Work for Hire (11 page)

“Fine.” Gemma agreed. She twirled a strand of black hair around her finger and giggled.

I reached for the pencil and got started on the next problem. Gemma reclined in her seat, math apparently forgotten.

“Oh my gosh,” she gushed. “Did I tell you what happened after school today? You won’t believe it. Josh asked me out! As if I would ever go out with some guy whose father is a musician, even if he does have a bunch of Grammies … ”

An hour later, I completed the math sheet—alone—and Gemma was still gushing.

“ … Then Pam said we should get Josh to take us all out to the movies, that it would serve him right,” she prattled. “Though I think maybe Pam has a crush on him herself. Do you think?”

I ventured a glance up from the sheet. I was nearly done re-checking the work.

“You’re right,” Gemma continued. “She probably does like him. The
nerve
!”

“Okay, Gemma,” I said, and cut off her monologue. Time to get back to serious business. “The math is finished. Do you have any other homework?”

Gemma snapped her mouth shut. “No. That’s it.”

“Great,” I got up from my seat. “Then we’re done.”

“Oh, o … kay,” Gemma stammered. “I still haven’t told you about Anthony, but I guess you have to meet with Xander.” She followed me out of her bedroom. “Though, oh my gosh, Tekla! I completely forgot to tell you,
Maman
is coming back from L.A. this weekend! Isn’t that great? Maybe she’ll take me shopping, or we’ll go to dinner or something. If she has time, that is. What do you think?”

I paused and looked back at Gemma. Mrs. Lamont was coming back to New York. That meant one thing.

Julian was coming back with her.

I grinned at Gemma, all annoyances forgotten.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe she will.”

And maybe Julian will finally call me.

T
HE WORDS, “
H
EY,
T
EKLA
, how’re you doing,” greeted me as I walked into Xander’s room and headed for the desk.

Except for a huge Pink Floyd poster plastered to the wall above the bed, the room was an exact replica of Gemma’s. Xander laid sprawled on the bed, strumming his electric guitar, a vintage 1960s red Gibson that must have cost a small fortune. Blessedly, the amplifier was off.

“Hey, yourself. And I’m doing well,” I answered.

Xander, like his sister, still wore his school uniform, but unlike Gemma’s micro-mini, Xander’s khaki slacks, red tie and navy blazer—with Harding Academy’s initials monogrammed in gold thread on the left breast pocket—bordered on Republican conservative. The getup, however, lost some of its starchiness on Xander’s lanky body. His tie was askew. The left tail of his white dress shirt hung down the front of his slacks, and Xander’s mop of black hair flowed over the blazer’s collar. The Prada loafers he probably wore to school had been abandoned by the bedroom’s door. A musky stink of socks permeated the room.

“And how are you?” I asked, still disbelieving this was the same Xander I had met during Mrs. Lamont’s forced lunch.

Xander’s attitude had undergone a complete one-eighty once I started coming regularly to his house. No longer a silent, sullen, difficult-to-talk-to teenager, Xander was friendly, if somewhat reserved. He actually
talked
to me, about school, his music and film aspirations. He asked about law school, my life outside NYU, and sometimes my views on social politics. He
listened
to my tirades against capital punishment, the inadequacy of funding for public education and economic disparities. He looked up current events and asked questions about the justice system or the gap between the rich and poor. He offered counter-arguments. He wasn’t as chatty as Gemma, but then, he actually
did
have homework for us to work on—in math, science or history—almost every evening.

“Cool.”

Xander stopped fiddling with the guitar, sat upright and rested the instrument against the bed’s edge. A bright red pimple fought to break through the skin of his cheek. He scratched at the surface. I winced. His hands couldn’t possibly be clean.

“But, dude,” Xander said. “We got an English essay due next Wednesday.”

I bit back a groan and momentarily shut my eyes. Not him too.

It seemed today was going to be filled with firsts, because although Xander had homework virtually every night, he never had to actually
write
more than a word for any particular assignment. All his homework questions were fill-ins, multiple choice or matching. I remembered Lisa had mentioned he needed extra “editing” with his writing. That warning couldn’t portend good things to come.

“Really?” I said, pretending enthusiasm. Then I reached for a kitchen stool near the door. Xander must have brought it up just for me when he came in from school.

I placed the stool near Xander’s chair and waited for him to take his seat. Then I sat—no, plopped—on mine. The stool barely measured above six inches. It was more of a footrest, really. Sitting, my knees reached my chin and my head hovered in the vicinity of Xander’s shoulder. I looked like Alice, trapped in the rabbit’s hole, both too large and too small. Xander chuckled at my predicament, his grin as wide as the Cheshire cat’s, but remained in his chair. He, unlike Gemma, never volunteered his seat for my benefit. I smiled back at the joke. Xander, clearly, liked being a prankster.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“Originality in the creative world.”

Xander leaned back in his chair and positioned his sock-clad feet, ankles crossed, on the desk right in front of my face.

“Dude.” I parroted Xander’s favorite word, scrunched my nose and waved a hand to ward off the stink. Fun and games notwithstanding, I drew the line at smelly socks under my nose. “Get your stinky feet out of my face. And what about originality in the creative world?”

“Sorry,” Xander grinned, clearly not at all sorry. He dropped his feet to the floor, pushed his chair away from the desk and rolled back towards the guitar. He reached for the instrument, placed it in his lap and began fiddling with the strings again. “Mr. Dandridge wants us to write about whether we think anything in, like, the arts or literature is original anymore. It has to be at least five hundred words. He made us start the essay in class today. I think the sheet is somewhere on the desk, if you want to look.”

If
I wanted to look?
Of course
I wanted to look. If Xander had actually written something already, we might have a good start. The essay was due next Wednesday, and it was only Thursday. We had five whole days to write and edit five hundred words. How hard could that be? I scanned the desk for any loose sheets of paper but found none.

“I don’t see it, Xander.” I shoved through some more pages. Xander wasn’t the world’s most organized student. Torn sheets of his science and math notes littered the desk’s surface, but none resembled the start of an essay. “It’s definitely not on your desk.”

Xander stared at me and continued playing. I mentally counted to ten.

“Xander, can you please leave the guitar alone, and come help me look for the essay.”

Xander bent his head over the Gibson and plunked its strings harder. The resulting discord had even him wincing. He paused his fingers, returned the guitar to the bed and rolled the chair back to the desk.

“Maybe it’s still in my book bag.” He pulled out his massive JanSport from underneath the desk and rummaged through its clutter of text- and notebooks. “Here it is,” he triumphantly crowed, pulling out a crumpled sheet from between two books.

I took the sheet and focused on the barely legible scribble. Xander’s handwriting was atrocious. I could just make out the essay. In his forty-five minutes of class time, Xander had managed to write:

I’m writing about how nothing new anymore, because everyone just copy what everyone else already says, ergo what point, like my mother, she take picture for magazine, but picture going to be like everyone picture, but magazine published, mother calls by important people important, they say she is giving new pictures, but I doesn’t believe them, because her picture is looking like picture of other important person they say is important, so I’m just saying like my mother that nothing new anymore because my mother picture like other people picture so ergo not new, nothing original,

I sat back in my seat—temporarily forgetting the stool had no backrest—and almost tipped myself over. I grabbed the desk for balance and scanned the page again.
Could this be another prank?
But few people could easily fake writing this poor, and Xander wasn’t that good of a prankster anyway. No, unfortunately, the essay was probably not Xander’s idea of a joke.

But perhaps I had misread his handwriting. Yeah, that was a definite possibility since Xander’s script
was
pretty illegible.

I ran my eyes over the text for a third time, just to make certain.

Nope.

The essay was really
that
bad. There was not a period in sight, not to mention the repetition or the paragraph’s complete lack of clarity. And “ergo”? Where had that come from?

I tried to recall my own freshman year of high school. I had to have made plenty of writing mistakes. Many a teacher had probably cringed at my efforts. After all, no one—maybe with the exception of Hemingway—was born knowing perfect grammar, but
this
? This felt elementary. I couldn’t possibly have been that bad.

I carefully placed the sheet back on the desk and looked up at Xander who, with two pens in hand, was tapping them on the desk, his head bopping to the beat, his shaggy hair flying in and out of his face with each shake. He seemed joyfully oblivious.
If only I were so lucky.

How to handle this? I didn’t want to hurt Xander’s feelings by being too critical, but I didn’t want to lie either. He had to rewrite the essay, obviously, and there was no denying everything he already wrote needed scrapping.

I ground my teeth. I had no clue how to teach someone basic writing. That’s what
English teachers
did, and I was not one. I was a law student hired to go over homework and make corrections. Xander’s essay, however, needed anything but minor fixes. What to do? Where to even start? I was in way over my head.

I straightened my back.
Calm down. No need to panic. Yet.
This couldn’t possibly be the first time Xander had an essay to do for English class. And, apparently, since he passed grades one through eight, he had done well enough on those. Perhaps his school was far more lenient in its expectations, and Xander’s essay would suffice, with a few small alterations.

“Ah, Xander,” I began, folding my hands. When Xander stopped his impromptu drumming, I continued. “Do you have any of your English essays from last year around? You know, for comparison, so I can see what your school expects.”

He pursed his lips, scratched his head, and narrowed his eyes, as if in contemplation.

“Lisa always put them away in some folder in my desk drawer. I guess I could look and see.”

He rolled his chair to the drawer and flipped through its contents. When the drawer finally looked like a bomb had exploded inside, he pulled out a couple of stapled sheets.

“Here, I think this is one.” He glanced at the paper. “Yeah, that’s when Mr. Barsky had us write about our most unusual hobby. I got an A-.”

I took the paper and skimmed the first paragraph:

I love to see people happy. It makes me feel good. The best feeling, however, is when I’m the one making the people happy. I have been a magician for more than three years. I love it, and so does everyone else. I specialize in card magic. I make cards disappear, reappear, switch places, even change color. I perform my magic everywhere I go, sometimes to friends and family, but mostly to strangers, people I barely know. When I first meet someone, there’s a very solid chance that I might go straight into one of my card tricks. On the subway, in a waiting room, at a party, I bring my magic to people everywhere, and they always take away a little more than just a shocked face.

Okay, then
. I tapped my fingers against the paper. We had periods here. We had subject-verb agreement. Hell, we even had parallel constructions. So there was no way Xander had written both essays. And since I
knew
he authored the one worked on in class today, obviously someone—read, Lisa—had to have written all of this one.

Was I now expected to take over, to write Xander’s papers for him—completely?

“Ah, Xander … ” I turned my head in his direction. While I was reading, Xander had abandoned his seat and was now pacing around his bedroom. “How do
you
feel about what you wrote in class today?” I asked.

“It’s crap.” Xander shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “You don’t have to say it. I know I can’t write for shit. Though I did use ‘ergo’—did you see?—and that was one of our new vocabulary words.”

“Yes, I did see,” I nodded. “But I don’t get it. You speak perfectly grammatical English. So what’s the problem when it comes to writing?”

Xander scuffed his left toe against the floorboards. “My counselor at school thinks it’s because I have a French mother. That my speaking and writing to her in French might be confusing my brain. He wanted to put me in remedial English with the other foreign students, to relearn the basics, but Dad wouldn’t let him. He said I was a U.S. citizen with a British father, and no Lamont by birth had ever been placed in ‘stupid English’—that’s what he called it. And that’s when he hired Lisa. He said I needed a nanny with a Harvard degree. We also went to a psychiatrist, who told the school I had ADD and that my grades in class exams would probably be much worse than those I did at home. My English grades have turned out decent since then, since I get Ds or Fs on my in class essays but all As on those written at home. That averages out to about a B, so Dad’s happy.”

I barely managed to hold my mouth closed. Evidently Mr. Lamont assumed I would write Xander’s essays:
I expect results. Whatever it takes, Miss Reznar. I don’t tolerate failure.
His warning spun in my head.