A bounty hunter. She was dealing with a bounty hunter. Someone who, for whatever reason, had a bounty on her . Bounty notice in hand, she wandered her tiny living room, thinking. She stopped at a picture of her twin sister and felt that sudden pang of loss again as she remembered how Gary had taken Daphne away from her. Then, because it was late and Sunny had no one else to talk to, she grabbed a chair and started talking anyway.
“Someone’s trying to bring me in,” Sunny told her sister’s image. “I don’t know why, but I have this horrible feeling they’re gonna lock me away for life.”
Her sister grinned back at her from the photo Sunny had taken the day Daphne had graduated EMT training with her…only days before Gary knocked her up again. Even though it had been raining and cloudy, Sunny had never seen her sister so happy, and she’d cherished the picture ever since Daphne gave up her dreams as an EMT to go back to being barefoot and pregnant in Gary’s middle-class condo.
Remembering that, and how Daphne’s life had veered away from her, plowing headlong into diapers and soccer practices instead of all the things they had planned to do together, Sunny had to fight down tears. She roughly wiped her face on her arm. “So basically this guy grabs BPI fliers and goes to see if he can bring in some easy marks,” she told the picture of her sister, “giving out free meals to throw would-be victims off their game while he preps his drugs and handcuffs in the bathroom.” That would certainly explain the fancy outfits and special tech. After her first gut reaction had been to think the guy was using magic, the drive home had given her rational mind a chance to mull on it and, after some deliberation, she’d pretty much decided that he had to be using some high-tech holographic device to project his image to several places at once in his attempt to confuse and corner her.
Sunny went back and read the last line several times.
Any legal resident. She didn’t have to be inducted or an employee of the BPI or any of that nonsense. Even an Undesirable was a legal resident.
That meant, all things considered, she could poach this bounty right out from under Khaz.
She glanced again at the amount. A hundred thousand dollars. She had to pay her rent in just six days. She thought of the things she could do with that money, and her eyes drifted to her fridge, where she had posted a list entitled Things to Replace When Rich List .
New battery for Bertha
Burglar shotgun with rock salt
Mattress & blanket
New druggie window
Barbecue grill
Teeth
Already, her mind was working itself into a potential-powered frenzy. She could do this. She knew she could do this. She could trick people into looking the other way and knock them over the head. Didn’t seem too hard, especially for the amount of cash involved. Hell, she’d done it before, with Gary, and she hadn’t even had her Aura of Forgettability back then.
Granted, Sunny didn’t have money or special tech like her competition, but she did have something nobody else had—forgettability. And that, she surmised, could get her into a lot more places than some fancy holographic silk. Surveillance, she deduced, was probably her specialty.
She glanced again at Mr. Dortez’s work address at New Republic High, felt her back molar throbbing from yet another day without dental. Over a thousand dollars to get a single tooth fixed, and that was just the last time she’d gone in for a consult. The damn thing hurt a lot more now, so it was probably a lot worse. She shuddered at the idea of a root canal.
Time to go back to school, she thought, with a little wince.
Chapter 4: Gabriel Dortez, Workaholic
Monday morning at 7:45, Sunny was chewing gum and wearing a brand-new neon pink tweeny Porga T-shirt she’d bought for the occasion with sixteen bucks from her rent fund, casually slipping into the fifteen-story school building with the flood of students headed to their first classes of the day. Immediately, she was caught off-guard by how many more rooms the place had than when she had attended ten years before. They’d added several layers to the building, including seventy more classrooms on the thirteenth through fifteenth levels, and had completely rearranged the staircases and elevators. She had to stop and consult a map just to reorient herself.
She found Mr. Dortez on the third floor, room 325. She took the elevator with a group of stinking, pimply teens, many of whom looked at her and made a face like they had a bad taste in their mouths.
“Porga is so last year,” one of the bold, I-Dress-All-In-Black emo hormone-fests said with a sneer, apparently because the girl was trapped in an elevator with her and she had nothing better to do. “It’s BeLittle now.” She held up a wrist that had been tattooed with the unmistakable Mohawk crest of BeLittle’s lead singer.
Because that was smart.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sunny said.
“Oh, and gum’s not allowed,” the girl said, chewing gum.
Sunny looked her in the eyes, chewed a couple more times, then yanked the pink wad from her mouth and stuck it to the wall of the elevator. Then the elevator dinged and she grinned pleasantly. Teens, she had learned the hard way, were in that halfway state where they sometimes remembered her and sometimes didn’t.
Mostly they didn’t.
A moment later, the same BeLittle devotee was sneering at her that her chosen band was no longer in vogue. Sunny ignored her and found room 325.
She slipped inside with the others, then found a spare chair by the far wall and claimed it. The teacher either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She was just settling in when she realized that her sister’s nerdy, computer-addicted son Jake, one of the sane ones of the family, was entering the room with the apparent intention of sitting down. Their eyes met, and Jake quickly looked around, then hurried over to sit next to her. Jake was one of the teens that could remember her pretty consistently, and Sunny was going to be disappointed when her nephew started forgetting her like everyone else.
“What are you doing here?” Jake demanded, looking disgruntled. “Did she send you here to spy on me?”
“Who, Daphne?” Sunny snorted. “No.” Then she cocked her head. “You’re the straight-laced one. Why would she send me here to spy on you?”
“I don’t know,” Jake retorted. “What else am I supposed to think when you show up in my class?”
Sunny opened her mouth to tell him she was on official business stalking his math teacher with the intent of hauling him to the BPI for some unknown crime because his face had been on a wanted poster in a briefcase carried by a man who liked to wear shimmery silks and use holograms of himself while chasing her down in parking lots… She closed it again with a grimace, knowing that sounded insane even to her. “Fine, you caught me,” she muttered.
Jake groaned and rolled his eyes. “Look, I told her. There’s something wrong with Mr. Dortez. He’s screwing up the test scores somehow. I should have a B, at least.”
Sunny squinted at him, surprised. As far as she knew, Jake had been in the running for valedictorian. “What do you have?”
It was then that Jake started to squirm. “Well, I, uh… It’s just until we can get the next batch of homework up…”
Pressing her advantage, Sunny said, “I could always ask Mr. Dortez when he shows up.”
“It’s a D,” Jake babbled. “But not for long, I swear. He got my name mixed up with someone else on the last test. He had to have.”
Sunny was amused. “Oh yeah? What’d you get?”
“An F,” Jake said.
At her raised eyebrow, he quickly cried, “See?! Totally crazy, right?!”
“Yeah, uh…” Sunny winced. Daphne was gonna kill him. “Sucks to be you.”
Jake’s face fell. “No, no no. You don’t understand. I knew the answers to those questions like the back of my hand. And he had all the jocks getting a hundred percent. Crazy. There had to have been a mix-up.”
She had to admit that seemed a little far-fetched, at least so far as she remembered from high school. “You better
get to your seat. Class starts at eight, right?”
But Jake was insistent, and Sunny actually saw a little desperation crack his normally cool exterior. “You’ve gotta say something to Mom, Sunny. I know I did better on that test. On all his tests.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, waving him away from her as the teacher entered the room from the far end of class. “Go sit down!”
Her first look at Mr. Dortez was pretty much exactly as he had appeared in the wanted poster. Eerily so. He was exactly the same, right down to the same tacky plaid sweater, the too-big lips, and pale skin that seemed too tight on a skinny frame. He was reading a massive book on cephalopods that looked like it had been written by one of those geeky science professors who didn’t care that nobody else gave a shit about their chosen area of neurotic expertise. It was easily a thousand pages, and he was dutifully halfway through it, reading it with the same eager intensity of a pulp fiction novel.
Sunny was starting to get those weird tingles again, and for the first time since she started her new gig as a bounty hunter, she wondered if maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
The bell rang and Mr. Dortez put down his tome on squid.
“All right, class. Everyone settle down. I believe it’s safe to say—” His eyes came to settle on Sunny. “Who are you?”
“I’m new. Hey, look over there.”
Dortez looked. He went back to his speech.
“Mung, spit out whatever it is you’re eating. Davies, feet off the desk. Now, I believe it’s safe to say that you all know you didn’t do well on last night’s test. I’ve never seen such disastrous scores in my twenty-four years of teaching.”
According to his file, it had only been a couple of months, but oh well. Sunny went with it.
Dortez skewered the class with his pinched sneer. “Essentially, class, I am disgusted by what I saw last night. If I had my way, every single one of you would fail. I didn’t see any effort. Not a whit. It was like you all got together and conspired to get as many questions wrong as you possibly could—” He stopped and hesitated, seeing Sunny again. “Who are you?”
“I’m new. I left a note on your desk.”
He looked at his noteless desk, then shook himself and went back to his speech.
Basically, it went like every other math class Sunny had ever been in, except for the fact maybe he laid on the guilt and disappointment routine a bit thick. And, after sitting through an hour-long harangue on falling test scores and threats to graduation, Sunny hadn’t come up with any reason why the man would have landed himself on the Republic’s Most Wanted list.
Still, he also didn’t act quite…right . She was still having trouble putting her finger on it as class ended and Jake and a handful of others went up to the front to catch Dortez before he left. They all had the same complaint—the test wasn’t theirs. Gabriel Dortez didn’t seem to care.
“Highly disappointed, Gables,” Dortez said when Jake stepped up last. The math teacher was packing the tome on cephalopods into his knapsack. “You had such potential.”
“But this isn’t mine ,” Jake protested. “I would never write such stupid —”
“Is that your name on it?” Dortez interrupted, pausing to stab an index finger to the top of Jake’s test.
“Yes, but, since everyone’s having the same issue—”
“I’m automatically supposed to give you all A’s whether you deserve it or not, is that what you’re implying?” Dortez demanded.
Jake blinked at his teacher’s vehemence. “No sir, I—”
“Then I’m sorry, Mr. Gables.” Dortez threw the strap of the knapsack over his shoulder. “I have more important things to do than coddle an otherwise very talented young man.” Without another word, he walked out.
Curious, Sunny started to follow him. As she was leaving, however, a panicked Jake stopped her at the door, holding out a test with an F written clearly in red marker at the top of the page. “Look at this!” he babbled, panic in his heavy, Neolithic Garyspawn features. “This can’t be mine. You’ve gotta go talk to Mom.”
Sunny skimmed the test, and even though the name looked to be in Jake’s handwriting, the test responses had a strange scrawl to them that she didn’t remember Jake ever having. Somewhere during finger painting babies in cradles as a preschooler and waddling around in her sixth pregnancy, Daphne had mastered the art of girly writing, and she had passed that on to her unsuspecting children. Whoever had written this looked like they had learned to write from a deranged chicken.
“Yeah, it’s not even your handwriting,” Sunny agreed.
But that made Jake frown. He glanced at the test, then back at her. “Yeah it is.”
Sunny squinted at him, and Jake hurriedly blurted, “But, I mean, it’s obviously fake . I mean, I didn’t write these answers. I don’t even sound like that.”
“Yeah,” Sunny agreed. “It’s not your handwriting. See?” She pointed to the chicken scratch. “Too jerky.”
Jake glanced at the answer, then at her, then at the writing again. “Uh, if you say so…”
He actually thinks that’s his writing, Sunny thought, frowning at it. She glanced at the name, Jake Gables, which, to her, looked like it was the only thing on the entire page that actually could have been his. She considered telling him that, then shook herself, knowing she couldn’t possibly have memorized all the handwriting styles of her sister’s seemingly endless supply of rug-rats.
“Gimme that test,” Sunny said. “I’ll talk to her about it.”
“Thank you so much.” With visible relief, Jake handed her the stack of paper. He glanced down the hall at the clock hoisted overhead. “I’ve gotta get to second period,” he said. “But tell Mom when you see her what he said about that girl, specifically.”
“What girl?” Sunny said.
“Arielle. He basically told her to go kill herself.”
Sunny’s eyebrows lifted. She definitely hadn’t heard that. “How so?”
“You didn’t hear about the suicides?” Jake blurted. At the shake of her head, he said, “Two weeks ago, a couple of boys in Dortez’s class committed suicide. He told Arielle if she didn’t like her test scores, she should probably just go emulate Bobby and Drake.”
Sunny had heard that, and she remembered thinking it was strange at the time how several of the kids in the class had started crying when he’d said it.
“Definitely not okay,” Sunny said with a frown.
“That’s what I thought!” Jake said on an indignant rush of excitement. “There’s something wrong with him, Aunt Sun.”
“I’ll talk to your mom,” she said, prodding him down the hall. “Get to class before you’re late.”
As he was leaving, Jake leaned close and gestured at a girl sitting against the wall. “By the way, that’s Arielle Westerly. She was gonna be the valedictorian before Dortez’s class. Now she might have to retake a semester.”
Indeed, Sunny saw that the girl that Dortez had several times singled out was now sobbing despondently in the hall outside. Sunny’d gotten the distinct feeling that the girl was being picked on during class, but everyone had been too petrified of Dortez to say anything.
“I see her,” Sunny said. “Go on.”
Jake hesitated, then gave Sunny a nervous look. “You’re gonna do something, right? No one else believes us.”
Sunny thought again of the test that clearly had two sets of handwriting on it. “You’ve shown people your tests and they don’t believe you?”
“Why would they?” Jake demanded. “It’s in my handwriting .”
It was pretty clear to Sunny that it wasn’t , but she’d been dealing with a lot of things since the ambulance crash that she couldn’t quite explain, and not all of them had been things that her fellow humans would or could believe. At most, they were evidence that she’d developed some sort of mental disorder.
Schizophrenia? Multiple personalities?
“I’ll talk to your mom,” Sunny promised for the
third time. “Get.”
Jake obeyed and she watched him depart, disquieted. After he was gone, she tentatively approached the sobbing girl and squatted beside her. “You okay?”
“I tried so hard that time, I don’t understand,” Arielle said. She was dressed in the preppiest, most A-student look someone could get. Even her socks looked starched.
“Bad test score?” Sunny guessed.
“He says I failed the last test,” the girl sobbed. “I don’t understand. I spent weeks studying. I knew it inside and out. After what happened to Bobby and Drake, I knew I had to do my best. I was taking practice tests with my mom and I was getting a hundred percent each time. I don’t understand !” It came out as a wail.
“Can I see the test?” Sunny offered.
Arielle obligingly pulled the test from her backpack and shoved it at Sunny. It had a great big red F circled on the front. Under that, there was a brief note of, Why aren’t you taking my class seriously, Miss Westerly? So disappointed…
Sunny scanned the rest. The name—Arielle Westerly—was written in a beautiful, curly calligraphy. And then, in that same chicken scratch underneath, someone had filled in the test with wrong—and at times ludicrous—answers. They were the kind of answers a stoner with ADD and chronic Tourette’s would vomit up the day after binge-drinking a gallon of whisky spiked with ipecac. One of the answers was actually a doodle of a penis.
“That’s your test?” Sunny asked, dubious.
“It’s mine, but the answers…” The girl was utterly despondent, pawing ineffectually at the paper as if to rip the façade away to reveal the real test. “These aren’t the answers I put down!”
Seeing the starched socks, Sunny believed her. “That’s…weird.” Sunny was frowning, now. “You said something happened to other kids in this class?”
“Bobby and Drake,” Arielle said, with a partial sob. “They were the best math students in the school and they killed themselves this semester. Some sort of suicide pact because they’d failed his tests. Dortez is so hard .”
Looking at the answers on her test, Sunny could see why. They weren’t wrong—they were forged . Almost like someone was pranking the A-students.
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 6
