The Profile Match

by Jill Williamson

  I glanced at her. “Uhm . . .” More like whenever Grace felt like it.

  But Meg laughed, like my being a “playah” simply delighted her. Actresses, anyway.

  Meg hung out with me all night—actually hung on me for much of it, keeping one arm slung around my waist like we were together. Kissed me at midnight. I didn’t complain. I knew Grace wanted to get back together, but until her mom agreed, it was a non-issue.

  By two in the morning, most the guests had gone. The pool was empty, and there were maybe a dozen people left inside. Brittany, Meg, Kayla, and Valeria got it into their heads that they wanted Coffee Time, which was a 24-hour coffee chain. Before I truly understood what was happening, Brittany shoved a set of keys in my hand, and the girls dragged me outside where the yellow Corvette was sitting.

  How convenient. I hadn’t had a chance to take it for a spin yet.

  But this was no good. I wasn’t allowed to drive anyone until I tuned eighteen, which was still two months away. I’d told Meg this several times tonight, but when Brittany took back the keys, then tried to use them to open the back door, I chose the lesser of two evils and opened the driver’s door. I had to adjust the seat before I could get in, but the moment I sat on that soft, black leather, my vision blurred.

  I see a girl, maybe ten or eleven, standing in front of a coffin. Tears leak down both sides of her face and drip off her chin, leaving water stains along the neck of her black dress. A man walks up beside her, stops and stands in silence, the two of them side by side.

  “Eto vasha vina,” he says in Russian. This is your fault.

  The girl’s shoulders jerk forward as she starts to cry.

  The man walks away, leaving the girl alone before the coffin.

  “Spencer! You asleep? I think he’s asleep.” A hand stroked my hair.

  “Wake him up! I need coffee.”

  I was back, sitting in the driver’s seat of MacCormack’s Corvette. Meg was in the passenger’s seat, while Brittany, Kayla, and Valeria had crammed into the back. I swallowed, confused about that glimpse. Had that been Anya as a child?

  Meg’s fingers were all tangled in my hair. “Are you okay to drive?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” I started the car, grinned at the sound of the engine and the way its power made my seat tremble. I revved it a little, the girls whooped, and I tore out of the driveaway. I wound my way around MacCormack’s estate, loving that this car was a manual. Something about shifting through gears felt manly. I’ve never felt manly driving the Banana.

  Meg kept one hand on me at all times. It was either in my hair, messing with my ear, on my shoulder, scratching up and down my arm. I couldn’t say I minded, but I told myself to be careful with this one. She seemed to be working her way up to Trouble.

  As I wound the car out of the mountains, I was pretty sure we had a tail. At the main road, I took a few extraneous turns, and, sure enough, the headlights followed us. Moreland had supposedly taken my detail off me when I was at Ving’s, so it couldn’t be Bridges or the Sloans. Why someone would be following me in the middle of the night made absolutely no sense—unless MacCormack was having me watched. I wouldn’t put it past him. Or Diane.

  I tried to talk the drunkards into going through the drive-through at Coffee Time, but they demanded to go in. They staggered to the doors, arms linked and giggling madly the whole way. I followed behind with Meg, who was hanging off my arm like this was 1902. I’d left my suit jacket back at the mansion, but I still felt extremely overdressed for Coffee Time.

  The girls reached the doors and found them locked. Lobby closed for the holiday.

  “Open up!” Brittany banged on the doors with her fists. She cupped her hands around her eyes and put her nose to the door. “Hellooooo?” Her breath fogged up the glass.

  Meg drew a smiley face in the fog with hearts for eyes.

  This made Valeria and Kayla giggle wildly. I didn’t judge. I’d had my day of being completely buzzed and acting like a moron. But from this side—the sober side—they looked pretty pathetic. I was glad no one was here to witness—

  A flash of light. I spun around and found some guy with a cell phone. What the—?

  “Hey, Brittany,” the guy yelled. “Congrats on your Cosmo cover. You looked hot.” Another flash. “You and Dennis back on?”

  “We should go,” Meg said, “before he starts recording.”

  “Get the girls in the car,” I told her, then started toward camera guy. “Hey, man. Why don’t you take a hike?”

  He pointed his phone at me and the flash momentarily blinded me. “You’re that high school basketball player, isn’t that right? The drug dealer?”

  That ticked me off. I’d almost reached him, but he started backing away, still holding up his phone.

  The jerk was recording.

  I made like I was going to stop, and the moment he slowed, I darted in, grabbed his wrist, and twisted his arm into a jujitsu hold. He yelped.

  “It won’t hurt unless you try and yank your arm free,” I said in his ear, using my best “Don’t mess with me” voice.

  The man stilled, and I snatched his phone out of his hand.

  “Hey! Give that back!”

  He reached for the phone, but I was bigger and had longer arms. I held him back with one arm and, with the other, thumbed to his photo folder and started deleting. Figs and jam! This guy’s phone was filled with pics of Brittany and Meg. Looked like I’d identified our tail.

  “You stalking these girls?” I asked.

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “No, you’re a stalker.” I hit select all and deleted them.

  “What are you doing?” His tone grew panicked. “Don’t delete anything. I need the money, man.”

  I found the trash folder and emptied it too. “You should get a real job.” I turned and simultaneously shoved him away. Then I tossed him the phone. He yelped, scrambled to catch it, but failed. It landed in the grass.

  “Now hit the road before I hit your face,” I said.

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s a promise.” What a jerk.

  It took me a while, but once I got the girls back in the car, I took them through the drive through, which was still open. I then placed the most complex coffee order of my life. The girls shoved a ton of money at me. I paid, handed them their coffees, and headed back to MacCormack’s house.

  When we were all back safely, sitting around the patio fireplace, the girls regaled the straggler partygoers with our exploits, making me out to be some kind of medieval hero.

  Halfway through the third telling of this story, Meg came and sat on my lap. I wasn’t sure why I let her. I also wasn’t sure why I let her kiss me again. But I knew why I—ahem—eventually, stopped her.

  “It’s because of that cheerleader, isn’t it?” she said, tugging on my ear. “Gretta or Goldie or something like that, right?”

  “Grace,” I said.

  “Yeah. She’s sweet.”

  Grace, going to Kip’s Jolt Revolt party . . . investigating when she had no business investigating. “She’s nuts,” I said. “But I”—for some idiotic, incomprehensible reason—”am crazy about her.”

  Meg smiled and kept playing with my ear. “I think that’s sweet. I miss that.”

  “What?”

  She slid off my lap to sit beside me. “Being normal. Going to high school. Having a boyfriend.”

  “Do you homeschool? Or did you drop out?”

  “I have a set tutor. She teaches the three of us, me, Kelsie, and Loanna.”

  The three underage stars from her show. “That would be strange, not having to go to school,” I said.

  “You won’t have to, soon enough.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling weird about adulting again. “Especially if I don’t get a college scholarship.”

  “Please. You’ll get one, Spencer.”

  I sighed. “I could always—”

  “I said no!”

  My gaze jer
ked to Brittany, who was facing Valeria.

  “You don’t get to say what I do!” Valeria shot back.

  “This is my place, Val,” Brittany said. “My party. My rules. I’m off the clock right now. I’m enjoying the holiday. I’m not going to do anymore of Diane’s stupid stuff. Not tonight.”

  “It’s not stupid,” Valeria said.

  “Yes, it is. You want to get high and talk to dead people? Great. But do it in your own place. Not here.”

  “You’re a fraud, Brittany. What do you think the FLYs around the world would think if they knew you weren’t a true convert?”

  “I am a true convert. I just don’t need to talk to dead people every day, just like I don’t need to get high every day.”

  “If you don’t start taking your role more seriously, I’ll tell Diane,” Valeria said.

  “You want my job, is that it?”

  “I’d do it a lot better than you.”

  “You’re just jealous it’s my face on all the billboards and not yours.”

  “My face is on those billboards too, Britt,” Valeria said.

  “Yeah, small and behind me, right where you belong.”

  Valeria screamed and threw herself at Brittany. A crowd quickly formed around them, blocking my view. I stood up, so I could see. Brittany had a fist in Valeria’s hair, and Valeria had ripped off Brittany’s sleeve.

  Wow . . . I’d never seen a full-on cat fight before.

  Meg elbowed me. “Spencer, do something.”

  Oh. Right.

  I rushed over to the girls and pulled them apart. A couple guys in the crowd booed me, and Valeria slapped my face, scraping my cheek with her dagger fingernails.

  “Stop it!” I yelled.

  Valeria yanked free from me and spat on the ground. “You’ll regret this, Britt,” she said, then clacked her way back into the house on her spiky-heeled shoes.

  “You’re nothing, Val. Nothing without me,” Brittany yelled after her, then collapsed on one of the patio chairs and started to cry.

  Meg and Kayla rushed to Brittany’s side to comfort her. I hung around, hoping to hear more about this rivalry, but the girls escorted Brittany inside to her bedroom, so I took that as my cue to hit the road.

  As per Mr. S’s warning, I drove over to the L. A. Field Office. I called Isaac on speaker from the car.

  “I’m up,” he said, his voice sleepy. “You in trouble?”

  “Naw, I’m good.” I filled him in on the night, all the way to Brittany and Valeria’s catfight.

  “Wow, Spencer. You do have all the fun, don’t you?”

  “Honestly, it wasn’t a bad way to spend New Year’s Eve,” I said.

  “When Brittany’s back to normal, you should ask her what all that was about. Sounds like she doesn’t like the FLYs as much as she lets on. Could be she’ll open up.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “Happy New Year, man. Get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” The line went dead.

  The security guards outside the building didn’t want to let me in since I was out past curfew. They called up to the field office, though, and must have gotten clearance because they waved me on through. Upstairs, a familiar face was waiting with a familiar set of cornrows.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, knocking fists with Jake Lindley. He was a former Pilot Point Mission League juvénile agent too, a year behind Isaac.

  “Working the graveyard shift,” he said. “This is entry-level for what I want to do.”

  “Crime scene investigation, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No bowtie?”

  “Nah, not for this job. What are you doing here?”

  “Working the graveyard,” I said.

  Jake laughed and waved me back to what looked like a doctor’s exam room. He took my statement, and since nothing suspicious had happened, gave me a cup and waved me toward the bathroom.

  “Bring that back and I’ll confirm you’ve been a good boy.”

  “Do I have to wait?”

  He grinned. “Not if you trust me.”

  “Call me crazy,” I said, “but I do.”

  I ran through the motions, then drove home. When I got there, I stuck my head in Grandma’s room to let her know I was back in one piece, then I sent my obligatory texts to Mr. S and Watkins. What a weird thing, having to check in with so many people. It was four thirty-five in the morning when I finally hit the sack.

  My buzzing phone woke me. One buzz after another over the course of several hours. Each time I picked it up and winced. My eyes never wanted to open. The first few texts were easy to ignore, but as they kept coming, they became more and more troubling.

  Lukas: Sorry, dude.

  Isabel: Spencer, what happened? Are you okay?

  Arianna: Call me if you want to talk.

  Arianna: I’m serious, Spencer. I’m here for you.

  Meg: I’m so sorry, Spencer. This was not your fault.

  Meg: Call me if you want to talk.

  Lukas: For the record, I don’t think you did anything wrong.

  Grace: why u didnt brng me 2 teh prty?

  Lukas: That guy was a creep.

  Kip: Bwa ha. http://gtc978s33w0

  I clicked on the link from Kip, which led to a video of me at Coffee Time last night, talking to that stalker reporter. There must have been two of them. Brittany, Kayla, and Valeria were stumbling around behind me, drunk as skunks. I grabbed the guy’s phone, held him back while I deleted his stuff, said some not so nice things. I shoved him. Threw his phone at him. It bounced in the grass.

  “Now hit the road before I hit your face,” I said.

  “Is that a threat?” the guy asked.

  “It’s a promise,” I said.

  Prière’s prophecy came back to me then. I hadn’t walked away.

  REPORT NUMBER: 19

  REPORT TITLE: I Get in Trouble with the Press

  SUBMITTED BY: Agent-in-Training Spencer Garmond

  LOCATION: Grandma Alice’s House, Pilot Point, California

  DATE AND TIME: Tuesday, January 1, 10:13 a.m.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. Arianna texted me a clipping from today’s Pilot Point Bulletin. On the front of the sports page, Sue Adams had written an article titled “Star Athlete Assaults Reporter.”

  I couldn’t catch a break with that woman.

  I got up and found Grandma and Prière in the kitchen. Grandma was at the stove, boiling tomatoes. Prière was sitting at the kitchen table, dicing cilantro.

  What was happening with those two?

  “Good morning,” Grandma sang, her attention fixed on the steaming pot as she poked a long wooden spoon into the water. “We’ve been to the farmer’s market. I got a great deal on tomatoes, so I’m going to can some salsa.”

  They’d been at the farmer’s market. How quaint.

  I went out to the porch and found the newspaper, still in its plastic sack. I guessed Grandma had been too busy shopping for tomatoes with Prière to read the paper this morning.

  By the time I’d made it back to the kitchen, I’d found the article. I slapped the paper on the table beside Prière’s cutting board. “Hey, Prière. Next time you give me a warning, do you think you could be a little more specific?” I tapped my knuckles on the article.

  He set down his knife, pulled out his reading glasses, and put them on.

  I went on. “I mean, couldn’t you have said, ‘When you see a reporter or paparazzi or a man with a camera, walk away’? Would it have been so hard to add that little clue?”

  Prière frowned, looking down his nose as he read the article. “I told you that he had a cell phone. How was I to know he would be using it as a camera?”

  That was true. He had said the part about the cell phone.

  Grandma joined us and read over Prière’s shoulder. “Is this that same reporter?”

  “Good ol’ Sue Adams.” I fake-grinned, like I was the luckiest man on earth to have the woman’s comple
te devotion.

  “This is bordering on harassment,” Grandma said. “Though I would like to know what exactly you were doing out with these actresses at three in the morning.”

  “They wanted coffee,” I said.

  “And I suppose you drove them.”

  “I tried to tell them I couldn’t, Grandma, but they were going to go without me. I couldn’t let them drive drunk.”

  “Did you forget that there’s a curfew in Los Angeles for anyone under eighteen?” Grandma asked. “You’re not permitted to be in a public place after ten at night.”

  I groaned. “Grandma, I’m on an approved mission. I don’t think that applies.”

  “You don’t think? Well, I don’t think you’d have nearly as much trouble with this reporter woman if you followed the law yourself,” Grandma said.

  So not helping.

  But she said no more after that. Just went back to her tomatoes. I wasn’t getting any sympathy from the woman, but thankfully she didn’t seem like she was going to ground me, either. I thanked my lucky stars and went back to bed.

  I had basketball practice in the afternoons all week. On Saturday, we played West Ranch up in Valencia. We won our game 72–58. Sue Adams was there, and while I managed to dodge her, some random guy took my picture and asked about Brittany Holmes.

  Sadly, I met no recruiting coaches and moped about it the whole ride home, wondering if any were even watching me anymore. Wondering if Sue Adams and her negative reporting were to blame. I prayed about it, and decided that I needed to do something productive about the whole mess.

  The next day I recorded a video for my YouTube channel. I told my version of what had happened at Coffee Time. I apologized to the reporter for losing my temper. Then I talked about how weird it was to be recognized in public by perfect strangers. I compared my teensy bit of fame with how people like Brittany and Meg have to deal with it every day. I asked my viewers where they would draw the line between fangirling and fanboying, and stalking. Then I challenged them to be kind and respectful if they ever met someone famous.

  In the end, I didn’t know if that video would do any good, but I felt a lot better after talking it out.

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