The Proviso
Page 91
Eric’s breath stuck in his throat.
“Tell me something. Would you want to go back home to LaVon Whittaker, knowing you’d gone against her? Go back to school knowing that half a dozen male juniors and seniors, a teacher, and a couple other grown men with their own families are going to prison because you coughed up the evidence?”
“Fuck no,” he whispered, horrified. LaVon Whittaker, all Eric’s burly classmates and their fathers, the families of the other men who’d done Simone Whittaker—versus one twelve-year-old girl.
“Yeah, me neither. So you think about that. Think about what a twelve-year-old girl did for you just because it was the right thing to do. Don’t let her down, Eric. Don’t let what she did for you be in vain.”
* * * * *
4: YOUNG MR. WILDER
May 1996
And there he was again. Tall and dark and very dangerous. The senior girls had always flocked around him because he was “hot.” They said he knew things—things about girls and how to make them feel good.
Well, Vanessa felt good every time she looked at him.
She had watched him for a year after she had gone to see Mr. Hilliard, silent, invisible, wondering when or even if he would see her and acknowledge her. Eric Cipriani would graduate in a month. After that, she would probably see him around town and in the feed store he managed, but she wouldn’t see him all the time, like she did now. Every day, she woke up wondering if, no, hoping that today would be the day he approached her to say:
“Thank you, Vanessa. You’re probably the bravest person I know.” And then maybe he would kiss her. Maybe on the lips, even.
The thought made her catch her breath and get a funny little sensation in the pit of her belly, which always happened when she thought that maybe, just maybe he would like her a little bit more than just as a brave person. Maybe he would come to like her, you know, that way.
Because once he graduated, unless he had that reason to seek her out, she would have no such easy access to him as she did now, no reason to go to the feed store, no reason to cross his path at all. Vanessa was running out of time.
She stood behind a tree, peeking around it, to watch him. He and his friends sat on the picnic tables just off campus, drinking beer out of bottles and smoking cigarettes while they watched the senior girls, and pointed at a few of them here and there, laughing. Although she didn’t know what was funny about the senior girls, she loved his laugh. His smile made her want to smile, too, so she did.
At that moment, his gaze met hers, and he stopped laughing. Stopped smiling. Hurt began to blossom somewhere deep inside her chest and she bit her lip, hoping his expression didn’t mean what she thought it meant.
He turned away from her then and his beautiful long black hair floated on the breeze. He didn’t respond to the talk going on around him anymore and he took a long drink from his longneck. He threw his cigarette down on the ground and stubbed it out with his silver-tipped cowboy boots the high school girls said had retractible knives in the toes.
He walked away from his friends—away from Vanessa—without a word. Her attention caught on the way his tight ripped jeans moved over his butt with every step, and there was that funny little feeling in the pit of her belly again.
No “thank you” for Vanessa today. No kiss. She whirled and, her back to the tree, she slid down its trunk to curl in on herself, tamping down the sharp pain in her chest. She managed not to cry about it for two whole months, until cheer camp that summer.
“Vanessa,” drawled Annie Franklin, captain of the squad. “Did you invite Knox to our camp closing exhibition?”
“Yes,” she lied. She hadn’t dared, though she knew very good and well that her access to “that hot prosecutor Knox Hilliard” was the only reason the cheerleaders, prodded by their mothers, had reluctantly recruited her for the varsity squad. Considering Vanessa wasn’t eligible to cheer varsity for two more years, their mothers had lobbied the Alumni Association for an exemption.
“Well? Is he coming?”
“He has a family thing.”
“Did you give him that note?”
“Yes,” she answered truthfully. That was why she hadn’t dared ask him anything else.
“What did he say?”
Is she out of her fucking mind?! “He was in a hurry. He just put it in his pocket.”
Annie looked through Vanessa, her mouth pursed. “Maybe he’s gay.”
Uh, no. “I don’t know.”
“Hey, Annie!” called the vice captain. “What happened to your Italian stallion?”
Annie’s face darkened and Vanessa’s heart beat a lot faster; she hadn’t seen him in almost two months. Anywhere.
“He left,” Annie snapped back.
“Left? Left where?”
“Left town.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Don’t know.”
“Ask his mom.”
“She’s gone, too. It’s like they disappeared off the face of the planet.”
* * * * *
To be continued . . .
NOVEMBER 27, 2009
at
b10mediaworx.com
* * * * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since before Moriah can remember, she wrote stories in her head to put herself to sleep at night. Unfortunately, they grew like kudzu and took over her neural pathways until, around age fourteen, she had to start putting them on paper before they choked out everything else. She’s been writing ever since, with the exception of a five-year sagging middle—er, uh, hiatus—during which a lot of stuff happened. The trouble started when she woke up one morning with the solution to a plot problem that had plagued her since 1995 . . .
mailto:moriah@moriahjovan.com
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