Tell It True by Tim Lockette

Author:Tim Lockette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: books for 13 year old boys;teen fiction books;books for 14 year old boys;teen books for boys;books for 12 year old boys;books for 13 year old girls;books for 12 year old girls;teen books;young adult books;books for teens;ya books;teen books for girls;tween books for girls ages 11-14;books for teen girls;young adult;teen girl books;books for teen boys;teen boy books;books for 14 year old girls;realistic fiction books for kids 12-15;thriller;mystery;crime;collection;suspense;fantasy;21st century
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2021-08-19T14:17:50+00:00

Face

It occurs to me now that before I became a journalist, my life was boring. In a good way. I didn’t really do anything; I didn’t really make anything. Long lazy afternoons on Preethy’s bed with its puffy duvet, reading manga and telling jokes. Preethy working on her long-term plan—maybe a twenty-year plan—to become someone who draws eyes for a living. Me still shopping around for a plan. The two of us watching countless movies as I tried to decide who I want to be when I grow up. Hard-nosed prosecutor? Wiccan priestess who marries a rock star? Earnest aid worker bringing medicine to peasants in the mountains? Mama anthropologist, leading a squadron of college students through a Dig of Monumental Importance at a secret site hidden from potential looters? It had seemed, just a year or two earlier, like I had a lot of runway before I had to pick a grown-up life. Then I could even still sink back into daydreams of my ideal life path: discovering a giant, docile, magical animal in the woods behind my house, clinging to its fur as we flew above the mountains. Watching those movies with Preethy, I might as well have been playing with dolls like a little kid.

After I became editor of the newspaper, though, things started happening so fast I could barely plan the rest of my week, much less the next week or ten years from then. That Friday, the day after my call from the Educational Press Law Center, was the day the craziness truly kicked in.

First: Mom misplaced her glasses, which meant that even though I was ready and at the door with my backpack by 6:50, we had to spend ten minutes tearing the house up looking for them. Finally, Mom had to roust Dad out of bed to drive me. Dad came out of the bedroom looking, in my opinion, rather skeevy in his workout clothes. Bicycle shorts and a T-shirt and Crocs.

“Um, do I look okay to go out?” he mumbled.

“You look like a CEO who’s getting arrested,” I said. “Why can’t old men in America wear smoking jackets or samurai kimono or something?”

“I won’t get out of the car,” Dad said.

So we got to school right at 7:20, just before bell and anthem time, and there were a bunch of kids holding a protest in the parking lot—big banners that read BAND FOR RAMSEY and NO NEW PEP RALLIES and maybe six or eight kids standing around or leaning on trombone cases.

“Dad,” I said, “let me out over there. I want to see what’s going on.”

They were all kids I knew from the band bus, low brass and percussion and that one saxophone the band director was always chewing out. Exactly the band kids who’d actually have the guts to be late for class to be in a protest. When I asked what it was about, they directed me to Mackayla Cotney, the only girl in the group. She’s the pit percussion section leader and the household deity of an otherwise all-male tribe of lanky, nerdy Napoleons.

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