Starburst (2 page)

Alley
dismissed herself and Trevas never saw her again. He was pissed at Chase
because he had dumped his bags in the downstairs guest room and disappeared.

Trevas
explained to Fletcher that he was going to turn in because he had just gotten
back from New York earlier that day, and was exhausted. He excused himself for the
night and didn’t return to the party.

His
room was very nice and had its own private bath. The king size bed was made in
a white down comforter and Trevas couldn’t wait to crawl into it. He peaked out
the sliding glass doors, opening to the pool, but he quickly closed the curtain
when he noticed the people walking around and talking with their drinks in
hand.

He took
his laptop from his bag, and while he waited for it to power on, scrolled
through his contacts in his cellphone and dialed Kim Lipscome.

“Lipscome,”
she answered with a hard ass tone.

“Hey
Kim, this is Trevas Evans. I was just calling because I just got thrown into
the job that you just walked out on, and I was hoping you had some pointers.”

“Oh
man, you’re at the Fletchers?”

“Yes,
afraid so.”

“I
have some pointers, run, get the hell out of there. That girl is a little bitch.”

“I’m
afraid that is not an option. Chase didn’t give me a choice. What is she like?
Help me out here.”

“Honestly,
she pretty much lives in her room. She comes down late at night to eat.
Sometimes she would come down to the pool. She was kicked out of school twice
while I was there and I had to get calls from Fletcher, which were not
pleasant,” she added. “She took his car in the middle of the night because I didn’t
know that I had to sleep with the keys. She went to the Breeze where she was photographed,
dancing very provocative with a much older man with barely any clothes at all. The
last straw was when she snuck out and was again in the tabloids, drinking beer with
a bunch of thugs on the beach.”

“Why
don’t they just put her in some boarding school?” He asked, and she snickered.

“They
have, she has been kicked out of all four of them too.”

“This
is just great, there goes my career.”

“I
feel for you man, good luck.”

“Yeah,
thanks for nothing.”

Trevas
Googled Alley Fletcher and clicked on images. He saw the photos that Kim had
told him about and read the articles. He wondered how a kid with everything
turned out this way. Her mother was one of the most sought after actors in
Hollywood and her father had won numerous awards for his accomplishments.

He
read about her for over an hour until his eyelids couldn’t take it a second
longer. He went into his personal bathroom, showered, brushed his teeth and crawled
into bed and was asleep within minutes. He was woken at four in the morning when
he heard noises. He stuck his head out and saw Simon carrying Fletchers bags
and, went back to bed.

He
woke around eight and pulled on a pair of jeans, started a pot of coffee and
walked around the house. He opened a door to a gym and was glad of that. Next
to gym was a theater with six comfortable theater seats and the biggest movie
screen he had ever seen. He hoped he would be able to get away long enough to
watch a movie in there. Across the hall from that was a game room with two
pinball machines, a Nas-Car racing game, a hunting game with an orange gun, a
tabletop Pac-Man game with a chair at each end, and a long bowling alley with
one lane down the back of the room.

When
he reentered the kitchen, Alley was there in very short white shorts and a light
pink tank- top that showed her midsection. She looked up to him with an annoyed
look and grabbed a bottle of water and a granola bar from a bowl on the island.

“I
can make you some breakfast if you want,” he offered.

“I’m
fine,” she replied with a malicious look and disappeared back up the steps.

Trevas
never saw her again the entire day. He watched a cooking show and made a
delicious chicken stir fry recipe from one of the shows. He called up for her to
come and eat but only got the same answer. “I’m fine,” she called back, and
Trevas looked out around midnight when he heard her in the kitchen warming up
food.

Sunday
was the same way. He saw her in the morning to get a granola bar, and then she
came back down around four and went to her dad’s office with a book and closed
the door. He tapped on the door about an hour later, and she opened it, annoyed
that he was bothering her.

“I
have supper ready, please come and eat,” he begged, and she almost told him to
get lost until she smelled it and decided that she was hungry.

“I’ll
be out in a minute,” she stated.

Trevas
had them both a plate on the table. He made shrimp with spaghetti noodles in a white
sauce, sautéed asparagus and homemade French rolls.

Alley
took her plate and walked upstairs.

“Well
that went well,” he said out loud, and she turned to look at him with a cold
glare and continued back to her room.

Trevas
ate, cleaned up the mess and noticed that she had left the light on in the
office. He went in and looked at the opened book on the desk. When he moved the
mouse he noticed that she had been trying to find help for a trigonometry
problem, and he was impressed. “Well she’s not a dumbass,” he said out loud and
then felt like a dumbass himself when he looked up to see her standing in the
door.

She
didn’t speak to him, gave him a dirty look and slammed her book.

“I
might be able to help you,” he offered, and she snickered.

“I’m
sure you couldn’t,” she stated smartly.

“Try
me,” he countered. She hesitated briefly and reopened the book, flipping
through the pages. There was no way this guy could answer a division problem
let alone a trigonometry one.

“Number
twenty four.” She slid the book across the desk, crossed her arms and stared at
him with a clinched jaw.

Trevas
looked at the crossed arrows, reading the problem, and asked her where her formula
calculator was. She opened the desk and tossed it to him, sliding it across the
smooth desk. He studied it for a few minutes and scribbled on the notebook.

“Start
from the initial side on the horizontal axis, positive direction, then rotate
435 degrees in the negative direction to locate the terminal side which is in
quadrant four,” Trevas explained and although she was impressed, she wasn’t
about to let it show and it still didn’t help her understand it. She was taking
the final the following day, and that was what she was worried about. If she
couldn't figure out how to do it then the answer really didn't matter.

“That
didn’t help at all,” she told him bluntly.

Okay
try to remember that 435 degrees = 360 degrees + 75 degrees.”

Alley
stared down at the notebook that he had been scribbling on, looked back to the problem
in her math book and then to him. “Hmm,” she said, intrigued and realized how
he had gotten it.

“Thanks,”
she said, scooping up her things and leaving him alone.

“You
are welcome,” he said to himself again. He hurried out and called up the stairs
to her. “What time do you have to be at school?”

Alley
turned on the steps and gave him that, ‘
don’t talk to me look,
’ again.
She twisted her mouth to the side, and he smirked amused at her. “Seven
thirty,” she shot down to him, spun on her toes and continued upstairs.

Trevas
watched some sports and turned in around ten at night. He was up before Alley
and made her an egg sandwich and had it on the island. He was just getting ready
to yell up to her when she emerged, wearing a plaid blue and green skirt with a
button up short sleeved white shirt, which also showed her midsection from the
skirt riding low on her hips. She had on the same white converse sneakers from the
night before and an army green back pack thrown over her shoulder.

I
don’t remember school uniforms looking like that.

Alley
grabbed a granola bar from the bowl on the island and ignored him or didn’t
hear him from the earphones shoved in her ears, when he told her the sandwich
was for her. She continued to the side door leading to the garage and got in
the backseat of the black, dark windowed SUV.

“Ten
thousand dollars Trevas, ten thousand dollars,” he told himself and followed
her out.

He
made her take out the earphones long enough to tell him where he was going.

“Corner
of Franklin and Matthew,” she answered irritated.

Trevas
drove in silence the twenty minute drive and occasionally glanced at her frozen
expression as she listened to the MP3 player and stared blankly out the window.

Trevas
watched her goaded reaction as he followed the line of traffic to the front
street of the catholic school, scoping out the surroundings.

“Is
there a problem Ms. Fletcher?” He asked, after watching her take the earphones
out and storing the MP3 player in her bag, rolling her eyes at and shaking her
head at him, looking around to get a feel of their surroundings.

“Nope,
you’re all alike. This is fine,” she told him.

He parked
in front of the school and got out and opened her door, and again she was
agitated with him.

“I don’t
need
you
to follow me to the door. I’m pretty sure I know the way from
here,” she snapped at him, walked past him and glared at him again when he continued
to follow her up the concrete steps, to the door, along with the other
security, escorting teenage girls to the door.

Trevas
called Chase as soon as he was back on the road. “I just wanted to tell you
that I officially hate your fucking guts,” he told him as soon as he answered,
and Chase laughed.

“So
it’s going good, uh?” He joked.

“This
girl is evil Chase. I don’t think I can do this for one week, let alone six or
eight.”

“You
can do it, I have faith in you.”

“No
you don’t. I’m the rookie. I got this job because no one else would do it and you
tricked me into.”

“I didn’t
trick you. I just didn’t give you all the facts. You make it through this
Trevas, and I will give you your pick with the next one.”

“I’m
holding you to that,” he demanded. “I think I need to go to Hawaii or Fiji or
someplace tropical. I’m not kidding you Chase, this girl is such a little
bitch.”

“I
know… I had coffee with Kim Lipscome this morning. Hang in there, you got
this,” Chase tried to reassure him, and he groaned.

The
first thing that Trevas did when he arrived back at the house was go to her
room. He wanted to see what he was up against. He opened her bathroom door, and
the first thing he noticed was a wet towel and a pair of skimpy panties on the
floor. He closed the door quickly and left. He opened her closet and was
surprised by her choice of clothing. She mostly had jeans, concert t-shirts,
hoodies, and of course her school uniforms. There were four pairs of shoes. A
pair of blue sneakers like the pair she had worn to school, two pair of
flip-flops and a pair of high-heeled dress shoes that he was sure, she had never
worn.

Her
room didn’t look like a teenage girl’s room at all. It was done in olive green
and gold. The bed was neatly made, which also surprised him, in an olive green
satin comforter with gold trim and matching pillows, lined the top. There were
no teenage posters, magazines or CD’s. He noticed the laptop on the desk and
wondered why she had come down stairs the night before to use her dads. He quickly
found out when he powered it on, and it was slower than molasses. He thought
for sure it would have been password protected but was pleasantly surprised
when it was not.

 He
was surprised again when he didn’t find a facebook account. He went into her history
and laughed when he had seen that she had googled his name, although the only
thing that she found was an article about him returning home from his tour in
Afghanistan in his local Utah paper and his phone number and address.
She’s
probably plotting to kill me,
he thought. He clicked on the twitter
account, also in her history and had to laugh again when he read her post. She
only had one friend that she followed, and it wasn’t anyone that he was
concerned about. It was someone that went by the name of Shakespeare, and he or
she was from Alabama. He almost felt guilty when he read what she had written.

Alley
Cat – “We have a friend of a friend staying here for a few weeks and he is so
freaking hot”

Shakespeare
– “What does he look like? How old is he?”

Alley
Cat – “He has dark messy hair that is so damn sexy, he is tall and is built
like something that just walked out of a magazine. I would guess him around
twenty five, twenty six maybe.”

Shakespeare
– “Is he nice?”

Alley
Cat – “No… he’s a dick,”

Trevas
laughed again. That was the extent of the conversation about him and then she
was asking her friend about how to do the math problem, but he or she didn’t
know. He pulled up a term paper that she had started on, and read through it a
little. It was on the Greek philosopher Socrates, and he was impressed with her
writing.

Trevas
knew that she would probably throw a fit, but did some maintenance on her
laptop, and after two, hours had her computer running ten times faster.

 He
put on a pair of swimming trunks and swam a few laps in the long narrow pool,
and had to jump out when his cellphone rang. He had a peculiar look on his face
when he saw that it was Nicholas Fletcher.

“Evans,”
he answered.

“Do
you have any idea where my daughter is?” He asked angrily.

“I
dropped her at school at seven thirty sir?” He replied, and hoped that she had
not escaped.

“She
is sitting in the principal’s office, waiting for someone to pick her up
because she just got suspended for three days for smoking. Where did she get
cigarettes Trevas?”