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My name is Marcus Daubney. I’m a reporter and a junior at Jonesville High. When I say that I’m a reporter, I don’t mean I’m an aspiring reporter. I also don’t mean I write for the school newspaper, which doesn’t even exist at my stupid, jock-worshipping school. I write for the Jonesville Bugle, a real paper. Print and digital. My mother once described me as a “born skeptic with an instinctual hatred of falsehood,” which I find very flattering. I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t trying to smoke out the truth. “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.” I read that somewhere and wrote it on a green Post-it, and it’s been stuck to my bedroom mirror for seven years. The story I’m about to tell you would make an amazing article, a career-making article. Unfortunately, I can never write it. Well, I can write it, but it can never be published. By the time you reach the end of this story, you’ll understand why.

I guess I should start at the beginning.

Sunday, September 10, 2017. I’ve just filed an article to Frank Schnell, my editor at the Bugle. It’s about the upcoming school-board election, and I feel pretty good about my work. It’s been a heated campaign, pitting a loud-mouthed “conventionalist” against a group of angry moms who think more money should be spent on the arts. It’s the same fight every year, and the conventionalist always wins. Jonesville is a jock town, always has been. “Reading, writing, and wrestling.” It’s not our official motto, but it might as well be.

While I wait for feedback from my editor, I text my best pal, DeShawn:

You in the hole?

He texts back:

Yup. Come on over.

So I head outside and hop on my ten-speed. Having spent the last six hours in my bedroom banging away on my laptop, it feels good to be outside on this fine September Sunday, cycling down Cherry Street. Jonesville is just about the most boring place imaginable—an outer suburb of Boston, solidly middle class, with a thin crust of new money that lends the place its piquant aroma of aspiration. But it does autumn very well. The russet trees arching over Cherry Street flicker in the sun, and there’s a faint smell of smoke from burning leaves somewhere. If you squint, you can almost imagine you were in a Norman Rockwell painting.

DeShawn lives in a two-story colonial on Elm Street, anchored by a huge, overgrown maple tree in the front yard. I ride straight up over his front lawn and around to the back, dump my bike by the basement door, and head inside. DeShawn’s basement is split in half. One side is an unfinished rec room with a secondhand bumper pool table and an out-of-tune piano slowly moldering from neglect. The other half, “the hole,” is DeShawn’s domain, a sovereign nation, devoted to robotics and modeling in a variety of materials. Nobody else ever goes there. But I have a passport and can come and go as I please.

The curtains are drawn on the ground-level windows, and DeShawn, lit by a trio of bendy lights, hunches over an unfinished insectoid robot with a soldering iron in one hand. The robot’s name is Terence, and he’s been working on it for six months.

I don’t believe in genius as a concept. I believe in commitment and focus. But if I did believe in genius, DeShawn would be its poster child. Nobody ever taught him how to make these robotic marvels. He taught himself. You want the art on DeShawn? Focus hard because he won’t fit into any of your boxes. He’s built like an athlete, but don’t let that fool you, he’s a hard-core nerd. Handsome in his way, with dark skin and a Lenny Kravitz Afro. He’s definitely better-looking than me. I’m the kind of guy who fades into the background: average height, average weight, pale, with dirt-brown hair. If you took all the white people in Massachusetts and blended them into a statistical average, you’d get me. DeShawn, on the other hand, is a true original.

“We should be outside,” he says, without ever looking up from Terence. “My mom says I need fresh air.”

“Yeah, I’ve just come from there. It’s overrated.”

My cell phone chirps as I pull up a chair and sit beside him at his workbench. It’s a message from Elena DePiero, my colleague at the Bugle. Apparently the police were called out last night to a keg party on Brooks Road, and Elena wants to know if I was there. I wasn’t, of course. I eschew keg parties. Or they eschew me, depending on your point of view. I’m pretty sure the party she’s talking about happened at Tara Budzynski’s house. I overheard people talking about it at school on Friday. Tara’s a junior, a middling field hockey player, marginally well-liked but not quite popular. Definitely not in the upper echelons of Jonesville High society, but reaching, baby, reaching for the stars.

It must be a really slow news day if Elena’s trolling high school keg parties in search of a lead. Then again, this is Jonesville. Every day is a slow news day. I tell her I’ll dig up whatever I can, then, while DeShawn works on Terence, I hit the usual sites on my phone. Sure enough, there’s loads of chatter about who hooked up with whom at Tara’s party, who broke up with whom, who got drunk, who got stupid. It’s the typical Jonesville bacchanalia, with the requisite pics to back it up: girls flashing their bras, guys chugging beer, other guys passed out, somebody’s naked butt, a still life of puke in the flower beds. Someone even captured video of the cops arriving while dozens of kids fled the scene.

“Hey, who’s that?” DeShawn asks, pointing to my phone.

On the screen is a poorly lit image featuring an unconscious girl being carried by three other girls across the front lawn, her long hair dragging along the grass.

“Is that Suze Tilman?” he asks.

It’s hard to tell. The unconscious girl’s face is obscured behind the legs of one of the other girls.

“Well, that one’s Nikki Petronzio,” he says, pointing to the girl on the left.

I can’t see her face, but I recognize Nikki’s distinctive hair: long and dark, like Cher from the early days.

“And that’s Lydia Moreau,” he says, pointing to the little blond pixie on the right. The third girl is hidden behind the others, but I’m guessing it’s Ani Chakrabarti, because these girls tend to move as a pack. Which, by deduction, means the girl being carried out of there is almost certainly the illustrious Suze Tilman, the fourth and newest member of their pack.

“I hope she’s not hurt,” DeShawn says.

“She’s probably just drunk.”

“Dude, everyone knows that Suze Tilman doesn’t drink.”

“Really? Everyone knows that? I didn’t know that.”

“What’s she even doing at that party?” he asks. “Since when do Suze and those girls go to parties?”

“DeShawn, you’ve never been to a party. How do you know who goes to them?”

He ignores my question. He’s too stricken by the photograph. “I’m really worried about her, man.”

To be clear, Suze is not a friend of ours. Neither of us has ever spoken to her. We’re juniors. She’s a senior. She moved here from Munich last year and was immediately co-opted by Nikki and her icy friends. Rumor has it she was born in the States but spent most of her youth moving from one European city to another, which makes her glamorous by Jonesville standards.

She doesn’t look so glamorous in this picture.

As a joke, I text the photograph to Elena with the fake headline: Cool New Girl Who Doesn’t Normally Drink Gets Trashed at Kegger.

A minute later Elena texts back: Stop the presses.

Like I said, Jonesville does autumn well, but every day is a slow news day.