Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [15]
She’s been married only three times, two times to the same guy. Is that so bad?
Maybe not, but if Edie had her way, dear old Mom would be adding Grant Sykes, her young golf-enthusiast fiance to the list. Again, she felt that pain deep inside, and again, she tamped it down and hoped some stupid hidden camera didn’t see her wipe her eye carefully so that she didn’t ruin her mascara.
Shaylee had just about had it with the small living room behind the locked doors of the nurse’s station, and she knew her only hope to get out of the place was Jules. Her half sister would see this school for the sham it was—little more than a prison. First, though, she had to find a way to communicate with the outside world, to contact Jules, and that would prove tricky.
And then there was Dawg. His real name was Jensen Wolfe, and they’d been dating a while. At twenty-three, he was just so much more mature than boys her age. And now, because of that stunt they’d pulled of robbing a convenience store, he was on his way to prison. She wished she could talk to him. Dawg might be the only person on earth who really “got” her.
She sighed and sat on the arm of a small love seat. Less than twenty-four hours here and she was still stuck in quasi-isolation pending her drug tests, which would come back—gasp!—clean. She’d only smoked a little weed this year and had had one hit of cocaine, but that was months ago. Despite what Mommie Dearest thought, Shaylee wasn’t a druggie. But then, Edie wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. You had only to look at her choice in men to figure that one out.
But she couldn’t worry too much about her mother right now. Not while she was in this hellhole. Detox, Burdette had called it. Ha!
Where would they send her next? Her counselor, the tall, black woman named Dr. Williams, had said she would be moved to semi-permanent quarters with a roommate so that she could “socialize” and “feel comfortable” before being allocated a private room of her own. Translation: until we can trust you and don’t have to have someone spy on you twenty-four/seven. It was lame, lame, lame. To the max.
But she was stuck, at least for the moment, and the roommate, a girl she was introduced to at dinner, seemed about as interesting as one of those foreign films Edie was forever going on about. The roommate’s name was Nona Vickers, from somewhere in the Midwest.
Shaylee hadn’t gotten to talk to Nona yet, but already she suspected it was going to be a stiff, uncomfortable pairing. She’d been the new kid in school enough times to know what the drill was. At first she’d be isolated, looked upon with curiosity, and a few do-gooders might try to take her under their wings, but she would have to prove herself if she wanted to have any real friends, which she wasn’t sure she did. Not yet. Not until she’d scoped out this place.
If she was here that long.
She crossed her fingers. Hopefully, somehow, someway, Jules would get her out of here.
Shay got to her feet and yanked the bandage from her inner elbow, where that moose of a nurse had stuck in the syringe to take her blood. Walking around the perimeter of the room, she ignored the reading material scattered about. All that God stuff and self-help garbage that she had no use for had been fanned neatly on the coffee table.
Under a shelf holding books like The Answer or With Jesus in My Life an aquarium bubbled, its brightly colored fish swimming around fake rocks and grass. Shay had spent an hour watching a shy, tiny eel hide in its little cave near a clump of coral. Every once in a while, it would dare to stick its head out, only to retract it quickly.
“I know how you feel,” she’d confided to the timid fish.
At the sound of her own voice, she looked over her shoulder, certain someone was watching her, listening to her, noting her every move. From the moment she’d stepped onto the seaplane, she’d felt hidden eyes observing her, eyes that were as malicious as they were curious.
Paranoid, Shay, you’re sounding paranoid. Any more of this and