Henry organizes a rescue effort for Westland Post’s redemption issue

Henry Page organizes a rescue effort for the Westland Post’s redemption issue after a missed stretch of work leaves the school newspaper facing a Monday print deadline with half its pages blank. The crisis begins in Henry’s withdrawal while Grace Town is absent, but it becomes a collective, two-day production sprint: Lola designs the pages, Sadie negotiates access to the newspaper office, and students turn private regrets into a shared theme. At the last reported count, the paper has only one spare page left, though the account does not establish whether the issue is completed or printed.

The deadline and the stalled paper

On the first Friday in December, Alistair Hink removes Henry from Mr. Hotchkiss’s math class and takes him to Principal Valentine’s office. Lola is already there, facing thirty tabloid-sized pages, half of them blank. Henry has been expecting the meeting, but has not been able to summon the energy to care: Grace has missed the entire week after Thanksgiving, and he has not even managed to enter the newspaper office. Lola had warned him that she would go to Principal Valentine if he did not get organized, but the warning had not moved him to act.

The principal makes the stakes concrete. The Westland Post must go to print on Monday; printing has already been paid for, and in its thirty-five years the paper has never failed to appear. Though Principal Valentine says she would remove Henry from his position if the choice were hers, Alistair Hink still believes he can assemble an issue. Henry is excused from class for the rest of the day and ordered to gather the writers, return to the office, and finish the paper.

Lola takes Henry to the office and calls the junior writers. That afternoon, Alistair Hink and Principal Valentine supervise and select time of your life as the issue’s focus. Henry briefly imagines that he might yet pull himself together and get the newspaper to print. The initial theme, however, is not the one that ultimately organizes the rescue: when the student team gathers later, Henry announces redemption as the subject.

Recruiting help under pressure

The work unfolds alongside another school event. Heslin has finally been ungrounded after throwing a party months earlier, and a rumor spreads that his next party will be just as large or larger. His parents leave him in charge of their house, and by Saturday afternoon a Facebook event lists about three hundred attendees. Henry, Lola, and Murray are not among them; Madison Carlson’s absence from the list surprises Henry. The group has other work to do.

An hour before they reach the school grounds, Henry posts an appeal in Heslin’s event, asking those seeking redemption to help save the Westland Post from destruction. Twenty-five people have liked it by the time he and his friends head for Alistair Hink’s office. They expect people to come, although neither the response nor the deadline is assured.

The attempt to enter the newspaper office becomes an improvised act of rule-breaking. Sadie, Henry’s sister, joins Henry and Lola as they scale the outer fence, with Ryan clinging to Sadie and laughing. The locks have been upgraded since Sadie’s teenage years of pranks, and the group does not know that video surveillance has also been installed. A security guard catches them while Sadie tries to pick the lock. She recognizes him as Jim Jenkins, a guard who remembers her too, and turns the encounter into a negotiation. After slipping him fifty dollars and offering to make coffee in the teachers’ lounge, she persuades him to allow them unlimited access to the English department and the newspaper office.

Inside, Lola begins designing the cover while Henry reviews the junior writers’ poorly punctuated submissions for material that can be salvaged and fitted to the theme. The room still carries traces of Henry and Grace, but that evidence has faded during Grace’s absence. The production problem is therefore also shadowed by a more personal absence: the office is the place where the issue has to be made, and a place that has come to hold memories of the relationship Henry cannot make himself ignore.

A theme built from private regrets

The rescue takes shape on a Saturday gathering at the office. Henry reckons that fourteen people have to do three months of work in two days. Sadie lays out snacks promised in the Facebook post, and the students settle around the office floor with Kit Kats and Mountain Dew. Henry asks for some kind of contribution from everyone, not only polished articles: a poem, cartoon, or musical score will do. His appeal rests on the idea that even people who cannot write have a story to tell, and that each person may want release from a past wrong.

The submissions give redemption a deliberately varied scale. Heslin writes a soliloquy about regaining his parents’ trust after his earlier party. Suki Perkins-Mugnai produces an article about the Gutcrushers and a poem about failing to call her grandfather before he died; she had thought there would be more time, and his last breaths were spent asking for her. Chance Osenberg writes about asking his father for a new phone just after his parents’ divorce, despite knowing the family could not afford it. Billy Costa recounts getting so drunk when he first met his girlfriend’s parents that he vomited in their bed.

Other contributions locate guilt in loss, family, and embarrassment. Murray draws dropbears as a thinly veiled expression of how much he misses his family in Australia. Madison writes about losing her puppy as a child and still not knowing whether she left the gate unlocked. Lola writes a haiku about the weenus, in penance for having convinced her mother that this was the name for elbow skin, and devotes a double-page spread to the memory of Ricky Martin Knupps II. The junior writers submit pieces about people they bullied in middle school, disappointing their parents, and making their siblings cry. The issue’s proposed absolution is not restricted to a single scale of wrongdoing; it makes room for grief, cruelty, family mistakes, and absurd personal embarrassments.

Sadie adds her own confession after Lola proposes a spread of handwritten admissions. Sadie recalls setting the school kitchen on fire as a teenager after making lemon curd cupcakes for Mr. Hotchkiss, her home economics teacher. She had been angry that Family and Consumer Sciences was taught as a subject and had set the kitchen alight; she describes it as the worst thing she did as a teenager. Although she jokes about the statute of limitations for arson, she begins writing before anyone can look up the answer. Her contribution turns the family member who secured the room into one of the people placing a personal wrong on the page.

The cover and the growing confessional

The next morning, Henry meets Lola outside his house at seven. She brings him a large coffee and asks not to be spoken to for two hours. They meet Jim Jenkins outside Alistair Hink’s office and return to work. The long day is physically punishing: Henry drinks large amounts of Red Bull and rubs his eyes raw as the effort continues.

When Lola shows him the cover, it depicts a girl in black and white against a grayscale universe, with an exploding supernova where her head should be. The image resembles an old penny-dreadful novel, and The Westland Redemption appears across it in orange letters. Henry recognizes that Lola has traced the girl from Grace, making the cover a ghostly imitation of her. Lola offers to find another model, but Henry calls the design perfect and asks her to print it at tabloid size and put it up for everyone to see. The image brings Grace into the issue even though she is not present to contribute.

The displayed cover and the continuing appeal draw more people to the office. The junior writers arrive at ten, followed by Buck and then two girls from Heslin’s party, whom Heslin has encouraged to stop by. Most of the pages are filled, but Lola’s handwritten-confessions spread still has room. The two girls, hungover, like the idea; they write down their sins and hand them over, and the group assures them that they will be absolved.

More students arrive as word spreads on Facebook. After the eighth person, Lola puts a sign above a drop box in the hall inviting people to confess their sins for absolution. Murray appears at lunchtime in a priest costume, carrying holy water, and sits beside the makeshift confessional to greet each person who comes. Classmates, friends, and students from other grades pass through over the course of the day. At five in the afternoon, Henry asks Lola how many pages remain to be filled. Her answer is that only one page is still spare. The rescue effort has transformed the initial blankness into a crowded, participatory issue, but the reported count leaves the final outcome open.