My Unfair Godmother

by Janette Rallison

  The officers turned and went to the door. Sandra followed them, apologizing for my behavior, telling them I normally wasn’t like this. “Our family is going through a hard time right now,” she said.

  My father didn’t move. He shook his head as though answering some question only he heard. “You didn’t do anything wrong tonight?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “You were grounded and you went out consorting with criminals.”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure what consorting meant. Maybe it was time I started reading again. My vocabulary needed some refreshing.

  “I don’t even know who you are,” my dad went on. He said the words quietly, but so forcefully it felt like he’d yelled them. “Just go to your room.”

  I turned and walked down the hallway. He was right. He didn’t know who I was.

  Chapter 6

  On Sunday, a repairman came and put in a new window in my bedroom. Then another guy came over and set up an alarm system in the house. The weekend rate had probably cost my dad extra. He didn’t tell me the alarm code, and I didn’t ask. I knew he had ordered the alarm so I wouldn’t be able to leave the house at night without setting it off.

  Dad hardly spoke to me all day, and Sandra sent me disappointed looks that didn’t change no matter how many times I said I was sorry. And I said it a lot. Apparently repeating the word multiple times didn’t make me any better at apologies.

  Nick, fortunately, was nice. When he saw me checking the Internet for news of more hold-ups, he told me he had a friend who had access to police scanners. Nick called his friend, then gave me the update: that afternoon the medieval bandits had robbed the Village Inn and made off with several boxes of sausages, all the pies in the dessert case, and an assortment of silverware. Robin Hood probably didn’t realize it wasn’t made from real silver.

  I was glad no one was hurt, but it was just a matter of time. I had to get things straightened out with Chrissy.

  • • •

  Monday morning, instead of riding on the back of Bo’s motorcycle to school, I sat in the passenger seat of Nick’s beat-up old Camry. As we went through the school lobby, I was glad for his company. He was proof I had one friend. Even if Nick had been forced into the position when our parents married.

  Everyone stared at me. They probably knew about my weekend. I tried not to meet their eyes. I especially didn’t want to see Bo or any of his friends. I was mad that Bo wasn’t sorry for what he’d done and mad that he hadn’t given me a chance to explain, but mostly I was mad that after all my debating as to whether I should break up with him, he had dumped me first.

  Eventually Nick and I split up to go to our lockers. As I walked down the hallway, I picked up bits and pieces of the conversations around me. Someone said the word “criminal.” Were they talking about Robin Hood, Bo, or me? Or perhaps the homework load our teachers gave us?

  It was going to be such a long day and such a long week.

  I rounded the corner and saw Bo leaning against my locker. He was scowling, which probably meant he wasn’t there to apologize. I let out a sigh. I wasn’t in the mood for this.

  I walked up and slid my backpack off my shoulder. “Hi, Bo.”

  He stepped close to me, leaning down so his face was inches away from mine. His eyes flared with indignation. “Why did you turn us in to the police?”

  I spun the first number on my locker combination. “Oh, I don’t know. It had something to do with the fact that you left me at a crime scene, and then the police handcuffed me, dragged me down to jail, and threatened to pin the whole thing on me.” I could have told him the police tricked me into telling his name, but suddenly I didn’t want to. His anger made me wish I had turned him in on purpose.

  “You’re such a—” He finished the sentence, but the word was muted when he punched my locker. “We did it for you, and this is what we get? I have a two-thousand-dollar fine and a court date.”

  I turned to face him. “You did it for me? Really? Because I remember asking you to stop. And what about the other buildings you vandalized? Those weren’t for me. You just like to destroy things.”

  “Maybe I do.” He punched my locker again, this time so hard I jumped. Then he put one hand on either side of me, trapping me against the lockers.

  My pulse hammered. He’s not going to hurt me, I told myself. Bo isn’t like that. But as I stood there with the locker handle pressing into my back, I wasn’t so sure what he was like anymore.

  Bo’s lips twisted into a snarl, and he opened his mouth to speak. Before he did, someone grabbed hold of his shoulder and pulled him backward, hard.

  My first thought was that it was Nick—who else would stand up for me? A wave of dread ran through me. Bo would turn around and flatten him. Then Bo’s friends would make Nick’s life miserable.

  When my eyes connected with my rescuer though, it wasn’t Nick. The hot undercover police guy had pulled Bo away from me. He stood by my locker along with several beefy members of the football team.

  “Is there a problem here?” Hot Police Guy asked. His jaw was set. His brown eyes flashed fiercely.

  Bo stepped away. “Get off of me, freak!” His gaze went back and forth between the guy and me. “Is that what you did at the police station, Tansy? You got friendly with the police chief’s son? What sort of interrogation was it?”

  The police chief’s son? I stared at the hot guy. I didn’t know whether to be happy he’d shown up here or horrified that I would be running into him at school.

  One of the football players stepped toward Bo, clenching his fingers into a fist. “Shove off, Bo.”

  Bo flinched away from me, rolling his shoulders as though to shrug off the entire situation. “You aren’t worth my time,” he said, then turned and sauntered back down the hallway, disappearing into the river of students.

  I leaned against my locker and took a couple of shaky breaths.

  The football players talked with the hot guy for a few moments. They did that boy thing where they bumped their knuckles together, and then the football players left.

  The police chief’s son stayed, surveying me. His brown eyes were softer now that Bo was gone, his stance more relaxed. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “I figured Bo might be a pain today.” He looked down the hallway checking to make sure Bo didn’t come back. “Hopefully that’ll take care of it.”

  Some of my gratitude for my rescue vanished. Police Chief Junior had known Bo was going to react this way, but he’d still tricked me. He didn’t care what it was going to do to my life or that I was going to be some sort of pariah at school now.

  “So you’re the police chief’s son?”

  His gaze returned to me. “My name is Hudson Gardner.”

  “You go to school here?” I asked.

  “I’m a senior.”

  A senior—like me. I didn’t have any classes with him, but we were bound to know some of the same people. Rock Canyon High wasn’t that big. “So it wasn’t even your job to wring a confession from me on Friday night; you did that for fun?”

  He gave me an exasperated look. “When you wouldn’t tell the police your name, my dad called me to ID you. I know everybody at school.”

  “You don’t know me.” I hadn’t seen him before. I would have remembered him. Guys that good-looking stick in your mind. “How did you know who I was?”

  “Nick and I are friends. He’s pointed you out.”

  I should have put my backpack away. I needed to get ready for first period, but I didn’t move. “You’re Nick’s friend and you tricked me? Do you have any idea how traumatic that whole stint at the police station was?”

  Hudson rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I could tell how traumatized you were by the way you used the two-way mirror to do your hair.”

  I blushed. He’d seen me do that. Stupid two-way mirrors. “I meant making me betray my boyfriend.”

  “Oh, your boyfriend.” Hudson’s gaze wen
t to my locker. It had dents where Bo had hit it. “I hope the school doesn’t make you pay for that.”

  I let out a sigh and finished my locker combination. With my luck not only would I have to pay for it, but the door would be stuck shut and I would be late for first period.

  Hudson leaned against the locker next to mine. “Speaking of boyfriends, how come you won’t tell the police anything about that Robin guy who held up Walgreens?”

  My locker didn’t stick, just creaked in protest as I opened it. “He’s not my boyfriend, and thanks for telling the police I was there when it happened. You can imagine how happy my parents were when a squad car came to my house. I’m now officially grounded until I graduate.”

  Hudson was unperturbed. “If I hadn’t told them, they would have still seen you on the surveillance tape …”

  I drew in a sharp breath. I hadn’t thought about the surveillance cameras. Not only would that footage be studied by the police, it might be played on the news. Then the world would see me kissing Robin Hood in the middle of an armed robbery.

  “… and your voice is on the 911 recording.”

  “The 911 recording?” I repeated.

  “I called the police. Those calls are always recorded.”

  Even better. They had soundtrack of the whole thing too. I leaned my head against my locker. Did surveillance tapes ever end up on YouTube?

  “You obviously knew those guys. Who are they? Friends from New York out here to visit you in the hick town?”

  I ignored him, pulled my books out of my backpack, and put them on my locker shelf.

  “Why the swords?” he asked. “What are they trying to prove?”

  I hung my backpack on its hook, then took my history book from the shelf. I went to shut my locker door, but Hudson put his hand on it to force me to look at him. “If you cared about those guys, you would help us stop them before a few get shot. That’s how a lot of armed robberies end up: with the bad guys leaking blood onto the pavement.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what I knew.” I pulled my locker door away from him and shut it. “And I was trying to reason with them, trying to get them to stop robbing places. But I can’t do that anymore, thanks to you. My father is keeping me under lock and key from now on.”

  Hudson ignored my complaints. “What wouldn’t I believe?”

  “I just need a little time to take care of them,” I said. Surely, Chrissy would check in on me today. I still had two wishes left. She had to come back sometime to grant them. “Could you talk to your father and make sure the police don’t shoot anybody before I can get rid of them?”

  “What wouldn’t I believe?” Hudson asked again.

  I hesitated, then told him. “It’s Robin Hood and the Merry Men.”

  “Robin Hood?” Hudson ran a hand across my locker door, tapping it in annoyance. “Sure he is. But what did I expect from you? You girls all think the guy is dreamy.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly describe him as dreamy.” I tucked my book under my arm. “Buff, yes. Handsome, I suppose. Daring …” I thought of the way he’d kissed me. It made me smile. “Okay, he’s dreamy.”

  Hudson shook his head in disbelief. “Your taste in men is pathetic.”

  Only if you believed what the pathetic-o-meter said.

  Without saying good-bye, Hudson turned and went down the hallway, weaving between the rest of the students with a purposeful stride. I watched him go and my spirits sank. They shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have cared what he thought—he was the guy who tricked me at the police station.

  Hudson was right, really. My taste in men was pathetic.

  As I made my way to class, I thought of Hudson’s phrase. You girls all think the guy is dreamy. What did he mean by that? I wondered about it until I sat down in first period and three girls descended on my desk like birds landing for bread crumbs.

  A wide-eyed blonde pulled up the chair next to me. “Is it true you were with Jessica Wilson and Hudson Gardner at the Walgreens when it was robbed?”

  I nodded. Jessica must have been the teenage girl who was with us.

  The second girl sat on the corner of my desk. “Did the robber really say the only thing he wanted to steal from you was a kiss, and then”—she waved her fingers dramatically—“and then he kissed you?”

  I nodded again.

  This made the girls squeal. “I Googled his composite sketch,” the third said. “He’s a total babe.”

  “Were you afraid?” the first asked.

  “Do you think he’ll try to see you again?” the second put in.

  “Is Bo upset about it?”

  That question I could answer. “Bo and I broke up Friday night.”

  Now all three girls oohed like they had learned a great secret.

  “Good timing,” the first one said.

  The second girl put her elbow on my desk and rested her chin in her hand. She smiled wistfully. “You must attract the dangerous type.”

  “I’m going to hang out in convenience stores until I run into him.” The third let out a sigh.

  The other girls trilled in agreement, then speculated where the bandits might strike next.

  My mind drifted back to Hudson. I couldn’t help being curious about him, and this was as good a time as any to get information about him. I kept my voice casual. “Hudson was really cool under pressure. Is he always like that?”

  The third girl grunted. “No, he’s just too sullen to get worked up about death.”

  Sullen? That description didn’t fit. The second girl leaned toward me. “Don’t mind Sarah; she had a thing for Hudson once.”

  “Every girl in school has had a thing for Hudson at least once,” the third girl—Sarah—said defensively. “But then his mom died a year ago and he went all antisocial.”

  “He’s not antisocial,” the first girl said. “He just took it hard. Can you blame him?”

  I felt a pang of sympathy for him and wished I hadn’t asked. It seemed wrong to hear these girls talk so lightly about his pain.

  “We all wanted to help him,” Sarah went on, “but he cut everybody out of his life.” She twisted her pencil through the ends of her hair. “He used to start for the football team, and he didn’t even go out for it this year. He didn’t run for student body either, and he was class president freshman and sophomore years. He would have been a sure thing, but it’s like he doesn’t care about the people at school anymore.”

  The girls didn’t say more because the bell rang and the teacher told them to go to their desks. But I kept thinking about what they said, and I saw Hudson in a new light.

  All during the rest of school, girls came up and asked me about the medieval bandits. Everyone wanted to know the details of the robbery. It was strange to have this surge of popularity.

  Before long, Bo heard about the kiss. He texted me his opinion about it, but I didn’t care. At least he knew I wasn’t at home pining for him on Saturday night.

  • • •

  After school, I did homework in my room. I kept staring out my new pristine window. It was so clean it looked like nothing was there, like I could lean out into freedom. I couldn’t, though. I pulled the curtains shut.

  Before long, I heard voices in the kitchen—Nick’s and someone else’s. I wandered out of my room to get something to eat and to see who was over.

  Hudson sat at the table with Nick, their math books spread out in front of them. The sight made me do a double take. Hudson looked so out of place there—Mr. Model Material next to the clutter, dirty dishes, and ordinariness of our kitchen. I stared in surprise and sputtered, “What are you doing here?”

  He smiled lazily. “Nice to see you too, Tansy.”

  It wasn’t an unjustified question. Granted, Hudson had told me he was friends with Nick, and suddenly I realized which of Nick’s friends had access to a police scanner, but they weren’t hang-out-at-each-other’s-house friends. Nick’s real friends belonged to the computer club. He wasn’t on knuckle-bu
mping terms with the football players.

  “We’re doing homework,” Nick said.

  I walked to the fridge, took out an apple, and let my gaze return to Hudson. I knew things about him now—that his mother had died a year ago, that his grief had changed him. But here in my kitchen, I couldn’t see anything about him that was vulnerable. He seemed more than confident—at least confident in my guilt. I raised an eyebrow at him. “You came here to spy on me.”

  Hudson wrote an equation on his paper. “If you’re not hiding anything, you have nothing to worry about. I mean, it’s not like that band of thugs has ever, say, shown up in your bedroom.”

  I sent Nick an evil glare.

  He shrugged. “You’re my sister. I worry about you, especially when the guys you hang out with threaten to cut out your tongue with their swords.”

  Which meant Hudson had told Nick everything that had happened during the robbery.

  “I am not hanging out with them,” I said. “I just …” But I couldn’t explain that I felt responsible for them. That I was responsible for them. After all, I had told both Nick and Hudson that it was Robin Hood and the Merry Men and neither believed me. “I’ll let you guys finish your homework.”

  I went back to my room, finished my math assignment, and wrote a long text message to my sister. Kendall thought she was doing drama? Ha.

  After an hour and a half, I walked back to the kitchen to throw away my apple core. I hadn’t expected Hudson to still be there, and I especially hadn’t expected to see him sitting alone at the table doing his homework.

  “Where’s Nick?” I asked.

  “He needed to run to the store to pick out some stuff for his science fair project.”

  That was odd. I tilted my head at him. “And he left you here by yourself?”

  Hudson sent me a look like I should know better than to ask. “Your parents want Nick to make sure you don’t go anywhere before they get home from work.” He leaned back casually in his chair. “Although that didn’t work on Saturday night, did it?”

  “Unbelievable,” I said. “You’re here babysitting me?”