* * *

By the time Clark and Pete show up for lunch, Chloe’s read the Ledger, the Planet, and the Inquisitor, and she’s so bored she wants to rip her hair out, strand by strand, just to have something to do. Summer before eighth grade; one more year to the promise of the Torch.

It’s cruel, doesn’t her father realize that? It’s wrong to take a girl who has known she wants to be a reporter since she first stuck a Nerf baseball on a paper towel tube and played “interview” and strand her in the middle of a town where nothing ever happens.

Pete and Clark are talking about something that happened in town today, and Chloe’s not listening, because very little that happens in town interests her. But then Clark says, “I don’t think they’ll put him in jail,” and now she’s interested. “Put who in jail?” she asks. “For what?”

Her friends turn to her like she’s slipped a gear or two, and Clark says, “Mr Linton. For attacking those people at the Pioneer Days exhibit.”

Chloe’s eyes light up. “Were you there? Did you see it?” She should be ashamed of this, but one of the reasons she befriended Clark was that interesting things always seem to happen around him.

“Nah.” Pete sits at the counter, biting into a nectarine she didn’t say he could have. “Just heard about it. You know what I heard?”

Clark rolls his eyes and fills a glass with water from the tap. “Here we go. Tell us what it has to do with the Luthors this time, Pete.”

Pete ignores this. “I heard Linton’s been pasturing his dairy cows in Riley’s Field, and that drinking milk from those cows did it to him.”

“That’s crazy,” scoffs Clark. “Lots of people get milk from Mr Linton, and none of them are attacking people.”

“Yeah, but I hear he drinks it unpasteurized.”

Chloe and Clark make faces, but Chloe wants to hear more about the cows. “What does Riley’s Field have to do with it?”

They look at her strangely. “You know, for somebody who wants to be a reporter—“ Pete starts to say, but she glares at him, and he starts over. “Riley’s Field is where, you know...where the meteors came down.”

This is all anyone talks about here, meteors and pork futures. She’s seen the green meteor rocks. She’s never paid them much attention; meteors that fell when she was three and living in a town that could be on another planet for all the resemblance it bears to this one, fail to interest her. But there’s a story here…

There have been other strange things. Chloe knows it. And there will continue to be strange things. She will find them all. She will track them down and investigate them and find out why a bunch of green rocks make people behave so oddly.

It’s not real journalism. Chloe realizes this. But here in Smallville, she’ll take whatever she can get.