The Ghostly Grammar Boy

by Sandra Thompson

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  'I'm telling you, they're in love with each other!'

  Lara looked scandalised. She was currently distracting me from my nerves by elaborating on her theory that Megan and Jason were far more than just friends. We were standing outside a café waiting for Shane. I was about to embark on date number one.

  Investigation number one, I should say. I was not going to kiss him again. This was purely detective work.

  Lara's kind offer to wait with me was not completely selfless, however. One glance at Shane would apparently provide her with enough 'eye candy' to last her a year. Right now, though, her thoughts were focused less on looking for eye candy and more on juicy gossip.

  'Last week I saw them at a café together. Jason was whispering in Megan's ear, and she had her hand on his leg, and I swear I heard Jason saying something about being in love!' Lara finished in a scandalised voice.

  I looked at her, incredulous. It was a bit hard to believe. For one thing, I talked to Jason every day, and I'd never heard him express any sort of deep feeling. For another, well, it was just too gross! The thought of them getting together made me feel queasy. Jason had sat next to me every year in English since we started high school, so I knew him pretty well. I could say with certainty that Megan wasn't right for him. Despite them being family friends for years, she just didn't get him. His jokes always annoyed her, and she often couldn't look past them to see his caring, sensitive side. She didn't get that he was a fun, interesting guy—one of the best. They would drive each other crazy. I hoped that Lara was wrong.

  'That's not all,' Lara pushed on despite my look. 'When I asked them what they were talking about, both of them broke into nervous giggles!'

  My scepticism remained unbroken.

  'Think about it,' she insisted. 'Jason doesn't giggle. Megan doesn't giggle. Why would they giggle when they're together?'

  My stomach dropped with dread. She had a point. Megan never giggled. Laughed, yes. Chortled, maybe. But giggled … never. Perhaps she was falling in love with Jason and his jokes after all.

  Before I could reluctantly agree with Lara, I was distracted by a whimper next to me. I glanced at Lara. She was staring at the chiselled figure approaching us.

  'Incredible…,' she whispered, in a trance. 'Good luck.' With a squeeze of my arm she discreetly disappeared, leaving me to greet Shane.

  Shane didn't even glance at Lara as she passed him. His eyes were fastened steadfastly on mine. I felt my stomach drop.

  'Fiona.' He spoke confidently and leaned in for a side-cheek kiss. He was so … self- assured, and … controlled. I wasn't used to side-cheek greetings. I felt a bit awkward as I leant in to accept his kiss and tried to make sure I didn't mess it up. Feeling his slightly prickly cheek against my face brought my mind instantly back to our kiss in the car.

  His lips on mine … his hand slipping down … then my panicked exit from the car.

  I shuddered, embarrassed. I hoped he couldn't read my thoughts. He was watching my face with amusement.

  'Shane! Good to see you again. How are you?' I asked brightly, trying to cover up my embarrassment.

  'I'm good,' he replied, still staring into my eyes. It was intense. My spine tingled. It was almost creepy how intense he was.

  'Should we get some coffee then?' I spoke quickly from nervousness. 'I've heard it's really good here.'

  'Sure,' Shane shrugged and motioned for me to head inside the café.

  The room was dimly lit and furnished with an eclectic mixture of chairs, tables and couches. The cafe was crowded by Canberra standards, but had an amiable, relaxed atmosphere. The air-conditioning felt good after standing in the heat outside.

  Shane chose a narrow two-seater couch positioned behind a small coffee table. A strategic choice if he wanted us to sit close to each other. With no other alternative, I plonked myself down on the couch next to him.

  A waitress came over and we both ordered mochas. She left an awkward silence in her wake. I wracked my brain, trying to think of something to say that didn't make me sound like a loser. Have I mentioned before that silences freak me out?

  I didn't need to worry though; Shane swiftly broke the ice.

  With a big, huge sledgehammer.

  'That was an awesome kiss the other night, Fiona. I can't stop thinking about it.' He put his hand on my leg.

  I laughed nervously, but didn't move his hand.

  Unbelievable. One sentence into our conversation and it was already time to change the subject. I was here for research after all.

  'So how was school today? Did you actually show up? Or were you stalking our school again?' I asked.

  Shane laughed. 'It's so nice of you to worry about my truancy record,' he replied.

  'No problem. Hey, you know, I met the funniest year-seven kid last week,' I changed the subject again.

  'Yeah?'

  'Yeah. He was doing the craziest bike moves. Like, falling off, I mean. I tried to talk to him and he seemed all spaced out. Like he was on drugs or something. Do you know him? His name is Alan Reynolds.'

  I was hoping my unsubtle mentioning of Alan's name might provoke a reaction from Shane that would give me some sort of clue about whether he had something to do with Alan's drugging.

  Shane looked confronted.

  'Ye—,' Shane began, before changing his mind. 'No, I don't know him.' I didn't say anything, but continued to look at him. Shane changed his mind again.

  'Actually … Reynolds … Reynolds…' Shane pretended to search through his memory. 'Any connection to Chris Reynolds, the guy in my rugby team who … ahem … passed away this summer?'

  For some reason, Shane was now at least pretending to broach the subject of Chris' death sensitively.

  I feigned excitement at the connection.

  'Maybe! Wow, no wonder he's upset. Have you met Alan before?' I stared intensely at Shane, watchful for any facial expression that might give him away.

  He was sure doing a good job of avoiding eye contact for someone who had just a minute ago been staring so hard at my face that I'd been worried I had a giant boogie hanging loose.

  Unfortunately for me, before my scrutinising gaze had a chance to siphon out Shane's confession, the waitress arrived with our mochas.

  'Thanks,' I muttered to the waitress.

  'Wow, these look good,' Shane said brightly. 'In fact, I think they would look even better with a slice of cake. I'll go and get us a piece.'

  Shane jumped up quickly, before I had the opportunity to object. I watched him with interest as he made his exodus to the counter, wiping his brow. I'd just made Shane work up a nervous sweat!

  Shane's fluster didn't last long. Two of the four wait staff working in the café had noticed Shane's approach and rushed over to the counter to serve him.

  Or should I say flirt with him.

  The woman at the cash register leaned forward on the counter so that her elbows pressed her bust up into a bulging cleavage directly in Shane's line of vision. The other waitress touched Shane on the arm whilst eagerly offering him her waitressing services, and flicking around her head of long brown hair.

  Was it wrong to admit I was secretly pleased that my date was hot enough to warrant so much attention?

  Yes, because Shane was a jerk, and I was here on business. And he'd just effectively avoided my clever line of questioning.

  I shook my head. Focus.

  That's when I noticed…

  In Shane's rush to get away from me, he'd left two objects behind. The first one was his mobile phone. The second was a small white bottle that was lying on the couch, where he had been sitting. It must have fallen out of his pocket.

  I glanced at Shane. He was going to be a while. His eyes were locked on cash-register-lady's cleavage, and he still had to flirt with touchy waitress before he could return to the couch.

  It was for the investigation … or maybe I'd just become a nosy sneak who uses her ghost twin's problems to justify her nosy, sneaky behaviour.

&
nbsp; Either way, I just had to look at Shane's phone.

  Glancing towards him one more time, I grabbed his phone from the coffee table and unlocked it. My hands were shaking with nerves. I quickly tapped the messages icon to see who his most recent text conversations had been with.

  Sharelle Reynolds, Mrs Knight, Mrs Elliot, Mrs Butler, Mrs Ross, Mrs Carter… the list began.

  They were all mothers from our area. I felt sick, but tried not to jump to conclusions. There could be an explanation. Maybe Shane was the president of the local mothers' club?

  Or maybe he was a dirty disgusting sleaze who was not only sleeping with Sharelle, but with every other female in the thirty-plus age group in the Canberra area.

  I opened up the first few messages and nearly had to avert my eyes.

  Yuck. Yup, they were dirty. If this was what the mothers' club got up to these days, they had clearly lost track of their mission statement.

  Stifling the queasiness I felt, I forced myself to look at the messages more closely.

  To say Shane was charming was an understatement. The compliments and flattery he gushed in his messages almost made me weak at the knees, if only I hadn't known he'd copied and pasted the same messages to every woman in town. His recipients were lapping it up too. It was clear he was meeting most of them on a regular basis, and they were not meeting to discuss homework.

  Then I noticed a pattern. Shane consistently mixed his overt praise with subtle pressure to give him gifts. Brand name clothes, money, new shoes, hair products, movie vouchers, cologne, electronics—you name it, he asked for it. Amazingly, it seemed his wants were being willingly fulfilled by these older women.

  Suddenly I understood. I'd written Shane off as a rich private school boy with his fancy clothes and accessories, but his affluence was just a façade. He was using these older women to buy him the luxuries of wealth. He was as much a predatory social climber as Carly. Shane's family must never have recovered from the failing of the Home Wizards company that Chris' father had dumped on them, packaged as a bargain deal. Brett had mentioned that Shane did really well at school. It was clear now. Shane wasn't a rich private school boy at all. He was a geeky scholarship student who had to use older women to maintain his status among the wealthy elite at his school.

  Shane was working pretty hard to support his extravagant lifestyle. Between studying to keep his scholarship and romancing all the old women, he must be run off his feet. Being a social climber was more of a time burglar than having a ghost twin sister. Perhaps Shane resented Chris' family for his own family's misfortune. Could Chris' death and Alan's drugging be all part of a revenge plan aimed at Chris' dad?

  I opened the text conversation with Sharelle to check for any further clues about Chris' family. The conversation started off like all the others. Flattery and praise, arrangements to meet up, and hints for gifts, which he ultimately received—but the topic of conversation changed in the recent messages.

  'Babe, we need to be more careful with Alan. We need to talk about this asap,' Shane wrote.

  'You are such a darling to help me with the brat. We'll talk tonight,' Sharelle replied.

  I put the phone back on the table, unnerved. If that meant what I thought it did—that Alan's poisoning was a team effort by Shane and Sharelle—this was really bad.

  I glanced up and checked on Shane's progress at the cake counter. He'd obviously got bored with cash-register-lady's assets because he was now standing rather close to touchy waitress. It appeared, though, that Shane's dalliance with touchy waitress was coming to an end, as she was being flagged down by another customer.

  That left me about two seconds to check out the bottle lying on the couch.

  Grabbing it, I examined the label. It was a prescription medicine of some sort, made out to Shane.

  Maybe Shane was using these to drug Alan!

  'The cakes didn't look any good,' Shane startled me.

  Unfortunately, I was still holding the bottle in my hand. Guilt was written all over my face.

  'Here, I think you dropped these,' I tried clumsily to cover my action.

  'Oh, you found my painkillers. Thanks,' Shane yanked the bottle out of my hand. 'I lost my last bottle. I don't want to lose this one too. I take these for an old rugby injury.'

  This launched Shane off onto his favourite topics: rugby and himself. While Shane's conversation washed over me, I pondered what I'd just discovered. If it was true that Alan was being drugged with Shane's tablets, there might be more evidence at Shane's house: drug crushing implements, sachets of crushed drugs, his previous bottle of painkillers that he'd conveniently 'lost'—something that might point to a motive. If I could find some evidence, I might be able to go to the police. Without evidence, I was powerless to help Alan.

  I just needed to get him to take me back to his house. This was a job for my feminine wiles.

  'Shane…,' I interrupted his boring story, huskily. 'Can we go to your car again?' I asked meaningfully.

  Shane practically knocked over our coffee table with enthusiasm for my idea. Not bad for someone who'd never really used her feminine wiles before. As if he was in a movie played in fast forward, Shane grabbed my hand, threw some money down on the table and, before I had a chance to withdraw my suggestion, I found myself sitting in the front seat of his car, with Shane's lips steadily approaching mine.

  Uh oh. This wasn't good for the investigation. I really needed to hone my manipulation skills.

  Then it was happening again.

  Shane's lips were pressing against mine. This time, instead of leaning in and enjoying the moment, I froze and didn't kiss him back. However, instead of backing off, he made a satisfied 'mmm' sound, and leant in some more.

  Now I had a choice. I could push him off me, and make him angry and suspicious. Or I could give up and just let him kiss me. For the purpose of the investigation, I decided not to terminate the kiss. Hey, if I just ignored the fact that he was a murderer and focused on his hotness, it might not be too hard.

  So I kissed him back. It felt distractingly good. Shane's hand had taken up its old position, cradling the back of my head, and I wondered if I should touch his arm—for the investigation, of course, so that I would know how strong he was.

  An instant later, the tingle of excitement in my stomach had turned into a cold wave of dread and shame. Shane's hand, which had previously been cradling my head, had started to slide, and I knew from experience where this move was going. I shouldn't have let myself get distracted by his bicep.

  Angry that I'd let myself get caught up in Shane's magnetism yet again, I jerked away from him. Shane's hand was left resting awkwardly on my shoulder. He looked annoyed and pulled his hand away. Strangely, the look of annoyance quickly transformed into a flash of understanding. He started to lean in again.

  'You're beautiful. You're such an amazing kisser,' he whispered, then his lips were coming at me again.

  Obviously, he thought what I needed was some false flattery before he was allowed to slide his hand down farther. Shane continued whispering as his lips approached me again.

  'You look so pretty today.'

  He was about to make contact!

  Swiftly, I turned my face so that his lips landed on my cheek.

  'Wow! You've got a really nice glove box!' I made a mad scramble for it. I yanked the compartment open as a distraction. Papers and CDs spilled out onto the floor. I didn't dare look at Shane's face, but I could bet he wasn't happy. I hadn't fooled him at all.

  'Oh, I'm so sorry! I've spilt everything. Your glove box looked so interesting I just had to open it.' I babbled as I doubled over and started collecting the papers.

  'It's just an ordinary glove box,' Shane said irritably. I glared at him.

  'I mean, it's ordinary compared to you. You're extraordinary.' Shane tried to re-ignite the mood.

  I was getting a bit sick of his shallow attempts to manipulate me. I was about to snap back at him (and possibly blow my cover), when I was distracte
d by a conspicuously familiar-looking object poking out from under the driver's seat.

  Ignoring Shane, I reached over and grabbed what looked like a block of chocolate.

  But it wasn't chocolate. It was an iPhone covered in a chocolate-bar phone cover. Carly's iPhone. The same one I'd seen in Carly and Hannah's face-wash video.

  Before I could take a proper look, Shane had snatched the phone out of my hands.

  My mind was racing. Carly's phone was under the driver's seat of Shane's car. It could only have fallen into that position if Carly had been sitting in the driver's seat. Shane was definitely not the type of boy to let a girl drive his car. My mind fixated on the only solution that made sense to me right now.

  Shane had been making out with Carly in his car.

  Just like I'd been doing.

  I mean, if I hadn't freaked out, Shane would have probably had me in his lap on the driver's seat within about five minutes.

  I felt the colour drain from my face. My heart thudded loudly in my ears. I must have stopped breathing. My eyes were starting to burn, threatening to yield angry tears of betrayal and confusion. I was way out of my league here. How many women did Shane have on the go? I already knew he was sleeping with Chris' stepmum and several of the mothers at my school, and now it seemed that he was having make-outs with Carly too? Why was he wasting his time with me? What did he want from me? And what did he want with Carly? Neither of us had any money! Most confusing of all, why did I care?

  I took a deep breath and tried to make sure my voice didn't betray my hurt feelings.

  'What is Carly's phone doing in your car?' It came out a little sharper than I'd hoped, but definitely not teary.

  'Fiona, baby, it's not Carly's phone. It's my cousin's,' Shane crooned. 'Baby, it's so sweet that you're jealous!'

  However, as Shane said this, he carefully tucked the phone into the back pocket of his jeans, out of my reach.

  I knew he was lying, but there was no point in arguing about it. In a split second, I made a decision. Shane was clearly not trustworthy. Now I was more convinced than ever that he was somehow involved in Alan's drugging. I'd got this far. I might as well keep this love sham going a little longer. If I could get Shane to take me back to his house, I was sure I could find some convincing evidence of his guilt that I could take to the police.

  I knew what I was about to do was wrong. I was going to get myself into trouble for sure. But I had to find out what Shane was up to. My instincts were screaming in protest, but foolishly, I ignored them and did it anyway.

  'Of course, I'm jealous,' I replied, and this time, I allowed myself to touch his arm. (I could confirm: he was definitely strong.) 'I want you all to myself. How about we go back to your place?' I mentally slapped myself for being so stupid.

  Shane's face lit up with excitement. If his grin got any wider it was going to slap me in the face.

  'Fiona! Has anyone ever told you that you're an amazing first date?'

  'No,' I answered truthfully, pretending that I was flattered by his comment. It's kind of hard to get feedback on your dating skills when you've never been on a date before.

  Shane reached up and tucked my hair behind my ear. I stifled my instinct to slap his arm down. I can't stand it when people try to tuck my hair back, and Shane was lingering in his efforts.

  'My house is really messy, but we can do whatever you want right here,' Shane whispered. Shane swiftly grabbed the back of my head with one hand and pressed my face into his. My unprepared lips mashed against his painfully. His other hand was now grabbing at my shirt.

  This forceful move finally hurled me out of my frozen state. Apart from the fact that I didn't even like him and he was being so rough that he was hurting me, we were in the middle of a car park in broad daylight. Lara could still be hanging around. She might see us. A teacher from school could walk past. Or, worse still, Brett. It was a popular café. Not to mention that clearly Shane was not planning to let me snoop through his house.

  Springing into anger- and humiliation-fuelled action, I ripped myself out of Shane's grip and scrambled for the door handle. After what seemed like forever, I managed to find it and yank the door open. I stumbled out of the car and slammed the door to prevent Shane from getting his randy hands on me again.

  The window started to roll down and Shane's ruffled and confused face poked out.

  'Baby?' he whimpered, like an injured puppy. 'I thought you wanted some fun.'

  I was still shaking with frustration and fear. It was terrifying how easily Shane had managed to manhandle me.

  No more being nice for the investigation. It wasn't worth it and it wasn't smart. It was time to burn my bridges with Shane.

  Fixing him with my worst death stare, my voice brimming with rage at both myself and him, I snarled, 'Stay away from me, Shane. We're finished.'

  Then I did something that would have made Lara proud—twenty minutes of cardiovascular exercise.

  I sprinted all the way home, and didn't even stop to look behind me.