Abandon - Meg Cabot [39]
Of course, being the only young, good-looking male instructor at a K–12 girls’ school — not to mention an athletic coach — Mr. Mueller probably would have been popular anyway.
But the free tutoring helped.
I seemed to be the only person in the entire school who was suspicious of Mr. Mueller and his motives right from the start. Maybe it was because one of my dad’s favorite expressions was “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” No one is that self-sacrificing, especially when all he’s getting out of it is homemade cookies from his students’ grateful moms.
It was only when a crumb from one of those cookies fell onto my bare knee as Mr. Mueller was bent over my desk, helping me with a particularly difficult algebra problem during class one day, that I first noticed anything strange about him, aside from his stunningly good looks and apparent overabundance of free time.
“Oops,” Mr. Mueller said, pressing the crumb into my knee with his finger. He then lifted his finger to his mouth and sucked the piece of cookie off it. Then he smiled down at me. “Sorry about that!”
Maybe a girl who hadn’t died and then ended up getting followed around by a disturbingly large, silver-eyed guy who’d once tried to force her to live with him might have said to herself only Huh. That guy must really like cookies.
I, however, felt as if I’d been given an electric shock.
And not in a romantic Oh, he touched me! kind of way. Other girls in my class might have been sighing over him, but I definitely did not like Mr. Mueller, nor did I want him touching me. I did not even want him touching cookie crumbs that might have fallen upon me.
It wasn’t until I got home that afternoon that I saw it.
Mr. Mueller just touched Pierce Oliviera’s bare knee, then licked his finger. HOT!!!!!!
This was followed by tons of comments on the various social networking sites to which this remark was posted, such as She’s so lucky and What did she do to deserve THAT? and Who the hell is Pierce Oliviera?
These remarks actually managed to sink through the thick glass of my coffin. They made me feel uncomfortable, not only because they raised old demons (I had been managing successfully to avoid any trips to the guidance office lately), but because then Mr. Mueller asked — in front of everyone — a day or two later, if I’d like to start coming in for some private tutoring sessions.
Things only went downhill from there.
Mr. Mueller just asked Pierce Oliviera if she wants private tutoring! She’s so lucky! He’s SO hot!!!!
“I don’t understand,” Mom said. “Mr. Mueller told me at his parent-teacher conference with me that he offered to tutor you because you’re behind in so many of your classes, and you said no. Why would you do that?”
“I already have tutors,” I said. I did, too. Dad made sure I had tutors for nearly every subject. Not that it helped. You had to care for tutors to make a difference.
“But Mr. Mueller seems so nice,” Mom would say.
I should have said something then. Mom, I should have said. Mr. Mueller isn’t nice.
The problem was, she wouldn’t have believed me. That the guy gave me the creeps wasn’t proof of anything.
Especially since Mom wasn’t the only one who thought Mr. Mueller was God’s gift to the Westport Academy for Girls. All the moms were giving their daughters cards and tins of homemade cookies to present to Mr. Mueller to show how much they appreciated him, and basketball season was long over.
Mr. Mueller would always beam with pleasure when he’d find these on his desk, and say chidingly (but really, you could tell he was delighted), “Girls! You didn’t have to do this!”
Until my ex–best friend, Hannah Chang — who’d really filled out over the summer that we hadn’t been speaking and who’d become the Westport Academy for Girls basketball team’s star player and one of the most enthusiastic attendees of Mr. Mueller’s private tutoring sessions — left a note on his desk that