“I had a bad couple years after I left here, that’s for sure,” he said.
A couple of years?
“First my mother died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Then I was in an accident. I was in the hospital for months and then in rehab.”
“God, James, that must have been awful.”
He shrugged. “My dad says my main problem is that I don’t focus. But that hasn’t been my problem lately. Before my mom and the accident, I didn’t care about school. I didn’t care about anything.”
He seemed like such a gentle, quiet guy. It was hard to imagine him not caring.
“But I care now,” he added quickly. “I don’t want you to think you’re going to be wasting your time. I’m already a year behind. I want to get through this. I want to make the grades so that I have some options.”
“If you keep working like you did today, you’ll be fine,” I said.
He smiled, and this time I saw how right Morgan was. He was extremely cute—and, unlike Nick, he was turning out to be open and easy to get to know. When he offered me a ride home, I accepted.
. . .
On my way up to my dad’s place, I stopped and knocked on Nick’s door. No answer. I could barely concentrate on my homework. Then my phone rang.
. . .
“So?” Morgan said the next morning. She was waiting for me outside school. “How did it go?”
“How did what go?”
“The tutoring. How was it? Did you have fun?”
“It was math, Morgan.” I had actually enjoyed myself, which surprised me. But there was no way I was going to tell her that. She might get the wrong idea.
“But you’re going to see him again, right?”
“I’m just tutoring him, Morgan. That’s all. Besides,” I added triumphantly, “Nick called last night. He invited me to a party.” The downside: most of the people there would be kids from his school. The glorious upside: it would be the first carefree night I had spent with Nick since the summer. I could hardly wait.
Morgan didn’t say a word. She didn’t seem to be paying any attention, and she wasn’t even looking at me. I turned to see what had caught her interest.
James. He was leaning against his car in the school parking lot.
“He’s been staring at his phone for, like, five minutes now,” Morgan said. “He does that a lot.”
I had seen him staring at it once. But a lot?
“He’s probably playing a game.”
“I don’t think so,” Morgan said. “If he was playing a game, his thumbs would be moving. But he’s just staring. I saw him doing it yesterday, too. Standing in the hall, staring at his phone. He didn’t even notice when I went up to him. I’m not one hundred percent positive, but I think he was looking at pictures.”
“Maybe they’re pictures of friends back home. Or maybe his mom.” I filled Morgan in on what little I knew.
“Well, whatever he’s doing, he looks really down,” she said.
Pictures of his mother, I decided.
“Let’s cheer him up,” Morgan said. She called his name and waved to him. His head bobbed up. He stuffed his phone into his pocket and made his way over to us. His limp seemed more pronounced than usual.
“Hey, Robyn,” he said, smiling shyly.
“What are you up to, James?” Morgan said.
The question seemed to startle him. His face
turned red.
“Up to?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“She means, what’s new?” I said, even though I knew that wasn’t what she had meant at all. I shot her a look. She just shrugged. We all went into school together. But I couldn’t help wondering what James had been looking at—and why he had been so startled by Morgan’s question.
. . .
“Robbie, I was just going to call you,” my dad said when I walked through the door after school. “Be an angel and let me borrow your car.”
I stared at him. My dad always takes pride in his appearance. When he dresses up, he really dresses up. He has a closet full of expensive suits. When he dresses down, he still looks great. His jeans fit well. His T-shirts are strictly designer. His boots and shoes are well looked after. I had never seen my dad sloppy or unkempt—until today. He was wearing faded, grubby jeans; a shapeless T-shirt that appeared to have been dredged out of a thrift-store bin; battered work boots that looked as if a few different pairs of feet had tromped around in them; and a faded work shirt.
“Why are you dressed like that, Dad? And what happened to the Porsche?”
“The Porsche is fine, Robbie. I have a job, and if I don’t punch in on time, I’m going to get into trouble on my first day.”
“Punch in?” My dad has his own business. He’s in private security and investigations. He has clients—plenty of them. But I had never heard of any of them putting him on a time clock. “What kind of job? Where?”
“Warehouse.”
“You’re working in a warehouse?”
“A lot of merchandise has gone missing,” my father said. “They think it’s an inside job.”
“You’re working undercover?”
My dad nodded. “I thought I could use your car. It fits the profile a lot better than mine does.”
I had a beat-up Toyota that my future stepfather Ted had bought me for my summer job. I had barely driven it since returning to the city. I dug in my backpack for my keychain, removed my car keys, and tossed them to him.
“I’m going to be working nights for a couple of weeks at least,” my dad said. “Maybe longer. It might be a good idea for you to move in with your mom and Ted until the house is ready. Otherwise you’re going to be alone a lot.”
I thought about being in close proximity to my mom while she was (a) working, (b) overseeing renovations that were already running late, and (c) planning her wedding, which was scheduled to take place in three months. I love my mother. I really do. But she’s a Type-A personality at the best of times, and it was so peaceful at my dad’s place.
“I’d rather stay here, Dad.”
He looked doubtful. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, Robbie. I have to get going.” He kissed me on the cheek and dashed out the door.
. . .
I met James the next day after school to help him with his homework. Morgan tagged along. The plan was that she would come to my dad’s place with me afterwards and spend the night. When we got to the library, James and I settled at a large study table and Morgan found a spot at another table where we wouldn’t disturb her, or vice versa. But the whole time she kept glancing at me and grinning.
This time things didn’t go as well. James seemed distracted while I was explaining the work to him, and he had trouble applying what I’d shown him to the exercises he had been assigned.
“Is something wrong, James?” I said, trying to hide the exasperation I was feeling.
“What?” He blinked at me.
“Something about my explanation you don’t understand?” So far he hadn’t gotten a single right answer.
He looked sheepishly at me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I’ll do better next time, I promise.” When he pushed back his chair to stand up, he knocked over his backpack. He ducked down, grabbed one of the straps, and hauled the pack up onto the table so that he could stuff his books into it. “Sorry,” he said again.
“We can review the material one more time if you want,” I said.
He shook his head. “I have an errand to do. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”
I frowned as I watched him make his way to the elevator. What was bothering him?
I glanced at Morgan. She was staring at the elevators. It was a few moments before she got up and came over to where I was sitting. As I gathered my things, she dove down under the table.
“What are you doing?” I said.
Her head popped up. She glanced around.
“What’s going on, Morgan?”
Sh
e straightened up, laid her hand on the table, and opened it. She was holding a phone.
“That isn’t yours,” I said. Morgan’s phone was pink. The one in her hand was black.
“It fell out of James’s backpack when he knocked it over.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
She glanced around again, checking to make sure that James wasn’t coming back. Then she turned the phone on.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I want to take a look, that’s all.”
“That’s James’s property. How would you like it if he went creeping around in your phone?”
She just shrugged. “I have nothing to hide. Besides, all I want to do is see what he’s always looking at. And check to see if there are any other girls’ numbers in here. Come on, Robyn, tell me you aren’t curious.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Give me that.” I grabbed for the phone, but she ducked back out of my way and continued to browse.
“Oh,” she said, a surprised look on her face.
“What?”
“I thought you weren’t curious.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, you would be if you saw this.”
“Morgan!”
“Just take a look, Robyn.”
She handed me the phone. There was a photo on the screen—a medium-range shot of a bearded, heavyset man in scruffy work clothes coming out of a rundown house that was surrounded by trees.
“Keep looking,” Morgan said.
I scrolled to the next picture, then the next. All the photos were of the same man. There were five or six shots of him coming out of the house, crossing the yard to a battered pickup truck, and getting inside. There was a second series of the same man getting out of the truck in front of what looked like a hardware store, going into the store, coming out again, loading stuff into the bed of the truck, and then getting back inside.
“See the store in the corner of that picture?” Morgan said. She pointed to the screen. “I know where it is. It’s in Harris.” Harris was a town on the way to Morgan’s family’s summer home up north.
“Is it just me, or do those look like creepy stalker pictures?” Morgan said.
James had certainly picked an unusual subject for his pictures, but ... “Maybe he’s into photography,” I said. “Maybe he’s working on some kind of project.”
“Please! If he were into photography, he’d be taking pictures with a proper camera, not his phone. Besides, those pictures aren’t exactly art.”
“You’re impossible, Morgan. First you try to convince me that James is the perfect guy for me. Now you’re trying to tell me he’s a stalker.” I began browsing through the phone again.
“I thought you said that was his personal property,” Morgan said.
“I’m just looking to see if he has his home number in here so that I can call him and tell him he dropped his phone.” But he didn’t. He hadn’t stored any phone numbers at all. In the end, I decided to leave the phone on in case he tried to track it down by calling his own number. Failing that, I would return the phone at school the next day.
Morgan and I went back to my dad’s place and made ourselves something to eat. Then we did our homework. Well, I did my homework. Morgan talked on the phone to Billy for an hour. I tried to remember the last time I had talked to Nick for more than ten minutes. I couldn’t wait until the next night. We’d be together at the party. We’d have fun for the first time in ages.
My mom called to see how I was and to deliver a message: “I’m expecting you for dinner tomorrow night.”
“I already have plans, Mom.”
“This is important, Robyn. I haven’t seen you all week. And I have to go out of town on Saturday.”
“So, I’ll see you when you get back.”
“You’ll see me tomorrow night for dinner.”
“Mom, I’m going to a party. I already accepted the invitation.”
“You can go to the party after dinner.”
“But—”
“It’s called compromise, Robyn. You do what I want—have dinner with me. Then you do what you want—go to your party. Deal?”
As if I had a choice.
I called Nick and left a message telling him that I’d have to meet him at the party and that he should let me know where it was being held.
. . .
The first thing I did when I got to school the next morning was show James the phone that Morgan had picked up in the library.
“Is it yours?” I said. “I found it under the table after you left.”
James’s face flooded with relief. “I thought I’d lost it,” he said. “My dad would have killed me.”
“Did you ask him about those pictures?” Morgan said at lunch.
“Right,” I said. “And let him know that I peeked into something that’s none of my business.”
“He took a lot of pictures of the same person, Robyn—a guy who isn’t even good-looking.”
“Maybe he’s a relative or an old friend.”
“Maybe if we started a conversation with him about photography ...”
“No,” I said.
“It’s bad enough we even looked through it, Morgan. We are not going to pry. It’s none of our business.”
A
fter school I went home to change. Then I took the bus uptown to the condo building where Ted lived.
Ted beamed at me when he opened the door. He is nowhere near as big and boisterous and good-looking as my father. In fact, he’s on the short side—in heels, my mom is easily the taller of the two. He’s also mostly bald and can’t see much of anything without his glasses. But he’s a terrific cook, has an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, and is incredibly successful in his work. He’s a financial analyst—whatever that is. My mom’s crazy about him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she picked someone who is home every night and all weekend and who is always more than happy to pamper her when she’s had a rough day at the office or in court. My dad never did that. He was hardly ever home.
“Come in, come in,” Ted said. “Your mother is in the living room. Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes.”
My mom was on the sofa with her feet curled up under her. She was sipping a glass of wine and looking surprisingly relaxed for a workaholic who was about to get married.
“Robyn, I feel as if I haven’t seen you in months,” she said, thrusting out her arms. We hugged, and I sat down beside her. Ted bustled in with a plate of canapés—tiny mushroom tarts and miniature triangles of toast topped with slivers of smoked salmon—and a ginger ale for me.
“Join us, Ted,” my mother said.
But Ted wouldn’t hear of it.
“You two catch up,” he said. “I’ll crew the galley.”
Ted was a sailing fanatic—or had been when he was younger. He kept saying that one of these days he was going to buy a boat, and he and my mother were going to sail around the world. My mom always smiled sweetly, but she never did anything to encourage him. She was uncomfortable at the thought of being surrounded by thousands of miles of open water, especially if there was the slightest chance that the water might be shark-infested.
“So how come you’re going out of town, Mom?” I said.
My mom smiled mysteriously.
“I can’t tell you yet,” she said. “I don’t want to jinx anything.”
“Are you scouting out honeymoon locations?”
Her smile broadened. My mom never looked happier than when she was with Ted. He seemed to have the opposite effect on her that my dad did.
“How long are you going to be gone?” I said.
“Probably most of the week.” There was that smile again. What was going on?
“Is Ted going with you?”
“He’s planning to join me for a few days.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Ted called from the kitchen.
My mom continued to smile as she got up off the sofa and swept into the dining room.
; Dinner was amazing—grilled fish, baby potatoes, salad, and my all-time favorite—crème brûlée. While we ate, my mother gave me a progress report on the renovations to our house and on her wedding plans.
Finally, over dessert, Ted said, “How about you, Robyn? How’s school?”
“Okay, I guess. I’m tutoring a new kid. He’s in my homeroom.”
“Oh?” my mom said. “Is he cute?”
“Morgan drools every time she sees him,” I said.
“And what about you?”
“He’s okay, I guess. But—”
“You’re stuck on Nick, right?” Ted smiled at me. If I liked Nick, that was fine with him. Ted always made me feel like my happiness was important to him.
I nodded, avoiding the less-than-thrilled look on my mom’s face. “I really have to get going, Mom. I don’t want to be late.”
“You’re going to that party with Nick, aren’t you?” she said, no longer as cheerful as she had been. “I think it would be a good idea if you came and stayed here with Ted and me.” In other words, where I would be farther away from Nick.
“I’m fine where I am, Mom.” I folded my napkin—linen, of course. “Dinner was great, Ted. One of these days you’re going to have to teach me to make crème brûlée.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Ted said.
“I mean it, Robyn,” my mom said. “I’d feel more comfortable if you were staying here.”
I stood up, circled the table, and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
“Have a great trip, Mom. I’ll see you when you get back.”
“Robyn—”
“Bye, Ted.”
I was glad to be out the door and down the elevator. I caught a bus back downtown and then another one to the address that Nick had given me.
. . .
The party was being held in an apartment building where one of Nick’s classmates lived. I could hear music pulsing as I made my way down the hall. My stomach fluttered. Nick knew some of my friends, but I really didn’t know any of his. So far that hadn’t mattered. But after my visit to his school earlier in the week, and the way his classmates had acted around me, I felt self-conscious. I wished that I had asked Nick to meet me so that I could walk in holding his hand instead of arriving all alone.
At the Edge Page 4
