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Leonard ignored it, his expression thunderous. “Asher, I had to let you go. It’s not cool to sneak in here and pretend you belong —”
“He’s with me,” Winter said, drawing herself up and somehow seeming more regal than a queen at that moment. She leveled a scathing look at Leonard. “That’s not a problem, is it?”
“No, of course not, Miss DeLaurie.”
“I shouldn’t think so.” She spun around and headed toward the locker room.
“You heard Her Majesty, Leonard.” I shot him a shit-eating grin. “Now, kindly fuck off.”
Asher
“So, what we know is that your father was working in the area, but he’d never planned to stay for long. He was a seasonal worker, just passing through.”
Winter’s PI, Alan, sat in front of me, nursing a cup of coffee. He looked jumpy; he’d never really relaxed much after I’d broken his nose a few weeks ago. He still had bruising around his eyes from it. Still, that was because he’d been following my mom. It was his own fault.
“But now you have a name, right? That has to help,” I said. We were sitting in the Chickadee Diner, where my sister used to work.
He shrugged. “A little. What I’m looking for now is anyone who might have hired him to work seasonally, maybe at the marina or the beach. The problem is that those places don’t always have a great records system. If they were paying him under the table, then there wouldn’t be much to go on. We also only have a first name to go on. We might have to ask your mom for more information.”
“What makes you think she’d decide to tell me now, after all these years?” I wondered, asking myself as much as Alan.
He shrugged nonchalantly. “I can see hiding it while a kid is young. You don’t want them running off and getting in trouble trying to seek someone out. Once they’re grown? You deserve to know.”
I stared at him. Was he right? It was hard to think that way. My upbringing had convinced me of how strong and correct my mother was. She’d provided for her twins and survived when lesser people would have crumbled. I’d always respected her wishes, until now. For the first time, I resented the fact that she was making it so much harder to find the truth than it had to be.
“We’ll see,” I told Alan. “But I can’t make any promises. I learned my stubbornness from somewhere, after all.”
Back at campus after tennis, I shot off a quick message to Marcus before heading to class.
You missed training this morning. What’s up? Coach is pissed.
It wasn’t like Marcus to miss training, not unless some family shit was going down with him. He hadn’t seemed to come back to the Hellions’ dorm last night, either. He didn’t respond, and I had to head into class.
Before lunch, I had one of my art electives. While art was my hobby and I loved studying it, I wouldn’t major in it. Instead, I’d do something sports-related, so that I could more easily transition to coaching when the time came.
“Okay, everyone, sit down,” Professor Dupont called and pointed toward a pile of sketchbooks on his table. “Has everyone handed in their assignments? True beauty, in all her forms.” He looked around expectantly and nodded when no hands went up to admit missing the deadline. The class liked Professor Dupont. Everyone made an effort.
“Okay, now, since we’ve had our noses to the grindstone for a while, I wanted to mix it up and do something a little more fun.”
The class as a whole groaned. Generally, whenever a teacher found a project fun, it turned out to be harder than ever.
He picked up a bowl of folded slips of paper and shook it. “Shh! Be adventurous. Be brave — and do what I say,” he quipped. The class chuckled.
He walked around the semicircle of chairs. “As artists, we shouldn’t get complacent. You are all too young and wet behind the ears to be stuck in one medium…this task will shake you from it. It goes like this. Pick a piece of paper. If that medium isn’t something you usually use, then that’s what you’re going to be working with for the next week.” He shook the bowl and stopped in front of me.
“Asher, you can do the honors.”
Everyone watched as I sank my hand into the bowl and fished out a slip of paper. It had a single word sprawled across it.
Metal
Metal? I showed it to Professor Dupont, and he beamed.
“That’s a very interesting medium for you, and you’re more than big and strong enough to bend that unwieldy material to your will. Good luck.”
He moved around the rest of the class. I stared at my slip of paper and racked my brain to think of something to make with metal.
“Okay, ten minutes to come up with the idea and then we get started.”
