Freaks of Greenfield High (16 page)

A masked Robin capered across his screen. She’d replaced the original
Boy Wonder Left Wondering
clip with one featuring another Boy Wonder—namely some guy who’d played Robin in the Batman TV series back the 60s.

Michael shook his head and leaned back in his chair. His life might be going down the toilet right now, but at least he didn’t have to go out in public wearing a red top and green shorts with matching elf boots, and to top it all off, a shiny gold cape, like that poor bastard. He scowled at Robin and closed his laptop. He drummed his fingers on the desktop and considered his options. His very limited options.

When the uploaded video had first been flagged by his tracking program, and he’d viewed the clip, he’d fist-punched the air. He knew exactly where she was. He could send in an extraction team, and it would all be over. He could say goodbye to chasing rumors and hearsay from one hick town to another. Hell, he might even be able to embrace his old life again, pick up where he’d left off. If his old life would still have him.

But it appeared the kid had been one step ahead of him—again. While he’d been imagining what his life would be like when this nightmare was over, she had been busy covering her tracks. It was a given she would have decrypted his IP address and realized she’d been compromised. It wouldn’t be long before she was on the move—again. Or at the very least, planning another little surprise for anyone who dared come after her.

Michael considered keeping this latest development to himself. After all, until he got a hold of the original clip again, he had no hard evidence. But—

He huffed out a sigh, grabbed his cell phone from the desktop and made the call. The instant it connected, he spoke without waiting for acknowledgement. “I got a hit on the kid, sir. And—”

“You mean
it
. You’d do well to remember it isn’t human, Mr. White.”

Michael winced at the icy-cold tone. “Yes, sir. I got a hit on the cyborg.”

“How?”

“A video clip uploaded to a social networking site.”

“Send it to me now.”

“She’s corrupted the source file, and replaced the original clip on the site with another one. She’s covering her tracks.”

The silence on the end of the line commanded more information. Immediately.

“I’m working on it, sir.”

More silence.

A single droplet of sweat rolled down his face, seeping into his shirt collar. “I need more time.”

“Call me in the morning when you have something new to report.”

“Yes, sir.” Michael found himself speaking into the discordant beeping of an already disconnected line. His superior was not known for his patience, or for anything less than substantiated facts. Which was why Michael had neglected to mention he knew where she’d been hiding. Chances of her still being there were slim, he told himself, and—

God. He was torn. He wanted this over but he’d give anything in the world for the endgame to take place somewhere else. Right now, he was praying she’d act true to type and up-stakes and vanish.

He slumped back in his chair and blotted his forehead with his sleeve. The kid—the
cyborg
—was good. Really good. So good, that even after five years of painstaking investigation, Michael still hadn’t untangled the maze of offshore accounts that had absorbed Alexander Durham’s considerable wealth after his death. “They”, the faceless, nameless people who comprised the clandestine corporation Michael worked for, had been playing a waiting game for years, hoping Durham’s protégé would slip up and make a mistake. Finally she had, by allowing herself to be caught on video. But Michael wanted—needed—to be certain of all the facts
before
he sent in the extraction team. He couldn’t risk civilians being caught up in the extraction. Especially not one of the civilians he’d seen in that clip.

If he could have avoided making that call, delayed a bit longer….

He’d done the right thing. His superior would have found out if Michael had sat on the information. He always found out.

Michael rubbed his eyes, rotated his shoulders and flexed his fingers. Regardless of what might prove to be a personal stake in this operation, he had a job to do. And if he valued his continuing health and wellbeing—and the continued health and wellbeing of his estranged family—the deadline he’d been given must be adhered to.

He’d think of something. He always did.

The crowd flowed around Tyler like he had an invisible force-field shielding him from physical contact. No one spoke to him. No one made eye contact. He might as well have been invisible.

Before Homecoming, he’d been star pitcher for the baseball team, and a top-scoring basketball player. He’d been one of the jocks who ruled the school. Girls had pulled all kinds of stunts to get his attention. But after the Vanessa debacle, he’d been demoted to a kid on the fringe who didn’t fit in anywhere.

If he’d spoken up and defended himself against the lies and rumors, maybe he’d have kept some of his friends. Hell, he might have even knocked the god of jock-straps off his pedestal and shown him up for the piece of scum that he was. But for Vanessa’s sake, he’d kept quiet. At least, Tyler told himself it was for her sake. Just like he told himself he’d done the right thing, and didn’t give a crap about what anyone else thought.

Now—too late—he understood that by keeping it all locked away inside him, all he’d done was enable Shawn and Vanessa, and alienate most of his peers.

Greenfield High’s current social structure was based around cliques. Sad and unimaginative, but true. And because Tyler had been one of Shawn’s crew—and a major douche-bag to any kid who
wasn’t
one of Shawn’s crew—when he fell from grace, it was one monumentally big-ass fall. He became a freak, a jock-god accused of something so heinous not even the jocks had been able to stomach him anymore. Everyone had their place. Everyone knew their place. And after that one incident, Tyler’s place was at the very bottom of Greenfield High’s social order.

At first it’d felt weird being invisible, but he’d gotten used to it. Plus-side, he didn’t need to check in with anyone. He could do what the hell he liked. Downside was he didn’t have anyone to watch his back. And at
this
school, life was tough if you didn’t have someone on your side.

He didn’t want to drag his sister down with him so he made himself scarce rather than put Caro in a position where she might have to choose her brother over popularity. She had enough problems looking out for herself. It was no box of chocolates being on the cheer squad and keeping the likes of Bettina happy, while not losing who you were, and what you stood for. Caro somehow managed to walk that ultra-thin line of being popular, while not succumbing to the temptation of being a stuck-up bitch. He respected that about her. He’d never managed to walk that line. It’s been easier to treat people like crap.

Pity Caro’s run of luck might soon be over. And, just like him, she wouldn’t fit in with any of the other existing cliques. Mind you, knowing Caro, she’d just form her own. Budget Fashionistas. Yeah. He could see it now.

Over lunch breaks Tyler usually hung out in the music room. Mr. Whaley didn’t have a problem so long as no one else had scheduled use of the room for practice. On the rare occasions Tyler did venture into the cafeteria, he sat way down the back, far removed from the food cabinets and even farther removed from what little natural light pierced the grime-layered windows. It was smart to avoid the prime tables—especially ones with an unbroken view of the lunch queue, from where Shawn would cast his eye over potential girlfriends, and Bettina’s squad would loudly critique clothes and makeup, hairstyles and personal attributes, with such consummate viciousness they reduced less resilient girls to tears.

Today, Tyler dared the cafeteria, dared to be noticed, and worse, dared slide into a seat at a prime empty table, right up front. He tried to appear completely unconcerned. He seriously debated leaving Jay and Caro to it—they would manage fine without him—but he didn’t want to miss the fun. Unfortunately for his rapidly waning daring, his sister and Jay were nowhere to be seen.

Kids balancing trays of food lurched past his table, nudging each other and whispering. Eyes slanted in his direction. Heads turned. Whispered words floated in the air. Tyler began to feel like someone had painted a huge target on his back. His spine prickled with unease as he rummaged in his backpack for his packed lunch—yet another reason for the in-crowd to sneer at him.

A hush smothered the cafeteria. Then the elegant squeaks of designer shoes were echoed by the screeches of less desirable rip-offs.

Crap.
He knew without even glancing up that Shawn and Bettina and their entourage had just made an entrance.

“C’mon Jay!” he muttered. “Where the hell are you?” To hide his agitation, he grabbed a library book from his bag, took a sip from his water bottle, and pretended to read.

A furtive reek of anticipation overpowered even the stink of burgers, fries, lasagna and other supposedly mouthwatering temptations. All the students seemed to be collectively holding their breaths, waiting for Tyler’s juicy humiliation to commence.

The type on the page he was pretending to read blurred. He flicked the page over, and hunched his shoulders against whatever form retribution would take. A soda down the back of his neck. Having his lunch snatched from the table and tossed ’round the room. Maybe his bag upended and the contents sniggered over. No problem. He could handle that.

But perhaps Bettina would come up with something new and original for Shawn to do this time—something that would cause Tyler’s control to snap and provoke him to retaliate, like he’d almost done in Bio. Then it’d all be on. He could just see himself wiping that smug look from Shawn’s face….

Tyler clenched his fists as tight as he could and then relaxed his hands and shook out the tension in his shoulders. It was far too late to dust off the past and rehash it. No one would believe him anyway. Not now.

Whoops of familiar laughter were music to his ears. The girls’ baseball team had arrived en masse. They were their own clique and none of them took crap from anyone. Except maybe their coach. And only so long as whatever Tyler happened to be saying made sense to them.

“Catch!” he heard one of his team yell.

He glanced up just in time to see Emma, his star pitcher, burst through Bettina and Shawn’s tight-knit group, scattering kids like skittles. She ignored their squawking protests, her eyes on the prize. She leaped, plucked the baseball from the air, and then flung herself into the chair next to Tyler.

“Gee, sorry, Betty,” she called, shooting a hugely insincere smile at Bettina, who stood stock-still and open-mouthed while her group fluttered about her, smoothing their ruffled plumage and exchanging varying expressions of disgust and indignation. “Didn’t see you there.”

She nudged Tyler in the ribs with her elbow. “Nearly got her,” she said, eyes twinkling with suppressed mirth. “An inch more to the left and I’d have knocked her down and used her for a cushion—not that she’d make much of a cushion ’cause she’s, like, such a bone-bag.”

Emma spared a glance for the rest of her teammates, who’d all joined the food line. With a gusty sigh, she took out her lunch, pried open her sandwich and grimaced. “Bologna. My favorite. I’m telling you, Coach, when I get a scholarship to some fancy university, I’m never gonna bring a packed lunch again. I swear on my mom’s maintenance money.”

Tyler took a bite of his own sandwich and wondered what it would be like to have money to burn, like Shawn. Maybe if his dad had stuck around and his mom wasn’t in a dead-end job—

“Hey, how come you scored a front table? Are you like, not feeling well or something?”

“I just felt like a change,” Tyler said.

Emma snorted. “About freaking time. We’d sit with you more often if you got us a decent table.”

“Thanks, Em.”

She gave him a singularly sweet, sympathetic smile—one that told him she knew exactly why he usually hid down the back. “You know, that sister of yours might look like a top model candidate, but she has skills. We could sure do with her on the team.”

Caro had helped out with practice a couple of times when Tyler had been down with the flu. She’d even subbed when the team had been short a girl. All the girls in the team liked her, and she really knew how to keep them focused. Em was right. Caro would be an asset.

“We’ve been through this,” he said. “Caro’s too tied up with the cheer squad. She turned me down flat when I asked.”

Emma smiled at him around her sandwich. “Well, maybe you should ask her again. Because if Shawn has his way, Bettina’ll dump her from the squad and she’ll have heaps more time up her oh-so-fashionable sleeve.”

“Crap,” Tyler muttered. “Does Caro know about this?”

“What do you think?” Emma half-rose from her chair, waving to catch someone’s attention.

Tyler’s breath caught as he spotted the familiar figure poised in the entranceway beside his sister. His face heated. He sucked down a few glugs of water to try and cool his face, wondering how merely gazing at Jay had the power to affect him so drastically.