Page 2 of The Confidant
The mandatory hour-long chat was my dad’s way of testing me and making sure I wasn’t skipping out on my weekly spiritual upliftment while away at boarding school.
Only once he got the spiritual quiz out of the way did he ask me how things were going here at school and if I was still on track to graduate as valedictorian.
Hunter used to join me for Sunday service in my room each week since his family belonged in my dad’s congregation, and that had always made it more fun and less of a chore. But he’d stopped coming last spring—right around the time my dad made me break up with him.
At first, I had thought he stopped coming because things were slightly awkward during our transition to being just friends again. But even though we’d eventually gotten our friendship back to normal, Hunter still hadn’t been joining me for church this year.
Maybe he just wasn’t a fan of my dad now?
My dad could be a bit overbearing—very strict and set in his ways. But Hunter had always known all about that because even before we became friends, we’d been neighbors—he’d grown up just down the street from the church property where my dad, stepmom, and I lived in Manhattan.
Was it possible my dad had said something to Hunter that I didn’t know about?
It was definitely a possibility.
Either way, things were different now. Instead of having someone at the school to complain to about how boring my dad’s sermons were, Hunter was telling me about how nice it was to sleep in on a Sunday, or how beautiful his morning hike was when the weather was nice.
“Anyway,” I said, pushing away my thoughts, “if you could email your article to Mrs. Donlan, she can proof it before we upload it to the website tomorrow.”
While our journalism teacher was pretty hands off and let our class take care of a lot of the preparation on our own, she still proofread all the articles before I pushed the button to make the online newspaper go live on Wednesday mornings.
I left Hunter’s station to check on what Ben and Casey were doing. Ben and Casey were the two senior guys in charge of the lifestyle and entertainment section. After last week’s article on “How to Date Two People at Once Without Getting Caught” had been a huge embarrassment, I needed to make sure they’d come up with something better.
“We’re still in the brainstorming stage,” Ben said, the slight smirk he wore telling me he and Casey had been goofing off all period as usual.
“Yeah,” Casey said. “We’re just narrowing down all the options—” He cleared his throat. “Themanyoptions that we came up with over the weekend. But you can bet we’ll have something epic by the end of the day.”
“I hope so.” I sighed. “Because I really don’t have time to write your articles for you.”
Again.
I was pretty sure Casey and Ben had only signed up for this class because they heard Mrs. Donlan was retiring and thought it would be an easy A. Which, yeah, she seemed to have checked out of teaching us anything about two months ago. But just because our teacher didn’t care about the quality of the gazette anymore, it didn’t mean I was going to let it crash and burn under my watch.
“We did come up with one idea, actually,” Ben said, glancing sideways to his friend.
“You did?” I was skeptical of whatever these creative geniuses had come up with.
“Yeah.” Casey nodded. “We were actually thinking that it would be cool if you asked the girl who writesThe Confidantto post her stuff in the paper. Her stuff would fit in the lifestyle and entertainment category easily enough. Plus, you’d get the hottest columnandwouldn’t have her competing with the gazette anymore.”
“And do you know how I might reach her?” I folded my arms across my chest. “Have you figured out her identity yet?”
“Well, no…” Casey ran a hand through his curly, blond hair. “But she has her email listed on the bottom of each post. You could probably email her and ask.”
He thought I could just ask nicely and the person behind the most popular advice column I’d ever seen in a high school setting would hand over all her content to us?
I had no idea who was behindThe Confidant, but whoever it was had to be a shrewd businesswoman. She’d started the online publication almost a year ago, giving advice to students who wrote her with their problems and doing a dang good job at it, too.
When it first popped up, I had been curious and even been a fan since this “Confidant” girl seemed to really know her stuff. But when the Eden Falls Gazette started getting less and less hits each week asThe Confidantgained thousands of readers, along with sponsored ads from companies I’d actually heard of before, I knew the competition was steep.
“No, that’s okay,” I said, annoyed that they were trying to get out of doing their assignments. “I think I’d rather have you two actually write your articles and give our classmates something juicy enough to wipe out our competition.”
The school newspaper might be a tiny publication in the grand scheme of things, but it was my responsibility. And I wouldn’t have it failing because some know-it-all had suddenly decided to post her advice and thoughts on life at the boarding school for everyone to read.
I left Ben and Casey to their own devices and headed to the back corner of the room where our graphic designer, Addison, was sitting at her computer.
“How are things coming?” I asked, taking the empty seat beside Addison. “Were you able to fix the typo we found in the ad for the Valentine’s dance?”
“Just fixed it.” She clicked over to her photo-editing program and twisted her monitor so I could see it better. “It now says it’s on February twelfth instead of the fourteenth.”
