Later that afternoon, Jimmy Whalen was missing from the assignment meeting for The Roundup. A chunky senior with a Bono mullet, Whalen thought being editor of the school paper was a career catapult toward 60 Minutes. He was as serious as the hole in the ozone, and when The Bear Facts, the Ursuline paper, had gotten the scoop on how their greenskeeper was burning leaves illegally, Whalen had stomped into The Roundup office and pinned the article to the whiteboard.

“This is the type of story we need to be going after!”

Okay, Ben Bradlee, got it.

But Whalen had not shown up that afternoon—in fact, the top two-thirds of the masthead, all the junior and senior editors, were missing. Instead, five minutes late, Father Walter Argerlich came waddling in with the layout boards of the latest issue of The Roundup. Father Argerlich was new to Jesuit Dallas, having come from Strake in Houston by way of German South Texas parishes. He had been appointed moderator of the paper because he was an amateur photographer and knew how to run the darkroom. Part irate Goldwater, part pudgy LBJ, he wore thick black horn-rimmed glasses, and his receding hairline was blotted with what looked like black shoe polish.

The priest threw the boards onto the teacher’s desk, put his hands on his hips, and caught his breath. Dan and the other freshman and sophomore cub reporters took seats as the priest composed himself.

“Well, I just came from the principal’s office. And the bad news to report is that The Roundup will not be publishing an October issue. As a result Mr. Whalen and his editorial staff have decided to resign in protest.”

Argerlich held up the front folio and showed the large red X Father Dallanach had run through Whalen’s page one story. The headline: bad flow day.

At the last dance held at Jesuit CP, the girls’ toilets had clogged with sanitary napkins, which caused a backup in the entire plumbing system that Brother Finnegan had snaked and run the discharge into the creek behind the school. What set the front office off entirely was that this was the first they were hearing about it—and Whalen had interviewed some tool in the Dallas EPA office about raw sewage contaminants and E. coli levels. The story might result in a city investigation of the school and a fine. All this caused by menstruation at an all-boys Catholic high school.

Argerlich rocked on the balls of his feet, his hands folded across his beach-ball gut.

“Mr. Whalen made a critical error by not running this story past me, and now we are missing our out-to-printer date. The question before us today, gentlemen, is what are we going to do moving forward?”