by AJ Myers
When I refused to play into Sheriff Martin’s hands, he finally started filling out my ticket. The thoroughly disappointed look on his face was enough to make me want to give myself a pat on the back.
Until he handed me the ticket, that is.
“I think you made a mistake,” I said, my eyes going round, as I read over it before I signed it. “I wasn’t doing eighty!”
“My radar says you were doing eighty,” he said with a smug little grin. Yeah, and pigs fly. “You’re welcome to contest it in court. Considering your record, though, I doubt it would do you any good.”
Don’t do it! Don’t say a damn thing! a little voice in my mind cried, jumping up and down and waving frantically through the wash of red painting my vision a really amazing shade of crimson. I swear, I tried to obey it. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I counted to ten, I took a deep breath—or four—but it was all for nothing. The second he smiled at me like Christmas had just come three months early, I lost it.
“That is such bullshit!” I yelled, flinging the ticket back at him. “If I had been doing eighty in a forty-five, you would be arresting me and we both know it!”
He got this dreamy looking on his face at the thought of me behind bars and I gulped. Maybe I shouldn’t have suggested that…
“Tell it to the judge, Ember,” he said, still looking like he was imagining my incarceration with an unhealthy amount of delight. “Now, if you’ll just sign…”
“No!”
When he held the ticket out to me again, I batted it away, got out of my car, propped my hands on my hips, and prepared to fight to the death to get out of that stupid ticket that was probably going to cost me more than just my savings account. I was already kissing my car keys goodbye with the realization that I would probably be eighty before I got them back.
“Look, Sheriff Martin,” I said, trying to stay calm even though I already had a bad feeling I was going to fail. “My parents are going to kill me when they see that ticket. Do you really want that on your conscience?”
“Stacy’s jaw still pops. Did you know that?” he asked conversationally, flipping the ticket pad in his hand to the next page.
“Then maybe she should learn to keep her bitchy mouth shut!”
I knew I had just given him exactly what he wanted when a sick, triumphant smile spread across his whole fat face.
Ten minutes later, I had not only a speeding ticket—that still stated I had been doing eighty and not sixty—but also one for not signaling properly when I pulled over to the side of the road, one for public nuisance because I was playing my music too loud, one for littering because an empty water bottle had fallen out of my car when I got out and I hadn’t picked it up, and one for verbal assault of a police officer because his daughter was a bitch and I’d told him so.
“You have a good day now, Ember,” he said, laughing as he walked back to his car.
“Yeah, because it’s been a great one so far,” I muttered under my breath as I got in the car and put my seatbelt back on.
If only I had known just how bad my day was really going to get…
Every Girl Needs a Stalker
Just to be annoying, Deputy Donut decided he would escort me to school. I had never been as careful while I driving as I was for the five minutes he followed me. I turned off the stereo, kept my hands at ten and two and the speedometer set exactly on forty-four. By the time I pulled into Oakhurst Academy’s student lot, I was so tense I felt like my tendons were humming.
I immediately reached over to grab my backpack and stopped breathing altogether when all my hand found was empty air. I closed my eyes and prayed to whatever power might be listening that I hadn’t been stupid enough to leave my backpack next to my chair at home. But when I opened my eyes, my backpack was still missing, and I was still screwed.
Almost at the end of my rope—and ready to hang myself with it—I was forced to accept the truth. All the homework I had slaved over the night before was MIA and my English Lit essay was due to be handed in to Ms. Cantrell, the Dragon Lady of Oakhurst Academy, in less than an hour.
No essay = Saturday detention.
Saturday detention = a week with no car keys.
A week with no car keys = no shopping trip with my best friend, Kim.
Standing Kim up = her finding some way to execute me. Probably via text message. Kim’s creative like that.
Then again, when my parents saw my latest batch of tickets and the way my insurance premium had just soared to the next galaxy, I would be totally dead, anyway. So, really, what did it matter?
If I was hoping things would get better, I was setting myself up for disappointment. First, Dragon Lady Cantrell seemed to take particular delight in giving me my Saturday detention slip for not handing in my essay, stating that getting pulled over for speeding was no excuse not to have completed the assignment. I set my notebook on fire in Chemistry, losing a month’s worth of study notes in the process. I failed the quiz I’d studied half the night for in Trig. Then, because I’d seriously pissed off the Cosmic forces somehow, I got stuck with none other than Stacy Martin, the Queen Bitch of Oakhurst Academy, as my tennis partner in gym.
I finally reached that noose at the end of my metaphorical rope, though, when I stumbled to my locker after the last bell rang to signal the end of my wonderful day, completely wrung out, to find the boyfriend I didn’t have—or want, for that matter—waiting to ambush me. Just the sight of Jack O’Connell standing there was enough to set my teeth on edge and send my temper into orbit.
I had known it wasn’t going to work after our first date. Dinner had been a disaster. Every time I’d made the mistake of making eye contact, I had felt like I was suffocating, like my lungs were filling with smoke or something. I could even smell smoke. He had taken me to the only nice restaurant in town, but the food tasted like ashes. My throat felt dry and scratchy and I kept chugging down water like there wouldn’t be any more tomorrow. When I started coughing up little black specks that looked like charred wood, though, I decided I’d had enough. I asked him to take me home before we even made it to dessert.
Once I was home and was feeling normal again, though, I started to wonder if I was just plain crazy. The food had looked fine, and I knew for a fact the building hadn’t been on fire—trust me, that’s something I definitely would have noticed. So, crazy, right? Just to test the theory, I agreed to one more date.
The second date went even worse than the first. After another disastrous evening of choking and breathing smoke that wasn’t there, I practically had to punch him to get him off me when he forced a good night kiss on me at my door. I had never had such a horrifying kiss in my entire life. The second he grabbed hold of me, I had the strangest feeling that he was going to hurt me. Come to that, it did hurt me. For one second, I felt like I was on fire. Literally on fire. I could even feel the flames licking at my skin. By the time I got him off me, I was so terrified I was blinking back tears.
There wasn’t a third date.
And there never will be.
At first, I felt kind of bad about it. He took the rejection pretty hard when I refused to go out with him again. Then he started to make me nervous, calling at all hours of the day and night. When I refused to take his calls, the texting started. When none of that worked, he decided to take his game up a notch and started sending me things like flowers and balloons and stuffed animals with notes begging me to give him another chance.
By that point, he was seriously starting to creep me out. Persistence is one thing, stalking is another. Leave it to me to date one of those guys who simply couldn’t take a hint.
Or an outright “Get lost, asshole!” either, for that matter. Believe me, I tried that, too.
Maybe in his mind it was just too hard to accept that a girl would dare to dump him. That wouldn’t be entirely his fault since it was an idea ninety percent of the female student body—and a few of the teachers, as well, if the rumors were to be believed—at Oakhurst lived to encoura
ge. Even I had to admit he was cute…but not cute enough to make up for his other not-so-great qualities. He was tall and broad in all the right places. His blond hair was constantly falling into his big, baby blue eyes, and he really could be charming when he wanted to be.
But, on the downside, he had no concept of the word ‘no’, was seriously stalkerish, and he had these great big paws that he would not keep to himself. Oh, and there was also that little problem of smelling something fleshy burning every time he got near me. Don’t get me wrong, I believe every romance should have some fire, but that’s just going a bit too far.
“Em!” Jack called cheerfully as I marched past him to my locker. “Where were you this morning? I waited for you at the Coffee Bean, but you never showed.”
Since he hadn’t gotten any of my other signals for the last two months, I did my best to ignore him as I turned the dial on my combination lock. I’m a fast learner. No eye contact meant no weird smoke inhalation. Which meant I got to go home and actually eat something instead of choking up charcoal for the rest of the night.
That still gave me chills. At first, I thought I had been imagining it, or it had been dust from the air of the restaurant or something. But that kiss had been enough to convince me that it wasn’t all in my head, after all. The second I got away from him, I had staggered inside to my bed to lie down and totally freaked out as I choked up what looked like finger-length chips of partially-burned wood all over my pillowcase. There's no way I could've breathed those things in. Just no way. I'd called my parents in to take me to a doctor, but they'd thought I was playing some sort of prank. They'd seen the inch-long shards of wood and gave each other a “whatever” look before telling me there were better ways to get attention, and gone back to the pool house to write their books without a backward glance, leaving me alone with my chips of char and gobs of black, smoke-smelling mucus.
So, yeah. It didn't escape my notice that something was very wrong with Jack. Or me, around Jack. Or just me. I didn’t know which, but it scared the crap outta me. I did my best to avoid him like the plague, but ever since that kiss, he'd made every effort to find me whenever he could, introducing me to a whole new level of Hell.
My fingers started to shake as I fiddled with my lock. When I got the second number wrong and had to start over, I started praying he would get bored and wander off to stalk somebody else for a change. But he just stayed right there, hogging up all my personal space and making me feel like something creepy with tiny little legs was crawling all over me.
Wanting to scream in frustration, I kept my eyes fixed on the lock. The first tinges of smoke at the edge of my awareness left me fighting the urge to drop my books and bolt, but I was also still warring with the perpetual desire to be polite. If there was anything my grandmother—and, okay, my sucky parents—had taught me, it was how to be a Proper Young Lady.
"I was late, Jack. I didn’t have time to get coffee this morning," I said, chancing a quick glance at him despite my weird instinct to run, run, run. He gazed down at me with an odd look, almost as if he didn't understand the words coming out of my mouth, and I wondered if I was going to have to pull out the crayons for him. “You know? As in not here on time?” I clarified, rolling my eyes. “Oh, and just so you know, stalking is illegal in all fifty states. Why are you staking out the Bean every morning? Dude, it’s creepy! Don’t you have something better to do?”
I wasn't sure what was wrong with Jack, but as the smell of smoke began to assault me in force, I instinctively knew it wasn't something I wanted to spend a few weeks ‘working him through’, as my parents liked to call their trips down psychobabble lane. As a matter of fact, it was all I could do just to stand there, trembling from his sheer proximity. I forced myself to hold it together, though. Showing fear in front of someone like Jack was the equivalent of dangling a bloody rabbit in front of a starving wolf. I wasn’t quite ready to be the rabbit just yet.
“Aw, is somebody in a bad mood today?”
He took another step closer to me and I arched an eyebrow in warning. When he moved even closer, I glared at him and held my hand up in a clear “Stay Back” gesture, but he just kept coming.
“Do you ever get tired of rejection, Jack?” I grumbled, shoving against his chest as his arms snaked around me. And there it was again, that feeling like I was being burnt where he touched me. I squirmed out of his hold and put a couple of paces between us, trying to breathe normally so I wouldn’t hyperventilate, and speared him with a look that should have killed him on the spot. “Seriously, why are you wasting your time on someone who has made it very clear she’s not interested? Move on, man! Find someone new to annoy!”
“I don’t want someone new, I want you.” A shadow of anger crossed his features when I rolled my eyes at him again, but then it was gone and he was back to grinning at me like the big ape he was.
I looked around for someone to rescue me only to find Matt Evans, the freshman whose locker Jack was blocking, looking about two seconds away from a panic attack. I could almost see his choices flashing across his acne-riddled face. He could, A: Ask Jack to move and hope he wasn’t in the mood to beat him up for asking, B: Stand there and hope Jack moved without being asked—taking the chance of missing his ride in the process, or C: He could just walk away without his books and hope for the best the next morning when his teachers started asking for homework assignments. Looking at the choices from Matt’s point of view, they all kind of sucked.
Knowing he wasn’t going to move until I did, I took pity on Matt and pushed Jack away from the kid’s locker—with the books I had in my hands. I catch on quick. There was no way in Hell I was touching him. Flicking me a grateful look, Matt began frantically trying to open his locker. Judging by the worried glances he kept throwing in Jack’s direction, I got the impression he was expecting Jack to beat him into a bloody lump on the hallway floor.
I didn’t wait around to find out if he did or not. I hated myself for it, but I left the kid to his fate with a mumbled, “Sorry, Matt,” and made a break for it.
Not that it did me any good. Like I said, Jack took persistence to a whole new level. He fell into step beside me as I tried to run away. “So, Homecoming…” Jack let his voice trail off expectantly, his tone adding the question mark at the end as he fell in step beside me as I tried to run away.
The word ‘Homecoming’ had me trying to decide if I wanted to rip my hair out in frustration or deck him for not being able to take a damn hint. The theme alone was enough to make me want to skip the whole thing. Mardi Gras Masquerade. A masked Homecoming? I guess it really was kind of inevitable since Homecoming was scheduled for the day before Halloween. If they decided to make it a costume party, though, I was boycotting it for sure.
But the real reason I didn’t want to go was walking right next to me.
Problem No.1: Jack assumed we were going together.
Not going to happen.
Problem No. 2: He had been telling all the guys in the locker room, including Kim’s boyfriend, Blake, that Homecoming was the night he was finally going to get me to sleep with him.
Unless icicles began to form in hell, that was definitely not going to happen. Just kissing him had been enough to make me violently ill. The thought of letting him touch me intimately was enough to almost give me a stroke.
“I’m not going, but don’t let that stop you,” I muttered. I looked around for some way to escape, pretty desperate to get away from him by that point, and spotted Kim just down the hall headed toward the front door and fresh, Jack-free air. “Look, Jack, I gotta go. I promised Kim I would give her a ride home.”
I hurried away before I had to endure any more of his crap—or, God forbid, his touch—and fought the urge to run as I literally felt the heat of his gaze burning holes in the back of my sweater. Why couldn’t he just take the hint already and move on to someone else? It wasn’t like he didn’t have plenty of willing volunteers to choose from. He couldn’t turn around in the hall without
running over ten girls slobbering over him.
By the time I reached the doors leading to the parking lot and a chance at freedom, I was practically jogging. Once I was outside, though, I ran. All the way to the parking lot and the shiny little copper red Miata that had been my reward for my parents forgetting my birthday in July.
Kim was propped on the hood, tapping her foot impatiently and blatantly ignoring the covetous looks the guys hanging out in the parking lot were sending her way. Kim just has that effect on people. With her dark hair and olive skin, and perfect, willowy form, Kim is almost supermodel beautiful. I say ‘almost’ because, unlike a supermodel, Kim doesn’t really care that she’s beautiful. Then, maybe that’s why she is.
I’ve spent most of my life wishing I was even half as beautiful as Kim. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not grotesque or anything. I’m fairly pretty, actually, or so everyone keeps telling me. I compare myself to Kim on a regular basis, though – one of the hazards of having a modelesque best friend – and, it has to be said, I always seem to find myself lacking.
I have a few good features, like my big blue eyes and long, fire-red curls. The rest of me…well, I could definitely do with some cosmetic enhancement. I’m too pale, too short, my butt is too big and my boobs just don’t fit with the size of my body. Visualize a stunted hourglass and you pretty much get the right picture.
Kim looked up from her phone as I ran toward her and I saw her eyebrows dip in concern. By the time I made it to my car, nearly in tears and shaking like a leaf, she was already headed my way, looking like a mother hen ready to take on the whole chicken coop for picking on her baby.
“Jack?” she asked, correctly guessing the cause of my strained expression and trembling hands.
“Who else?”
I started digging in my purse for my keys to avoid looking her in the eye. I didn’t want her to see how much Jack had upset me. That would lead to a lot of questions I didn’t want to answer. There were only two things I had kept secret from Kim in twelve years. And thinking Jack was somehow setting me on fire every time he looked at me or touched me was one of them.
