Overpowered Page 6
I immediately logged on to my laptop to check e-mails. There were several from Lai in Bangkok, who filled me in on her latest boyfriend woes (she finally had a date with Pak, a senior on the gymnastics team), and one from my mother down in Buenos Aires. My mom hoped I was settling in okay with the new school and making friends. She also said that although she missed me terribly, she was busily preparing for her long trek down to the South Pole. That meant shopping for just the right kind of water-repellent, fleece-lined Canada Goose parka and rubber boots and snow goggles and turtleneck sweaters and whatever else one needs in the coldest place on earth. All in all the e-mail was vintage Lydia—short and sweet with just a splash of sentimentality. Rather than wait to send my reply I shot back a brief e-mail telling her that school was great and that the kids were awesome and that I was doing fine.
In other words, I lied.
It was best for everyone: less drama all around. The last thing I needed was having my mother feeling all guilty about shipping me off to live with my dad. The last thing I needed was her calling him and them conspiring to turn me into a happy camper. No, it was much better for everyone—especially me—if they were kept totally in the dark about my current emotional state.
Someone once said, “Ignorance is bliss.” Well, if not total bliss, then way less misery.
• • •
And misery is exactly what I felt after wasting more than two and a half hours on mind-numbing tedium—aka my homework. I desperately needed a break. So I plugged in my iPod and chilled as it shuffled through Rolling Stone’s top five hundred rock-and-roll songs, one of the truly cool gifts my dad had gotten me last year. By the time Blondie’s “Call Me” came on, my mind had drifted to thoughts of Jackson Winters.
Next thing I knew I was online reading all about his many snowboarding medals in halfpipe and parallel giant slalom at the US Juniors the year before. Oliver was right. Jackson had had a bright future. Not only was he nationally ranked, but he was also on the brink of breaking into the top ten. He’d had a real shot at making the US Olympic team. That is until Dana Fox left Barrington and he threw it all away.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Who was this girl who broke Jackson’s heart? Was she really as special and as awesome as Oliver claimed?
A Google search on Dana Fox turned up little information—surprisingly little. Other than Jackson’s website, Dana Fox Is Missing,” which had a dozen pictures of her and claimed she’d been kidnapped, scant media attention had been given to her disappearance six months earlier. Odd.
Usually if a popular and very pretty young woman, let alone a high school cheerleader, goes missing, reporters trip all over themselves to interview the anguished family and friends and write about the tragic story. And yet in this case there was just one story written about Dana’s disappearance. It was a short, vaguely written article in the local Barrington paper in which her parents claimed Dana was “alive and well” and living safely “somewhere back east with relatives.” End of story. Reading between the lines, it sounded as if her parents and the police were suggesting that Dana Fox had left Barrington to get away from Jackson, “the intensely attached boyfriend.” As if he were this crazy nut job or stalker with severe emotional problems. I knew that was what Oliver, and perhaps the other kids at school, believed. I was sure of one thing: Jackson Winters was obsessed with Dana Fox.
I studied the pictures of Dana—her bright, smiling face—and her equally attractive family. She really was gorgeous, with striking, exotic features: shiny black hair, green eyes, and beautiful full lips. Her beautiful mother was fifth-generation Chinese American, whose family had apparently helped build the transcontinental railroad way back in the 1860s. Her distinguished father was an African-American science nerd who’d moved from Washington, DC, to Barrington in the late 1980s. I recognized his picture. He was the man who’d argued with Jackson at school. By all accounts the Fox family was successful and happy. Dana seemed to have it all. Then she was gone. And poor Jackson was left out in the cold.
The battery on my laptop started flashing a warning that it was running out of juice. That was okay. I looked at the time and saw that it was already after six. I logged off, plugged in the power cord, and called my dad. I was hungry and wanted to find out how much longer until he came home with dinner.
• • •
My father returned home at seven p.m., with enough sushi to feed a small army. He’d had trouble deciding what to order, so he’d gotten an assortment: unagi, hamachi, toro, ebi, and tako among others. And all skepticism aside, I must admit he was right—the fish was pretty tasty.
We chatted about unimportant things: the weather (unseasonably warm), college football (Ohio State’s rivalry with USC), and my new teachers, along with several other (mostly boring) topics I forgot by the time we retreated to our rooms to finish our work. Dad disappeared into his study to work on some research paper about heart valves or something like that. I had at least a couple more hours ahead of me of homework.
• • •
By the time I’d finished, it was after eleven p.m. Still, I wasn’t the least bit tired. I grabbed my laptop and snuggled in the window seat, looking forward to chatting on Skype with Lai in Bangkok to give her the full report on my first day. Given the fifteen-hour time difference, she would most likely be arriving home from school by now.
But when I tried logging on to Skype, I kept getting error messages. After a half dozen futile attempts, I discovered that Internet service was down. I walked down to my dad’s room and saw his light was out, so I couldn’t ask him what was wrong. I then tiptoed around the house and finally found the cable modem underneath the large oak desk in my dad’s study. The connections were fine. Maybe my room had become a dead spot? I sat on the floor and hooked up my laptop to the modem. Still no Internet connection. Then I opened my cell phone. That wasn’t working either. It was as if the entire network had been deliberately shut down, just like this town after curfew. How annoying was that. I closed my laptop and cell phone in frustration, pissed as hell.
“Nica, what are you doing in here?”
Startled, I looked up to find my dad standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants. He sounded really irritated and looked perturbed, as if I had done something horrible.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, rising up from the floor. “The Internet was down and I tried hooking up my laptop to your modem to see if it would work.”
“Well, it won’t,” he announced, swooping over to his desk and checking to see if I had disturbed any wires or medical files on his desk or any of the locked cabinets lining the wall.
“Yeah, I kind of discovered that. Should we contact someone to report it?” I asked quite innocently.
“No,” he snapped back at me. I must’ve reacted to his sudden harshness with surprise, because he quickly softened. “The network goes down a lot. Erratic service. They’re probably just doing maintenance.”
“Okay, whatever,” I replied, not quite sure why he was having such a strong reaction to me being there. I hadn’t looked at any of his files, nor had I touched anything on his desk. I turned to leave, but stopped when I heard my dad speak again.
“And Nica?”
“Yeah?” I turned around, feeling embarrassed at being scolded like a six-year-old.
“In the future, please stay out of here and don’t touch anything. Ever.” I’d never seen my father act this testy before.
“Sorry, Dad.”
I left my dad’s study and hurried back to my bedroom, trying to shake off the unsettled feeling that I’d violated some unspoken rule and done something horribly wrong.
• • •
Licking my wounds, I sat in my window seat in the dark, feeling sorry for myself and very much alone. The lights were already out in all the other houses in the neighborhood. People in this town obviously went to bed earlier than I did. It was creepy to be looking out into a completely black landscape. Even in rural Thailand, when my mother and I visited small vi
llages at the edge of the jungle, we would see lights from nearby houses. I felt a wave of homesickness again overtake me, and I wished I were in any of the other places I had lived with Mom, anywhere but here in Barrington.
Then I saw Jackson’s car cruise by my house with its lights off. It was just like the night before. Was Jackson really just searching for Dana Fox, even when all evidence pointed to her leaving town? Or was this nightly ritual, a deliberate violation of town law, a statement of some kind?
4. BORN TO BE WILD
* * *
I finally fell asleep sometime after midnight and woke up on time at six thirty a.m., my alarm having done its job quite efficiently. Taking advantage of the extra time I even managed to throw an outfit together (moss-colored long-sleeved V-neck T-shirt over black skinny stretch jeans) that I didn’t totally detest. After finishing his 10K morning run, my dad made me a hearty, well-balanced breakfast. And he insisted I eat it.
“The most important meal of the day,” he declared, quite serious.
I was taken aback. He always seemed so relaxed about what I ate—especially in the morning. Now suddenly he was micromanaging my breakfast? I chalked it up to our new (permanent) living arrangement.
After I dutifully ate a bowl of fresh fruit mixed with plain Greek yogurt, he fed me one hard-boiled egg (hardly my favorite food at seven a.m.) and a slice of dry wheat toast, hold the jam and butter. Heart healthy, as they say. I obeyed because it seemed to make him so happy to see me eat it all. You’ve got to throw the parents some crumbs once in a while.
“Sorry I flew off the handle like that last night,” my dad said contritely as we straightened up the kitchen before leaving the house.
“That’s okay.” I shrugged, not wanting to make a big deal of it. “I shouldn’t have gone into your study without asking in the first place.” It was always best to accept an apology from Dad and move on without rehashing matters too much.
“It’s just I’ve got medical files and other sensitive documents in there that need to remain private.”
“Of course. It’ll never happen again,” I vowed as we walked out the front door.
On the drive through town, Dad ran into a local java house for his double dose of coffee with nonfat milk and two Splendas (his one vice, as far as I could tell). I snapped a few photographs of the oh-so-quaint shops along Main Street, which I intended to send to Lai, just in case she doubted that I was living in the land of the Brady Bunch and apple pie. There was Will Wright’s, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor where they still made their own flavors daily. Then there was the original movie theater from 1926, the Odeon, which showed only classic films made before 1980. There was also a mom-and-pop grocery and a retro bookstore specializing in mysteries and thrillers, along with other assorted homegrown businesses. At least Barrington was not the land of ugly strip malls. It was a friendly, hospitable town that looked like it came out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
As I looked around, I noticed that every single store had identical red-and-white BTS decals prominently displayed in their front windows. Curious, I asked my dad what the deal was with all those BTS stickers. Did they represent some kind of community organization like the Elks or the Barrington Better Business Bureau? All he said was that they were for Bar Tech Security, a private patrol company, and then he flipped on the radio to listen to the morning news.
I got the hint he didn’t want to discuss the topic any further. I was wondering why and how it was that a sleepy, ultrasafe town like Barrington needed a private security force, especially one run by a corporation, anyway. Not to mention a silly curfew. I was thinking so much about these questions that I never got around to asking Dad because I knew it would just annoy him.
• • •
My father dropped me off at school with twelve minutes to spare before first period. Rather than immediately head to my locker, I hung around the quad, secretly hoping to run into Jackson again. Maybe this time we might actually have a conversation. Maybe he’d even tell me about his late-night rides. I knew that was unlikely, but even just being introduced to the guy would be a start.
So I hung around and waited. Minutes ticked by. I tried not looking like a total douche just standing there all alone, so I greeted every familiar face that passed by me with a friendly hello. I felt like one of those smiley flight attendants standing by the cabin door, cheerfully welcoming passengers as they boarded the plane. And Jackson never showed up.
When the first bell rang, I was forced to make a mad dash off to my locker, where I ran into Chase Cochran and his clean-cut band of brothers. The four of them had all just finished morning football practice and were strutting along like they owned the hallways. With Chase clearly the top dog—always the alpha. Given the high school pecking order, I guess that made them all something like royalty.
“Well, if it isn’t the doctor’s daughter.” Chase smiled, super friendly, casually brushing his sandy blond locks out of his big brown eyes. “Finding your way around school okay?”
“Yeah. No problem,” I responded with a forced, awkward smile.
“You know my boys?” he asked, gesturing to the trio like they were his trusty lapdogs. “Kyle, Vox, and Alex.”
Kyle, the big one, was an utterly faux beach boy, with a deep, even tan (courtesy of the local tanning salon, no doubt) and a couple of beaded bracelets on his right wrist. No way had he ever been within a thousand miles of Malibu. Vox, the skinny one, stood ramrod tall and sported a severe military buzz cut. Alex, a strapping lad with curly black locks, had a nervous and very annoying habit of laughing at everything anyone said.
“Hey, guys,” I replied with a little wave, feeling incredibly gawky as I nearly dropped all my books.
“Dudes, this is Nica,” Chase announced. “She’s cool.”
They all grunted politely.
“So you going to the game after school?” Chase asked.
That was the first I’d heard about any game, and I did a lot of hemming and hawing, trying to think of an excuse. The last place on earth I wanted to be was at a football game, cheering Chase. “Sorry, I can’t plan that far ahead.” As I heard those lame words come out of my mouth, I cringed. How utterly lame.
“Yeah. Hate to tie you down, Miss World Traveler. With your busy schedule and all, given you’ve been living here what, forty-eight hours?” Chase teased with a mix of bravado and conceited charm, which I found oddly appealing. His buddies riffed off him and razzed me about being some kind of “alien foreigner.” A phrase they all found rather amusing.
Alien foreigner?
I held my tongue and let the nonsensical redundancy slip by without comment. For some reason I was reminded of an old Confucian proverb Master Kru liked to quote: Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.
Anyway, I just smiled and walked off, with Chase following and the boneheads following him.
For a split second I actually had the thought that Chase might have been waiting around for me to arrive. But I realized that was totally ridiculous when a moment later Maya appeared from around the corner and kissed Chase right on the lips. Not a gentle peck you give a friend or relative, either. It was the kind of long, lingering full-on lip-lock that cute cheerleaders give to hunky quarterback boyfriends.
News alert: Maya and Chase were a couple.
Of course, that didn’t surprise me. In fact it made perfect sense, as if it were biologically predestined. They were a textbook example of evolution: survival of the fittest. Charles Darwin would most definitely approve of such a pairing.
• • •
As we headed toward class together, Maya jabbered on about how I should totally hang with them after the game. Chase and his crew chimed in.
“It’s going to be awesome,” bragged Kyle, the team’s star wide receiver. “Watch me score a few TDs.”
The Cougars were going to annihilate their archrivals from Fairview High. I was about to beg off with a feeble excuse about needing to unpack and havin
g too much homework, but then I had one of Oprah Winfrey’s famous “aha” moments. (Yes, we got that show even in Thailand. And, amazingly, pretty much wherever we were. My mother was a fan, so I watched it a couple times, under duress, believe me.) Anyway, my epiphany was simple: Why fight it? They were being friendly and including me, so what was the harm in me being sociable in return? My mother always preached “stepping out of your comfort zone.” She said it would help me grow. I thought, Why not try to fit in for a change?
I took a deep breath, swallowed all my cynicism and foolish pride, and chirped out, “Go, Cougars.” Rah, rah, rah.
Well you would’ve thought I’d told Maya she’d won some lame-ass reality show competition. She literally jumped up and down and made a noise that sounded like “whoop.” Then she promised to introduce me to all her cheerleading pals at lunch, and vowed to get me into a cheerleading uniform if it was the last thing she did.
“Don’t hold your breath,” I told her. I mean, fitting in was one thing, demeaning myself quite another. I did have my limits. Cheerleading ranked high on the list.
• • •
True to her word, Maya caught up with me on the cafeteria lunch line and introduced the entire cheerleading squad to me: Emily, Annie, Maddie, and Jaden—an enthusiastic clique of tanned limbs, well-blended natural highlights, and winning smiles. Even though they looked like they’d burst out of the pages of a Neutrogena ad, they seemed extremely down to earth and couldn’t have been nicer. Within seconds of our meeting I was invited to go to the mall with them and to the movies over the weekend. I graciously accepted. This was the new Nica, throwing caution to the wind.
• • •
“Wow. Talk about a meteoric rise. Maya will have you running the school dance committee before you know it,” Oliver teased me as we snagged a shady spot in the quad to eat our grilled chicken Caesar wraps five minutes later.
“Hardly. I’m just going to a stupid football game.”