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Leo whips open his copy Hanover High Herald with a flourish, the paper smacking against the stale air of the Student Council office. The newsprint is wrinkled from his multiple anger reads, his hands gripping it so hard it ripped in some places and rippled in others. Coffee cups and soda cans have left circle-shaped blotches on it from all the times he’s used the paper as the trash coaster it is.
Like each time he picks it up, his focus is on one article, headlined in bold below the masthead.
Dunn is Done by Delilah Moore.
In a landslide vote, current Student Body President Leo Dunn lost his shot at a senior-year term to rival Neveah Holt — 759 votes to 1,136.
Holt’s victory comes after a hard-fought month’s long campaign, the likes of which this school has never seen, resident Hanover High history buff Ms. Jameson told this reporter. When students filled the auditorium for a debate, for the first time they wore mass-produced candidate logo wear. The political rally on the outdoor track was another HHS first, where Dunn supporters gathered, chanted, and hoped for a win.
Such a campaign isn’t surprising considering Dunn’s presidency was unconventional from the start, beginning on what he said was a dare from some friends. Since being elected, he’s made changes that have pleased some, but left others confused, such as changing the Student Council office into a “bro pad” and making the Homecoming theme “Tiger King”—both of which sparked controversy from parents, faculty, and students alike.
By the end of last school year, Hanover High was experiencing what student council President-elect Holt dubbed “Leo-nitis.” While it’s pronounced like the Greek king Leonidas, Leo-nitis is actually a play on senioritis, and describes indifference towards school politics after a mind-numbing year under Dunn’s rule, Holt said.
But there wasn’t enough indifference to give Dunn a win. Since his loss to Holt, he hasn’t said much other than telling Holt supporters to “suck it.” Holt has since made a shirt that says “no thanks” which people believe is a response to…
Leo grunts, and begins to crumple up the paper, only stopping at the knock on the metal doorway to see his brunette nemesis—well, one of his nemeses. The voice of the article has become flesh.
“Delilah,” he says, before returning to the important job of balling up her work.
“Leo. Are we still good for the interview?” she asks, holding up a notepad, file folder, and pen, as if he didn’t know what an interview entailed.
He doesn’t have any options other than to say yes to her invitation.
When he tried to reject it before, Principal Meyer told him it was in the Student Council bylaws that the outgoing president had to speak with the student press. Even if Leo could say no, he doesn’t know if he would. At least not every time. He enjoys riling Delilah up way too much to completely cut himself off from the opportunity.
“I wouldn’t say ‘good,’ but I’ll do it. Take a seat.” He waves to the chair made out of metal and hard plastic in the corner across from his cushy, upholstered desk chair. Simultaneously, he arcs the newspaper into the garbage, and watches it bounce off the wall instead. “Just need to take out the trash,” he tells her.
She pulls a tight smile, and sits, crossing one corduroyed leg over the other. “You’ve had a busy few weeks.”
“Yep. A lot to do when you’re president. And like you’ve written, I’m on borrowed time, so I have to do what I can while I can.”
“I don’t think I phrased it—,” she says.
“Anyways, where do you want to start?” Leo asks.
“Okay. How about…” Delilah flips open the manila folder in her lap, fishes a paper, and lifts it for him to see. It’s a split screen image with him on one side, and one his classmates, Derrick Jones, on the other, and lines of texts beneath it, some highlighted. “Your TikTok, telling people boycott Mrs. Jameson’s class.”
Leo rolls his eyes and reaches for the box of licorice on the desk, grabbing out one of the red twisted gummies. “That wasn’t my TikTok. I made a duet.”
“Of you nodding and agreeing to him saying that people should walk out of her class, which you shared with your hundreds of followers,” she replies, scribbling down his words without looking away from him. How she’ll be able to read it later, he doesn’t know, which he could use to his benefit if she writes something he doesn’t like.
Leo shrugs and bites the Twizzler, ripping off its edge. “It was an interesting point. She teaches about free speech, but then she cut the kids off in class for supporting me.”
“She cut off a fight about the election so she could teach. She told the people who were chanting for Neveah to be quiet, too.”
“And who told you that? Neveah’s people?”
Finally, Delilah’s pen stops moving, and she looks at Leo like he had told her their goblin mascot was actually a real creature.
“No, I told myself that because I was there, and from what I saw, Mrs. Jameson didn’t deserve to have a bunch of students walk out of her class for doing her job.”
He scoffs and waves away the idea like an offending smell. “Principal Meyer made most of them go back to class in like 5 minutes, so it’s not that big of a deal. Besides, the point is, I didn’t make the TikTok, so if you want me to answer any other questions, we should move on.”
Delilah purses her lips, but flips the page over in the spiral bound notebook. “Fine,” she says, and pulls another sheet of paper out from her folder, this time a copy of the Student Council agenda from the week before.
“Do you have a copy of everything I do?” he asks.
“I try to. You have a habit of deleting things,” she replies, and he sighs. The whole point of deleting things is so people don’t have a record of it, but of course Delilah has found a way around this. “At the last Student Council meeting, you made a resolution to make a Post-Presidential Program, or as you called it, the PP Program.” She looks up from the sheet. “You do know it should be the PPP if you’re just going to abbreviate it? There are three Ps.”
“It’s catchier the other way,” he says, leaning back in his chair, and propping his Nikes on the edge of the oak table. It’s old, at least 30 years from the names and class years carved into the sides, and marred enough that no one has told him not to disrespect the furniture. “My friends thought it sounded good.”
“I’m sure.” Leo can sense the sarcasm in her, as well as that there’s more she’d like to say, but won’t. Whatever it is, he’d bet his next paycheck that it was something insulting. “Whatever the name, you said it would give people who were once in Student Council special privileges—prime parking spaces, able to skip ahead in the lunch line like a Disney fast pass, get free tickets to games and dances.”
“Yeah, I think people who gave their time to the school should be thanked, like presidents get protection and stuff.”
She arches an eyebrow at him. “And it’s just a coincidence that you’re pushing for this as you’re going to be a person who was once in Council right?”
Of course not.
He wants what he deserves, and he deserves better than what he’s been given so far.
“Right. It’s all for the people,” he says, and helicopters the Twizzler around just to catch it between his teeth.
Delilah begins shuffling through her folder again, and he fights the urge to rip it from her hand and frisbee it across the office. “Is that why you did an Instagram Live, saying you were going to start a ‘student leadership’ club? For the people?” She lifts a screenshot of it as if he didn’t remember—which, if he’s honest, he didn’t until he saw the image of himself reclining in the office chair with an AirPod perched in his ear and a Gatorade bottle in his hand.
“All people except you,” he says.
“Well, that fits, considering you said you wanted to ban women from the office and officially make it a ‘bro only zone.’”
“Yeah, because it’s a great idea. One I should’ve done before this apparently.” Swinging his legs off the table, Leo’s feet hit the carpet with a smack that makes a tiny ripple inside his water bottle. If he was peeved at Delilah before, he’s full-on pissed now, but she has no reaction. Just the same stare he’s seen on her in Civics class during the point-counterpoint exercise that she always wins. “You know, you’re just a reporter for a high school newspaper no one reads, so maybe you should get off your high horse and stop acting like you’re Woodward and Bernstein or whatever.”
She bristles and the side of her crimson-painted mouth tugs into a frown, and he feels his own lips spread into a smile.
Finally, a chord struck.
“Maybe you should stop acting like a madman clinging to a high school presidency then. A bitter lame duck who, by the way, does read the paper,” she retorts, pointing to the trash can.
“Whatever.” He spins in his chair, so he faces the white board marked up with winter dance ideas, and a game of dirty hangman his friends hadn’t finished. “You can go. I have important president stuff to do.”
“Seems like.” Leo listens to the chair creak as she stands, and her footsteps recede down the hallway before he turns back around, and propels himself over to the door to slam it shut.
Screw Delilah. Screw Neveah. Screw everyone who voted against him.
For at least one more week, it’s his office, and no one is going to make him feel like shit in it. Who cares what they think of him, anyways.
He scoots back around the table, past Delilah’s chair and the garbage. But he only makes it a few feet past the latter before he stops and stares down the balled-up newspaper. Much like the writer whose story is printed on it, the paper doesn’t flinch.
He should leave it there, maybe even crush it with the sole of his shoe. Instead, he picks it up, and for the 10th time, irons out the wrinkles against the table’s edge. Popping the cap off his Sharpie pen, Leo places the tip on the newsprint, watching the ink bleed into a blob. He has an idea, and this time, he’s not going to air it to the world so Delilah can place it in her neat little file. She’ll only find out when Leo wants her to and there’s no way to stop it.
Start own better newspaper.
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