CHAPTER SEVEN- Issuing a Challenge
"What do you do in your spare time, Robert?" Lucia followed closely behind Rob, her pen poised above the pad of paper she held. Instead of responding, however, he merely hunched his shoulders and tried to weave through the crowd. For heaven's sake, he could manage to get a football from one end of the field to the other without a single man touching him, but he couldn't get away from lunatic Lucia Lovejoy?
She'd have made a mean football player, he thought as he swung around a corner, between two first-years, and never even came close to losing her.
"Perhaps he didn't hear me," the determined young journalist said conversationally to herself, quickening her pace and bludgeoning the back of Rob's heel with her toe. Unaffected, she spoke louder, tucking a lock of fine blonde hair behind her ear. "I said, what do you do in your spare time, Robert?"
Several students, alerted by the loud query, turned to watch the spectacle laughingly.
He stopped so suddenly that she breezed right into his back, laughing that fairy laugh as he turned to face her, running a hand over his bright red mop of hair as though to calm himself.
She'd decided to write a story on him, she had, and any other time he'd be glad for the attention.
But it was Lucia Lovejoy, and her articles weren't known for their accuracy or, say, their sanity.
Neither, for that matter, was she. And besides, he thought uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one leg to another, something about her just made him… itchy.
She was an odd duck, that one.
"Listen, Lucia…"
"Lovey," she said brightly, pen once more at the ready.
"Lucia," he repeated firmly, his face coloring slightly beneath his sun-darkened freckles. "I am not, nor am I planning on, giving you an interview for the Holforth Herald. Now… go terrorize someone else." Much to his horror but little to his surprise, Rob saw her writing away as he spoke. "Oh, for pity's sake, Lovejoy, would you just-don't-" He shut his mouth finally, clamping his lips together hard enough to make them pale.
No use in persisting with that one. She'd just keep writing like a bloomin' crazy.
Blessedly, her pen stopped scratching, and cursedly, for a moment she looked back up at him with big blank eyes.
The poor boy must have been paranoid, Lucia judged. Else he'd not be so twitchy, unwilling to answer a simple question. Cocking her head thoughtfully, she drew a tiny, flourished 'P' in the margin of her notes. It was certainly something to look into. Her attention, easily swayed, was diverted when she saw movement from the corner of her eye.
"Hello, Drake," she said brightly, completely and conveniently ignoring the sneer Drake gave her as he approached the pair. His clothing was in its usual disarray, his hair standing on end. This time, the wild look in his eyes completed the ensemble.
"You look as though something's the matter," Lucia continued solicitously. "How might Rob and I help you?"
Rob was so incensed at Drake's arrival that he didn't even have an appropriate response for Lucia's oddness. "I thought I told you to stay away from me and mine, Mallory."
"Very overdramatic of you, Wesley. Where is she?" Drake stepped between Lucia and Rob, shooting the girl an annoyed glance when she didn't move to make more room for him, but instead stood so close she was arm-to-arm with him.
"She who?" Rob asked, though he had a sneaking suspicion. His sister hadn't looked all that sick when he'd left the house that morning, but she'd certainly sounded sick.
"She your idiot of a sister," Drake exploded, rolling his eyes. "Why else on earth would I talk to you?" He hadn't listened to six kinds of hell from his father the evening before just to be left hanging the next day. And hanging he'd felt, passing from class to class and seeing that skinny, poncey wraith she was always hanging about with-but no Genevieve to be found. Of course it made him a bit sore.
She'd issued a challenge, she and her sharp, spiteful tongue, and he didn't intend to leave it lie. A Mallory always picked up the gauntlets thrown at him.
"And because you're clearly dafter than I originally thought," Rob said, stepping up and looking down his long nose at the equally tall Drake, "I'm going to have to repeat myself. Stay away from me and mine. You're a loon if you think I'll tell you where she is."
"Home sick, then, is it?" Drake asked, blinking innocently. All he needed to know was in the drop of Rob's jaw. "Not so hard to figure when she's been gone all day. Thanks again, chum." Sliding his sunglasses to the tip of his nose, he roughly thumped Rob's shoulder in a mockery of camaraderie.
As he sauntered down the hall, swinging his keys from one finger, Rob sneered and started after him, but the quiet, feminine voice behind him stopped him.
"He seems to be a very unhappy boy," Lucia said, frowning briefly then turning back to Rob. "You never answered my question."
"He's not unhappy, Lovejoy, he's an arse." He felt like hitting a wall, but kept his cool instead, the glower he held not suiting his face. "I can't figure out why she'd even bother putting up with him, punishment or no. It's not like Gen to get into trouble."
Lucia's frowned returned, deeper this time. "What about her first year?" she asked, the words reflexive. When Rob's eyes lit on hers, confused, she shook her head and the thought was gone. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that. I must have been thinking of someone else."
And Rob, ever skeptical of the moods of Lucia Lovejoy, rolled his eyes and ignored what he thought of as her ramblings. So when he stalked off for football practice, he never even noticed Lucia standing where he'd left her, completely perplexed by her own words.
~~~
All in all, Gen thought, she got more done at home alone for a day than she did at school. She'd caught up on her class reading, watched a few shows on the telly, treated herself to a long soak…
And all of it had felt completely joyless, completely wrong. She'd spent the evening before listless, confused for reasons she couldn't even put her finger on. For the first time, Gen was forced to look at herself, her family, her life, from another's eyes, and for the first time, she found herself lacking.
It wasn't so much the money, she thought as she stretched out on the bed she'd so carefully made earlier that day. She'd hardly slept the night before thinking of it. No, it wasn't the money, and it wasn't even her family. It was her attitude.
It was the fact that she spit back at Drake Mallory every time he spit first, the fact that she'd felt very much like clawing his father's eyes out. She'd answered hatred with hatred and nastiness with nastiness, and Gen Wesley hadn't been raised like that, and moreover, the punishment she'd been granted by Professor Dunmore had certainly been combatant to that sort of attitude. He'd punished her for being so acidic, and she answered his punishment with… more acid.
And jealousy. Oh, there had been more than a bit of jealousy in her comments about Drake's lifestyle, his money, and she'd been sick with shame by the time she let herself in the front door of the humble Wesley home. What she had said to him implied money could buy happiness. What she had said to him implied she felt her own situation inadequate.
Had she been a lesser person, it never would have occurred to her that she'd insulted herself and her family while trying to insult a young man who could quite possibly have been truly unhappy.
She didn't move an inch when she heard the door slam downstairs; if it was her Mum, she'd likely expect Gen to still be abed. The heavy but rapid footsteps progressing up the stairs sounded straight to the back of her mind, her thoughts occupied elsewhere. Her thoughts lately, it seemed, were all directed toward one person-or one problem, as he had turned out to be. She was truly afraid they'd kill each other before their little project was over, and though a few days before she'd have judged otherwise, now Gen wasn't so sure she wouldn't feel badly if she did kill Drake Mallory.
Guilt was a tricky thing.
"Lazy, are we?"
The voice from her open doorway had her rocketing off the bed, her feet tangling a bit in the well-worn bedskirt hanging to the floor. Steadying herself on the scarred nightstand with a shaky hand, Gen looked wide-eyed at the very person she'd just been ruminating on, the last person she'd ever expected to see in her house.
Shock came first, followed quickly by shame. He was in her house, for God's sake.
"What in the hell are you doing?" she asked, her voice pitching up to a higher register. She looked for some way-any way-to get him out of her room, out of her house.
While she was at it, out of her life might be an okay thing, too.
He'd obviously come straight from school, though the school's starched uniform shirt hung completely open, on this particular day displaying a tight white undershirt with no sleeves. His slacks were beltless, hanging just a bit lower than the school specified, his sunglasses hooked oddly through one belt loop.
From his long fingers dangled a shopping bag from one of the city's higher-end shops, and from his lips dangled an unlit cigarette. He held it there for just a moment, then tucked it away in a flash of fingers so fast it may as well have been a magician's trick.
Drake would die before admitting he didn't want to light up a cigarette in her house for fear of breaking some sort of taboo.
"Feeling quite all right, pauper?" he asked, his voice showing none of the strain it had back at the school with Rob, showing none of the strain he'd felt the entire evening before. The anger of yesterday's outburst was forgotten-or cleverly concealed.
"I asked you a question!" she insisted, edging around the room, staying as far away from him as humanly possible. What was in the bag? Was it dangerous? Was he bloody insane?
Moreover, was she? Surely he in all his mussed, idiotic glory was a hallucination. She really had felt off all day.
"Asked you one first, Wesley," he said, crossing to her bed and sitting down, bouncing as though testing the weight. In reality, he was buying time, thinking. He'd entered the house, stifling his first instinct to call her name, to smoke out the weaselly brat. He'd wandered a bit, taking in all the small details, the photographs and messages hanging all over the refrigerator, the note in competent, feminine handwriting addressed to Gen-There's soup in the icebox to warm up if you'll have it, Love, Mum-, the shoes scattered haphazardly.
All the things he never saw in his own home.
"No, I'm not feeling quite all right," Gen burst out, shoving a hand through her messy hair. She'd let it curl after washing it, not bothering to dry it or even run a comb through it, and now it was a wild mess surrounding a pale, peaked face. "If I were, I'd have been at school, you arsehead!"
"Temper, temper," he said, carefully setting the bag on the floor. "Well, regardless, you don't look contagious, and you've a spot of tutoring to do. I'll not do school work on the weekends, you know."
"You're a lunatic," she decided with a weary sigh. How was it someone so caustic, so provocative, could seem so utterly harmless? He had horrid words, bags and bushels of them, mean and spiteful and barbed.
But it was starting to seem words were all he had, and words were, in fact, harmless.
"No, I just see to it people finish what they start," he said casually, picking up his feet and swinging them to the end of the bed, crossing his ankles and-to Gen's disbelief-taking care not to put the soles of his shoes on the bedcover, bedraggled though it was.
"Don't you have anything to say about my house, Mallory?" she spat before she could stop herself. But he'd yet to answer when she slapped her hand over her mouth. Once again she'd berated herself, her parents, her life, before he'd even had the opportunity to.
"I try not to be so obvious," he drawled. He'd thought of it, of course-how anyone lived in a house so small was beyond his imagining. "It seems someone's defensive," he said, stretching out his arms and then tucking his hands behind his head. Though her bed was awfully comfy, and he was acutely aware his presence was making her awfully uncomfortable. It was hard not to enjoy the combination.
She forced herself to sit, and after several moments of not entirely awkward silence, to talk about the chapter she knew he would be tested over the next week.
In the wake of the previous day's storm came the calm, the peace that can only come after a purging fire. The two were momentarily and unknowingly united by their spite, but moreover, by the spite they had been shown by the same man.
An hour passed before the work was finished, and the instant Drake was satisfied with his tutelage, he slid gracefully off the bed, picking up the shopping bag and tossing it to her.
"Put those on," he said, crossing his arms over his chest and letting a smug smile flit over his lips. Here, then, was the Drake she was accustomed to. "We're leaving."
Gen gaped at him for a moment, not touching the bag. "We're not doing anything. I've fulfilled my duty to you for the evening," she said thoroughly confused and more than a little bumfuzzled at the peace that had just passed. It was… weird. There was no other word for it. And now that peace was to be broken, she saw, for that wicked light was back in his eyes and he was about to start trouble.
"You issued a challenge yesterday, Wesley. You accused me of judging without knowing, and I accused you of the same." He leaned down, planting his hands on the end of the bed and looking her in the eyes. It had been an idea, a hatchling, the day before, and when he'd slammed out of his house after arguing with his father, he'd needed somewhere-anywhere-to go. So he'd gone shopping, and the insidious hatchling of an idea had blossomed into a wonderful scheme.
If the Wesley wanted to know what his life was like, from what pedestal he judged, she could very well see.
"Tell me, Wesley, that you're not too much a coward to have a go at my way of life." He tapped the long fingers of his right hand on his left arm, looking archly at the Rolex on his right wrist. "And if you've the guts, snap to it. Don't want to have a late start." He watched her from downcast eyes, through thick pale lashes, knowing he couldn't have spurred her on any more effectively.
He'd already pegged their similarities, and he'd found one very exploitable parallel, indeed-if Genevieve Wesley was anything like him, she'd not stand being called a coward.
He wasn't surprised when her chin jerked in the air and she snatched the shopping bag up. "Give me fifteen minutes," she said heatedly, clutching her fist in the handles of the bag. Cowardly, her freckled arse.
"Should've looked in the bag before you agreed," he said, spreading his hands in a fait accompli gesture and turning on his heel.
He was already out the door when he heard her scream of exasperation.