Chapter 4 Sebastian
Nine minutes. Sebastian had been alone at the table in the school library for nine minutes, and all his mature self-talk was
growing less effective with every second that passed. He jumped up from the table for easily the fifteenth time and glanced
at his watch for at least the thirtieth.
Finally he heard footsteps in the distance. There weren’t classes on Fridays, so he knew it was them. And if there had been any doubt, it went away as the rhythm of Old Man Kimball’s walking stick, tapping against the terrazzo flooring, got
closer. As their elevated voices grew louder. Particularly Jo’s. He hadn’t met her until years after her retirement from teaching,
but in some ways, once a teacher always a teacher. Jo still had her authoritative, booming teacher voice when needed, that
was for sure.
Sebastian hurried to the doorway to meet them.
Self-control had won the day. He hadn’t looked at the newsfeed on his phone once.
He hadn’t even taken a single one of the flirty women of a certain grandmotherly generation who lived at Spruce House, right next door to the school, up on their long-standing offers that he should stop by anytime for tea and crumpets, just so he could take a look at their television.
(Mainly because he had so often been offered “crumpets” since moving to town that he was suspicious it was a code word of sorts among the senior citizens of Adelaide Springs.
He lived in fear of accidentally breaking the code.) So .
. . yippee. He’d shown restraint and kept a level head and proven once again that he was now in a healthy and emotionally stable place. His therapist would be so proud.
Now, for all that was good and holy in the world, could someone please tell him what was happening?
“What’s going on?” he asked as soon as they appeared around the corner.
“Good morning to you too.” Jo patted him on the arm and slid past him into the room. She sat in an adult-sized orange plastic
chair at the round table and sighed.
“Doc?” he asked softly and directly to the town’s unofficial patriarch as he entered the room just behind Bill Kimball, who
had grunted his standard greeting.
Doc responded with a heavy sigh and then placed a firm grip on Sebastian’s shoulder. “Come on over and we’ll get into it.”
There was comfort to be found in Doc’s presence. In six years he’d come to look up to the older man as a father figure. Not
that Sebastian would ever tell him that. That wasn’t the sort of emotional confession Sebastian felt equipped to handle, or
that he’d ever seen Doc open the door to. And it wasn’t that he was lacking an actual father. Martin Sudworth was the single
biggest influence in his entire life. With the possible exceptions of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Okay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. It sure made him sound smarter when he named Woodward and Bernstein as his earliest role models, but the truth was he had aspired to be Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in their portrayals of the two men scooping the Watergate story in All the President’s Men .
Back in the day, when he used to wear ties to work, you could almost always find him with his sleeves rolled up and his
collar unbuttoned, because a film from years before he was born had instilled in him the belief that that was how serious
newsmen dressed.
His dad’s influence on his life went even deeper. Martin had worked in the Office of Administration during the Carter presidency,
and then worked with the next administration to help form the Office of Presidential Correspondence—which definitely entailed
a whole lot more than responding to requests for a signed photo from Ronald Reagan. When he worked in that White House—or
next door in the OEOB, to be precise—the elder Sudworth’s value was soon recognized. Before the end of that first term, he
had become an advisor to the president. A nonpartisan one who had gone on to advise, in some form or other, every president
of the United States to follow, right up through the present day.
That was what had been instilled in Sebastian throughout his life. That the United States may have needed men and women who chose
political sides and ran for office to advocate for the beliefs of the people, but the world needed solid men and women who didn’t pick sides to contribute calm, order, clarity, and hopefully an ample serving of wisdom to the conversation. And while his
father traveled the world as an unknown-to-the-public, indispensable-to-the-president asset, Sebastian spent his formative
years watching the news every single evening, hoping for a glimpse of his dad.
When he finally got tired of playing I Spy alone night after night—never once spying his dad with his little eye—he shifted
his obsession to All the President’s Men . The fictionalized portrayals of Woodward and Bernstein caused him to grow his hair out past his collar (no matter how much his parents hated it), wear corduroy jackets, and vow to one day make his dad (and Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee) proud.
His relationship with Doc Atwater was something else entirely. Sebastian sought his approval—the need to earn the respect
of those he respected was a character flaw he had no desire to rid himself of—but he also knew Doc wouldn’t turn his back
on him because his story had holes or because he showed weakness.
That had taken some getting used to.
They all sat around the table, and Sebastian braced himself. “So what is it? Tell me.”
They all looked to Doc, and he spoke with quiet measure. “Brynn Cornell just saw fit to... how should we say it? To make
clear her feelings about Adelaide Springs.”
Sebastian did a double take. “Um... okay.” The National Guard wasn’t going to get called in for that one. “But I mean,
what was everyone huddled around watching at the Bean?”
Jo crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair. “That. Her . Doc is being his normal diplomatic self, of course, but don’t be fooled. That ungrateful little girl smeared the good name
of our town on national television, and did all but cuss us each out by name in the process.”
“Well... it wasn’t quite as severe as all of that.” Doc turned to Sebastian. “I didn’t get the impression it was intentional.”
“Oh, she meant it, alright,” Bill grumbled.
“Well, yes, Bill,” Doc said. “She probably meant it. But she didn’t mean for us to hear it.”
Sebastian sat up as straight as he could in his awful chair, which must have been designed in the eighties to address that nagging good-posture outbreak among America’s youth.
“Hang on. Brynn Cornell? As in local-girl-made-good?” You couldn’t spend a day in Adelaide Springs without hearing someone talk about how they had once worked with her or gone to school with her or once had to call her because she had an overdue library book.
“You’re saying she said something on-air ? On Sunup ?”
Sebastian had been picturing a deranged gunman in a stand-off with police. A new pandemic. An old-fashioned dramatic car chase.
Maybe the death of a world leader. It had never occurred to him that the news would be something quite so personal to the
people of Adelaide Springs. He didn’t know what she had said or how she’d said it, but it didn’t take refined journalistic
senses to put the pieces together. And Sebastian did have refined journalistic senses. He could put that thousand-piece puzzle together in his sleep.
She’d probably already been fired—not that they’d call it that. On second thought, they might not even fire her. The way her
face was plastered across every single magazine short of Birds & Blooms and the way her network seemed adamant that she was the future of all that was good in the world, they wouldn’t want to let
her go over a slipup. They’d invested too much. They’d probably go the “pressures of stardom” route. She’d be sent to a spa
and out of the spotlight for the appropriate amount of time, which would be determined by the court of public opinion, of
course, then she’d carry out her penance by getting caught by TMZ serving meals at a Bronx soup kitchen, where of course she’d been helping out for years.
Would she be a Winona Ryder who needed to step away long enough to usher in a new generation? Coming back as the comfortingly,
excitingly familiar but clearly more mature mom in Stranger Things ? Or on Dateline , which was probably the news equivalent? Or would she fall into the “We don’t want to go on a road trip with you, but we’ll
keep paying at the box office” category, like a Tom Cruise? Surely her outburst hadn’t instituted the rules of Amanda Bynes
martial law, had it? It couldn’t have been that bad.
“What did she say, exactly?” Sebastian asked, his pulse finally returning to normal. This wasn’t news. This was entertainment news. In the grand scheme of things, it really didn’t matter. Not to the world, anyway. To his friends, it understandably
mattered very much. He was interested. He was just interested in a lower gear.
Doc cleared his throat. “I don’t think it’s worth rehashing—”
“She called Adelaide Springs a tiny, insignificant blip.” Jo leaned forward onto her elbows. “She said we’re stupid—”
“And poor,” came the assertive contribution from Old Man Kimball.
“That’s right,” Jo continued. “Stupid and poor. She called us pathetic, Seb. Pathetic! Can you believe that? I tell ya...
I’ve never seen someone grow up to be such a spoiled, ungrateful—”
“You didn’t tell him about the part where she insulted our greatest tradition.”
Bill Kimball claimed he hadn’t heard Sebastian when he made a motion to allocate some town funds for a recycling initiative,
he mistook his yays for nays more often than not, and half the time he seemed to think his name was Sercastian. As if that
were a real name. But doggone it if he hadn’t heard and committed to memory every word out of Brynn Cornell’s mouth.
“What tradition is that?” As soon as he asked, he unfortunately knew the answer.