EPISODE ITHE BEGINNING
“EVERYBODY loves a dead girl!”
“Not everybody, Cameron.”
“Almost everybody loves a dead pretty white girl.”
Blair shuts her locker door, turns to face her best friend. “So we what, cash in on the obsession of gross people?”
Cam huffs in exasperation at Blair’s unwillingness to see the light. “Not only gross people. Like, all people. Plus, everyone loves podcasts. Millions of people listen to podcasts.”
“You don’t love podcasts. Have you ever listened to a podcast?”
“I’m not everyone. The point is to develop something with broad appeal. Think how good it will look on our college applications if we break an unsolved case.”
“Like you need to worry about college applications,” Blair says. Cam’s transcript already reads like a completed checklist from a handbook for the precocious overachiever, and they’re only juniors.
“Think how good it will look on your college application, then. Are you in?” Cam pushes her chin-length black hair out of her eyes, the same impatient gesture Blair’s seen her make since the sixth grade, when Ms. Rubin partnered Cam and Blair on their end-of-year science project. They were as unlikely a pair then as they are now. Blair wanted to get her first A. Cam wanted to make a scale model of an exploding volcano. Cam almost blew up the classroom, Blair got an A+ for managing the chaos, and they’ve been best friends ever since.
Blair learned long ago that when Cam gets a Bright Idea, it’s easiest to say yes and deal with the consequences later. And, as far as Cam’s brainchildren go, Blair has to admit this could be a good one: turn their shared semester-long Journalism project into a podcast on the eternal local mystery that is the disappearance of Clarissa Campbell.
Everyone from Oreville knows the story of Clarissa. Her living ghost haunts the long rain-dark winters alongside the looming specters of Washington’s grim army of infamous serial killers and litany of missing girls. Clarissa Campbell: the prettiest, most popular cheerleader to spring from the soil of Oreville, who disappeared one flawless August night twenty years ago from a party in the middle of the woods outside of town. Clarissa Campbell, who vanished so completely that no one has found a trace of her—not the full investigative force of the Oreville police department, not legions of armchair sleuths and online obsessives, not television news crews or magazine reporters or Clarissa’s friends and family.
No one.
The odds of Blair Johnson and Cameron Muñoz, Teen Podcasters, succeeding where hundreds have failed are slim to none, Blair thinks. But No is not a command the vast machine of Cam’s brain is capable of processing.
“Look at all this,” Cam’s saying, thumbing through open windows on her phone. People magazine, CNN.com, conspiracy threads, true-crime forums, a missing persons database. Dozens of pictures of Clarissa’s face; Clarissa’s long, tan legs; Clarissa in her cheer uniform; Clarissa accepting an award. A candid shot of Clarissa looking melancholy, as if she can sense her own future as a legendary lost girl.
“People are obsessed. This one guy has a whole website saying Clarissa was abducted by a Sasquatch. He updates it monthly with new evidence. I bet we get famous.”
“I kind of doubt that,” Blair says.
“Seriously. Here”—Cam tabs to a page with two shiny-haired brunettes grinning like maniacs and holding stage-bloody daggers—“these chicks have a podcast where they just, like, get drunk and read the Wikipedia pages for crimes that are already solved and they make like a hundred thousand dollars a month.”
“I don’t think Mr. Park will like it if we get drunk,” Blair says.
“I’m not saying we have to get drunk,” Cam says. “I’m saying podcasting is easy.”
“We have to ask Mr. Park first,” Blair says. “He could say no.”
“He won’t say no. We are the best thing that has happened and will happen to Mr. Park in his entire career.”
Silently, Blair blesses Cam for that we. The likelihood that Mr. Park will remember Blair alone after graduation is small.
“Come on, say yes. It’ll be fun. She’s probably still alive. That would be amazing, right? We’ll find her drinking martinis next to a pool in Los Angeles or something. Maybe she’ll get us parts in the movie about her.”
“You have no idea how to make a podcast.”
“How hard can it be to record ourselves talking?”
“Cam,” Blair says, laughing, “I think it takes more than that.”
“Say yes.”
“Fine. Yes,” Blair says. She checks her reflection in her phone camera, the same self-conscious impulse Cam’s been trying to get her to give up since they both turned thirteen and Blair discovered boys.
“You look great,” Cam says. “You always do.”
“I do not.”
“Oh, shut up, B. Come on, I’m going to be late for Calc.”
But then Cam sniffs, wrinkling her nose at the all-too-familiar smell of rich jock that permanently precedes Blair’s boyfriend’s entrance. He sweeps up behind Blair, a vision of muscle and artful five-o’clock shadow and cheekbones: James Howard, the handsomest boy in all the school.
Cam would happily knife him.
He covers Blair’s eyes with his hands. She giggles, a sound she only makes around James. A sound Cam loathes.
“Guess who,” he says.
“Look, B, it’s your knight in shining armor,” Cam says.
Cam is not a subtle person, and the only reason James is unaware of the full extent to which she hates him is that it is unfathomable to James that any girl, even one as weird as Cam, could be wholly unmoved by his charms. Nevertheless, he avoids her as much as he is able, a tacit agreement that suits them both.
“Mmm, you smell good,” Blair says as he dips her into a dramatic kiss.
“Mom got you a new bottle of Axe?” Cam suggests.
James sets Blair back on her feet. “Ralph Lauren,” he says.
“Cam,” says Blair.
“Classy,” Cam says. “See you in Journo, B? I gotta run.”
“We’re going the same direction—” Blair begins, but Cam’s already darting away through the crowded hall, waving a hand behind her like a retinue-dismissing queen.
“She’s such a freak,” James says, not for the first time. “I don’t know what you see in her.”
She doesn’t know what I see in you, Blair thinks, rueful. Her bestie’s enmity toward her boyfriend remains the sole bone of contention between them. Why can’t Cam see how lucky Blair is? James is a senior, gorgeous, adored by teachers and students alike, all-state basketball star, rich parents, those eyes.
Plus, James is going places: Duke on a basketball scholarship, to be precise, the first Oreville High sports star to head so far in so long he made the front page of the Oreville Examiner.
And of all the girls James could have—which is any of them—he’s picked, for whatever reason, Blair Johnson. Their first date, she kept pinching herself. Their first month, she was sure he’d ghost. James and her?
But here they are, two years later, all in love.
“She’s like that with everyone,” Blair lies, not for the first time either.
James beams down at her, ruffling her carefully curled hair. She’ll have to spend five minutes in the bathroom later fixing the damage, but it’s worth it for the look in his eyes when he looks at her.
“I have to go to class,” Blair says.
“Meet me after practice?”
“I’m working on this Journalism project with Cam.”
“What project?”
“We’re making a podcast.” She opens her mouth to tell him about Clarissa. She doesn’t have Cam’s enthusiasm, but she knows it’s a good idea. James will get it.
“A podcast?” he says. “That’s so cute.”
“It’s not cute. It’s serious,” she says, and ruins the effect with another giggle.
“Sure, babe,” he says. “But it’s only the second week of school and you spend all your time with her already.”
“I don’t,” she says. She doesn’t. Cam has the same complaint about James.
The problem is, there’s only so much of Blair to go around.
“Have it your way. See you later.”
“Love you,” she says in a small voice, but he’s already walking away.
Blair hurries off in the same direction Cam headed, torn as usual between the person who knows her best and the person who—she swears—loves her most.
* * *
CAM’S TAKEN JOURNALISM every semester since freshman year. Not so much because she wants a future as a girl reporter—truth is, Cam’s not much of a writer—but because Mr. Park is one of the two things in Cam’s life that make high school bearable. Mr. Park, the only teacher who gets it—who gets anything—and Blair. This year Cam convinced Blair to sign up with her, which makes Journalism the only place at school Cam feels at home.
There are so many things Cam knows about Blair that Blair refuses to know about herself: that she’s beautiful, that she makes jumping hurdles in track look like ballet, that she’s generous and wise and funny, that she has an intuitive understanding of the thing you do with liquid eyeliner to draw matching flicks at the outside corner of each eye. (Cam tried once; it went badly.) Blair is patient and tolerant, supports Cam’s good ideas and checks her worst ones, sees through Cam’s prickle and bluster to the best of her. Cam’s strung together out of barbed wire and broken glass, a person too sharp for the world, every part of her trying to go in fourteen thousand different directions at once. It’s Blair who keeps her electrons in orbit around a fixed center, roots her in the real world, knocks her head back to level and her heart back into her chest.
Blair’s the most generous person Cam knows, and sometimes Cam wants to shake her, shout Stop giving other people everything that you are! But that’s Blair’s superpower. She can care and care and keep going with her own heart intact, a phenomenon that’s as incomprehensible to Cam as spooky action at a distance.
How a girl as good as Blair can’t see her own worth is a mystery far greater than whatever happened to Clarissa Campbell.
* * *
Cam crashes into Journo with her usual chaos energy. Mr. Park doesn’t bother to glance up at Cam’s commotion. Journalism’s an elective, and not a popular one: The whole class this year is six students. Blair, Cam, a couple of white freshman boys whose names Cam will be unable to retain until at least winter break, a white sophomore girl, and Sophie Jenkins, who’s Pinay. Sophie is a senior and a total vamp who crosses and uncrosses her legs in front of Mr. Park a lot, which is crazy, because Mr. Park is seven hundred years old. Like, at least forty.
Blair’s already at her desk, notebook out and pen at the ready. Cam collapses into the seat next to her, panting. Pens explode from her bag. Papers fly. A book falls on the floor with a bang. Where did that come from? Oops.
“Good of you to join us today, Ms. Muñoz,” Mr. Park says, as he always does when Cam is late, which is always. How is she always late? She really, truly does not mean to be always, always late. “As you’re all aware, today we’ll be discussing our semester reporting projects with each other. I’m excited to hear what you’ve come up with.”
The assignment was open-ended: Pick a topic, pick a medium. Pick a partner, or not, as they chose. But Cam knows that doesn’t mean Mr. Park will go easy on them. He gives his classes a lot of free rein, but his standards are high. It’s one of the things Cam likes best about him: He treats his students like adults.
Mr. Park is Korean American. He looks like he was airlifted in out of some teen show about a librarian who helps teenage girls battle vampires. His hair is a mess, his sweater a rumpled mass of moss-colored wool. Cam knows without looking that he’s sporting the same shapeless brown corduroy pants he wears every Tuesday.
And behind his funny old-fashioned glasses, his dark eyes are ruthless as mirrors.
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