by Meg Cabot
I felt my cheeks heating up, and uttered a silent curse at myself. Why did I let this guy get under my skin? I mean, I was actually blushing, just because he’d given me a compliment. Why did he have this insufferable power over my body temperature?
“I always told you,” he went on, still not looking in my direction. Which was good, because if he had, he’d have seen my face heated up red as a lobster. “That the problem with your being so quick with your fists was that someday, someone bigger than you was going to hit you back. And you weren’t going to like it very much.”
“That would never have happened,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “I’m too quick on my feet. Float like a butterfly—”
“Yeah, well, I think both Randy Whiteheads would agree that your sting is much worse when you use your head,” he interrupted, “than your right hook. Who’s Eric?”
I blinked at him. “Who?”
“Eric.” We’d reached the long driveway to his house, and Rob turned the truck up it. It really was a beautiful piece of land—the one Rob’s farm sat on—complete with stately hundred-year-old oaks and its own stream. Randy Whitehead Senior, I’m sure, would have enjoyed turning it into a golf course or country club. “The guy you said you’d tell Mrs. Whitehead about if her husband didn’t do what you said.”
“Oh,” I said with a grin. “Him. Yeah. My dad told me about him. Eric’s a waiter at Mastriani’s.”
“So?”
“So you know how people who work together get to chatting. Eric, my dad says, likes to hang out at a gay bar in Indianapolis.”
“Yeah. And?”
“And it turns out, so does Randy Senior.”
Rob brought the truck to a stop with a jerk, his foot landed on the brake so fast. Finally he turned his head to look at me.
“You’re kidding me,” he said, looking stunned.
“Nope.” I undid my seat belt and started to climb from the pickup. “Eric’s Mr. Whitehead’s boyfriend. They have their own little love nest together and everything. Except, apparently, Randy Senior would rather his wife not know about it.”
I gathered up all the burgers and started towards Rob’s house. Chick—owner and proprietor of Chick’s Bar and Motorcycle Club, out by the highway—apparently heard us pull up, since he came to the front door. When he saw me coming up the brick walk, he broke out into an enormous smile.
“Well, if it isn’t Lightning Girl,” he said, holding open the screen door to let me in. “Long time no see.”
“Hi, Chick,” I said, grinning back at him. “How’s life?”
“A whole lot better now that you’re back in town,” Chick said as Rob followed me up the walk. “Hey, now that you two are back together, maybe you can do something to make this guy stop working so hard and have some fun once in a while.”
Chick slapped a heavy hand down onto Rob’s shoulder. Rob winced. But not, I’m pretty sure, because Chick’s grip hurt.
“Yeah,” Rob said, not looking at me or Chick. “Well, Jess came back, but only to help me find Hannah. She’ll be heading back to New York soon.”
Chick’s smile vanished. “Oh,” he said. Then he noticed the bags in my hands, and his crestfallen demeanor brightened again, but only slightly. “Well, at least she brought food.”
And he started back inside the house.
I turned to glare at Rob. “How do you know?” I demanded.
He stared down at me, confused. “How do I know what?”
“How do you know when I’ll be heading back to New York?” I couldn’t explain why I suddenly felt so incredibly angry. But I was definitely rethinking my whole nonviolent stance, as well as my decision not to knock his block off. “Maybe I won’t be going back to New York. You don’t know. You don’t know anything about me anymore.”
He blinked at me. “Okay,” he said. “Take it easy.”
Why is it that whenever anyone tells you to take it easy or relax, it has the totally opposite effect?
Feeling exceptionally unrelaxed, I stomped into Rob’s house to find his sister, Hannah, just coming down the stairs to see who was at the door.
“Oh,” she said, looking distinctly disappointed when she saw who it was. “It’s you. I thought it might be my mom.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just as thrilled to see you,” I snapped. “Is there a VCR up there?”
Hannah cocked her head quizzically at me from the staircase. “What? Yeah. Why?”
I signaled for her to turn around and head back up the stairs. Rob, going into the kitchen to get plates for the burgers, said, “Jess. Eat first, okay?”
“Oh, Hannah and I are going to eat,” I assured him. Then, seeing that Hannah had stayed where she was, I pointed up the stairs again and said, “Go. Now.”
Looking churlish, Hannah spun around and headed up the stairs. I followed, after handing Chick all but one of the bags I carried.
Upstairs, in the guest bedroom where Hannah was staying—the one that used to be Rob’s, but which he’d done over in muted beige—I saw that she’d made herself at home. Her clothes were strewn all over the floor, along with several bags of chips and numerous empty soda cans.
“You’d better pack,” I said to her. “Your mom’s on her way to get you, you know.”
“I don’t care,” Hannah said, flopping back onto the bed and glaring at the ceiling. Her multicolored hair made a rainbow against the white pillowcase. “I’m not going back to live with that bitch. And Rob can’t make me.”
“Uh,” I said, pressing POWER on the VCR and inserting the videotape I’d removed from my backpack. “Yes, he can. He is under no obligation to keep paying for you to live under his roof.”
“Fine,” Hannah said to the ceiling. “He can kick me out, then. He can’t make me stay with Mom, though. I’ll just run away again.”
“Because that worked out so great for you last time?” I pressed PLAY, then took the bag of burgers and went to sit in an armchair by the room’s single window—after first removing a pile of Hannah’s clothes from it. “Good plan.”
Hannah was watching me, not the TV. “Hey,” she said, sitting up, “can I have one of those? I’m starved. That Chick guy offered to make me a sandwich, but have you ever looked at his fingernails? I was, like, no way.”
After taking a burger out for myself, I tossed the bag to her. “Be my guest.” I looked at the TV screen. “Oh, cool,” I said, sinking my teeth into the thick cheese-and-bacon combo. “This is my favorite part.”
Idly, Hannah glanced up from the burger she was biting into to the TV…
…then let the burger drop to her lap.
“What?” She stared, bug-eyed, at the screen. “Where did—hey, that’s—”
I swallowed. “Yeah. I prefer boxers, too. But what can you do? Some guys will never learn.”
Hannah scrambled off the bed—sending burger everywhere—and dove for the VCR. She slammed the EJECT button. When the videotape slid out of the machine, she wrenched it up and stared at the side, where the neatly typed label—HANNAH—caused her eyes to bug out even more.
“Where did you get this?” she demanded in a small voice.
“From your boyfriend’s closet,” I said when I was done chewing. “You didn’t know you were being filmed?”
She shook her head. The ability to speak had apparently left her.
“He had copies, too,” I went on. “I assume for distribution purposes.”
“Dis…distribution?” Hannah’s face had gone as white as the sheets behind her. “He was…selling them?”
“Oh, not just yours,” I said. “There were lots of different tapes of lots of different underage girls. He apparently had quite a little harem going. You really didn’t know?”
She shook her head again, staring down at the tape.
“Well,” I said with a shrug. “You don’t need to worry about it anymore. He’s in jail now. Or will be until his dad bails him out, anyway. Unless they hold him without bail, like the DA is threatening. Intersta
te porn trafficking is actually taken pretty seriously, especially when it involves minors, but Mr. Whitehead—Randy’s dad—has a lot of money and power and…well. We’ll just have to see what happens.”
Hannah looked at me. She had a ketchup smear on one side of her mouth. She actually appeared, for the first time since I’d met her, much younger than her fifteen years.
“Randy’s in jail?” she asked softly.
“Randy,” I said, “is very much in jail. You can help keep him there by letting me give your tapes to the police, and agreeing to testify against him. Which I very much urge you to do. But I guess I’d understand if you chose not to. Though it’s not a course I’d recommend. I mean, if he gets away with it, he’ll just do it to someone else, maybe even younger than you.”
I waited for her to light into me, the way she had back in Randy’s apartment. I was, after all, now doubly her enemy—I’d taken her away from the man she loved, and now I’d been instrumental in putting that man in jail.
So, of course, had her brother. But I was willing to take the blame for Randy’s incarceration, since if Rob had had his way, all her boyfriend would currently be suffering from right now was a concussion, not years of legal woes and quite possibly a good deal of jail time.
But to my surprise, Hannah didn’t fly into one of her rages. Instead, still gazing down at the tape, she asked softly, “Did Rob see it?”
I shook my head. “No. Just me.”
“Where are the others?” she asked. “You said there were copies.”
I reached for my backpack, and pulled out the other two tapes with her name on them.
“Right here,” I said.
She stepped forward and took both the tapes from my hand. As she did so, our fingers brushed, and she said in the same soft voice, “Thanks.” She looked down at the tapes. And appeared to come to a decision, if the way her mouth turned into a flat little line was any indication.
“I guess I’d like to,” she said. “Press charges, I mean.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Let Rob know. Or your mom. One of them can take you down to the station.”
“I will. And…I’m sorry.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What for? It’s not your fault.”
“No, not for Randy,” she said, keeping her gaze on the tapes. “For those things I said yesterday. About you being—”
“A huge, giant, überbitch?” I finished for her.
“Uh,” she said. And she actually blushed. “Yeah. That. You’re not. You’re actually pretty cool.”
“Well,” I said. “Thanks.”
And then we both heard Rob call up the stairs, “Hannah? Your mom’s here.”
And Hannah’s face crumpled.
“Mom?” She dropped all three videotapes down on the bed, turned around, and ran for the door. “Mom!”
A few seconds later, I heard her thumping down the stairs, and a woman’s voice say, “Oh, Hannah!” before she was interrupted by youthful, joyous screaming.
I stayed where I was, finishing the rest of my burger. When I was done, I got up, threw the wrapper in the trash, and started for the door.
But I stumbled and nearly lost my balance when my foot caught on something hidden beneath the detritus on the floor. When I looked down to see what it was, I saw a piece of paper with my name on it. So of course I had to stoop down for a closer look.
The paper turned out to be sticking out of an album—green leather with gold-embossed trim. When I picked it up, it was heavy. More paper came out of it. I saw that they were newspaper clippings, and that they’d come loose due to someone’s rough handling.
Someone who, I didn’t doubt, had thrown the album across the room in a fit of pique at me.
I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.
And when I opened it, I saw why she’d done it.
Seventeen
It was all about me. Every page in the album—and there were a lot of them, messily inserted and sloppily glued, even before Hannah had inflicted it with such bodily harm…. The work of someone not used to scrapbooking and with no interest in neatness or even in using the correct kind of adhesive, Rob seemingly having grabbed whatever was handy, including duct tape—was plastered with magazine and newspaper articles about me, starting from the very first story that appeared in our local paper and progressing to a piece that had appeared in The New York Times after the start of the war on terror, on some of the unorthodox methods the government was using to combat terrorism.
There was even the People magazine article—the one I’d refused to take part in—about me and my family (“Though she’s the inspiration for a hit television show, Jessica Mastriani is surprisingly camera shy….”).
There weren’t just clippings, either. There were some photos, too. I recognized a few of them—snapshots Rob’s mother had taken of us at Thanksgiving dinner…even a picture of Ruth and me sitting on Santa’s lap in the mall, giggling like mad. Rob must have talked the photographer into letting him buy a copy of that one, since I know I hadn’t given him one.
But some of the photos I’d never seen before—like a black-and-white one of me, in the center of the book, looking off in the distance, seemingly unaware I was being photographed. I didn’t know where or when that photo had been taken, let alone who’d pressed the shutter.
The final thing in the book was the last piece ever written about me—an announcement in our hometown paper of my winning the scholarship to Juilliard. My mom must have submitted that. She’d been so proud—prouder that I’d won that scholarship than she’d been of any of the other things I’d done, or all the kids—and fugitives from justice—I’d found.
I guess I could understand that. My musical gift was much easier to accept than my other one.
The one that, until recently, I’d thought I’d lost for good.
I could understand my mom keeping an album like this. In fact, she had one just like it.
But that’s because my mom loves me—even if we do have our differences.
The question was, why did Rob have an album like this—one he’d obviously kept up with, even after we’d parted ways? What did it mean? Obviously that he’d kept on thinking of me, even after I was long gone out of his life….
But had he kept on thinking of me because he loved me? Or had he kept this album as a sort of trophy he could brag about—I dated Lightning Girl.
But wouldn’t my letters and e-mails to him—the ones I wrote so sporadically while I was overseas—make better material for bragging? And none of those were in the album.
There was only one way I was ever going to find out what it meant. And that was to ask its creator.
Holding the album to my chest—in the hope, I guess, that it would hide the violent hammering of my heart. Though why my pulse should be racing so hard was a question I didn’t dare ask myself—I left the spare room and came down the stairs to find Hannah and a woman I assumed to be her mother huddled together on the couch in the living room. Both of them were weeping, and speaking to each other in hushed voices.
Chick sat at the dining room table, eating what appeared—if the empty wrappers in front of him were any indication—to be his third cheeseburger. There was no sign of the owner of the house.
“Where’s Rob?” I asked Chick, since Hannah and her mother seemed otherwise occupied.
“He couldn’t take all the estrogen,” Chick replied with his mouth full. I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to be keeping his eye not on Hannah, but on her mother, who was an attractive blonde around his own age, though considerably slimmer. “He went out to his workshop in the barn.”
“Thanks,” I said, and started for the door…
…only to be stopped by Hannah, who cried, “Oh, there she is!” and leaped up to grab my wrist.
“This is her, Mom,” Hannah said, dragging me over to where her mother sat on the couch. “Jessica Mastriani. She’s the one who found me.”
Mrs. Snyder, Hannah’s mom, looked up at m
e tearfully. “I can’t thank you enough,” she gushed, “for bringing my daughter home.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” I said. I always did hate this part. “It’s very nice to meet you. I have to go now….”
“That’s not all she did, Mom,” Hannah began, and she started chattering about Randy and his misdeeds, and the part I’d played in getting his no-good butt hauled off to jail, and how she needed to go down to the station house to do her part to keep him there. Fortunately I managed to wrestle my wrist free and escape without her seeming to notice. A second later, I was out in the bright sunshine, heading for Rob’s workshop in the barn.
In the same way that his house had undergone a renovation since the last time I’d seen it, so had Rob’s barn. New wood panels lined the walls, so that in winter the place would stay snug, and in the summer, the central air Rob had obviously installed would cool it. The holes in the high-beamed ceiling, through which birds used to slip, were gone, as were the horse stalls—removed to make way for tool racks and a pneumatic lift. Partially refurbished bikes stood in neat rows, with the one Rob was currently working on—a 1975 Harley XLCH—on a table in the middle of the barn.
Rob was standing by the sink he’d installed at the far end of the building when I came in, and didn’t notice me right away. When I said, “Rob,” he turned around, started to say something, then noticed what I had in my arms.
Then he immediately clammed up. He leaned back against the metal sink basin, his arms folded across his chest. Dr. Phil would call this kind of body language hostile.
“I found it in Hannah’s room,” I said when I’d gotten close enough to him—about five feet away—that I could speak in a normal voice in the cavernous space and still be assured of being heard. “She…she told me about it before, but I didn’t believe her.”
Rob’s gaze was on the album. His expression was carefully neutral. “Why wouldn’t you believe her? Is it so weird I’d want to keep track of what you were doing? It’s not like I could ask you. You weren’t speaking to me, if you’ll recall.”
I looked down at the album, too. “Not all of this stuff is from the time when we weren’t speaking.”