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  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  So there I am, sitting in Mr. Culpepper’s office being my natural self, which is pretty cool, and there is Ashley Schmidt like she’s ready to punch out the world, starting with me.

  “So what exactly is your complaint, Miss Schmidt?”

  “My complaint,” said Ashley, shooting another glance in my direction, “is that the School Journalism Association has just put out its list of best school newspapers. The Spectator is published at Stuyvesant and that came out in first place.”

  “Stuyvesant is a respectable high school.” Mr. Culpepper’s voice sounded tired. “And the Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted and Talented is a middle school.”

  “The Verdict, published at Cardozo, came in second.” Ashley’s fists were balled up.

  “Yes, another high-school paper.” Mr. Culpepper glanced over at me.

  “And The Cruiser came in third!” Ashley shot a mean look in my direction. “That poor excuse for journalism is not even the official Da Vinci newspaper!”

  “And the School Journalism Association has no official standing, either,” Mr. Culpepper said. “So whatever they said or however they ranked the newspapers makes no difference.”

  “It makes a difference to me!” Ashley protested. “I didn’t even know they were ranking the papers, but someone — someone must have sent them copies of The Cruiser without even letting me or the school know. And I think that someone was Alexander Scott!”

  “Mr. Scott?” Our assistant principal raised one eyebrow as he glared at me.

  “Some kids from Frederick Douglass Academy asked me for some back copies of The Cruiser,” I said. “I didn’t know what they were going to do with them. Ashley is just mad because The Cruiser is a better paper than The Palette. I mean, everybody knows that.”

  “I wouldn’t go that — Ashley, do not cry in my office.” Mr. Culpepper rolled his eyes upward. “Look, I think you’re making a rather inflated deal over nothing. Why not look at this as a challenge to The Palette?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ashley was talking through clenched teeth. “I will do exactly that. Did you get the letter I sent you?”

  “Yes, and I think it’s a brilliant idea to reprint two hundred words from the British newspaper the Guardian each month,” Mr. Culpepper said, handing Ashley a tissue. “I used to read the Guardian on a regular basis when I worked in London. And now that you have their official permission to reprint from their editorial pages it should add significantly to Da Vinci’s official paper.”

  Ashley stood and gave me another mean look. She didn’t say anything in front of Mr. Culpepper, but outside of the assistant principal’s office she made herself pretty clear.

  “I’m going to bury you and your stupid newspaper!” she hissed at me before starting down the hall.

  In a way I could see her point. As the editor of The Palette she had a lot of pride in the paper. She also worked hard to keep up its standards. But, hey, it wasn’t my fault if The Cruiser got third citywide.

  I called a meeting of the Cruisers for 11:15 in the media center. When we got there I saw the staff of The Palette already in one corner, so we took the corner nearest the window.

  “Why are they giving us dirty looks?” LaShonda asked.

  “Because of us being picked as third-best newspaper,” I said.

  “They don’t know that it doesn’t mean anything?” Kambui asked.

  “Ashley is hurt because they picked The Cruiser over her paper,” I said. “She would have been fine if they had picked another high-school paper or even a middle-school paper, but she’s embarrassed that they picked us.”

  “So let’s just tell them to forget about it.” Bobbi McCall was being cool, as per usual. “Ashley’s good people.”

  “She’s good, but she said that The Palette is going to bury us,” I said. “And that sucks.”

  “Yo, dueling editorials,” Kambui said. “That’s kind of all right. I like it.”

  “Yo, Zander, check this out.” LaShonda put her hands palms down on the media center table. “We’re the Cruisers because we don’t get into that competition thing. If Ashley wants to get all worked up over it, let her go for it.”

  “Okay, but she’s got permission to reprint material from the Guardian, an English newspaper,” I said.

  “So?” Bobbi.

  “So that’s going to make The Palette look really classy, just when everybody is paying more attention to our paper,” I said. “We’re, like, the voice of the people, and Ashley’s paper is, like, what?”

  “The real deal,” Kambui said. “They’re the official school paper, and we’re, like, the underground rag.”

  “I thought that’s what we wanted to be,” Bobbi said.

  “Underground, but not buried underground,” I said. “What makes us a good newspaper — and what got us the number three rating — is that we speak the truth out loud when The Palette is sort of edging around it.”

  “So what do you want to do?” LaShonda asked. “Go beat them up?”

  “No, let’s find a way of upgrading our paper, too,” I said. “Maybe we can hook up some guest editorials.”

  “We could run more photos,” Kambui said.

  That was a good idea and I should have known that Kambui was going to come up with it because photography is his thing. LaShonda said she would do some thinking about getting the paper together, but Bobbi wasn’t too hot for the idea.

  “You guys are getting into a boy thing,” Bobbi said. “Lighten up!”

  When our meeting was over I went to lunch and the other Cruisers had classes. In the lunchroom I picked up a ham-and-cheese panini and iced tea and thought about our meeting.

  Bobbi McCall was right, in a way, and we all knew it. The Cruisers had been formed when Mr. Culpepper called the four of us down to his office and complained about our grades. He ran down the whole bit about Da Vinci being a school for the gifted and talented and we were just scraping by. When he pointed out that none of us were involved in extracurricular activities we formed a club and called it the Cruisers. We also started a newspaper, and Ashley, who was editor of the official school newspaper, The Palette, had always been our biggest supporter. Nobody wanted to fight her or the school newspaper. On the other hand, she had a lot of pride in the paper and had been hurt when our paper was mentioned and hers wasn’t. Like Bobbi, I didn’t want to fight Ashley, but I didn’t think I had to lie down and die just because she was upset.

  The rest of the day went by slowly, with the biggest thing that happened being a puppy got into the school and everybody was chasing it around the hallway. The puppy thought we were playing but Mr. Culpepper got uptight and said he was calling the SPCA. Then Cody, the fastest kid in the school, caught the dog and gave it to Mrs. Maxwell, our principal. She carried the puppy around for a while and then gave it to the security guard, who took it outside.

  “That’s your kind of story, isn’t it?” Ashley said when she saw me in the hallway. “You know — dog runs around in hallway as gifted and talented kids give chase?”

  Ouch!

  Okay, so Ashley was getting me a little mad. Not mad big-time, but a little mad. I tried to put it out of my mind by the time I got home but I did tell Mom, who was soaking her feet in s
melly water.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked. “You going for a stinky feet commercial?”

  “It’s plain water and white vinegar,” Mom said. She was flipping through the channels with the remote, sound off, the way she always does. “It kills fungus on your feet if you have any.”

  “You got fungus on your feet?”

  “Nope, but if I did have, the white vinegar would kill it,” Mom said. “So what are you going to do about your newspaper?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “No use in starting a fight with Ashley.”

  “One time I had a good friend named Marlene Clark,” Mom went on. “We were really close until she started talking about me getting a hands commercial that she wanted. I didn’t think much of it but she kept it up. Then, the next thing I knew, her agency was talking about how the two of us were competing for jobs. The next thing I knew, she was getting some of the jobs I had been getting. She used the her-against-me thing to jump right over me.”

  “You think that’s what Ashley’s doing?”

  “She might not be thinking like that,” Mom said. “But she sees that your paper is doing well and she might just be a little bit green-eyed.”

  “She’s got gray eyes,” I said.

  “Jealous. If you’re green-eyed it means you’re jealous,” Mom said.

  “What are we having for dinner?” I asked. “You buy anything?”

  “Spaghetti and meatballs. I made the sauce myself, too.”

  I went to the kitchen to see if she really had made the sauce and saw the pot on the back burner over a low light. I took a spoonful of the sauce and it wasn’t bad.

  Mom is a model, so I could see other models competing with her for the same job. The whole modeling world is a little crazy. Sometimes agencies will call her and ask if she’d do a bumblebee, or look sexy standing near a car. Once she had to fly all the way to Chicago and stand next to a car with a leopard on a leash, and then they didn’t use the photos they took because Mom was too tall. They wanted somebody tall and elegant, but not too tall because the car was small, and not too elegant because the big feature on the car was gas mileage, not looks.

  “I think that there’s always going to be room for two papers at Da Vinci,” I said when I went back into the living room.

  “Could be,” Mom said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Just ‘could be,’” Mom said.

  I looked over my homework assignments, saw that I had an essay due in two days, and thought I’d watch some television as I outlined it. Mom had bought an exercise band and was doing a routine in the living room, so I settled in my bedroom and was trying to work the remote with my toes (which I’m pretty good at) when Kambui called.

  “How about I take photographs of kids in the school, and then we run them with funny captions?” he said. “Like, ‘what is he thinking?’”

  “Culpepper might not like that,” I said. “How about taking photos around the city? That way you get more variety.”

  “Good idea,” Kambui answered. “I’ll get on it. Oh, by the way, did you get the tweet from The Palette? It’s from Ashley,” Kambui said. “She’s asking the student body to send in their definition of a real newspaper. And Zhade Hopkins said that there’s kind of a nasty editorial in The Palette, too.”

  “You smell trouble?” I asked.

  “I do be smelling it,” Kambui said.

  THE PALETTE

  A Modest Proposal

  By Ashley Schmidt

  It strikes me as both sad and melancholy when reading the various newspapers of the modern world to see how many bad stories are competing for attention. They parade themselves as celebrity happenings, as when an intoxicated young woman falls out of a hotel window. Sometimes they pretend to be of public interest, as when some hunk wannabe “discovers” a new cure for his addiction. The problem with all of these stories is that they all feel they must have some connection with the truth. I suggest that we cut this precious cord and let the pretend newspapers take their rightful pose as light entertainment. That way, their staffs can Cruise freely through the editorial process unhampered by a need to make more of their “reporting” than mere typing exercises.

  THE CRUISER

  C IS FOR ???

  By Zander Scott

  Apparently The Palette is celebrating the letter C in its editorials by capitalizing that letter in the word “Cruise.” Other C words they could have used were “catty,” “callow,” and “caustic.” The editorial board thought it had another word but, alas, there is no C in sour grapes.

  You can’t sell ten dresses at a time in a big mall like this,” I said. Me, LaShonda, and Kambui had just gotten out of the rain and into the Olde Harlem Mall. “And you especially can’t sell to the Gap. They only buy, like, a million dresses at a time.”

  “I think maybe I can,” LaShonda said. “Anyway, it’s worth a try. Are you afraid of trying?”

  “No, but I don’t want to look stupid, either,” I said.

  “You guys go on,” Kambui said. “I’m going to go around the mall and take some photos.”

  LaShonda and I went into the Gap and she took my arm, which meant that she wasn’t as confident as she said she was. But LaShonda is good people and when she calls me sometimes to watch her back I’m glad to do it. What I thought was going to happen was that the people at the Gap were just going to look at us as middle-school kids (which we were) and young (ditto) and smile at us as they said no. But, as my mom always says, if you aren’t asking some dude to spare your life, “no” isn’t really that terrible.

  LaShonda started looking around at some of the denim dresses, pulling me along, and before too long a guy with muscles in his forehead came over to us and asked if he could help.

  “We’re looking for the special markets manager,” LaShonda said.

  Muscle Head looked us up and down and then grunted something that might have been “What you want to see him for?” Or it might just have been indigestion.

  “We have a business proposal, of course!” LaShonda was getting her confidence back.

  Muscle Head gave us a hard look but produced his radio and called somebody. Then he told us to wait a minute and stretched his neck as he started looking around. He had muscles on his Adam’s apple, too.

  Shortly a skinny little white woman with a smile bigger than she was came over to us.

  “And how can I help you guys?” she asked.

  “We represent You-Nique Fashions,” LaShonda said. “What we would love to do is to have you carry our line of You-Nique fashions, just ten pieces per month, in the Gap.”

  “Oh, well, we only deal in gross lots,” Miss Big Smile said, turning her head to one side and tilting the smile. “A gross is a hundred forty-four pieces, a lot more than ten. But thank you ever so much for dropping in.”

  “Our marketing idea is that ten, and only ten, lucky customers get the chance to buy something unique that no other customers will have,” LaShonda said. “And we are neighborhood people.”

  “You might have read about LaShonda’s designs for the stage in the New York Times,” I added, being pretty smart.

  Miss Big Smile’s smile changed slightly and she turned her head just a little bit away as she looked us up and down.

  “You go to that school on One Hundred Forty-First Street?”

  “Da Vinci,” I said.

  “And do you have your proposal written up?”

  “Not yet, but —”

  “Yes!” LaShonda said, swinging her backpack off her shoulder. She whipped out a small presentation notebook and handed it to Miss Big Smile.

  Miss Big Smile opened the presentation case, turned quickly to the last page, checked something, and then turned to the first page. I could see there were drawings in the book and felt stupid for having started to say that we didn’t have a write-up.

  “You know, this is different,” Miss Big Smile said finally.

  “We thought you would appreciate that,” LaS
honda said.

  “My name is Ellen Carter, and I do work with some of the buyers here. You know what I’ll do, I’ll talk to some people in special sales,” the woman said, closing LaShonda’s presentation case. “They’ll talk it over and give you a call within three weeks or so. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough!” LaShonda said. “May I have your card?”

  I had a million questions for LaShonda and couldn’t wait to get out of the store. Besides feeling really glad for my homegirl I also felt a little like I was the only one back there who didn’t know where the happenings were.

  We stopped for smoothies and LaShonda laid her whole plan on me.

  “I’ve put together a group of women in the neighborhood who sew. Most of them are either stay-at-home moms or unemployed. Every month we can come up with ten You-Nique designs for either shirts or two-piece numbers,” she said. “Then the store puts them in one corner and announces that they are for sale and they won’t be duplicated. We tailor the piece to whoever buys it.”

  “How are you making money?” I asked.

  “Whoever’s piece is sold gets paid for it and the tailoring,” LaShonda said. “Then, maybe, if things go right, one day I’ll be able to open my own design house. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “And the Gap gets all kinds of publicity because it’s a community project. They make a few dollars on the item, they get people coming into the store to see what they can buy that’s You-Nique, and everybody is happy.”

  “I wish I had thought of that idea,” I said.

  “How are you going to think that deep when you’re only a guy?” LaShonda asked. “I mean, it’s nothing personal, but you are a guy, right?”

  That was seriously stupid, but I liked it.

  Kambui found us just as we were finishing our smoothies, and he had somebody with him. Caren Culpepper.

  “Yo, Caren, what you doing, slumming?”

  “They go for it, LaShonda?” Caren asked, ignoring me.

  “Yes, they did,” LaShonda said. “They said they would get back to me in a couple of weeks. I think she’ll either go for it or come back with a counteroffer.”