Turnabout

by Carmen Webster Buxton

  Turnabout

  Other Books by Carmen Webster Buxton

  The Sixth Discipline

  No Safe Haven

  Tribes

  Shades of Empire

  Where Magic Rules

  The Nostalgia Gambit

  Saronna’s Gift

  Alien Bonds

  Table Contents

  Chapter One 1

  Chapter Two 5

  Chapter Three 11

  Chapter Four 23

  Chapter Five 33

  Chapter Six 43

  Chapter Seven 53

  Chapter Eight 65

  Chapter Nine 81

  Chapter Ten 93

  Chapter Eleven 105

  Chapter Twelve 117

  Chapter Thirteen 129

  Chapter Fourteen 141

  Chapter Fifteen 149

  Chapter Sixteen 157

  Chapter Seventeen 167

  Chapter Eighteen 173

  Chapter Nineteen 183

  Acknowledgements 193

  TURNABOUT

  by Carmen Webster Buxton

  Cracked Mirror Press

  Rockville, MD USA

  Note:

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events decribed herein are entirely the product of the author’s imagination.

  ISBN: 978-0997989816 (paperback)

  Copyright © 2017 by Karen Wester Newton

  All rights reserved

  A Cracked Mirror Press Book

  One

  The first time Becca Sommers mentioned Spanish class to me it surprised me—partly because I didn’t know Becca took Spanish, but mostly because she had just that moment slid her hand under my tee shirt and raked my chest hair with her fingernails.

  “So, Jason,” she said, moving her hand down to just brush against my belt buckle, “you have Walters for Spanish 3, don’t you?”

  My fantasy of dating the most popular girl in the senior class crashed and burned. And I stopped worrying about hiding my now-fading boner. “What?”

  We were half sitting, half lying on Becca’s frilly four-poster bed with Coldplay’s latest release playing on her iPhone speakers. Becca had invited me into her bedroom under the assumption that I wanted to hear Coldplay. I wasn’t about to correct her. Becca had her clothes on, except for the flip-flops she had slipped off earlier, but that wasn’t saying a lot because her tube top showed a lot of cleavage, and her jeans couldn’t have been any snugger and still zipped shut.

  I had on much looser jeans and a tee shirt. My sneakers had hit the floor as soon as I sat down, and I never wore socks if I could help it. “Yeah,” I said, disgusted. I should have known something was up when she asked me to come to her house after school. A girl like Becca Sommers would never go for a borderline nerd like me, no matter how well I kept my ownership of a flip phone and my passion for classic jazz a secret.

  Her hand kept stroking me. I knew it was a trick, but I couldn’t move. Like a deer trapped by headlights, I waited for the impact.

  “Have you read the novel yet?” she asked. “In Spanish, I mean.”

  “Of course I read it,” I said, irked out of my frozen state. “I had all summer to read it.”

  She gave me a pouty look. “It’s not available in English. I checked eBay, even. Nothing.” She leaned over me and smiled, shaking her head so that her blond hair whipped across my face. “Nada.”

  The test on our Spanish summer reading, a rambling family saga set during the Spanish Civil War called Sin Vergüenza y Sin Honor, was set for Thursday and today was Tuesday. That explained Becca’s sudden interest in me. She had cut it pretty close.

  A faint vibration shook the bed, and a grinding noise sounded over the Coldplay track. I glanced at the sound system to make sure it hadn’t somehow skipped or kicked up a few notches.

  Becca frowned and scrambled from the bed to look out the window. “Oh, my God!”

  I figured one of her parents had shown up. It looked like Becca wasn’t supposed to have after-school company—not male company, anyway. I sat bolt upright and looked around for my shoes. “Who is it?”

  “It’s my dad.” She looked suddenly pale.

  I glanced out the window and realized Becca’s room was right over the garage. The vibration had been the garage door opening. One look and my eyes opened wider. “Is that a cop car?” I jumped up and grabbed for my shoes. “Is your dad a cop?”

  “Yes!” She looked around frantically. “We have to get you out of here!”

  I pulled on my sneaks and ran a hand through my hair, then took a quick glance at Becca’s full length mirror to see if what was left of my boner showed. Did I look like a guy on the make? Maybe, but mostly I looked like a scrawny bean pole whose clothes hung on him like they were still on the hanger. “Why? We weren’t doing anything.”

  Becca grabbed my hand and ripped open the bedroom door. She dragged me into the hallway, but then gasped and dragged me right back into her bedroom. “Oh, fuck! He’s already in the house.”

  “Why don’t we just go downstairs?” I said. “What’s he going to do, shoot me?”

  She stared at me with her eyes wide, her pupils dilated like a stoner’s. “We can’t take that chance—not after last time.”

  That got me. “What do you mean, ‘after last time’?”

  She shook her head and glanced around the room. “It doesn’t matter. Get in the closet.”

  “I’m not hiding in your closet.” I tried to sound indignant, but it came out more whiny.

  She picked up my backpack and shoved it at me. “Get in the closet!”

  “Rebecca?” a deep, masculine voice called. “Rebecca, do you have the TV on?”

  I raced across the room. The closet was the wide shallow kind with a pair of doors that were each supposed to fold in the middle and slide along on a track, but both doors stuck after only a few inches and wouldn’t budge.

  “I’m in my room, Dad,” Becca called. “I’m just listening to music.”

  I wedged myself through the gap and discovered why the doors were stuck. Clothes and shoes covered the closet floor so thoroughly that I could barely stand up.

  Becca gave me a sharp shove and then pushed the doors shut behind me. “Watch out for the laundry chute in the floor.” The whispered warning sounded eerily muffled in the enclosed space.

  I found myself clutching my backpack and teetering in the dark, with only thin strips of light coming in through the slats in the doors. Soft fabrics brushed my face and hands.

  I took a step, and my foot kept going. I had found the laundry chute the hard way. I flung myself sideways and nearly fell over, hitting the back wall with a muffled thump. I grabbed a jacket for balance and then bent down to check out the laundry chute as a way out. It seemed awfully small for an escape route, and I didn’t want to risk getting stuck like Santa in a chimney.

  I moved as quietly as I could to the far end of the closet, holding the hangers as I pushed the clothes out of my way, so that none of them scraped on the bar.

  “Rebecca?” The deep voice sounded incredibly close.

  The mattress springs screeched as if Becca had thrown herself onto the bed. “Yeah, Dad?” She didn’t sound nervous. I wondered how many guys she had shoved into her closet.

  The bedroom door creaked open. “Are you alone?” The voice sounded even deeper from up close. I could see a shadow as he moved across the room.

  “Yeah,” Becca said. “It’s just me.” The bed squeaked again. She must have sat up. “What are you doing home in the middle of day shift?”

  The shadow shifted like her father was moving around. “Mrs. Chester called your mom. She said you brought a boy home with you.”

  “Mrs. Chester is legally blind—and a nosy bitch.” Becca soun
ded annoyed more than worried. I could see where a nosy neighbor could cramp her style.

  “Watch your language!” Officer Sommers was still moving around. His shadow kept coming back to the closet. “And just because she’s legally blind and nosy doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

  I fought the urge to hold my breath. The last thing I needed was to pass out from a lack of oxygen. Suddenly something blocked the light almost completely and the doors rattled in their track.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Becca sounded suddenly anxious.

  I tried to press myself backward into the far corner of the closet. You would have thought a girl with a four-poster bed would have a walk-in closet, but no such luck.

  The doors rattled again. “Nothing,” Becca’s father said. “Just checking this door. It’s stuck on something.”

  “Mom says I need to clean out my closet.” Becca’s voice held an edge of desperation. “Too many shoes.”

  For a moment I thought about trying to drop down the laundry chute, but I couldn’t make myself move to the middle of the closet. If Becca’s father got the doors open, I’d be right there in plain sight. Instead I pressed myself into the corner, willing myself to dissolve into the wall. Just then I felt an angry vibration from my pocket and heard an insistent buzz.

  “What’s that noise?” the deep voice demanded.

  I dug frantically in my pocket for my phone, flipped it open and closed it instantly, but not before the luminous display had shown me that I’d hung up on my best friend Ryan.

  Not good. Ryan would either call back or text me—and my phone couldn’t be silenced without making more noise than either of those events. A desperate need to be somewhere else consumed me. The doors jiggled back and forth with an angry metallic screech. I heard Becca’s father muttering under his breath. He might not like her swearing, but it was obvious where Becca had learned to use the f-word.

  I closed my eyes and wished desperately that I held a communicator instead of a cell phone, so I could beam aboard my starship—or maybe I could tap my heels to go home. I wanted to be home. More than anything, I wanted to be home!

  I twisted my body, trying to block the angry blows I was sure would rain down on me once Officer Sommers got the doors open. Or maybe it would be bullets. I twisted the other way. I had nothing—no plan, no escape hatch, no hope.

  Dizziness struck me for a few seconds, and then suddenly I heard my little sister’s voice say, “Jason Miller, what the hell are you doing?”

  I opened my eyes to find myself standing in my own living room with my jeans down around my ankles.

  .

  Two

  My first thought was relief that I was wearing underwear. My next was that this couldn’t be reality. I glanced around, sure I must be hallucinating, but the living room looked like it always looked. Same olive green thrift shop sofa and battered brown leather recliner. Same ancient TV with, believe it or not, a digital converter and antenna instead of a cable hook-up. Just then our cat Sancho came up to me, rubbed against my bare leg, and purred. I could feel his fur and hear the rumble.

  I dropped the backpack, tossed my phone into it, and pulled up my jeans. I was out of Becca’s closet, back in my own home, and my belt had disappeared. How the hell had that happened? Had I somehow blacked out? Did I have amnesia or something? And what had happened to my damn belt? It was my least-favorite of the three I owned, but how it had gotten lost still worried me.

  “Well?” Lorrie said. Her glasses had slid down her nose a little, which made her look more studious than she really was.

  I couldn’t let go of my pants or they might fall again, so I held them up with one hand while I retrieved my backpack. “None of your business.”

  She snorted. “It will be when I tell Mom you’re running around the house naked.”

  “I’m not naked.” My backpack buzzed. I could feel the vibration through the strap. “And if you tell her I was, you’re worse than a snitch.” I wanted to answer my phone, but I was running out of hands. I glanced around to be sure my belt hadn’t somehow slipped out of the belt loops and fallen to the floor. No sign of it.

  I headed for my room and started to throw the backpack down when it occurred to me that it seemed awfully light. I dumped it out on the bed. Nothing fell out except the phone I had just tossed in. Everything else was gone—my books, my brand new iPod Touch, and expensive upgraded earbuds. And of course, the belt.

  Suddenly I clapped my hand to my back pocket. My wallet was missing, too. What the hell was going on? Had someone gone to a lot of trouble to get their hands on my learner’s permit, my student ID, a condom I had been carrying around for six months, my house key, and four dollars? I opened my still vibrating phone and said hello.

  “Dude,” Ryan’s voice said. “What’s up?”

  “Well, for one thing I’ve just been robbed.”

  MOM gave me a sharp glance as she passed Lorrie the mac and cheese. “Your whole wallet?”

  Like anyone ever lost half a wallet. “My house key was in it.”

  The glance evolved into a frown. “Oh, Jason! Whoever finds it will have our address.”

  “Don’t sweat it, Mom,” Lorrie said. “It’s not like we have anything worth stealing.”

  Mom turned on her. “You count your blessings! There are plenty of people worse off than we are.”

  But most of them didn’t live in Bethesda, Maryland. Mom paid twice as much rent as our apartment would cost near her job in Laurel, twenty-five miles away, just so I could go to Clara Barton High School, one of the best public high schools in the country—at least that’s what people said. I didn’t have such a high opinion myself, but then I ate school lunches almost every day.

  Living in Bethesda was the reason I didn’t know anyone else with a flip phone. Mom couldn’t afford anything more expensive. And she thought smart phones made for dumb people.

  Lorrie dropped her eyes to her plate and scooped up a forkful of mac and cheese. She shot me a strange glance—half amusement, half triumph. You owe me, that look said. I realized she had distracted Mom on purpose.

  “Don’t forget to take the spare key with you when you go to work,” Mom said. She seemed to have forgotten she was mad at me so maybe I did owe Lorrie. “I don’t want you waking me up to let you in when you come home.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  She gave me an anxious glance. “Are you walking to work, sweetie?”

  I poured dressing on my salad. “No, Ryan’s picking me up.”

  And then finally I would have someone to talk to about how I had gotten out of Becca’s closet.

  I certainly wasn’t going to tell Mom how I had gotten into it.

  RYAN beat both hands on the steering wheel and frowned at me. “What happened?”

  I unhooked my seat belt and glanced around the tiny strip mall parking lot. No one was close enough to overhear us through the open windows of Ryan’s Hyundai. “It’s not going to change the third time I tell it.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not possible. Becca Sommers lives in Briar Woods. No way you could walk from there to your place in less than half an hour. Even the bus takes fifteen minutes.”

  And I had left school with Becca at 2:30 p.m. and arrived home at 3:25. What’s more, my phone showed less than two minutes between the two times Ryan had called me. I held up both hands. “Well, duh! I guess Scotty must have beamed me aboard.” I wished I could stop thinking about that. How had I suddenly materialized in the living room? The front door had been locked and the deadbolt in place. I had checked. My house key was in my wallet, and my wallet was gone.

  Ryan pulled out his phone and glanced at it. “Dude, you’d better get going.”

  I opened the passenger door. “Thanks for the ride.”

  He waggled one hand at me. “Any time.”

  I had just stepped out of the car when Becca Sommers came up to me and shoved a paper grocery bag into my hands. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, in a tone just shor
t of annoyed. “Take your things.”

  I pulled open the bag and looked in. My books, my iPod, with the earbuds still wound around it, one brown leather belt, and one canvas wallet.

  “How—” I started to say.

  “Sorry about my dad,” Becca said in a rush. “But really, you shouldn’t have left all that stuff in my closet. If Dad had noticed it, he would have known who to look for.”

  The condom wouldn’t have helped my case. I swallowed and tried to think what to say. “Thanks.”

  She gave me a head-to-toe stare. “Good thing you’re skinny enough to make it down the laundry chute.”

  Could I have fallen down the laundry chute, hit my head, and blacked out? There was an idea. “Uh—”

  A crease marred her perfect forehead. “How did you do that without making any noise?”

  How could I have? “Uh, I didn’t slide. It was so tight, I had to wiggle down.”

  The crease disappeared. “Oh. Good. I thought for sure you were dead meat when Dad finally got the door open.”

  A horn honked behind her. She whirled, waved at someone, muttered a goodbye, and darted off.

  “You had to wiggle down?” Ryan asked through the open car window.

  “I made that up,” I said, pulling out my iPod. It looked okay, which was a relief; it had taken me three months to save up for it, and a week to get all my music loaded onto it. “I still don’t have a clue.”

  Ryan chortled and nodded at the iPod. “And now you won’t have to scrounge yard sales looking for old-people music.”

  It was an old argument between us that neither of us was really trying to win. “I’d rather be addicted to Miles Davis than Beyoncé.”

  He pointed to the window of Jimmy’s Java Joint, the Starbucks-wannabe coffee shop where I worked. “Dude, you’d better get in there or you won’t have a job to support your jazz habit.”

  Ryan was right. I waved a hand and darted to the door to get inside before Ms. Dock-Your-Pay-Because-I-Feel-Like-It Assistant Manager spotted me. I had put the bag away in my locker and put on my apron and paper hat before she even saw me.