Page 51

“It sure looked that way,” Bristal agrees, and Dad immediately jumps on her wording.

“Looked?” He leans forward again. “Have you seen photos?”

“Uh . . .” Bristal shoots me a panicked look, then crosses her arms in front of her face. “Shield law!” she yells at Dad, then turns to Mom, arms still crossed, and screams, “Shield law!” again.

“Am I doing this right?” she asks me.

“No,” Dad tells her. “But it’s amusing.”

“You don’t have to say it,” I tell her. “Shield law stands without being invoked. And you don’t have to actually shield yourself.” I reach across the table and push her arms down.

“Lydia’s right,” Dad says calmly. “You don’t have to reveal your sources, and I know you’re not my daughter, but I want both of you to be careful.”

“We are,” I say confidently, lying through my teeth.

“Both of you,” he repeats, looking at Bristal, who only nods, her arms twitching like she wants to bring them back up again.

“I read the comments on your last episode of On the Ground in Flyover Country,” Dad goes on. “You girls really caught it in the teeth.”

“I gave back as good as I got,” Bristal says, her chin coming up.

“Be that as it may, I hope Lydia informed you that her mother and I would like to review each episode before it airs.”

“Which is censorship,” I add.

“It’s parental concern,” Mom says.

“It’s censorship masquerading as parental concern,” I restate, for Bristal.

“Ohhhh, okay, so . . . about that?” Bristal eyes shoot to mine, and my stomach drops. “I don’t think I technically knew about the censorship-slash-parental-concern angle.”

“Oh my God,” I say, pushing back from the table and grabbing for my phone. “Is it already up? Did you publish?”

“I . . . Okay, so here’s what happened,” Bristal says, looking around the table. “I scheduled it for future release—”

“Monday,” I say, stabbing at my phone as I wait for our site to load. “We publish on Mondays. That’s what we agreed on.”

“Yep, we totally did,” she says. “And that’s what I scheduled it for. Except, I saw there was a typo in the show transcription. I said something about County Road 33 being an accident-prone area, but the AI fumbled it.”

I glance up from my phone. “What did the transcript say?’

“Uh . . .” Bristal glances in between my parents. “The transcript read that County Road 33 is an accidental porn area.”

Mom spits out some of her wine, and Dad doesn’t even bother hiding his laughter. “Well, that’ll send the kids out that direction.”

“And not just them,” Mom says.

“You fixed it, right?” I ask, scrolling through the transcript. “Please tell me you fixed it.”

“I did,” Bristal says, and I exhale in relief. “But when I went back in, it must’ve wanted me to set it up as a scheduled episode again.”

“And you didn’t?”

“No, I thought it would keep all the settings, so I just hit publish.”

“Well, it didn’t,” I tell her, turning my phone around so that she can see the newest episode of On the Ground in Flyover Country, which apparently is titled “There Are Potholes Out Here Bigger than My Dick.”

“Oh, whoops,” she says, taking the phone from me. “It must’ve wiped out the title, too, and reverted to the one I was using as a placeholder.”