When Elephants Fly Read online

  Carla has been crushing on Sawyer since forever. She has great taste. But he’s dating a model named Wyn who he met in Europe.

  Sawyer runs fingers through light brown hair, gray eyes in a lightly tanned face momentarily downcast. “Thanks?”

  Carla turns, a little smile on her lips. “By the way, Lily, you were voted most fun to give a makeover.”

  Sawyer puts his arm around my waist and propels me away. “And I need a makeover, why?” I ask over my shoulder. I will pay for my snarkiness later.

  “You could wear some of your own clothes,” Sawyer says, glancing at the oversize Stanford sweatshirt I swiped from his bedroom. He pulls the hood over my head.

  “Careful! You’ll ruin my hair.” We both crack up. I’ve worn my hair in a knot since I was eight. Otherwise the curls sprouting like twisted macaroni from my scalp would make it impossible to see. A freshman running by squashes my little toe. “Ow!”

  “The danger of wearing flip-flops out of season,” Sawyer notes, giving the kid a light shove.

  I watch the guy ricochet off a locker. “We’re a long way from Gary Haycox.” Gary was back in second grade. I was taller than Sawyer and popular because I kicked ass at dodgeball. The fact that I used the bigger kids as shields eluded the brainiacs in my class. Sawyer wasn’t coordinated yet, probably because his feet were almost as long as he was tall. He was picked last for every gym team unless I was captain. We weren’t friends yet, but I had a thing for underdogs.

  Sawyer had another strike against him. Back then he liked to wear superhero costumes to school for no reason. One day he came as Wonder Woman. He liked the golden lasso and bracelets. Gary tripped him during recess, then tried a move he’d seen on WWE wrestling. He straddled Sawyer’s back, attempting to twist my friend’s leg around his own neck. It looked impressive but überpainful, so I punched Gary in the nose. It broke.

  My dad upped my therapy with Ms. Frey to twice a week. Sawyer and I became best friends. We stayed that way even after he became insanely coordinated and effortlessly popular.

  “It’s a good day to have a good day,” Sawyer says.

  I snort again. We wouldn’t have Freyisms to share if I hadn’t broken Gary’s nose. I nudge Sawyer’s shoulder. “Seriously, why’d you do it?” Sawyer turns to wave at Jonah, a pencil-thin freshman with ginger-colored hair. Jonah wears a JV Track T-shirt, even though he’s been kicked off the team by his own teammates. “How long before he gives up and puts on a different shirt?” I ask.

  “He just wants to fit in.”

  “That ship has sailed.” Jonah told his dad that there was a keg at a preseason track party. His dad called the principal. Jonah is now a pariah.

  “Hey, Jonah,” Sawyer calls.

  The kid’s super fair cheeks turn bright red. Sawyer is probably the only person talking to him in the whole school even though they have the least in common. I nod at Jonah. Sawyer’s position in high school is a lock. I have to keep my head down.

  “Lily, I’m just trying to give you possibilities,” Sawyer says. “If your internship goes great, you’ll have more options for college.”

  “I’m not going to apply to USC.” The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is one of the best in the country. It’s a five-hour drive from Stanford, or a short flight, which I can’t afford but Sawyer Cushing Thompson, heir to countless pulp and paper mills responsible for decimating Oregon and Washington state forests, can.

  “We could hang out on the weekends,” Sawyer says. He whispers in my ear, “‘When no one knows you, you can be anyone, anyone, freedom from everyone, everyone.’”

  Sawyer is quoting a Swift Jones song. I am not a fan of pop star SJ, because I don’t relate to her particular brand of teenage angst. But she’s Sawyer’s favorite singer. When I hang at his house, which I do a ton to avoid feeling like I’m an amoeba under my dad’s microscope, Sawyer picks the tunes. Those tunes revolve around Swift Jones.

  “You do realize that I hold your popularity in the palm of my hand. If anyone else heard you quoting SJ, you’d be screwed. Guys do not quote SJ without serious hazing.” Sawyer scrunches his forehead. He sucks at feigning worry. I stamp my foot. “You have to pick a different name.”

  “It’s my money. I adhered to the elephant-naming contest rules: five dollars per entry. Shall I do the math?” He pretends to count on his fingers. “Five dollars times twenty thousand entries, each with the same name, equals $100,000. I win.”

  It’s unreal that Sawyer has access to that amount of money. But he does. It’s a drop in his oversize bucket. “What if the baby elephant is a boy?”

  “The name Swift Jones is unisex. Another reason SJ is perfect.”

  I’m not going to win this fight. “I’m sure Dr. Tinibu will be thrilled. And if blowing a hundred grand doesn’t make your father talk to you, nothing will.”

  The bell rings. Sawyer walks into the doorway of his AP physics class. My class is across the hall: math for dumbasses.

  “After school?” Sawyer asks. “Betty is making apple tarts.”

  Betty is his family’s cook. My mouth waters. “Can’t,” I say. “Internship.”

  “Still going okay?”

  “Yeah. They hardly know I’m there.”

  And that’s how I need to keep it.

  3

  “The boss wants to see you,” Shannon says when I arrive at the Pennington Times after school.

  “Um. Why?”

  She looks at me over the top of her bifocals. “He buzzed for you. That’s all I know.”

  Shannon McDaniels is a thirty-eight-year veteran news reporter at the Pennington Times. She sits five feet to my right behind one of the desks that form rows of five in the open space that is the Pennington Times newsroom. The minute I walked into this place, I was drawn to the sense of order. The linoleum floors are a no-nonsense gray, and there’s perfect symmetry in the metal desks, halogen lamps and matching laptops. I’m an intern working three afternoons a week, starting last month. Except for a few tiny stories, I’ve mostly made phone calls for reporters to double-check facts and quotes. There’s no wiggle room in reporting. Everything must be truthful, verifiable. I like that, too.

  Right now there’s a deep crease between Shannon’s eyebrows. She wasn’t happy to be saddled with an intern, even though she’s the one who interviewed and hired me. Her beat is politics and big legal cases. Shannon turns back to her screen. Its glow illuminates a constellation of freckles and washes out her pasty skin. Without looking at me, she pulls the pencil stuck in her strawberry blond braid free and throws it like a dart. It whizzes by my right ear.

  “Don’t keep the King waiting. Rumor has it he has hemorrhoids. Scoot.”

  With each step toward the editor in chief’s office my skin tightens. I wish I’d worn something other than Sawyer’s lacrosse T-shirt and worn Levi’s. The newsroom is a pretty informal place, but I’ve never met the big boss, who from a distance looks like a football linebacker, except he’s bald. Maybe he asked for Lucy in Accounting, not Lily.

  “Kid, grab me a coffee?” Bart Jacobs calls. He’s on Sports. I think he used to be a pro athlete. But maybe that’s just because he chews tobacco then spits it into a Diet Coke can.

  “Sure. Americano. But I need to see Mr. Matthews first.”

  “Oooh,” Bart says. He tosses a Nerf football at my head. I duck. “Your eye-hand coordination sucks.”

  The editor in chief of the Pennington Times is the only person at the newspaper who has an office. Right now it smells like take-out Vietnamese from Silk, the restaurant one block away. On his desk is what looks like a #7, crispy duck rolls. I knock on the glass of his open door.

  Mr. Matthews is focused on the oversize foam box containing his lunch. He stabs a duck roll with the end of one chopstick and drops it into his mouth. “Come in,” he says betw
een chews. “Those articles...”

  “Um...”

  “The zoo ones.”

  That’s my internship news beat—really, really small local happenings. I’ve covered a few restaurant openings, a visiting children’s book author (who answered all my questions in rhyme) and the impending birth of Raki’s calf, which, stunner, a few people actually seem to care about. Mr. Matthews looks up. Deep-set, hazel eyes set in a light brown face squint at me like I’m next on the menu.

  “Have a seat.”

  I sink onto the wooden chair across from his battered desk and remind myself that I don’t really need this internship. I’m attending Oregon Muni College next year. It’s small, state run, a bus ride from our loft, and everyone who applies gets in.

  Mr. Matthews holds up an issue of the P-Times folded open to the elephant-naming contest. “Whose idea was this?”

  “Mine,” I admit, wincing a little.

  “It was a great idea.”

  The bunched muscles in my back release. I’m a skydiver who just realized she has a parachute. “Cool.”

  “What made you think of it?”

  “The Pennington Zoo has one of the largest elephant habitats in the country. But Dr. Tinibu, the zoo’s director, said that their exhibit still needs work. Her short-term goal is to create new features in the elephants’ habitat so they don’t get bored. Eventually she wants to build a sanctuary separate from the zoo where elephants can be rotated out of the exhibit to a nature preserve where they’ll roam almost free.” I suck in a lungful of air because I forgot to breathe.

  Mr. Matthews toys with a duck roll. “Back to my question.”

  “Sorry. I thought a contest might hook the public into caring about elephants, help raise some money for their exhibit.”

  “How’d you know anyone would pay to name an elephant?”

  “People like to name things—boats, buildings, even their cars. I know a guy who named his pinkie toes.”

  “Why?”

  “So they’d feel as important as his other toes.” That was my father, when he still had a sense of humor.

  “What names have been popular?”

  “Daisy if it’s a girl. Duke for a boy with Buddy a close second.”

  Mr. Matthews almost smiles. “How much has the contest raised?”

  “Until yesterday? Eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  “And a few hundred more today?”

  “Um. One hundred thousand more.”

  Mr. Matthews shakes his head like he heard wrong. “What?”

  “Someone sent in an anonymous check for $100,000 this morning.”

  “Must be a hoax.”

  “It’s real.”

  Mr. Matthews whistles. “I’ll be damned. Me? I hate everything about zoos,” he says, fiddling with his brass nameplate. “Remind me of prisons for animals. What’d you think of the current elephant exhibit?”

  “I didn’t see it. Dr. Tinibu and I talked over the phone.”

  Mr. Matthews leans forward. “Why?”

  “I don’t, um, drive?”

  “Ever heard of a bus?”

  I sit up straight, because he sounds annoyed. “Um. It’s quicker to get the information by phone?”

  Matthews tosses the empty foam container into a can beside his desk. “Easier, you mean. That’s the problem with your writing.”

  He’s actually read my writing enough to know there’s a problem with it? My face gets warm. “It’s not that it’s easier,” I try to explain. “It’s...more unbiased.”

  “It’s a local-happenings beat. People want to get jazzed about a new restaurant or their favorite author, even if she’s annoying as hell and speaks in rhymes. They want to be excited about the birth of a baby elephant after a two-year wait for the little bugger.”

  I’ve stretched the tiny hole in Sawyer’s shirt to the size of three fingers. I should just nod, agree, thank Mr. Matthews and then scram. But he’s messing with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code. The Code is something I researched after Career Day my freshman year pointed me toward journalism. It’s a large part of my Twelve-Year Plan.

  Silently I tick off the four major tenets because it’s the life preserver I cling to whenever waters get turbulent.

  Seek Truth and Report It.

  Minimize Harm.

  Act Independently.

  Be Accountable and Transparent.

  Nowhere in the Code does it say I have to make people excited or that it’s important they care. What it does say is to be logical, emotionless, responsible and balanced. If anyone asked me what superpowers I’d want, it’d be those four traits.

  “But if I go to the zoo, I won’t be able to write an objective article.”

  Mr. Matthews frowns. “Why’s that?”

  My palms are instantly damp. Violet used to take me to the Pennington Zoo. She was fascinated with the tigers. She’d make me stand in front of their exhibit for hours to hear them roar, and then we’d practice our own throaty growls. Violet also loved the bats, and we’d stay even longer to watch them fly. She said it was research. “I hate everything about zoos, too.”

  Mr. Matthews narrows his eyes like he’s trying to see me better. “Kid, you don’t have to love every aspect of a story. But when it’s a human-interest piece, you do have to figure out a way to infuse life into it while still reporting the facts. You want to be a great reporter?”

  I took this internship because Ms. Frey harangued me into it. All I want is to learn the basics about being a reporter so I can work for a small-town paper with a beat that covers parking tickets, jazz bands, maybe G-rated movies where an animal doesn’t die. It’s the perfect job for me, at least for the next twelve years. “Maybe,” I say.

  “Then figure out a way to connect with a story no matter what it’s about. Despite your flat prose, you’ve already hooked readers with that elephant contest. Do a follow-up.”

  “About the elephant?”

  “No, about the Pope’s visit to the US.” Mr. Matthews turns to his computer screen. “What are you waiting for?” he asks. “Get the hell out of my office. It’s late, but call the zoo lady and try to get that interview today.”

  4

  Dr. Addie Tinibu sits at a desk piled high with files and folders. “Budget cuts,” she says with a wave of her long fingers. “I’m now the director of the Pennington Zoo and head paperwork pusher.”

  Dr. Tinibu’s voice lilts like a song. She’s very pretty with high cheekbones, dark brown skin and a smile that takes up half her face. “Thanks so much for letting me interview you on such short notice,” I say. My plan is to ask a few quick questions, give her the check, then head home to write my article. “So. Dr. Tinibu, where did you grow up?”

  “Call me Addie. Please.”

  “Okay. Everyone calls me Lily.”

  “Lily, I’m from a very small village in northern Kenya.” She walks over to a faded map on her wall and points. “It’s near the Nairobi National Park.”

  “How’d you end up in Oregon?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  All I need is one good quote about elephants. I take a step closer. “I’d really like to hear it.”

  Addie unzips her red fleece vest. “I had seven brothers and sisters. We were the kind of poor that I can still feel in my belly. My father supported us by poaching elephants.”

  My breath sticks and I look up from my notes. “Killing them?”

  “Yes. Then selling their tusks on the black market. An elephant’s two full tusks can be worth as much as $10,000 if a poacher is willing to kill the animal illegally and hack its face off to remove the ivory. The rest of the animal is left to rot.”

  A chill creeps down my spine. “That’s horrible.” Crap. I’ve just insulted Addie’s father.

 
She sits down, gesturing for me to take the chair across from her, then rests her elbows on the cluttered desk. “Yes, it is pretty horrible. Poachers illegally slaughter up to thirty-six thousand African elephants annually.”

  “Are there enough elephants for them to survive?”

  Addie twists the gold ring on her thumb. “Birth rates can’t keep up with the rate that they’re being slain. Up to a hundred are killed each day.”

  “How many are left?”

  “Approximately four hundred thousand, which means that wild elephants in Africa may become extinct as early as ten years from now.”

  My shoulders sag. “That’s a depressing thought.”

  Addie nods. “The situation is even worse for Asian elephants, like the ones we have at our zoo.”

  “Poaching?”

  “Yes, but also Asia is the world’s most densely populated continent. Every day elephants lose more of their natural habitat. As a result, they’ve destroyed property and had deadly interactions with people. So they’re killed with guns or poison. They’re also captured for illegal wildlife trade.”

  “How many Asian elephants are left?” I ask.

  “Only about forty thousand in the wild.”

  I stare at my notes, not sure where to go from here. “So your father?”

  Addie runs a hand over her cropped hair. “It’s the only life he knew. But when I was nine, I got a job cleaning pots in the kitchen of the Henry Shaw Wildlife Trust. The people I met there, and the animals I watched them rescue, changed my life. I earned a scholarship to an all-girls’ high school, then to a college in America. Grants allowed me to get my PhD in zoology.”

  “You dedicated your life to protecting animals, but do you ever feel bad that they’re in cages?”

  Addie sighs. “It’s not perfect. We do the best we can with the money we have to give each animal the highest quality of life possible.”

  Silence stretches between us. I wait for her to say more. She doesn’t, so I dig into my backpack. I had a whole speech ready for presenting the contest check, but instead I just give it to her.