By Annie Liang & Michelle Gao
Class of 2007 & Class of 2008
Posted Wednesday, March 1, 2006, The OG, creative writing

Part 2: Joanne

The lead article in the Gargoyle. Joanne's hands quivered wonderfully in a mixture of delight and nerves. She'd been waiting three years for this moment — three years! And now it was hers. The lead story.

It had been a long and torturous road. Sophomore year, she'd had the perfect story. Everything was in place. She'd made an outline of everything that was supposed to happen on the night of winter formal: the night would go well, people would be happy, and then she would write about a perfect night. But then life had to go and mess it up.

How the hell was she supposed to know that some stupid freshman delinquent had planted a bomb in the dance floor? She was the reporter, dammit, not the cop. But as it was, all her planning and all her photos were suddenly useless — she had had to ditch the whole thing, and start over again.

Her story had been ruined.

And it had devastated her, but she still had hope. It wasn't her fault, anyway. And she couldn't help it if it wasn't part of her genetic makeup to be able to deal with emergencies. Besides, she had thought, my next story can't possibly go wrong.

It had.

Junior year, she'd let go of the whole dance idea. It was time to focus on something new. Something fresh. Like … politics. It didn't matter that she didn't know anything about politics beforehand; she was smart. She learned. And through her research, she knew — she just knew — that Kerry was going to win the presidential election instead of the monkey — ahem, Bush.

She'd done all the necessary interviews. She'd even managed to get an interview with Kerry himself (and that had taken some madd skilllz). Her story was going to be fabulous. “Kerry, the new president of our nation,” her headline had read. It was going to be a blockbuster hit. Hell, it'd probably even win a Pulitzer. Who would stand in her way? Who would dare? She was going to be famous and rich. The next Oprah. And then people who said she had “delusions of grandeur, it's-only-some-stupid-article” would all be sorry.

But that had fallen through as well. Somehow, a primate had bested a human. It was unthinkable. She had thought that she had covered all the bases … and she had. She had, dammit. It wasn't her fault that more than half the people in America had pudding instead of brains.

And now it was her senior year. Her last chance. It was in the palms of her hands, and she wasn't about to let it slip away. Not if she still had a breath of life in her lungs.

It was all planned. To the minutest [sic] of details. She was the senior editor of the features section now, and no one would be able to stop her. It was quite an ingenious plan, actually, if she did say so herself. (Which she did.) She'd simply asked to write the “What to do in CU” article — a minor, informal thing, really.

But she was about to turn it upside down and take it to a new level.

It'd been all too easy. A couple calls (and ahem, bribes …) to a couple well-chosen friends, a raid of Dallas and Co, the purchase of two yards of rope … and she was ready. No one would ever be able to guess that it had been an orchestrated affair, something she'd been planning for the past three months.

So on Saturday morning, she headed out to Curtis Orchard as planned, crazy with excitement. It truly would be a fabulous story, and she would pull every string she could get to put it on the front page. Which, if everything went well, wouldn't be too difficult. She grinned at her two “henchmen,” two boys who weren't from Uni, of course.

It would be simple. She would be at Curtis Orchard, and all of a sudden, two scary dudes in ski masks that didn't match the rest of their cowboy outfits would kidnap her. The photographer with her would take pictures from “behind a bush,” as they would say later to anyone who asked why he hadn't helped her.

She would escape heroically (after a long, dangerous adventure underground and through town of course), with her photographer following along the way snapping photos every five seconds or so to prove that everything she would write was true. She would amaze everyone with her bravery — her brilliance — and recount it all in detail.

And it had bloody well worked. She stared at the finished product in her hand, what she had worked and bled for (really! — she'd scratched her finger), and stroked the page affectionately. The headline jumped out at her in bold letters:

UNI STUDENT ESCAPES FROM REALITY

FIN