Adventures of Alexis Davenport Series

by West, Shay

  No one said anything. Alex’s anger rose when she noticed that six of the people in her group had their phones out and two others had earbuds in their ears. The rest looked at the clock or their watches and rolled their eyes.

  “Did any of you even go to class last week? Do you have Alzheimer’s and can’t remember?” Alex asked.

  “Look, Alex, we know you were forced into doing this. Why don’t you just be cool and let us hang out while we’re here. You wanna be cool don’t you?” Beau asked, smirking at her.

  “I’m not here to hang out. I’m here to tutor you so you can pass your classes. Doesn’t it worry you that you won’t be allowed to play ball if you fail?”

  Beau blew her off. “Are you kidding me? Do you really think the athletic coaches would kick us off the team? It’s a scare tactic.”

  She clenched her jaw against her first instinct to respond. She had been in this argument with Beau before and he obviously didn’t see the need of an education. Why should I care if they just sit on their asses and fail?

  As she sat watching the students staring at their phones, bobbing their heads in time to the music they were listening to, or with their heads on their desks, her rage exploded. Part of her knew that much of her anger was due to her Traveling but there was nothing she could do to stop it. Alex stood and grabbed the phones out of the hands of two students closest to her while at the same time kicking the chair of a student who was sleeping. She didn’t care that the other group led by Mr. Edwards was now staring at her like she was insane.

  “You want to play with this crap? Fine. Do it out there.” She pointed to the hall. “As long as you’re in here, you’ll put the damn phones away and pay attention. You want to fail? Then do it somewhere else. For any of you that want to pass you classes so you don’t get held back like some moron, feel free to stay.

  “I’m taking time out of my busy schedule to help you guys. I really couldn’t care less if you pass or not. Instead of being rude, lazy, jerks, how about you show a little respect and maybe put forth a little effort? With my help, you may pass your classes. Mr. Edwards asked me to help because I’m good at history and he knows I can help you. So how about giving me a chance before blowing me off?” Her breath came in gasps and she felt the heat in her face but she stood her ground. She tossed the phones in the laps of the students she took them from and waited for anyone to get up. When they all stayed put, she sat back down and faced her group.

  “Now, once again and I’ll say it slowly so you can understand me: What. Did. You. Do. Last. Week?”

  CHAPTER 4

  ALEX RUSHED HOME from school, eager to tell her mom about what happened in her tutoring session, but more so to get on the computer and see whether or not she could find any information on Sean or Gavin. She had searched for information on Sean but it was impossible to search through them all. He would be in his forties and Alex wasn’t sure she would even recognize him from a picture. Today she planned on searching for Gavin. His name was unique enough that she thought she would have better luck and his appearance wasn’t likely to have changed that much.

  “How was your first day as a teacher?” Alex’s mom, Patricia, teased.

  Alex rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t a teacher, Mom. It started out horrid but ended up being pretty good, actually.” Alex told her mom about her outburst at the behavior of the students she was supposed to be helping.

  “You know, I’m starting to wonder if all this technology isn’t hurting you kids. Everywhere I look, you guys have your noses plastered to your gadgets. Just yesterday there were two girls in the store and they never spoke one word to one another. Just kept plucking away at their phones.” Patricia shook her head.

  “We just like to keep in touch with our friends, Mom. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “It was big enough that you lost your temper when it was interfering with your responsibilities.”

  Alex refused to admit her mom may be right. “Anyway, I got a handle on things. I’m going to start on my homework.”

  “Okay, I’ll holler when dinner’s done.”

  Alex shut the door to her room, grabbed her computer, and hopped on her bed, wiggling around until she was comfortable. She opened her browser and her Facebook page popped up. She wanted to search for information on Gavin, but she couldn’t resist the urge to check her newsfeed to see what her friends were up to. Mom would say I’m addicted or something.

  Jenn wasn’t online to chat with so she scrolled aimlessly through her newsfeed. Just when she had decided that there was nothing much going on and that the information of Gavin wasn’t going to be found amongst Grumpy Cat memes, idiot status updates, and the endless parade of inspirational pictures, she saw a recent post from Drake.

  Alex sighed when she realized she hadn’t given him a single thought all day. She clicked his name, curious what he had been up to even though a large part of her really didn’t care. His wall was full of posts about the first theater production of the year and updates from Spotify. Gavin’s face flashed through her brain.

  Just as she was about to open a new window in her browser, she spotted something that made her breath catch in her throat. She scrolled down to get a better look. His status had changed from “in a relationship” to “single”.

  Why didn’t he tell me?

  Tears sprang to her eyes as she thought about what she should do. She hadn’t changed her status yet. Maybe I should. It would serve him right. Alex went to her profile and changed her relationship status to single. She hoped he saw it and realized what a jerk he was for not even having the decency to talk to her about it. She grabbed her phone and texted Jenn, seething as she punched the buttons.

  -Why do you care? You wanted to break up with him anyway.

  -That’s not the point. He should have told me.

  -You have barely spoken a word to him in months. What did you expect?

  -You just don’t understand.

  Alex tossed the phone on her bed face down, refusing to look as it vibrated at Jenn’s response. With shaking hands, she went into her friends list and found Drake’s name. She clicked on the Friends link and hesitated with her pointer over the Unfriend option.

  Just do it Alex. It saves you having to actually speak to the guy. He’s obviously moved on. Time for you to do the same.

  She clicked the Unfriend option and closed out her Facebook window. She opened up a new browser window to search for Gavin’s name, her fingers hitting the keys on her laptop so hard she feared they would pop off. Alex scrolled down through the list of names hoping one would stand out at her. There were a few advertising funeral homes, some LinkedIn profiles, even some on Facebook. She aimlessly clicked links, her frustration rising when the men she saw on the pages were clearly not Sean’s Master.

  Alex tried looking up Gavin’s name and pairing it with the word Scotland thinking that would narrow the search. She sighed and scrolled down the list. After a few minutes, she shook her head, realizing she had scrolled down the entire list without actually reading any of the links. Alex groaned and moved her mouse back to the top of the page, determined to pay more attention this time around.

  It’s Drake’s fault.

  She was still fuming over his relationship status change and wanted to send him a text or perhaps call him and confront him about it. She only felt a little guilty at how angry she was. After all, she was the one that had ignored him for so long, trying to figure out why she was feeling that way about him. He was a great guy, nice, attentive, into theater, had a brain and could actually carry on a conversation, not to mention how hot he was.

  So why didn’t she want him anymore?

  Alex chewed her lip. If she could figure out why she was avoiding Drake, maybe she could make it go away and they could start over. But do I really want to? She missed the dinners, movies, and date nights at Banana’s Fun Park. Alex flushed when she realized how much she would miss the kissing and the necking.

  Beau’s face filled her mind and sh
e gulped at the rush of heat that filled her face. It didn’t matter how mean he was or that he had dated the girl that had made her life a living hell, Alex couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to kiss him or to feel his hand on her leg.

  And there are those guys back in the past.

  She closed her eyes. While she had been in the bodies of the girls in the past, there had been a man in each time period, someone who had made her toes curl and her heart beat so hard she feared it would burst from her chest. Each one had been different and yet there was something familiar about them, something that each one shared that made her wonder if she’d known them her whole life. But that’s impossible.

  Alex knew she was looking for something like that and she just didn’t feel it with Drake. I don’t feel it with Beau either.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Alex, stop fussing over boys. You have more important work to do,” she mumbled to herself.

  She methodically clicked on each link on her computer, switching between web and photo searches, hoping one of the photos would be of Sean’s Master looking all handsome and dashing and Scottish. The more she searched, the more desperate she became, nearly crying when a link led to another dead end. The thought of having someone to talk to who had her same gift, someone who could advise her, was overwhelming. She didn’t hold out the hope that her Traveling days were over. She didn’t want to face the evil Traveler again. Alex shivered and hugged her arms across her chest. She knew she’d been lucky during the previous encounters and had barely escaped with her life from several of them. She didn’t want to die.

  I need to find Sean and Gavin!

  CHAPTER 5

  “SO IT’S OFFICIAL, huh?” Jennifer asked.

  Alex nodded. She nibbled on her sandwich so she wouldn’t have to answer right away. “Maybe it’s for the best. I mean, it’s not like I planned on marrying the guy or anything.”

  “That’s true. It’s so weird imagining our parents marrying so young. I mean, the last thing I want is to be tied down and start having kids.”

  “You? Have kids? I can’t picture it.”

  “I don’t know. That’s what girls are supposed to do, right?”

  “Not unless you want to.”

  “What about you, Alex? You want kids?”

  Alex sighed. “I haven’t thought about it. There’s so much to do before I get to that point: get through high school, college, meet someone I actually want to marry...”

  “If you wait till you do all that stuff, you’ll be like thirty before you have kids. Geez, that’s so old!”

  “I know, right? Maybe I just won’t have kids and focus on my career.”

  Jenn shoved a cookie in her mouth. “That sounds like a good plan. Kids are so much work and way too expensive.” She swallowed. “Hey, did you have any luck searching for Sean or Gavin?”

  “Not at all. I think I just need to figure out how to group words together to search better, that’s all. I can’t give up.”

  “They’re out there somewhere. Too bad Scotland is so far away. If they lived here in the States, we could maybe just go for a visit.”

  “Oh man, that would be so awesome! Mom will never let me go to Scotland.”

  “I doubt mine would either. But hey, worse comes to worse, you can always go next year when you turn eighteen.”

  Alex groaned. “I hope I am done with this whole Traveling thing long before I turn eighteen.”

  The bell rang and the girls parted ways, planning to meet after school to ride together to the local university’s theater. They had a new professor this year, Ms. Ashton, and she wanted the students to rehearse in the larger theater the university had whenever they could. She said it helped them with their projection of their voices so they would reach all the way to the back of the theater.

  Alex had advanced biology and her tutoring session that afternoon. And while she was looking forward to her biology class, she was dreading the tutoring. She hoped the students would remember what had happened at their first session and behave themselves. She didn’t want to have to take phones away again today.

  She walked into the tutoring classroom and was relieved to see only a handful of students. While she was listening to her biology teacher chattering about dominant and recessive traits, she had thought of a fun activity to help the students study for their history material. While she waited for the rest of her group to show up, Alex drew pairs of rectangles on the white board, drawing horizontal lines across one of the pair.

  The students filed in and sat near the white board, a few taking out their phones. Alex crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow and the students rolled their eyes, placing their phones in their backpacks.

  “I thought we were here for history, not art class,” Beau said.

  Alex ignored the laughter and took a deep breath, trying to slow her galloping heart. She grabbed her notes for the material she received from the history teachers and turned to face her group.

  “I thought we would try something different today. Rather than me sit up here and rephrase what you already learned, I thought I would share a study method with you guys that I use for all my classes.”

  “Why would we want to learn that for?” one student asked.

  “So you can pass the history class, for one. Secondly, you can use this for your other classes. It’s easy and if you do it the right way—”

  “You said ‘do it’. Bet you’ve never ‘done it’, have you?” Beau high-fived a student sitting next to him.

  Blood rushed to Alex’s face and she swallowed hard against the lump forming in her throat. The laughter of the group washed over her and she fought the urge to flee the room. Suddenly, the faces of the girls she had traveled into flashed through her mind. They all smiled at her and their eyes had an intensity to them as though urging her to do something.

  “If you mean studying and passing my classes like a big girl, then yes, I’ve ‘done it’. Now if you’re done making juvenile jokes, I’ll show you guys how to get through the rest of high school.”

  Alex let her lips stretch into a half-smile as she silently thanked the personalities of the girls with whom she had shared a body. It was strange, like she carried them with her even though they had been long dead, ghosts from history past. All of the women had been strong, each in their own way, and had had to deal with various hardships and danger.

  Those girls have made me stronger.

  She knew she never would have been able to take the taunting when she had first come to Grand Junction. When Beau’s ex-girlfriend, Catelyn, had teased her, Alex had run and hid in the bathroom more than once. She had spent many a night crying over the cruelty of the head cheerleader and her horrid friends.

  “If you guys want to pass this class and any others you might be close to failing, you need to have a way to find out what you don’t know. How many of you answer the questions in the back of the chapters you read?” Alex nodded when not one of them raised their hands. “I bet you just sort of flip through your notes and maybe read the chapters, right?” A few of the students nodded, but all of them stayed silent. “And how many of you begin studying the night before the test?” Most of the students nodded this time.

  “The only way to prepare for an exam is to study such that you are constantly quizzing yourself from day one rather than waiting. You really think it’s easy to cram weeks’ worth of info into your brain in just one night? Seriously. Not a good idea.” Alex turned to the white board and pointed to the rectangles.

  “I’ve drawn examples of 3 x 5 cards. You can easily use these to re-write your notes or the chapters you have to read and have a portable way to quiz yourselves as you study. You do a question on one side and write the answer on the other. Let me show you what I mean.”

  Alex spent the next hour showing the students how to take their notes and write the notecards. She had them practice, correcting them when they tried to put too much information on one side or when they had too broad of a question.

&nb
sp; “Now, I want you to get some notecards this week and write your history notes on them like I showed you. I’ll check them next week and have you guys break into groups so you can quiz each other before your first test.”

  The students groaned and complained as they put their books away but no one questioned her instructions. As she was erasing her writing on the white board, Mr. Edwards approached her.

  “I overheard what you were teaching them today. Great idea, Alex. If they have the means to study, they can do better in all their classes.”

  Alex blushed. “Thanks, Mr. Edwards. I thought it would be more helpful than me just reciting their material to them over again.”

  “Have you considered what your schedule will be next year?”

  “Not really.”

  “You should consider taking some classes over at the university. You’ve already taken all the advanced placement classes we offer here. The college classes would be more challenging and you could start getting college credits.” Mr. Edwards gave her a side-long glance. “You are planning on going to college aren’t you?”

  “Of course. Just hadn’t really thought about where.”

  “Well, you have a university right here in your own backyard. And if you begin taking classes, you’ll get the feel for college life before you dive in with both feet after graduation.”

  Alex nodded. “I’ll talk to mom about it. Thanks, Mr. Edwards!” She waved as she left the classroom on her way to meet Jenn.

  Jenn was waiting at her locker, phone in hand, fingers furiously moving over the surface. Probably texting James.

  “Took you long enough,” Jenn said without glancing up from her phone.

  “I was talking with Mr. Edwards about maybe taking some courses at the college next year.”

  “Seriously? Why do that to yourself your senior year? Take a couple of lounge periods and take it easy, why don’t ya?” she said as they made their way out of the building.

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. Seems like a waste of time. I mean, if taking some classes gets me that much closer to a history degree, why not?”