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It was becoming clearer why Boone had been angry with me before. He must have thought I’d recruited Pris to pressure him to come along to this lunch.
Fat chance of that.
“Don’t worry. I’ll wear him down for you, though,” she added. “I’ll get him out of his shell. He doesn’t know I know this, but…” She lowered her voice to a mock whisper. “He still has a picture of you. I mean, not you like this.” She held her hands out in front of her chest. “But you back then. I think it’s so cute.” She shifted her eyes to Callie. “Don’t you?”
Callie nodded.
A picture of me?I wrung my hands under the table. Sure, I’d filled out up top, but that was irrelevant between me and Boone. This conversation had gone entirely the wrong direction.
Pris turned to Callie. “Did you know how tight Boone and Angela here were in high school?” She twisted her fingers together. Turning back to me she asked, “Were you his first? He never would tell me if—”
I interrupted before this reminiscing got out of hand. “That was before my family moved out of state,” I said. “And, trust me, that died a long time ago.”
When Dad moved us abruptly to Massachusetts at the beginning of Christmas break, just after the Boone debacle, it had seemed like a gift from heaven. I had no idea how I would have survived the rest of the year at Peterville High.
Dad’s warning that I shouldn’t get involved with any of these“Virginia boys”had rung true. Of course, after we moved, his words changed to “any of these New England boys.” He’d been a bit overly protective back then.
“So, tell us what you’ve been up to,” Callie suggested, likely trying to change the subject.
Eagerly, I explained how we’d moved from Peterville to Massachusetts, and after spending an extra year in high school there because of the move, I’d gone to a four-year college. I only stopped briefly when our waitress brought the nachos and took our burger orders.
Callie picked up a chip. “Grace said you work with computers?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I contract out to do projects for companies.” That was as simple as I could keep it. Getting into any of the particulars always resulted in glazed-over stares.
“Like what kind of projects?” Pris asked.
This was where it got sticky, because if word got around that I’d been discussing client business—even in the abstract—I’d be blackballed. There wasn’t much I was allowed to say, and even less they would understand. “I work with security systems, and I’m not really allowed to talk about it.”
“Like for who?” Pris asked.
“My clients are very sensitive, and I’m not allowed to discuss them.”
Pris finished chewing and nodded. “That sucks. So, you’re like a hacker?”
“More like the anti-hacker,” I explained.
“Put any of ’em in jail?” Callie asked.
I smiled. “Nothing like that. I work to lock them out of the systems is all.” Even saying that was bordering on too much. I needed to shift the conversation. “But I do other stuff as well—whatever they’ll pay me for. Like my very first project was a site search for a national chain of electronics stores when they wanted a new location in Dayton, Ohio.”
Our food arrived, pausing the interrogation.
I took the opportunity to grab another chip and scoop up some beans and cheese.
“Doesn’t sound very computery,” Pris noted after the waitress left.
I had to finish chewing before responding. “The impact studies are—traffic, parking, and the like. Cities often require that stuff to greenlight a project.”
“Huh,” she said.
I’d almost gotten her to the eyes-glazed-over stage.
“Which store was it?”
I shook my head.
Callie cut in before I could say anything. “Give it a rest, Pris. She told you she can’t talk about it.”
