Okay so. I'm like,,,, fuckin ready for this story. For once I have a whole plot and everything all planned out are you proud? Basically this is like the book The Sugar Queen, which is really good btw, (it's by the person who wrote Garden Spells) but like,,, Newsies characters. If you haven't read the book, it's fine, you don't really need to, but if you have, you kinda know what's happening and have an advantage over everyone, aren't you special? (I think there's an excerpt on google reads or whatever if you want to read a little of it)
ok so here's just some character roles!:
Josey Cirrini: Katherine Pulitzer/Plumber (she also adapts some of Chloe's charter arc, just a heads up)
Adam Boswell: Jack Kelly
Chloe Finley: David Jacobs (minus the Julian part that's for Katherine oof)
Della Lee Baker: Spot Conlon (STCK WITH ME BLS I PROMISE ITS NOT WEIRD)
Julian (does he have a last name): Morris Delancy (ugh I know I'm so sorry)
Margaret Cirrini: Joseph Pulitzer
Jake (fuck what's his last name?): Racetrack Higgins (except not the cheating boyfriend part. More the 'boohoo I haven't seen my boyfriend for a while' kind)
The old nice lady that helps Chloe towards the end (I forget her name but she was so great): everyone's favorite theatre mom Miss Medda
Helena the maid lady: Hannah (bc I fuckin love this woman she doesn't get enough credit)
And the rest are added in as extra characters but they still have important roles! Don't worry I'm not gonna throw away Crutchie I'm not evil.
uhh on with the story?
(oh also i envision them as the 2017 Netflix version that was professionally recorded so that's how they're gonna be described)
When Katherine wakes up at eight o'clock precisely on Friday, she's excited to find frost painting her window and lightly coating the yard and shrubs out front. Good.
Frost means winter, and winter means exciting stories. More exciting than the fall festivals and summer flower shows, at least. Winter means house fires from woodstoves left untended overnight, blizzards that cripple the town, skiers and snowboarders flocking to the trails and mountains, looking for excitement.
She opens the window and sticks her head out, breathing deeply, relishing the crisp air that fills her lungs. She gazes out at the valley of Bald Slope, North Carolina, filled with old Victorian houses, trees older than the houses, and memorials older than both of those combined. Her day was brightened immediately.
Then she looks down and confusion clouds her mind, dimming her mood. There's a ladder propped under her window, cloudy ice droplets forming on the rungs, like someone had recently been there, dripping wet river water or something similar. She shakes her head to clear her mind and closes her window. It's probably from the builders who were there a few days ago fixing the siding. Yes, that was it. Despite her self-reassurance, she locks it after a moment's hesitation.
Distracted, she walks across her room to her closet, planning to grab clothes and get ready for the day. She opens her closet door, then screams and falls back, accidentally brushing her well-used Moleskin notebooks and countless papers and articles off her gigantic desk. They landed on the plush carpet with a muffled flump. Papers scatter across the room, but that isn't the problem.
There is a man in her closet.
"Fer God's sake," he starts sarcastically, "don't freak out."
She studies him carefully from her perch on the floor, a safe distance from her closet. She's seen him before, haunting bars and working at a few different places, the most recent being the newspaper her father owns downtown. He's well known for his gambling habits and getting into trouble with his posse of boys.
"Spot Conlon," she says, slowly standing, "what the hell are you doing in my closet?"
He grins- no, smirks, he has the audacity to smirk at her- and she notices distantly he has a small gap in his front teeth. It doesn't look out of place on him. He's wearing a dark red striped shirt and a dripping newsboy cap, which isn't odd, considering where he works, and the water explains the ice on the ladder.
His presence also explains the ladder.
"You kiss your daddy with that mouth?" He asks, but quickly falls short of whatever he was going to say after.
She hears her father stomping up the stairs, calling her name. Spot looks at her, panicked.
"Please don't tell 'im I'm here," he begs, something unrecognizable in his eyes. Desperation, maybe? She closes the door without a second thought, pushing down the warning bells in her head, the ones telling her about the consequences of closing it.
The first one? Keeping the man in her closet from being arrested. That was a big one.
"Katherine?" That was her father, opening the door slowly, filling it with the scent of ink and, for some odd reason, eucalyptus.
"Yes, Father?" She asks, mentally preparing herself for immense levels of passive-aggressive insults and reminders to hurry up.
He sends a noticeably judgmental look at the pile on her floor, the papers scattered around the room, the newspapers, and her heavily written-in notebooks, the margins scribbled in, notes on the front cover, cut out parts of the newspaper with drawings in them from the newsboy.
"What was that thump?"
"My uh," she looks around, searching for an explanation. "I. Fell?"
He nods distantly, not seemingly concerned. "Yes, well, leave it for Hannah to clean, then. I have an important meeting in my office at nine, and I don't want to see or hear you, understand?"
She nods dutifully.
"Good," He leaves, taking the tension with him, thankfully. She softly closes the door, turning to the other one, her closet door, with an obvious look of disgust on her face.
She opens it, glaring down at the face that is still smirking back up at her.
"So," she starts, pulling out an outfit for the day, "why exactly are you in my closet?"
He shrugs, picking at a loose carpet thread as he looks up at her through his dripping cap and bangs. "Dunno. I needed a place ta hide, and this was the first place I thought of."
She nods skeptically and makes a noise of agreement. "Uh huh. And this," she gestures wildly at her room, "was the first place you thought of?"
"No one would find me here," he says simply, shrugging again.
She points to the window. "Get out."
He shakes his head furiously. "Can't, sweetheart. I needs ta make sure they don't find me."
"Who?" She decides to ignore his terrible grammar, instead opting to get answers. She needs a hell of a lot of those before she decides to just let him live in her closet.
"Them." He spits out the word with such a livid anger that she almost steps back.
She starts arranging her clothes on her bed, grabbing towels and things she needs for her morning routine. "Okay, guess I'm not getting any specifics on that." She sends him an inquisitive look. "How long are you planning on staying here, exactly?"
He pretends to count on his fingers, looking up at her clothes thoughtfully. "Dunno. Coupla' months, maybe?"
She scoffs and grabs her checkbook off the desk, one of the few things that didn't land on the ground in a heap. She starts scratching in numbers, thinking about how much a motel would cost for a few months' stay. Spot looks at her accusingly, shifting around trying to see what she was doing.
"Whata' ya doin'?" He asks, sounding slightly desperate.
She waves her checkbook at him, looking at him through hair rumpled with sleep. "Getting you out of my closet. Hey, what's your favorite place to stay around here?" She stops suddenly. "Where are you going, anyway?"
"Ya can't just send me off!" He says, waving his arms, panicked. She closes her checkbook slowly, and he seems to calm down. "And ta answer ya second question, I'm headin' up north."
She nods doubtfully. "And where is up north?" She asks.
"North."
She sighs exasperatedly, dropping her arms to her side. "Okay. I'll be back."
She grabs her things off the bed and showers quickly, dressing and putting her hair up in a towel to dry.
She walks out and hears Spot whistle.
"That's quite tha updo ya got there, princess." She ignores him and checks the time. Eight thirty-four.
"So, how did you get in, anyway?"
"Ya shouldn't leave ya window unlocked," he said, debunking her father's theory that his position as a popular newspaper owner would keep anyone from breaking-and-entering or worse, out of fear that the newspaper would close down and the town would lose its only reliable source of news.
She sits down, wringing her hair out in her towel, watching him as he studies her room, and, more specifically, her closet. She stiffens as he scoots around so he's facing the back, and then gets up to stop him as he tentatively slides open the small door to the secret room.
Inside there are magazines and old newpaper articles, a few water bottles and granola bars, and her pride and joy. And old, expensive typewriter, the kind that old newspaper reporters would have used a long time ago, the kind that makes the area around it smell like fresh ink and the sweet smell of thick, old-timey paper.
It was a small space between her closet and the guest bedroom. The door to it was covered by an oversized piece of furniture left to rot in the extra room, so you wouldn't know it was even there if you looked in.
"Well, well, well, what have we got 'ere?" Spot asks, smirking in her direction. When she tries to push him away, he scrambles to the farthest corner of her closet, a bit more dramatically than she thought needed, nearly burrowing in her longer, more formal dresses.
She doesn't dwell on it too long, though, instead closing the door more forcefully than necessary.
"If you tell anyone-" she starts, backing away, letting Spot resume his former position smack-dab in the middle of her closet.
"Relax, toots, I ain't gonna tell anyone," he stays, leaning against the door. He sends her a knowing look, like 'if you don't tell anyone about my closet-squatting habits, I won't tell anyone about your weird, secret, typewriter-fetish-writing-room.'
She starts to brush out her hair furiously while glaring at him, then looks away and sets the brush down.
"So," Spot says, shifting awkwardly and trying to push the hanging clothes threatening to suffocate him out of the way, "this is tha life o' tha imf-infam-imfamous-infamous? Katherine Pulitzer?" He stumbles over the words a bit, and Katherine can't help but smirk at that.
"Plumber," she corrects.
"What?"
"I go by Plumber. It's my byline," At his confused look she adds, "the name I write under."
He nods, understanding. He'd probably had to go under fake names for a while, to stay under the radar.
"Oh."
"Yep."
The conversation ends there.
It's going to be a rough next couple of months.
The Pulitzer's new maid was one of the most interesting people Katherine had ever met.
Her father had hired her to help with paperwork and managing household chores when work got too busy, and she stayed in the small bedroom near the front door, anxiously peeking her head out whenever someone went downstairs after bedtime.
She wasn't interesting in the adventurous way, more in the personality department. She's like the cool aunt Katherine never had. She keeps tabs on anything that goes on around the house, and if she doesn't think Katherine's father would approve (like when Katherine lets the newsboys have some of the leftovers from the night before), she won't tell him.
She helps Katherine with her reporting jobs, sometimes letting bits of information slip about her father's meetings and who they were with, what they were about, and similar things.
She's also a very good cook.
Katherine thinks about this as she listens to her father's voice from downstairs through the vent. There are both perks and downsides to having a room right above his study. One of the perks is eavesdropping on his meetings, which is what she's doing right now.
The downside is listening to his computer whir and his frustrated mumbling as he pounds on the keyboard at two in the morning.
Spot is watching her curiously as she leans toward the vent from his sitting position on her closet floor. While her legs are crossed neatly, her hands folded on her lap, his are splayed out in front of him, his arms the only thing holding him up from falling onto his back.
"Whataya doin?" He asks, and his thick Brooklyn accent breaks through her thoughts. She gets up slowly, trying not to give away the fact that she was listening in on her father's very private and improtant meetings that were 'no worry or use to a young lady' in her father's words.
She gently places a towel over the vent to muffle her and Spot's conversation. He didn't know Spot was there, and she didn't need him thinking she was developing the talking-to-yourself habit.
"Listening to my father's meeting," she says simply, sliding on to her bed ungraciously. She lays on her back, staring at her white ceiling. She distantly wonders what the roof is like, and what it would feel like to sit on top of the large, two story house. Cold, probably.
"The meetings he 'cifically told ya not ta listen to?" Spot asks, something similar to amusement or faux pride lining his voice. "I don' even have ta help ya, yous already a rule-breaker. 'M so proud." He says, wiping a fake tear from under his eye. She rolls her eyes.
"I'm not 'breaking the rules-" she starts, then stops abruptly when she sees the time. Ten fifteen. "I'll be right back," she manages through a voice choked with excitement, and runs down the stairs, only slowing down in front of her father's office, so not to make too much of a scene, and into the front room.
She opens the front door before they can even ring the doorbell and looks out at the boys trudging up the front path of her house. Wait, boys. Boys, plural. There are two of them today, that's new.
She steps out onto the large porch and crosses her arms, watching the two figures get closer and pretending to be disappointed. One of the boys is smaller than the other, probably a kid, and the other, who is slightly taller, but no bigger in body mass, smiles when he sees her standing there, glaring down with her lips turned down in a frown.
"Racetrack. You're late." She says to the taller one, then bends down to shake hands with the little boy, who smiles shyly at her. He shakes her hand and she grins wide, because he's so cute.
Racetrack Higgins hands Katherine her paper and rolls his eyes fondly. She hasn't seen him for a while, and he definitely looks different. There are barely-noticeable dark circles under his eyes, and he doesn't hold himself with as much confidence and cockiness as usual. He looks tired.
"Yeah, yeah. Yap all ya want, old lady. It ain't gonna faze me no more," he says and looks at her expectantly. "Where's m' prize?" He asks, and she sighs.
"You'll get it once you introduce me to your friend," she says, and the little boy stands a little taller at her words. Race groans and flails his arms like a child.
"Fine, Katherine Pulitzer, this is Les Jacobs. Les Jacobs, this is Katherine Pulitzer. Happy now?" He gives her a look and she retreats into the kitchen to grab spare change and some leftover sticky buns wrapped in tinfoil from yesterday's breakfast. She hands the change to Race and the sticky buns to Les. Just as she's about to say her goodbyes, she realizes something.
"Wait, Race, did you say Jacobs?" She asks, glancing at the little boy again.
"Uh, yeah, did I stutter?"
Katherine thinks for a second. "Is your brother David?" Les nods enthusiastically.
"Ya didn't figure that out yet, Pulitzer? I thought you was a reporter, ain't theys supposed ta be smart?"
Katherine ignores him, turning to the boy. "Can you relay a message?"
Les nods again, apparently keen on not speaking.
"Can you tell Davey he owns me three cents? He skimped on change last time I bought a sandwich at the deli."
Race snorts.
Katherine turns to him. "You got a problem, Higgins?"
"Yeah, I do. You gets all ya fathers money, why'd'ya need three cents?"
"To prove a point," she says simply. "Also, where do you think your pay comes from, my father's pocket?"
"Ain't that where everything else comes from?" He grumbles. She ignores that comment.
"Hey, can we talk real quick?" She asks, glancing at the boy watching them closely. Race nods.
"Hey, kiddo, can yous go make sure we got th' rest of th' houses? Don't go too far, but I needs ta have a grown-up talk with good ol' Kathy here." Les nods enthusiastically and bolts down the stairs, nearly tripping and falling down, and Race cringes.
Katherine gently grabs his elbow. "Are you okay? How much have you been sleeping lately? I swear, Race, if you gave up your bed for another newsie, I'll hit you. That's Jack's job, and you know it-" She's stopped by Race's furious nodding and laughs at the look on his face.
"Speaking of Jack," she says, "where is he?" At the smirk that takes over Racetrack's face, she stops him. "No. Don't answer that. Did he drink the paint water again?" Race's smirk grows and she scoffs.
"Again? What kind was it this time?"
"Oil." He says, and Katherine makes a face.
"That must be bad."
"Yeah, he's layin' in bed right now, throwing up his guts. 'S why we's is here today, 'steada Cowboy. 'Course, you probably already figured that much out." Race snorts and turns to go. Katherine grabs his wrist tightly before he can starts the long trek down their yard, though.
"Are you sure you're okay?" She asks, concern lining her face and brightening her eyes. Race nods, swallowing the lump in his throat.
"Yeah-yeah, 'm good. Just been goin' through a rough patch. It'll get better," he sounds so broken, but he holds up the swagger walls and Katherine decides to let him off the hook.
"If you say you're good, I'll believe it. Just promise me that if you need to talk or a shoulder to cry on, you'll come to me, okay? I'll be here," she says, hugging him tightly. She would've loved for it ton last longer, but she hears her father's office door open and breaks away as the hushed voices fill the foyer.
She pats Race's arm reassuringly, then parts ways, heading back inside, missing the subtle wipe he makes at his eyes. She drops the paper on the table, only grabbing the comic section, the only page with half of the illustrations done by Jack Kelly, her usual newsboy.
She takes it upstairs, walking through the kitchen to avoid confrontation with her father or any of his business friends. When she's out their range of hearing, she pounds up the stairs and throws her door open, then slams it closed (gently) and flops on the ground in front of her closet. Spot looks down at her through eyes lidded with boredom.
"You was gone ages, I thought ya died," At her look he smirked a little and continued. "Too bad. I wrote a lovely eulogy in m' head. Wanna hear how it starts?" She shakes her head, but he continues anyway. "Katherine Plumber/Pulitzer was a girl. A real girl with boobs an' everythin'-" He tries to go on, but stops and holds his hands up in a defensive manner when she get too close for comfort, looking like she's going to smack him.
"Okay, okay, I'll stop! Jeez, don't get ya panties in a bunch or anythin'," he grumbles, backing into the wall of the closet. "Anyway, who was ya talkin' to? It got awfully borin' up here without ya yappin yer head off, ya know." She glares at him from her position back on the floor, but answers anyway.
"Racetrack Higgins. You know him?" She waits for a smartass quip or a snort and looks over, expecting to see his infuriating, shit-eating grin. Instead his face is dealthy white and his eyes are filled with guilt. "Do you know him?" She repeats.
"He was my boyfriend."
"Oh."
Alright heres the first chapter uhhh. There were a couple of parts I didn't like but i wanted to get it out so you'll just have to deal with it oof,,.,.,.,...,.,,
(also the oil race and Katherine referred to was oil paint not actual oil, just a heads up friends)
uhhh have a great day/night, where ever you are kiddos!