CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I spent all of Sunday morning feeling disgusted and dirty. Shane was sleeping with a married woman. It was just so wrong. The thought of it made me want to throw up. I mean, having to watch Hannah's gross make-out on the staircase was bad enough, but this was just a whole new level of foulness. And how does a stepmum even go about picking up a high school boy anyway? Although at eighteen, Shane was more a man than a boy.
I shuddered internally. It wasn't like he seemed to have trouble getting what he wanted. I mean, we'd kissed, and I don't even like him.
Unfortunately, my chosen form of therapy to deal with this disgusting news, was not helping. Lying in bed all day and thinking about it did not seem to be making me feel any better. So when Lara rang me in the afternoon and asked me to go for a jog, I agreed. It was time to snap out of it.
Lara arrived on her bike within fifteen minutes of getting the agreement out of me. There was no backing out now.
'I'm up here!' I called out from my bed, when I heard the doorbell ring.
Lara's face cringed when she entered my room.
'Fiona!' she cried in horror. 'Still in bed in the afternoon? You've stooped to a new low. It's lucky that I called. Get your shoes on, now!'
I rolled out of bed, feeling sorry for myself, and started to put my shoes on.
'Thank you for rescuing me from my sloth,' I moaned.
'No problem.' The look of disgust hadn't left Lara's face. She looked around the room warily, for more signs of despicable health crimes. 'Maybe you can tell me what's bothering you while we run it out.'
As it turned out, there was no chance I was going to tell Lara anything, with the gruelling run she had planned for us. I could barely think over the noisy puffing of my own breathing and the thud of my feet on the pavement. We'd picked a bad time to run too; the hot afternoon sun was beating down with a bite, sucking every ounce of energy from my body. For once, though, I didn't stop. The pain in my lungs distracted me from the buzzing thoughts in my head.
That is, until Lara's route took us jogging past Alan's house.
Instinctively, I checked whether Shane's car was in the driveway. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't. I'd almost hoped I'd catch him walking out with his pants undone so we could have it out in one big confrontation. On second thought, maybe I didn't want to face him right now. I was currently panting like a dog, and my shirt was drenched in sweat.
It was weird that out of all the women in the world, Shane had chosen to sleep with Chris' stepmum, who was married to Shane's dad's ex-business partner. I know Canberra is small, but it's not really incestuous-small. It was quite suspicious.
I stopped dead in my tracks. My loud puffing seemed to project out into the hot, still air, now that my feet had stopped thudding.
'Fiona. What's going on?' Lara asked, jogging backwards to face me.
'Nothing.' I swung my legs into action again.
But it wasn't nothing. I already knew that Shane hated Chris, despite their fathers being business partners and once-close friends. Now that Chris had died, Shane was sleeping with his stepmum? It needed further investigation. I had to find out more about what was going on with Shane and Sharelle. The best way to do that would be to infiltrate.
I needed to go on a date with Shane Harris.
The Ghostly Grammar Boy Page 13
