Chapter 10

Julia Mendel

One of the persistent challenges faced by the Wilson Chronicle was its attractiveness to rabble-rousing plebs. They tended to think that they could use the paper as a vehicle to expose the societies and break our grip on campus, like some sort of high-school Woodward and Bernstein. We handled them by giving them the most boring possible stories to report on until they got tired of it and quit or graduated, and by making sure the exec board was always composed exclusively of society members. However, that meant that we needed a continuous influx of freshmen who wanted to join societies to keep the system working, and the kind of freshman who wanted to join a society was typically more interested in sports or theater than the newspaper. We had gotten some interest from Nolan Pierce, one of the boys on the hall Jamie Calloway proctored, who Jamie was angling to tap for the Crimson Circle.

To Carrie’s delight, Nolan showed up with two other boys from his hall – Asher Montgomery and Theo Alvarez. For the first time in years, we ended up with more potential taps than plebs, although the drawback was that they all ranked sports as their top preferred beat. The way the paper worked is that freshmen were classified as ‘interns’ and assigned to shadow a beat reporter or editor until they made it through the fall semester without fucking anything up, at which point they were promoted to ‘staff reporter.’ Nolan got assigned to shadow me on the student government beat, beating out a girl named Midge who talked too fast and mentioned on the interest form that her parents were investigative reporters and she had a strong belief in transparency.

After getting our assignments, we were dismissed to meet with our interns. I explained the basics of student government to Nolan – what the positions were, how the elections worked, what the student government could actually do (more than most student governments, although less than naïve freshmen sometimes thought), and what I was allowed to say about the political rivalries within the senate.

“There’s a faction of students who believe that the student council is controlled by the secret societies and keep proposing initiatives they think will undermine them. Naturally, this annoys the students who just want to keep things running smoothly, and the meetings can get a little bit heated. We’re very conscious that everyone is in high school, just like us, and still learning to express their opinions in a civil manner, so we strive to report accurately without repeating statements that wouldn’t look good to a college admissions officer, if you catch my drift.”