She leaned forward to place her hand on Marissa’s wrist, squeezing lightly to reclaim her attention. “Don’t blame Tyler for this, Mrs. Davidson. It’s not his fault. If I had not spoken rudely to Shawn and provoked him, it’s highly unlikely he would have hit me, and then Tyler wouldn’t have felt it necessary to assault Shawn on my behalf.”
“He. Did. What?” Marissa spluttered. Her chest heaved like she was having difficulty breathing.
Jay analyzed the subject of the sentence and tried to decipher exactly who Marissa’s anger might be directed at. “He” meaning Shawn, or “he” meaning Tyler? The ambiguity of the question disturbed her. As did the glittering intensity of Marissa’s stare and the fury vibrating across the woman’s body.
“I didn’t see
that
on the video clip,” Marissa said. “Tell me exactly what happened. Right now.”
“Very well.” Jay related the incident while mulling how best to handle Marissa’s evident distress. The woman posed a threat, albeit a minor one. It would be more difficult for Jay to maintain her cover if Marissa demanded to personally speak to her fictional guardian. And she struck Jay as the type of woman who would insist upon face-to-face interaction when it came to a child’s welfare—whether her own child’s, or anyone else’s.
Jay did not want to keep on running. She’d done that for seven years. She wanted to stay in Snapperton and attend Greenfield High and pretend to be a normal teenager. She wanted to explore the possibility of friendship with Tyler and Caro and—
Most of all she wanted to explore that possibility with Tyler.
She did not know why all this was suddenly so important to her. She only knew that it was. And if she were to have a chance at normality, this present situation must be contained before she moved on to the potentially far more serious issue of the video clip. The clip showing her tossing a much larger, heavier person into a Dumpster as though he weighed nothing. The clip that was now out in the public domain for anyone to see—for
them
, the men who relentlessly pursued her, to see.
“I regret what I did,” she said, meeting Marissa’s fierce gaze. She assumed an earnest expression, hoping it would help sway the woman if her words didn’t. “You should be proud of Tyler, Mrs. Davidson, and proud of yourself, too. You’ve raised a son who’ll look out for his friends and won’t hesitate to step in to defend them if they’re threatened. Many kids these days are so tied up in themselves it wouldn’t even occur to them to bother to stand up for others.”
Marissa stared at her, mouth agape for a moment before she gathered her wits enough to shake her head in disbelief. “You have
nothing
to apologize for, Jay. I can’t believe Shawn hit you. You poor kid. Are you sure you’re okay? Do you want me to take you home and have a word with your parents?”
“I’m perfectly fine, Mrs. Davidson. The handprint can barely be seen and my face doesn’t hurt at all. Please don’t worry about me.”
Marissa tore her gaze from Jay to glare at her daughter. “And that’s the boy you’ve chosen as your boyfriend, Caro? A boy who hits on other girls behind your back and then gets physical with them when they don’t return his interest? You need to get your priorities straight, my girl. Good looks, flashy cars, and wealthy parents don’t necessarily add up to good boyfriend material.”
Jay had to admire Marissa Davidson’s interrogation technique. Beneath her steely-eyed regard, Caro broke out into a cold sweat and wriggled about in her chair. “I’m, uh, planning on dumping him first thing tomorrow?”
“No need,” her mother said. “Because I’m ringing Wes Evans right now and telling him what his precious son has done. And then I’m telling him if that boy comes anywhere near either of you girls again, I’m going to—”
“Mom, please!” Caro’s face twisted into an agonized expression.
“Yeah, please don’t ring Mr. Evans, Mom,” Tyler said. “School’s hard enough as it is without Shawn
really
having it in for me.”
Jay added her voice to the fray. “I wouldn’t recommend that course of action, Mrs. Davidson.”
Marissa turned that gimlet eye on her again. Her lips had compressed in a thin, bloodless line. A vein visibly pulsed at her throat.
Jay fought the impulse to quail. Mrs. Davidson would be an asset to any interrogation team. “If you bring this incident to Wes Evans’s attention, it will cause him public embarrassment,” she said. “And I predict he will retaliate by pressing charges against Tyler for assaulting his son. If the incident with Shawn slapping my face is not included on that video clip you saw, then it will show Tyler attacking Shawn without provocation. It will be Tyler’s word against Shawn’s.”
Marissa’s jaw worked but only a strangled gargle came out, so Jay continued. “Since I was the one who provoked this incident, if anyone should be ringing the mayor to complain about his son’s behavior, it should be me. And I choose not to take further action. Shawn took an interest in me and believed I would welcome that interest.” She paused when she noted Tyler’s posture go rigid.
“Of course, he was mistaken,” she said, and the breath Tyler had been holding whooshed out as he sagged back against his chair.
Interesting. Could he be jealous of Shawn? Jay hadn’t given him any reason to be, but then, most humans weren’t particularly talented at reading non-verbal clues.
“I have now made that fact quite clear to Shawn, and I believe he will move on and not bother me any further. And if I am mistaken, then
I
will handle Shawn in my own way.”
Marissa chewed her lower lip. And then nodded. “I see your point. And apparently, from what I saw, you can certainly take care of yourself.”
“Yes.”
“About that—”
“I’ve trained under karate and jujitsu masters.” Jay shrugged, hoping the gesture would convey the right degree of self-effacement. “It’s all in the knees, and using your opponent’s momentum against him.”
Marissa considered that explanation quite carefully.
Jay noted acceptance sliding across her face. Better still, the beginnings of a smile twitched her lips upward.
“Shawn picked on the wrong girl, huh?”
“Yes, he did.”
“I guess I have to respect your decision.”
“Thank you,” Jay said.
“I don’t have to like it, though.”
Jay held her gaze. “No, you don’t. You just have to accept it. Please.”
“Very well.” But Marissa wasn’t finished. “And that’s another thing, Tyler. Why has this boy got such a problem with you anyway? He’s got a rich and influential father, a very sweet step-mother, and everything he could possibly want. Surely he’s got better things to do than to make your life a misery?”
Tyler shrugged. “Guess he’s still pissed that despite his so-called brilliance, ever since I left the basketball team the Raiders haven’t won a game.”
Marissa’s righteous anger softened. She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “You don’t make it easy on yourself, love,” she murmured, stroking her fingertips down her son’s cheek. “Perhaps if you took up a sport again, rather than immersing yourself in your music? I know it was unfair of your basketball coach to bench you, but that was no reason to quit baseball as well. Maybe you could try out for the school team again? You had loads of friends when you were involved in sports.”
Jay watched Tyler’s relief seep into his body, unclenching his fists and loosening the tightly held tension in his muscles. “Yeah,” he said. “Turned out they weren’t real friends at all. And I like coaching the girls’ baseball team, Mom. I like coaching even more than playing.”
Jay surprised herself by blurting, “You do have real friends, Tyler. You have me.”
“Yeah. Thanks. But don’t expect me to help you out of the scrapes you get yourself into anymore, huh? It’s so not worth the shit-storm afterward.” He tried to hide his embarrassment over her outburst by resorting to sarcasm.
“Tyler!” Marissa wasn’t at all impressed by this declaration.
“Sorry, Mom.”
Marissa heaved a sigh that was tinged with a mixture of pride and worry. “So I guess you were only doing what any good friend would do. But regardless of the provocation, it still doesn’t look good on video, does it? What if your principal gets wind of it? You know how Ms. Harris feels about physical violence. She won’t care you were trying to protect a friend. She won’t let you coach the girls’ team anymore, and all your music room privileges will be taken away.”
“The video clip is quite easily handled, Mrs. Davidson,” Jay intervened. “I can delete it from the social networking site.”
“You can do that?” Marissa gave her big, luminous, hope-filled eyes.
“Yes,” she said, ignoring the obvious doubt pouring from Tyler and Caro. “I can. All I need is a computer.”
“Great! You can use Tyler’s.” Marissa stood so quickly she set her chair rocking. She began stacking empty plates. “Now all I have to worry about is all the people who’ve already copped a look at Tyler monstering Shawn.”
“I might be able to fix that, too,” Jay said. “With a bit of help from my friends.”
Marissa brightened and a few of her worry lines smoothed. “Well in that case, you three go to it. I’ll even volunteer to do the dishes.”
Before she left the dining room with a stack of plates, she had one more thing to add. “And Tyler?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“Next time, use your brain not your fists. If I hear you’ve been fighting—whatever the provocation—I’ll ground you for the rest of the year. You hear me?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“And as for you, Caro. You know what you have to do about that boy.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“And don’t think you’re getting off easily, either, Jay. If I hear even the slightest rumor Shawn Evans is bothering you again, I
will
be having words with his father on your behalf. Either you handle it, or I will. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, Mrs. Davidson.”
“Good. Now scram—all of you—before I change my mind and stir up a shit-storm of my own.”
Caro waited for her mother to exit before she said, “If Principal Harris sees that clip, Tyler’s ass is toast. I sure hope you’re as good as you think you are, Jay.”
Jay didn’t respond to Caro’s statement. Her gaze flicked to Tyler, but his face was suddenly as flatly expressionless as she knew her own could be. She found herself wondering what was going on inside his head at this particular moment, and strangely energized by the phenomenon of not knowing, of being clueless… like a normal human.
“You really a computer whiz?” Tyler finally asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I really am.”
~~~
Jay sat in the creaky swivel chair at Tyler’s desk with her back straight, feet planted flat on the floor, legs slightly apart. Even though she did not feel pain as humans did, she saw no reason to inflict the perils of poor posture upon her body. Her fingers danced over the laptop’s keyboard as she searched the internet for the clip. “Here it is,” she told Caro and Tyler. “It’s not a featured video and it’s only had twenty-three views, and no comments. Unfortunately, that’s twenty-three too many for our purposes.”
“There’ll be a heap more tomorrow once word gets around,” Caro said.
Tyler peered at the screen, trying to make sense of the username. “NessaSary?”
“That’s Nessa’s username,” Caro said. “
She
must have uploaded the clip, not Matt. Sheesh. That girl really holds a grudge. I’d understand if
you’d
ditched her for another girl, Tyler, but she’s the one who ditched you for Matt. What the heck did you do to piss her off so bad?”
Tyler’s face blanked. “I have no idea what her problem is.”
“Liar.” Curiosity lit Caro’s gaze. “’Fess up.”
“Drop it, sis.”
She threw up her hands. “Whatever.”
Jay clicked on the link and observed Tyler from the corner of her eye.
He winced as he saw himself charging Shawn and whacking him up against the side of his car.
Caro socked her brother in the arm with her fist. “How could you do that to a sweet ride like a Miata?”
“Owww!” He rubbed the sore spot. “Stop picking on me, willya?”
“Baby.”
“Brat.”
“Wuss,” Caro said, then choked back any further insults as the truly interesting part of the clip began—the part where Jay had intervened.
Tyler sucked in a sharp breath as the video version of Shawn sailed through the air, easily clearing the side of the Dumpster before disappearing into its depths. “Ho-ly cripes!”
The uploaded clip was short, and had been inexpertly spliced together from two separate source files. But although jerky and at times unfocused, it plainly showed the damning evidence of Tyler making the first aggressive move toward Shawn, as well as Jay launching Shawn into orbit—plainly performing a feat of strength no teenage girl should be capable of.
“Sheee-it!” came Matt’s tinny-sounding whisper. “Un-freaking-believable.”