making me do these bullshit exercises and then tearing them down.

  But I had been too proud to push him on it. To stand in front of him and say, “But what about my grades? What about not flunking out of college?”

  That was the kind of thing Rainbow Brite would do. She would push and push and push until she got what she wanted. I was not that sort of person. I was the sort of person who put off signing a lease on the crappy rooming house in Boston he’d arranged to move into in June out of fear he might not graduate.

  I hoisted my backpack higher on my shoulders. I was the sort of person who went out under cover of night to deface public property.

  As I pushed through the front door of my dorm, I forced my mind to stop dwelling on my session with Curry earlier that evening, on Curry riding me about the lack of emotion in my work.

  No emotion, my ass. Curry wanted emotion? How about rage? Would that do?

  I honestly didn’t know whether my graffiti runs were about expressing anger at society in general—I acted like they were, making stencils that called out the hypocrisy of the Reagan administration—or at this picture-postcard town, with its rich hippies and entitled, coddled college kids. I didn’t much care, to be honest. I just knew the anger was there. And when I was done, when I slunk back to my room with my hood up and my eyes burning from exhaustion, it wasn’t, and I could go back to another few days of getting my shit done.

  So. Time to work.

  As I strode across the quad that linked the dorms to the campus proper, a feminine voice pierced my bitter recollection of my session with Curry. “Get away from me, you pig.”

  Shit. I hugged the portfolio that contained the stencil—Mickey Mouse Reagan again because I hadn’t had time to make anything new—close to my chest. The campus at two in the morning was usually pretty deserted. If I ran into anyone, it was generally packs of drunk kids who either said something sneering or didn’t notice me at all.

  With any luck, the couple having a fight up ahead wouldn’t either, and I could just slip by.

  “No, sweetheart. Not a pig. I’m the big bad wolf,” slurred a second, masculine voice. Jesus. These rich fuckers and their melodramas. “You shouldn’t be walking alone at night if you don’t want to attract the big bad wolf.”

  The girl, whose face I couldn’t make out because she was swathed in some kind of neon-pink hooded sweatshirt, was trying to wrench her arms from the guy’s grasp. Damn. Now I was going to have to find a pay phone and call campus security—this was evolving from a lovers’ quarrel into something more sinister.

  “Let me go, Royce, or so help me God, I will write about this in the paper. I will write about that other night, too. And I will name names. I will tell Nessa everything.”

  My knapsack clattered to the ground, and the clang of the metal paint cans hitting the ground, even through the nylon fabric of the bag, drew the pair
’s attention. Two sets of wide eyes turned toward me.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Art Boy,” Royce sneered. “You here to rescue your little cunt girlfriend?”

  “No,” I said calmly as I walked toward them. The scattered, abstract anger that always propelled me on my graffiti runs had crystallized into a deadly laser beam. “I’m here to do this.”

  I punched him so hard he toppled over.

  Then I picked up my bag, pressed my hand against Rainbow Brite’s lower back to give her a little shove, and said, “Run.”

  Jenny

  We didn’t stop running until we were in the lobby of my dorm. The whole way, I kept thinking, I’m going to tell him about Royce. I had no idea why. It didn’t make any sense. I had never told anyone. Not my RA, not my dad, not Nessa. So why was I going to tell this sullen kid who didn’t even like me?

  “Come up to my room,” I said, still panting.

  “What about your roommate?”

  “She’s gone home for the weekend, which I suppose is why her gorilla of a boyfriend is on the loose.” He was holding his right hand gingerly with his left. The crack of bone on bone as his fist connected with Royce’s jaw had been sickeningly loud. “But first let’s get some ice for that.”

  I took off toward the dining hall, and to my surprise, he followed without protest. “Won’t the cafeteria be closed?”

  I shrugged, eyeballing the rickety gate secured with a padlock that looked like it had already given up the battle. I pulled a metal nail file out of my purse, and it only took a few seconds of jiggling for the lock to yield.

  He whistled. “Damn. I never would have pegged you as a criminal. Do they teach breaking and entering at finishing school these days?”

  “I didn’t go to finishing school,” I said, not even bothering to turn my head toward him so he could see my eyes rolling. “I’m going to be an investigative reporter.”