Headlines

A New Header

    You always loved new articles. If you were to write a news article about today, it would go something like this; Roseville was a sunny town drowned with torrential showers. The air was clean and fresh, despite being weighed down by the scent of rain on the horizon. The morning was quiet save for the few people of the town opening their businesses, and Y/n was among them. The little town was about to get a lot louder, as the Roseville Gazette was opened for the day by your boss Derreck Judes, but no one knew that just yet.

  He smiled as you approached him, that same look of smug glee on his face as if taunting you with the fact that he was your superior. Derreck was only two years older than you, but despite that, he had retained his baby face since the age of fourteen. He was passed down the Gazette from his father, Matthew Judes when he was ready to retire at the ripe old age of fifty-five. Despite that fact, Matthew Judes was always present at the Gazette as the chief, although you had to run everything through Derreck, he had to run everything through his father, which in your opinion, was much worse. Matthew Judes had a desk right next to yours, quietly clearing his throat as he peered over his glasses to read the final edits of your work. His gaze was cold, and his eyes were judgmental, never speaking, but always judging. You didn't mind, however, as Matthew always walked straight into the building, never uttering the word to you, then walked straight out of the building when it was time to leave. It used to irk you, but since his last comment to you was to "Shut your damn trap you over-glorified secretary", you didn't mind the silence. 

  "How ya doing today Y/n?" Derreck smiled and fiddled with the keys in his hand, successfully opening the glass doors to your workplace. You tried your best to smile back at him and reply with a friendly response, "I'm doing pretty great today, a bit of a sleepless night, but good anyways." You followed him inside as he held the door open to you, his eyes raking over your body. You shifted your bag back up onto your shoulder, treading over to your desk facing the entryway windows. As you walked, you continued to feel eyes lingering on you, and getting the hint, you turned to face him. You sighed and remembered why he was looking at you; you had broken the daily ritual of pretending to enjoy the company of your boss.

  "How are you doing today, Mr. Judes?" You force a welcoming smile on your face, tilting your head and angling your body towards him to fake interest in his response. "Why thank you, Y/n, I'm doing fantastic today!" With that, he turned and walked into his office in the back and close the door. 

  Done with the formalities today, you sighed and sat down at your desk slowly rolling your chair back towards your desk. You swiped away the scribbled notes on sticky notes who had lost their tackiness over time. You knew their content without looking at the letters written in the bold ink from your favorite pen. The notes were scrawled with little sentences that you had liked too much to just delete.  Although you are the main editor for the Roseville Gazette, you had your fair share of articles that you had crafted when your innocent boss had decided to go on a bender instead of submitting an article for the paper the next day. Then he would come into work the next day without thanking you only to needlessly edit my hard work. The sentences I had poured out like Ichor from God's wounds which Derreck buried in the grave, you carefully resurrected and kept for a later day to embrace their life.

  You opened your desktop to stare at the picture of your family gathered around you at your graduation, smiles plastered on your faces as you graduated Roseville High, a graduating class of 300 people. You smiled moving the cursor over to Google Docs to write up your newest report on what was happening in the town for the month, and fun fact that wasn't much. For January, we had a total of three events happening, and two of them were for the high school. The other was a community service project being run by the mayor to help paint a mural on the inside of the town hall. You stared at the blinking cursor as you slowly waited for the stroke of inspiration to strike, and you finally set on your usual format; the dates and times followed by the event and how to sign up. Although you're supposed to stay monotone in your paper, you can't help but focus more on the mural, pouring enthusiasm into the description of the activity.

  Satisfied with the results, you send it to Derreck to confirm that it fit his expectations, and he quickly replies with only a thumbs up. You sigh and roll your eyes, moving onto the article he had just sent you, his perspective on the recent killing spree that had just erupted in several states over, all the way in Utah. You knew that Derreck was in charge of the current events, but it never failed to bother you that he got to write crappy retellings of someone else's stories to be given the credit of success. Derreck had the inane ability to read a story and retell it much worse, basically copying an oil painting by Da Vinci, only with crayons and a rubber eraser. You read through the story and can't help to be surprisingly drawn in, as the fascination of the serial killer's actions gripped your attention.

  A man running around in a Father Death costume committing brutal disfigurations of normal, ordinary people, seemingly without any sort of motive. The killer murders his victims, stops to take a selfie with their mangled corpse, and walks away, leaving the polaroid with the crime scene for the police to discover. The famous killer was later given the name after he signed one of his polaroids, his calling card, with a single signature; Ghostface. Since that day, his case has been widely followed by every news station in the United States, and by far this was the most interesting thing the Roseville Gazette would publish. 

  And truth be told, the paper needed it. Recently the Gazette had given work from home status to many of their crew in the recent months, as the papers weren't selling as well as they used to. Originally, the gazette writes for all the nearby towns in the vicinity, but the papers started doing better online, meaning that we only needed a few people actually in the building, the others could work from home. Most of the other employees were overjoyed for this, however, you fought to stay in the building and they let you. As much as you like blaming the failure of the printed newspapers on the booming ease and accessibility of the internet, you knew it was truly traced back to Emily leaving. Emily Backer was the head editor for the paper; your mentor. When you had first started working at the gazette at sixteen, and she had shown you the ropes, quickly catching on and forming a  mother-daughter relationship between the two of you. This continued as she started giving you more and more articles to edit instead of berating you, slowly guiding you through your mistakes and improving. You flourished under her mentorship until three months ago when she decided that she needed a change of pace away from a quaint town with a population of 17,000.

  You shifted in your seat growing uncomfortable with your thoughts. Shaking your head, you look up to see Matthew Judes' eyes boring into you as if drilling into your skull to see inside your brain. Smiling quickly, you look back down towards your notes on the article of Ghostface, checking the time to see you had spent twenty minutes alone with your thoughts. You send the edits to Derreck, and he replies with a casual thank you. You think about the advertisement you had posted in the paper a few months prior, asking for a new journalist as Matthew had comfortably filled the role of the head editor. You have no more time to dwell on this thought as the familiar bell of the door chimed, signifying that someone had pushed open the door. If you had known the whirlwind that would follow the man who walked through the door, you may have locked the doors after coming inside. You look up to see a man with dark hair and vivid blue eyes smiling at you, which you so graciously returned. You only share a fleeting introduction, his last words being said to you were short and sweet.

  ''Hello doll, my name is Jed Olsen."

  And with that, he disappeared behind the door with Derreck and Matthew.