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looped there for hours. But how did he know? Had he looked at my report cards? It certainly wasn’t because of my performance in class. “I’m not actually— I am actually interested in writing. I don’t know why I said that about needing an extracurricular.”
    He spread his hands. “Doesn’t matter to me why you sign up as long as you sign up. I’m hoping it’ll be fun, though. I’d like to put out an issue every month, which I know sounds like a ridiculously low bar to clear, but when you’re starting from nothing it’s a lot of work just getting everything together.”
    “I can imagine. So you have experience running a paper?”
    “Yeah, some,” he said. “I was the editor of my college paper for two years. We’re not talking about the
Crimson
or anything, but we did a few good stories. Exposed a financial aid scandal. Traced the origins of the dining hall’s Tater Tots. The Tater Tots thing was actually much more disturbing.”
    “If they were anything like the Tater Tots here, I can’t imagine the depths of malfeasance you exposed.”
    He laughed. He had a nice laugh—low, almost private, as if he were laughing to himself. “Malfeasance. See? You’re a natural. I’ll put you on word search detail.”
    “I’m just good at studying my vocab words,” I said. “So you’re keeping the name?”
    “Are you suggesting that
Truth Bomb
is not a worthy name for a school paper?”
    I laughed. “I don’t, uh…no?”
    The bell rang.
    “I should go,” I said. “Lila gives me shit—uh, crap, sorry—if I make her save me a seat at lunch.”
    He waved at my apology dismissively. “Swearing is the last thing you have to apologize for in front of me. We’ll start meeting in a week or two, I think, but I’ll let you know more in class when I’ve gotten things organized.”
    “Well, I can’t fucking wait,” I said, thinking for a moment that it would be funny. Then I lost my nerve and skittered out of the room, but all the way down the hall I could hear him laughing.

I found my dad in the basement later that afternoon. He was hitting his computer monitor and cursing softly.
    “Sounds like it’s going well,” I said.
    “Hey,” he said. “Can you get me that hammer over there, sweetheart? I need to fix something.”
    “Let me look before you break it,” I said.
    “Thanks,” he said. He got up and went to his worktable, which bristled with scraps of unfinished projects. “How was school?”
    “Fine, I guess,” I said. “How do you manage to screw the website up so much in so little time?”
    “Practice,” he said. “Tell me about your classes.”
    “Not much to say. Boring as ever.”
    “I’m here with Frida all day and no one else to talk to. Give me something.”
    “You’re not missing much. We did yoga for gym class and learned how to relax our groins. Oh, and we have a new teacher.”
    “A new teacher who’s instructing you to relax your groins? Do I need to get in touch with someone about this?”
    I laughed. The basement door creaked open and Frida came bounding down. My mother was home.
    I turned toward my dad. “Mrs. Deloit was teaching her first yoga class. Well, I say teaching. She fell asleep.”
    “Yoga?” my mother said as she came down the stairs, flushed from the sun. She must have come back from a workout. She flicked on the overhead light, and my dad and I both winced. “I don’t know how you can work down here when it’s so dark,” she said. She’d scraped her hair back into a clean glossy knot, but she was wearing a baggy T-shirt, thin and corroded with age, that had been my dad’s. “That must have been fun. Remember when we took that class together, sweetheart?” Her voice was high and constricted. She knew I was still mad at her.
    My dad and I both watched her for a second; she looked bright and out of place. Then I said, “Yeah, vaguely, I think,” and returned to the computer screen.
    My dad went to give her a kiss. I knew he would; he