Dawn, driving, let her window down. “Hey,” she whispered. “Way to go. Perfect. Hop in the back seat but don’t close the door all the way. Just hold it. No noise.”
Carrie, her heart beating so hard she was surprised that they couldn’t hear it, followed these instructions to the letter. As soon as she was in, Dawn got the car rolling again and caught Carrie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Is this awesome, or what?” Dawn asked.
“Totally,” Emily said from the front passenger seat.
Carrie wracked her brain searching for the right answer. “Easy peasey,” she finally said in the calmest voice she should muster.
“Easy peasey, so cool. We knew you’d be down with us, Car,” Dawn said, then giggled and added, “Jason’s going to just shit.”
For a while, Chris Duke believed that he was friends with Jason Trent. After all, they’d played on the same football teams for eight years, Pop Warner on up, with Trent always the quarterback and Chris usually a linebacker on the D-squad, although he’d had some luck last year transitioning to fullback and had even taken a few snaps at that position last Spring. Things had been looking up. Chris was large, strong and fast. Maybe he could become an impact player.
He and Jason had always gotten along well enough, not that they talked much or anything like that. But they were teammates and that’s all that needed to be said. Then they became a little more than that after grades came out at the end of Chris’s junior year and he hadn’t made the academic cutoff with his 2.0 GPA, when he needed a 2.5 to stay on the team; he’d gotten a damn C-minus in geometry, like he was ever going to use geometry in real life.
But Jason — though himself not the sharpest tool in the shed — was in the summer school tutoring program and the two of them spent a couple of days a week at Jason’s fancy house on the golf course trying to make sense out of triangles and circles, proofs and space, and the areas of figures. Total waste of time, Chris thought, since what was that stuff ever going to do with him? And ultimately he didn’t understand it anyway.
But he and Jason had broken up the tedium and failure of the geometry lessons with computer games and working on Jason’s passing and handoffs and Chris’s receiving. They had laughed a lot. Jason was rich — well, his parents were — but basically he seemed like an okay guy. When they checked in back at summer camp, Chris knew that Jason put in a word to Coach to let him try out in the backfield again.
But then his final summer school grade, another C-minus, came in and the coach told him he had no choice. It wasn’t his decision to make. Chris didn’t make the academic cut and therefore he couldn’t be on the team.
Jason, who went off to football practice after school every day like he always did, simply dropped out of Chris’s universe. He obviously couldn’t have cared less about whether or not Chris was still on the team. He’d given it his best shot to help him, sure, but now that was over. It hadn’t worked, and the two guys had nothing left to say or to do with each other.
A couple of times, Chris had nodded to Jason passing in the hall and though he’d nodded back, it was obvious that his former tutor did not know for sure exactly who he was.
Jason probably meant no offense, of course, but life was life, fair was fair, and he was still the quarterback after all, while Chris was nothing.
Oh, except a loser.
He only accidentally heard about Jason’s parents’ vacation to Cabo when he’d been sitting at the next table in the cafeteria and heard Jason telling his current babe girlfriend Dawn that he’d be alone in the house starting Thursday and through the weekend, so she could come over any time and...
...and she’d stopped him there, although there had been a lot of laughing.
Now it was Friday morning, about twenty-five minutes after midnight, and Chris had made his way past the backs of four houses down the Sixth fairway, to Jason’s place. Two houses in, there’d been some dim lights on inside, and across the fairway, a few more, but otherwise generally it was dark, dark, dark.
Chris was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. The September night was warm. He hadn’t figured out exactly what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but the general idea was that he was going to even out the playing field of their lives, at least a little. The way it was now, Jason had everything and Chris had nothing. That just wasn’t right.
Several times over the summer, Chris and Jason had taken the shortcut through the parent’s bedroom on their way out to the pool, which was just a few steps outside the floor-to ceiling glass French doors. The room was about half the size of Chris’s whole house, with a king-sized bed and a dresser on the top of which Cheryl Trent kept an enormous array of her jewelry, taking up almost the whole top of the dresser, neatly laid out or hanging on display — bracelets, necklaces, rings and earrings. Everything appeared to be made out of gold, diamonds, and other gemstones in every color and shape.
Chris didn’t know the actual price of any of that stuff, but he couldn’t imagine it would be less than fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. Maybe way more. As if that kind of money had any real meaning for him.
The plan to even things up was coming together.
How about if all that jewelry went missing when the Trents were on vacation down in Baja? First off, the parents were going to have to consider the possibility that their own dear son Jason was the thief. And even if they didn’t go far down that road, their trust in him would have to be shaken, and they’d still be out all of that jewelry, stolen while Jason was supposed to be watching the house.
Nice job, kid. We thought you were responsible and could take care of things while we went away for a few days, but we guess not now. It’s sad but there it is: we just can’t trust you completely anymore.
But even without that, even if they bought Jason’s story about his complete innocence, the house wouldn’t feel safe and impregnable any longer. And that alone would be a huge payback.
Okay, Jason, Chris thought, welcome to my world. This is what it feels like when you get cut and your parents don’t have money to bail you out and you’re not important to anybody anymore. Get used to it. The rest of your life starts tonight.
Thunk.
Jason Trent woke with a start and sat up, fully awake.
What the hell was that?
His heart pounding, he swung his feet over and down and crossed his room in the dark to his closet where his jeans hung off the peg on the back of the door. Pulling them down and putting them on, stepping into his topsiders, he crossed back to the bed, moving as quietly as he could, the lights still off.
Feeling around, he opened the door to the bedside table where he’d stashed the gun he’d taken from his father’s office after his parents had driven off to the airport.
He probably should have told them, or asked them about wanting to have the gun in his own room next to his bed, just in case something weird happened — which it never did, not in this Neighborhood Watch community — but he didn’t want them to know that he was even a little tiny bit uncomfortable about staying alone in the house for the weekend.
Not terrified, really, just nervous.
But if he told them that he felt he needed the gun, they might — no, they would — start to curtail their traveling. And the two of them getting away alone, like with this trip to Baja, had only recently become something his parents were doing with regularity, leaving him alone at the house, often having Dawn over (and Shelley before her), or his teammates, or even just hanging out in his house alone, when he could sneak some alcohol — not so much that they would notice when they got back, but enough to get a little buzz.