Chapter 47 - 46 : The Hit Piece

Chapter 47: Chapter 46 : The Hit Piece

As the Ferrari swung into the student lot, the row of narrow basement windows along Hollis was still lit.

Dom had woken up somewhere along the way and hadn’t gone back to sleep. All Rhett could tell him was that Chuck said they were in trouble, and nothing more. Dom called Kevin, and Kevin had only one thing to say. "The fax machine won’t stop. Get back here." After that, Dom didn’t say a word all the way to the freeway exit.

When he pushed the door open, everyone was there. Claire at her computer, Sam leaning against the editing desk, Kevin pacing the middle of the room. Even Sierra and Mac had come. Fax paper covered the table, the thermal sheets curling at the edges. Somebody had flattened a few and stapled them together.

Nobody said anything. Normally the first thing Mac did in any room was look for food. Tonight he sat on the arm of the couch with both hands clamped on his knees.

What Chuck had faxed over was the page proof for tomorrow’s front page of the Daily Breeze, four sheets in all. On the cover sheet, Chuck had scrawled one line in thick marker. Not a column this time. It’s news. You can’t answer it with a video. Under that, the headline ran big across the top of the first page. MONEY CIRCUS IN A COLLEGE TOWN.

Kevin spoke first. "So what now?" He pointed at the whiteboard. The two words Rhett had written last week were still up there. BATTLE ROYALE. "The thing we’ve been planning. Do we still do it?"

Rhett didn’t answer. He hung his jacket over a chair, picked up the stack of faxes and started reading from the first line.

Page one was pictures. The trampled flower beds had been replanted the next morning. Skip. Kids on roofs, beer cans in the bleachers, thousands of people outside the tape that nobody could have kept in line. Skip. The last one was the Ferrari, parked outside the main gate, every detail sharp.

The gray sedan from the evening before came back to him, and the long lens poking out through the half-open window.

He flipped back to the other pictures. This time he was looking at where they’d been taken from.

The kids on the roof had been shot head-on, from the roof across the way. The flower beds behind the gym had been shot from down at ground level.

On the day of the squid game, every corner of central campus had been taped off. To stand in those spots, you had to be inside the tape, carrying a pass the school had issued.

Whoever took these was a professional. But to stand where he’d stood, somebody had to let him in. Somebody inside the school had opened the door for him.

Page two was about his grades. He turned right past it.

After that came the money. A hundred thousand dollars in cash hanging in midair, students betraying each other to get at it, a casino on a college campus. People had been saying that since the day the first video went up. He’d been hearing it for two months, and it hadn’t gotten any newer.

Page three was the one that mattered.

At Fresno State, a sophomore had tried to jump from a second-floor dorm window into the pool for a video he’d titled Crazier Than MrPelican. He missed the pool and broke his collarbone.

In Austin, four college kids played live-action Red Light, Green Light in a mall, knocked over a stroller and ended up pinned to the floor by security.

In Arizona, somebody had turned Share or Steal into a punching game, where whoever flipped STEAL took a fist to the face. By the end of that video, the guy’s nose was visibly crooked.

The last paragraph quoted a parent. "I didn’t send my kid to college to learn how to get famous on the internet." Under that came the reporter’s own conclusion. MrPelican was teaching a generation of college students to treat their campus as a set and their classmates as props.

Rhett set the four pages back on the table.

Everything before this was aimed at him. This was aimed at the people copying him. He’d never met the kid with the broken collarbone, and by tomorrow morning parents all over the country would be sure Rhett had broken it himself.

And a hundred students hunting each other across campus, filmed right now, would play as the sequel to this article.

He walked to the whiteboard, picked up the eraser and wiped BATTLE ROYALE off the board. Then he turned around.

"Talk to me," he said. "The paper says we’re ruining college kids. What do you all think?"

The room was quiet for a moment. Kevin went first. "Honestly? The guy who jumped out a second-floor window into a pool? If it wasn’t us, sooner or later he’d have jumped off something else."

"Parents won’t see it that way," Rhett said. "Neither will anybody reading the paper tomorrow morning."

"The paper’s not all wrong, either." Sierra had her arms folded. "Millions of people watch us. Whatever we film, somebody copies."

On the arm of the couch, Mac suddenly sat up straight. "With great power comes great responsibility."

Everybody turned to look at him.

"Spider-Man!" Mac threw his hands up. "Uncle Ben! Right before he dies! Have none of you seen it?"

Dom cracked up. Rhett didn’t. He turned around, picked up a marker and wrote the line across the top of the whiteboard.

"Sierra’s right. Millions of people are watching, and whatever we film, somebody copies." He tapped the line with the marker. "So flip it around. What if what we film is worth copying?"

"Like what?" Dom said. "College kids studying? Who’s going to watch college kids study?"

"They’ll watch if there’s a prize." Claire didn’t even look up.

"The prize can’t be cash again," Sam said. "The paper just finished trashing us for hanging money over the campus."

Kevin snapped his fingers. "Student loans. Half my floor’s got loans. My roommate says he’ll be paying his off till he’s thirty-five."

Rhett wrote while they talked. A word, an arrow, a question mark, one thing crossed out and another added in. Slowly the whiteboard filled up. Some of it the others could follow. Some of it only made sense to him.

Close to an hour later, he capped the marker and stepped back. Everybody stared at the board.

"Is this... actually going to work?" Dom was the first to say it. "Chuck wrote it right there. This one’s news. It’s not something a video can fix."

Rhett shrugged. "Got to try, right? The president’s going to call me in first thing tomorrow. He can be the first test."

"An academic showdown?"

Whitman paged through the plan from front to back, flipped back to the first page and looked at Rhett across the desk. "This is your solution?"

The president’s secretary had called the dorm not long after sunrise. When Rhett walked in, the Daily Breeze was still folded at Whitman’s elbow. Before Whitman could pick it up, Rhett had already set the printed plan in front of him.

"Do you know how many calls I’ve taken this morning?" Whitman didn’t wait for an answer. "Two trustees. Three parents. An alumnus who paid for one of our buildings. And a producer from a morning show who wants to know if we’d like to come on and ’respond.’" He nudged the newspaper forward. "You promised me you’d make SCU the coolest college in America. According to this, it’s the biggest mess in America."

"So with the next one, I want to make it the hardest-working college in America."

Rhett turned the plan to page two. "Every question comes out of our own professors’ lecture notes, and every professor whose notes we use gets credited in the video by name. The library stays open all night.

"That morning-show producer wants a response? Invite him to the library at three in the morning a few days before the contest. What he’ll get on camera is a few hundred students studying. That’s also what the parents touring campus next spring are going to see."

Whitman’s frown didn’t ease. "The faculty won’t go for it. Half of them think you’re a clown."

"Then I’ll start by asking the one who hates me most," Rhett said. "The harder his questions, the better. Two hundred students getting stumped by the professor who can’t stand me. That’s the version people will believe."

"And the money? You planning to hang another box of cash over the campus?"

"No cash this time. The money goes straight from the sponsors into the students’ loan accounts. Not a cent passes through my hands. We post the books every week, same as we did after Katrina."

"And if nobody clicks the button?"

"Then the prize is just the ten thousand I’m putting in myself," Rhett said. "But you’ve seen our numbers. People will click."

Whitman said nothing. He looked down at the plan, then at the newspaper he hadn’t unfolded yet. The board met next week. If he did nothing, it was as good as signing off on every word in that paper. And if he was being honest, he couldn’t think of anything better than what was sitting in front of him.

"Three conditions," he said at last. "It has to be over before finals, and it can’t take up class time. Every question goes through the provost’s office first. And—" He tapped the newspaper. "This says your GPA is 3.2. I’m going to have someone look into how that number ended up in a newspaper."

"No need to trouble yourself, sir." Rhett stood and left the plan on the desk. "I’ll take care of that one myself."

Whitman studied him, then waved a hand. "Go. It can’t get much worse anyway."

Out of the administration building, Rhett kept adding to the plan in his head as he walked.

Sony came first. That first-negotiation right had been written for exactly this kind of moment, and with the PS3 launching in two weeks, nobody wanted college kids hearing some good news more than they did.

Then the banks. Wells Fargo and Bank of America were both fighting to sign up college students.

And Red Bull, which had spent a whole year handing out free cans on campus with no story to hang them on. He’d emailed them just yesterday, pitching the battle royale. With that on the shelf now, he’d have to walk in with something else.

Claire would have to start building the button tonight. Sam would cut the promo, and this time Dom would run the shoot on his own. As for the professor who hated him most...

"Rhett!"

Kelsey was jogging over from the other side of the lawn. She had on a new dress with the white cardigan over it, and the rose gold at the ends of her hair had been redone, brighter than last time.

"I saw the paper this morning." She stopped in front of him, a little out of breath. "My PR class used it as the case study first thing today. The professor asked what we’d do first if we were your publicist."

"What did she say?"

"She said apologize." Kelsey wrinkled her nose. "But I know you’re not going to apologize. Right?"

"Nope."

"What about you? What would you do first?"

Kelsey thought about it, then reached up and picked a stray thread off his collar. "Ask if you’d eaten breakfast."

Rhett laughed. "I haven’t."

"And you didn’t sleep last night either, did you?" She looked at his eyes. "They’re all red."

"An hour."

"An hour doesn’t count." She dug an energy bar out of her bag and pressed it into his hand. "Eat it. Don’t say later."

Rhett tore it open and took a bite. Kelsey watched him eat, and seemed about to say something else.

"So... tonight..."

The Sidekick in her hand buzzed, then buzzed again. She glanced down at it, didn’t answer, and tucked it back into her cardigan pocket.

"What about tonight?" Rhett asked.

Kelsey hesitated, then shook her head.

"Nothing." She took a step back and gave him a smile. "Go get ’em."

She turned and walked off, the hem of her cardigan lifting in the breeze.

Rhett stood there and took another bite of the energy bar. Her dress was new. He’d noticed that. The thought stayed in his head for about a second before the next thing on his list shoved it out. He took out his phone, scrolled to Ryan Cho’s number at Sony, and hit call.