Jex Malone (2 page)

“Please be seated,” the judge suddenly orders, her voice annoyingly calm and filling all the space in the small room. Mom nods and nudges me toward a big, dark leather chair.

I sit.

Slowly.

“Professor Malone, your daughter doesn't think the custody agreement between you and your husband—I'm sorry ex-husband—John Malone should be enforced,” begins the judge. “This is because—and let me make sure I say this exactly as she put it in her petition to the court—she is a ‘free and independent spirit who should not be forced to submit to an agreement in which she had no say.'”

At this point, the judge allows her glasses to slip-slide to the bottom of her nose as if she can't believe it either. She has no string and the glasses actually fall off and land on her desk blotter with a tiny ping. They bounce once and then there is the most awful silence.

“Did I get that right, Miss Malone?” the judge finally says, looking me dead in my baby blues.
Oh, right, I'm the Miss Malone in question.
I don't blink. I don't even move my mop of long red curls or shift my otherwise unremarkable bod with my scrawny, pale, freckled arms. Maybe it's the free and independent thinker in me—or maybe I'm just plain crazy here.

“Yes!” I finally answer—and boldly (plus loudly) to boot. Then I feel Mom nudging me with her elbow. “I mean, yes ma'am,” I add in a quiet tone.

“Your honor, my daughter is a very independent thinker, and I thought you could explain to her the odd nature of the child custody agreement,” Mom blurts.

Judge Goslee holds up her hand to halt Mom again. Clearly, she isn't into some long-winded history of why my super weird, split-up family, the Malones of New Jersey and Nevada, agreed to some whacked out custody agreement when I was only five years old.

“Let me explain, Judge,” Mom verbally marches on, nervously twisting the hem of her sensibly boring navy blue cardigan from Target. She does have a PhD from Yale in archaeology and knows that she can talk her way out of anything.

“I was protecting my child's life when we signed the agreement. She was only a little girl. You don't know the situation. She was in immediate danger. She could have been killed. My ex-husband is … ”

“Ms. Baker-Malone. You're an upstanding citizen of this community. In fact, you're a professor at Princeton. You're an educated woman, so I'm sure you have tried to explain to your daughter that when you sign a child custody agreement, you have to honor it—no matter what bizarre twists are in it,” the judge lectures, suddenly standing up from behind her desk like a human exclamation point.

Zeroing in, she pivots and I'm the new target.

Disappear. Evaporate. Dust in the wind,
I pray.

“Jessica, you were supposed to start spending entire summers with your father at age nine. That was seven years ago,” Judge Goslee continues, almost daring anyone to interrupt her. “But you took it upon yourself to repeatedly defy a court order. Year after year, you decided that you would be absent for these summers. On your own volition.”

Even a B student like me knows “my own volition” means that I blew him off.

Intentionally.

Hey, I had my reasons.

I swallow because I'm basically a criminal who ignores court orders. A teen felon. The bad kid. A Lohan.

“At nine, you had Girl Scout camp and your father understood. At age ten, your Aunt Mary needed you in Ohio.
For the entire summer
. To help her horse give birth. How many babies did that horse have? Ten? Twelve? Were these births staggered?” Judge Goslee continues to admonish.

“Just, uh, one colt born on a hot summer day,” I say. “We named him Fred.”

Judge Goslee's stare says that she isn't a horse lover.

“At age twelve, your pet snake Fluffy died and you were in mourning. For twelve weeks. Again, your father understood these excuses and allowed you to blow him off, as you might say—and I could go on and on. But no more! He has lost out on a lot of time with his only child.

“Jessica Malone, I order you to spend this summer and every summer from now until you are of age, which means eighteen, with your father, Detective John Malone, in Green Valley, Nevada, where your life certainly, or should I say hopefully, won't be in danger. Again, hopefully, you two can form some sort of a real relationship and you won't see this as some sort of punishment,” the judge commands, her eyes locked on my face.

“But Judge, he's not fit, plus he's a total dor … ” I begin to argue, only to be halted by the judge's right hand shooting up.
Again with the hand
.

“It's over, young lady. Decided. Done,” the judge states. “Have your mother buy you a plane ticket. You leave on June first, the day after school is over. You are very lucky to have a father who wants to spend time with you.”

I feel an eye roll coming on, but I command my eyeballs to stay where they are.

“Don't give me that face, young lady. If you choose to defy this court order,” the judge continues, “I will personally make sure that this will be the worst summer of your entire life.”

It already is.

It's dark now, at 4:30
P.M.
, and I wish upon the starless sky that the last of the dirty snow would never melt. I hope the winter lasts forever and spring, or even my 17th birthday, doesn't come this year. While Mom fumbles for the car keys, I watch as my breath forms puffy clouds in the freezing air. Mom is so shaken that she's still digging aimlessly in her purse, so I text Kel.

Just one word.

Death sentence,
I type.

Then I see something horrifying: a sign for summer camp sign ups at the local YMCA. The cold hard facts slap me in the face: Spring is just around the corner, which means summer is just a few months away.

Which will mean the end of my life.

As I know it.

“‘This is the first mystery I've solved alone,'” she thought. “‘I wonder if I'll ever have another one half so thrilling.'”

—Nancy Drew

This is hell.

Closing my eyes, I let the sun beat down on my face. It's so bright that even with my eyelids squeezed extra shut, there are still little bouncing spots of bright light. I breathe deeply.

Yep. Still alive.

It's Tuesday in Green Valley, Nevada, and I'm some twenty minutes away from the Las Vegas strip, but I might as well be hanging out in Anywhere Suburbia, USA, with rambling front “lawns,” small brick houses, nosy old lady neighbors, and absolutely nothing to do.

Doing nothing here in H-E-Double-Toothpicks means watching a baby lizard crawl across the driveway and then into a little hole in the brown rocks that make up our front yard because it's too scorching hot for real grass to grow in hell.

“Don't go, little lizard. I have to talk to someone,” I tell her. Him.
It
. Talking to reptiles? I wonder if they put this stuff on your permanent record or put you into some sort of loony bin? Of course, I could easily end up in that bin because it's
only
110 super-hot degrees here with the sun beating down directly on my fried brain, which must be scrambled goop by now.

I'm sitting on the hot sidewalk with my feet dangling into the painted green gutter, thinking just one thing:
This really sucks
. Extra sucking points could be granted because I am obviously being held against my will in a strange, foreign land talking to Jurassic Park–like creatures.

It is June 1, the first day of the first week I'm legally required to spend time with my father in this faraway land doing absolutely freakin' nothing—except bonding.

Oh yeah.

That.

However, it's hard to bond with someone who is not there—mentally, physically, or in any other way. In other words, what else is new? He's at work, which is just a supersonic great twist of fate. You'd think the guy could take off on his daughter's first real day at Camp Getting to Know You. He has to work. Big cases. Gotta go. Gotta bust some felons.

At least, he did go through the happy-to-be-your-summer-jailer motions.

Let's recap: My father has basically been absent my entire life, which is why this whole get-to-know-Daddy plan seems like the biggest sham in the entire world. Correction. It is the biggest BS I've ever heard.

Dad is like Santa. He plops in about once a year around Christmas after a ride on Guilty Airlines, usually wearing his mondo blue police-issued parka, which makes everyone stare at us like they're under arrest. He wears it to embarrass me at The Olive Grove, which is the only place he can ever find that's open on Christmas Eve.

Bonding and breadsticks.

It's a classic American family holiday.

It's not like he would ever do any advanced planning to find a nice restaurant to catch up with his phantom of a kid. Nope. He prefers all-you-can-eat salad, lukewarm, sponge-like chicken parm, and questions. Endless questions. This is usually followed by some lame present like a gigantic doll that accessorizes—not exactly a dream gift at ages 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. At least he's consistent.

Physically, he is a mountain of a man. He tosses the parka into the booth and then by the sheer act of sitting down makes all the air whoosh out of the seat cushion. The waitress inevitably comes by one too many times with a stupid smile on her face that says, “Dump the kid. Let's go on a date.”

Even I notice his muscles trying to burst out of a black, mondo kind of sweater. It's like he's some superhero about to get a call to save the city. I'd like to imagine that his cape is in the rental car, but that's not the case. Only his return ticket is on the passenger's seat, so he can quickly get out of Dodge. This is his standard whiplash fast trip to Jersey.

By the way, his jeans are always extra faded like he doesn't care, which he doesn't about most things, except for crime and criminals. The weird thing is, he can't turn off his inner cop and gives me these intense, make-you-want-to-confess-to-something stares, the kind I give my mom, but I'm sure I invented them. With him, it's always like I'm being booked for illegal ordering of extra fried calamari.

Ten years to life for bad spaghetti twirling.

Let's recap last night, shall we? Daddy-o picks me up at the airport looking tanned and frankly younger than the last time I saw him—in other words,
forever ago.

Now, it's summer and shock of all shocks: Dad is stylin' at McCarran Airport in fabulous Las Vegas. The parka and wool knit shirts of his Jersey visits are gone. He's dressed in a very white polo shirt tucked into actual human-looking khaki shorts and wearing really nice Perry Topsiders.
Hmm, something is up.
Either he's vying to become
People
magazine's Sexiest Dork Cop Alive or … well,
something is up
.

Women in the airport are doing whip-fast double takes because he has that big square face, all those arm muscles, shoulders that go for a city block, and he's like six foot four with a mess of longish, wavy brown-blonde, older hunk surfer-guy hair that goes past his chin. He shoves it off his XL face. Technically, he looks like he walked off the cover of some dopey romance novel.

The man who has summoned me to his turf musters a big friendly wave and shouts “Jex” as soon as he sees me, which is right away at the airport, where there are about one trillion people on fun gambling trips.

He looks past them.

He's a cop.

He has laser vision because he's Super Dork Cop. Remember?

Oh, and as for the Jex thing, I might as well explain right now. Jex is a nickname my dad gave me as a baby.

He would never admit it, but he convinced himself that I was going to be a boy, and a girly name like Jessica or Jessie or even Jess didn't really seem to fit the little tough guy he really wanted in his life. He wanted a Jake or a Nick. Instead, he got me, a six-pound crying little frail thing, a preemie that looked like she might break. I guess he was afraid of me as a baby and didn't do any of the heavy lifting—or light lifting. According to my mom, he didn't touch diapers or even feed me for many months. All he did was wiggle a finger in my face and give me a nickname.