Dangerous Games (12 page)

‘F
irst, can I say I didn't do it on purpose?' I said.

I'd called Soph the next morning, the second it seemed late enough to do so. I hadn't wanted to risk waking her up and making her even madder at me than she was already. But I didn't want to leave it too long either. I hadn't really expected her to take my call, since we weren't speaking, but the situation was so dire I guess she'd decided to make an exception. But she still sounded pretty frosty.

‘I didn't think you did,' Soph said warily.

‘I didn't know I was your alibi. Otherwise I would have warned you,' I said.

‘Well,' Soph said, ‘it doesn't matter now.'

There was an awkward silence.

‘Are you in heaps of trouble?' I asked.

‘Heaps,' Soph said.

‘Yeah, me too. I'm grounded for a month and they took away my phone.'

‘They threatened to cancel my party,' Soph said. ‘They think I've got a boyfriend.'

‘I know. My mum asked me about it.'

‘And what did you say?'

‘I told her you don't, of course.'

There was another pause. Soph was still cool with me, but she was starting to relax a bit.

‘So where did you tell your parents you were?' Soph asked.

‘I told them you and me went to a thing with Ben.'

‘A thing?'

‘A very casual thing. Not a party.'

‘And did you tell them about Draz?'

‘Of course not!'

There was another pause.

‘So where were you, anyway?' Soph asked. ‘You never go out.'

I felt slightly offended by this, although I had no real right to be, since it was true. ‘Something came up unexpectedly.'

‘A destroyer thing?'

‘Yeah.'

Another silence fell, a deeper and more textured one. I could practically hear Soph's thoughts churning.

‘Look, about the other night,' I said, ‘I never meant to freak you out.'

‘I know,' Soph said.

‘I would never have actually done anything to you.'

‘No, of course not,' Soph said, a little too quickly, ‘I know that.'

‘I mean it,' I said. ‘You're my best friend. I could never use my powers against you. Ever.'

‘What about Draz?' Soph asked.

‘Well,' I said, ‘that depends. As long as he's nice to you
he's got nothing to worry about. But if he ever pisses you off, all you have to do is say the word.'

Soph laughed, a little nervously. After a moment she said: ‘The thing is, I've never seen you look like that before.'

‘How did I look?'

‘Well … Dangerous. Scary. Not like you anymore.'

We were both silent for a moment.

‘I am still me,' I said.

‘But sometimes, you turn into – that.'

‘Yeah.'

‘That must be kind of scary,' Soph said.

‘It is,' I said.

There was a long pause.

‘Hey, I'm sorry I didn't tell you I was using you as my alibi,' Soph said. ‘It wasn't very fair.'

‘I'm sorry I wasn't there to help out,' I said.

‘And thanks for not telling them about Draz.'

‘Well, of course I wouldn't tell,' I said. ‘My mum told them we were both out with Ben, so now they think it's me who's got a secret boyfriend, not you.'

‘It's not too late for you and Ben, you know,' Soph said, sounding more like her old self.

‘Soph …'

‘All right, forget I said anything.' Another pause. ‘See you at school tomorrow? They are letting you go to school, aren't they?”

‘That's about all they're letting me do.'

‘Okay then. See you tomorrow.'

Oh, the relief! Me and Soph were speaking again, and it was such a weight off my mind I felt like skipping and jumping.

‘What are you looking so happy about?' Mum asked when I went out to get my breakfast. She had dark circles under her eyes and looked cranky as anything.

‘Nothing,' I said, and composed myself.

And really, making up with Soph was the only bright spot in my day, because things were all wrong again between me and Ben, and as for me and Finn – well …

It'd taken me a while to get to sleep last night, even though it'd been so late when I finally got to bed. At first I was just mad at Finn for leaving me there in that scary place and not coming to get me. But then I started to worry. What if the agents of order had missed me and got him instead? Maybe there was a good reason why he hadn't come back for me. Maybe he'd been fighting for his life. Maybe they'd neutralised him. Maybe I was mad at someone who was never actually coming back. I used my bracelet to call him before I went to sleep, but heard nothing.

I tried it again after I got off the phone from Soph –
Finn, are you okay?

And this time I got a response:
I'm coming
.

If my parents caught me sneaking a boy into my bedroom the morning after being grounded, the consequences were likely to be extreme. Beheading was a distinct possibility. But I didn't care – I needed an explanation.

Finn didn't keep me waiting long. He bobbed up in my bedroom window and gave me a wicked grin as he scratched on the glass to be let in. I opened the window for him and he clambered in. ‘We hit the jackpot!' Finn
said. He was bright, happy, excited. ‘That laptop was filled with information.'

‘Keep your voice down,' I warned him. ‘If my parents catch you in here I'm dead.'

‘We've got a lot of planning to do,' Finn said, sobering. ‘With all the information I've got now we can do some really serious damage to the forces of order.'

‘Wait a minute,' I said. We were getting ahead of ourselves. ‘What happened to you last night?'

‘Nothing,' Finn said. ‘Got out of there easy as anything. Those guys must be losing their touch.'

‘But you left me there in that office for hours,' I said.

Suddenly it hit him that I was annoyed with him. ‘It wasn't hours,' he said defensively.

‘Yes it was.' An awful thought struck me. ‘You did come back for me, didn't you?'

‘Yeah, course I did.'

‘When?'

‘I wasn't keeping a close eye on the time,' Finn said sarcastically. ‘I didn't know there'd be a test.'

‘Were you planning to call and find out if I was all right?'

‘I knew you were all right,' he said impatiently. ‘What is this about, Mel?'

‘You left me there,' I insisted, ‘paralysed.'

‘It wore off, didn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you're okay now, aren't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘So what's the problem?'

I gazed at him in amazement. Did he really not know what he'd done wrong?

‘Look,' he said, ‘up until last night I didn't know if I could really count on you. But now I know you're game, you're up for anything, you do what you're told without squeaking, and you can get yourself out of a tight situation without any help. Mate, you're a legend!'

I stared at him. ‘This was a test?'

‘No,' Finn said. ‘But I needed to be sure you were really up to the job. Now I know you are.'

Suddenly I saw Finn in a whole new light. When he'd talked about joining him for a life on the road, I'd let myself imagine that there was some possibility, some time in the future, that I might take Angie's place in his heart as well as in his car. Now I realised that that was never what we'd been talking about. Finn was a destroyer, and he was consumed with fighting the forces of order. That was all he cared about and it was all he was really interested in. The charm and the jokes and the patter – that was all surface. When you really got down to it, the one thing that meant something to him was fighting the agents of order. With Finn, the mission would always come first.

And the stupid thing is, he'd never really made a secret of that. I just hadn't taken it in.

Disappointment washed through me as the last vestiges of my romantic daydreams fell in a heap, but once they were gone I could see with wonderful clarity.

‘I'm glad I passed your little test,' I said, ‘but that's it for me. I don't want to be part of your war.'

Finn frowned, surprised. ‘Is this because I left you
there? What was I supposed to do, abort the mission so you wouldn't have to be scared?'

I felt myself blushing, but I held firm. ‘I wouldn't have left you there if you were paralysed,' I said. ‘I would have found a way to get you out.'

‘If it was you, you never would have been there in the first place,' Finn said tartly.

He reached into the bag he was carrying and pulled out the laptop. He started it up. ‘Let me show you something,' he said.

He clicked through a couple of menus and then handed the laptop to me. The document he'd opened was labelled ‘active'. It was a list. A short list. It had Ben's name on it, and mine. It had our addresses and our phone numbers. It even had my mobile number. It listed the names of our schools, our parents, our siblings, and our pets.

‘They know where to find you,' Finn said. ‘They know everything about you.'

I stared at the list, feeling like the bottom had just dropped out of my world.

‘This is what I've been trying to tell you, Melissa. They're coming for you. It's only a matter of time.'

I stared at the list for a moment longer, then I slapped the lid shut. ‘I don't care,' I said. ‘I can't do what you're asking. I'm sorry.'

Finn stared at me, and there was no hint of a smile in those eyes, which were as grey as winter rain. A muscle moved in his jaw and he took the laptop from me. ‘Okay then,' he said, and climbed out the window without a backward glance.

I felt a quiver of regret as I watched him go, thinking:
that's the last time I'm ever going to see him
. I knew he was trouble. But man he was good-looking.

I should have known I wasn't going to get out of it so easily.

‘M
eliss totally saved me,' Soph said the next day at school as we were all sitting around together at lunchtime. ‘My parents were all set to cancel my party. But now they think Melissa's the skanky ho sneaking out to see boys instead of me, so the party's back on!'

‘Yay!' said Mina.

‘And are they still planning to go out for the night?' asked Emily.

‘We didn't discuss that,' Soph said, ‘but hopefully if I'm extra extra good they will.'

‘So what's the plan?' I asked.

‘Well,' Soph said, ‘I'm still making up my mind about that. I was actually thinking of inviting our whole year.'

That was about 200 people. ‘Are you serious?' I said.

‘Bad idea?' Soph asked.

‘What will you do if they all come?' I asked. ‘Where are you going to put them?'

‘The ones that don't fit in the house can go on the patio,' Soph said.

Soph's house was quite big, with a parents' zone and a kids' zone. The kids' zone had its own TV and stereo and bathroom, and Soph only had to share it with her horrible brother Felix. But even so, 200 people would be a tight squeeze. And the patio would be no fun if it rained.

‘What will you do if they
don't
come?' asked Sarah.

Soph looked hurt. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I'm not saying they wouldn't,' Sarah said hurriedly. ‘But if you've invited everyone, and nobody comes …'

The enormity of the social humiliation silenced us all for a moment. Imagine if you threw a party and nobody showed up. And everybody knew about it because they'd all been invited. Imagine as the news travelled round the school:
did you go to Soph's party? No, did you? No, did you?
Etc etc. Oh it was too, too horrible.

Soph was looking downcast, so I jumped in and said, ‘Well they
would
come, of
course
. But in my opinion it might be better not to invite so many people. Your parents aren't going to be keen on hosting a party for 200, are they?'

‘Are you kidding?' Soph said, widening her eyes. ‘They'd have me disembowelled!'

‘That means you're going to have to try and get everyone to leave again before your parents come home, and that's just going to spoil the party vibe. Because no-one's actually going to
want
to leave. So maybe it'd be better just to invite the people you
really
want to have there – people who understand your situation. And you can have a really humongous party next year.'

Soph smiled. ‘You know what? You're right. So in that
case, it'll just be the seven of us, and Draz, and some of Draz's friends. Oh, and anybody else you guys want to bring along.'

Soph smiled benignly around at the group, secure in the knowledge that no-one else would be producing a surprise boyfriend at her party.

‘This is going to be the best party ever!' she said.

Saturday dawned.

Soph's parents were going to a concert. Her brother Felix was going to a friend's place. The house would be ours.

‘I don't care if you have to tunnel out,' Soph said. ‘You've got to come.'

I begged my mother for a special release from prison for one night only on the grounds that this was a special occasion. She couldn't deny me that, could she?

‘Melissa, do you understand what grounded means?'

She could.

Which left me with plan B: sneaking out. This plan had its drawbacks. For one thing, Mum had now been alerted to the fact that there was a party on and I was missing it and was therefore likely to try and escape. So there was a better than average chance that she was going to be checking on me at regular intervals. Or chaining me to the couch in front of the TV show about the quirky English country detective. (The horror, the horror.) And I know I could have just given up on Soph's party – I mean, it's not like I was desperate to spend an evening hanging out with Draz and his mates – but it felt like things were finally starting to get back on an
even keel between me and Soph, and this was one night I really didn't want to miss.

I'd come up with several plans to make my escape using my powers. First I considered giving my brother Jason some picturesque but non-fatal illness so my mother would have to rush him to hospital. This would have left me home alone, because Dad was back in China working on a dam. But then I realised my mum was perfectly capable of making me come to the hospital with her, which would be even more boring than sitting around at home. So that plan, tempting as it was, went out the window.

Next, I thought about doing something to our house – making a storm and blowing the roof off, for example – and then sneaking away for a couple of hours in the confusion. But then I thought that it wouldn't make for a very nice party at Soph's if a typhoon went through the neighbourhood. And it would probably be kind of cruel to let my mum think I'd been blown away by a twister, Wizard-of-Oz style, even though it would only be for a couple of hours, max. Not to mention how inconvenient it would be to have no roof on our house. So that was out.

My next plan involved sleeping gas seeping into the house and putting everyone to sleep for a couple of hours. I was pretty taken with that idea for a while, but then I remembered the annoying thing about the forces of destruction. You couldn't count on them to stop when you wanted them to stop, and I didn't want to come home to find my family blue in the face and dead on the floor.

After that, my ingenuity ran out. Saturday afternoon wore on. Dinnertime rolled around. Lamb roast. I love lamb roast but I picked at it silently. They could keep me a prisoner in my own home but they couldn't make me enjoy it.

‘There'll be other parties,' Mum said.

I didn't dignify that with a reply.

Another Saturday night in front of the box.

‘I'm going to read my book,' I said, with wounded dignity.

‘I'll be in to check on you later,' Mum said.

I bet you will
, I thought darkly.

I retired to my room and brooded about what I was missing out on. Who knows, maybe this was my chance to really get the point of Draz. Maybe tonight was the night I was going to get a glimpse of the guy Soph liked. But I would never know, thanks to my stupid parents. My snake bracelet seethed around on my wrist in sympathy as my powers rumbled and grumbled in the background.

Seven-thirty became 8.30. Mum popped her head round the door. ‘Do you want anything?' she asked, as if she was concerned for my welfare and not just making sure I was still in my cell.

‘No,' I said shortly.

‘Why don't you come and watch TV with me?'

‘I hate that stupid show,' I said.

Mum made a sound through her nose and closed the door.

Ten minutes later there was a bang from the house next door, followed by some yelling and shrieking and
panicking. A minute or two passed, and then someone started thumping frantically on our front door.

Mum opened it. Our next door neighbour was standing there. ‘Evan was fixing the toaster!' she gasped. ‘And it blew up in his face and burnt his hand and now the power's out and someone has to drive him to hospital and what about the children?'

I know what you're thinking: that I used my powers to blow up Mr Simpson's toaster. But I didn't, I really didn't. Admittedly I was in a fairly bad mood when the accident happened. But I'm sure – well almost sure – that I had nothing to do with it. And in my defence, Mr Simpson was a stinge who was always repairing stuff himself because he hated having to pay somebody else to do it. Proof, I guess, that you shouldn't fool around with electrical appliances when you don't know what you're doing.

Mum took charge. She was good at that. ‘It's all right. I'll drive him to hospital, you go back and look after the children.'

‘Oh, thank you, thank you –'

‘Melissa, go and find the candles. And make a thermos of coffee.'

Mum grabbed her car keys and pulled the electrician's phone number off the fridge and issued instructions as our neighbour hurried back next door. ‘Melissa, take that coffee next door as soon as it's ready. And don't forget the candles.' She looked at me and Jason anxiously. ‘I'm not sure how long I'm going to have to stay at the hospital. Do you want me to call Nana and ask her to come over and keep an eye on you?'

I most certainly did not want Nana to come and keep
an eye on us. ‘Nana's probably asleep already,' I said. ‘We'll be fine.'

‘We don't need Nana,' Jason agreed enthusiastically.

Mum looked torn, but I could tell she was already halfway out the door. ‘Melissa,' she said, ‘I can trust you, can't I?'

‘It's nearly nine o'clock,' I said. ‘The party's practically over.'

‘All right,' Mum said. ‘Don't stay up too late.'

And then she was out the door.

I waited until I heard Mum's car start.

And then I ran to my room and started throwing on my party clothes.

Jason was waiting for me when I opened my bedroom door.

‘Where do you think you're going?' he said.

‘I'm going to drop coffee and candles off at Mrs Simpson's.'

Jason crossed his arms and smiled. ‘I want Destructo X-tra 3 or I'm telling Mum.

‘What's that?'

‘The game they wouldn't let me have because it's too violent.'

‘Okay sure, whatever.'

‘And a year's supply of chocolate.'

‘You're getting the game and that's it.'

‘Pleasure doing business with you,' Jason said, and stuck out his hand for me to shake.

I ran next door and handed over the coffee and candles to Mrs Simpson, then stepped out into a cold, clear, starlit night.

It was nine o'clock. I was free.

I started running as fast as I could.

When I got to Soph's street, I found it was jammed with cars. And not the kinds of cars that you usually got on Soph's street, which was a quiet, respectable, suburban street not unlike ours. No, these cars had mag wheels and personalised numberplates and disco lights round the bottom of them and doof doof stereos and really loud exhausts and gigantic high-revving engines and more and more of them kept arriving every minute.

Either one of Soph's neighbours was having a Nascar rally in their driveway, or Soph's party had gotten way out of hand.