The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom by Jenny Holiday Page A

worry about any of the passengers.
    One. There was one I needed to worry about.
    She was laughing, laden with shopping bags and jokingly objecting to something that Nessa was saying. She was back in her colorful armor: a denim miniskirt, purple leggings, and a matching loose purple T-shirt belted low across her waist.
    The pinhole that had opened up in my chest ripped itself into a huge, gaping rift, and instead of exiting in an orderly, drawn-out fashion, my rage was all sucked out of me in one heaving, horrible instant.
    You have to let yourself care about something.
    The shocking truth was that I wanted to fall to my knees before her once again. Right now and every day for the rest of my life. So I could taste her, yes, but also so I could beg the forgiveness I came nowhere near to deserving. So I could exhort her to have me.
    â€œWas I drunk to let you talk me into that?” Jenny exclaimed, looping her arm through her roommate’s. “Because I am never going to wear that shirt.”
    â€œShut up! That shirt is amazing! You’re going to kill in it.”
    â€œIt doesn’t even have a back, Ness! It—”
    Even if I hadn’t been watching them, standing there immobilized by the great roiling mass of fear and love and anguish and lust and guilt that had taken up residence inside me, I would have been able to pinpoint the exact moment she saw me. It was the moment the laughing, teasing, easygoing banter died. Killed by the sight of a boy who had broken her. Or tried to. Because even if she didn’t know it herself, no one could ever really break her.
    Her face took only a moment to catch up with what she was seeing. Then it rid itself of all outward sign of emotion. Like the door. The untouchable door. Oh God, it was like being lanced directly in the heart. Rainbow Brite wasn’t supposed to look like that. To be like that—immovable and impenetrable. She deserved so much better.
    So why, said a little voice inside my head, didn’t I think that I did, too?
    I watched Nessa take in the scene. She used the arm that was already linked with Jenny’s to pull her friend closer and began marching down the sidewalk. They’d been headed my direction, but Nessa rerouted them, sending them the long way around the circle so they wouldn’t have to pass me. When they were a good ten yards away, Nessa looked over her shoulder at me. I couldn’t hear, but I could read her lips clear as day: “Asshole.”
    Jenny, by contrast, did not look back.
    I had to fix this. I had to fix a lot of things.
    I made for the art building. There was that door again. What the hell? Why had I assigned so much bullshit symbolism to it? I dropped my bag and pressed both hands against the wood, like I wanted to make sure it had no miraculous powers. Nope. Just a fucking door.
    Which I pushed open, a new mission crystallized in my head. I needed to find someone with a camera.

Chapter Eight
    Jenny
    I woke the next morning to pounding. At first, I thought it was just my head, because after seeing Matthew on the circle, Nessa had taken me straight to a bar—not the one Matthew worked at—and gotten me drunk, and we’d stumbled home after last call.
    But it hadn’t been enough. I had wanted to forget him, just for one night. To numb myself. But it hadn’t been possible. My mind couldn’t let go of the images assaulting it. It was the contrast between them that slayed me. Him laughing as we fell together onto his bed. Him kissing me like he would die if he stopped. Then, just as vivid: him staring at me as I got off the bus, wearing that same, horrible, blank expression he’d turned on me earlier that morning. As if he didn’t even know me.
    But as Nessa stumbled toward the door, groaning—she’d had her own heartbreak to nurse last night, after all—I realized the pounding was coming from outside.
    â€œWhat?” she snapped, opening the door. Then her