Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

“That’s right,” Ryan piped up. “He wanted ten bucks. Like I’m gonna give him ten bucks for some stupid math answers!”

“I mean, why would you need them?” said Nicholas. “You’re so smart, Rock, you’d have aced the test anyway. Right?”

“Right.” The bully’s eyes narrowed. He suspected he was being mocked, but didn’t fully understand how. “Anyway, the point is, he’s a cheat.”

“As I say, Mrs. Schmidt, it isn’t a case of one kid’s word against another’s. Half the third grade has corroborated Ryan’s story.”

Tracy nodded understandingly. She looked at her son, not sure how, exactly, she was supposed to help him, when she saw a light go on in Nicholas’s eyes.

“Check my phone.”

“Excuse me?” said Principal Jones.

Nicholas reached into his pocket. A few moments later, he slid the offending cell phone across the principal’s desk. “Check it. See if the pictures are on there.”

“That seems sensible to me,” said Tracy.

“Very well.”

The principal switched on the device and fiddled about with it awkwardly. “How, er . . . where would I find pictures on here?”

“I’ll show you,” Nicholas said brightly.

“No. I’ll show you.” Mrs. Carson’s huge white arm shot out across the desk and grabbed the phone. “He’ll probably try and delete ’em.”

Watching her fat fingers slide over the screen was like watching Lennie from Of Mice and Men stroke a mouse.

“Here ya go.” She opened up the media files triumphantly, but her expression of smug satisfaction quickly faded. “Hey, what is this?”

“May I see the pictures?” Tracy asked sweetly. “Well, now, as far as I can see, there’s nothing that looks like a math paper here.” She handed the phone back to Principal Jones.

“He’s deleted ’em already. He’s a liar!” Mrs. Carson was shouting. “Half the class saw those pictures.”

“Any files deleted within the last hour would still be in the deleted items folder. I’m sure Mr. Farley would be happy to check that for you,” Nicholas offered helpfully. Alisdair Farley was the head of the school’s IT department. “But he won’t find any pictures because I never took any. That’s the truth. I was playing Angry Birds. I guess because I was near the teacher’s desk, Rock kinda assumed . . .”

Look at those eyelashes fluttering! thought Tracy, rising from her chair.

“Is that all, Mr. Jones?”

Look at that figure! thought Principal Jones.

“I guess that’s all, Mrs. Schmidt. It must have been a misunderstanding. Thanks for coming in.”

OUTSIDE IN THE CORRIDOR, Nicholas kissed his mother good-bye.

“I’ll see you after school. Glad we got that nonsense straightened out.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tracy. “See you after school. Oh, Nicky?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget to bring that other chip in your backpack.”

“What other chip?”

Tracy grinned. “The one with the pictures of the test on it, honey.”

Nicholas Schmidt watched his mother walk toward the double doors. She was trying to hold it together, but he could see her shoulders shaking with laughter.

He loved her so much in that moment he could have burst.

DRIVING HOME THROUGH THE familiar Steamboat Springs streets, Tracy laughed for a long time.

Nicky might look like her, but his personality was all his father. Charming, handsome, funny and occasionally deceitful, at eight years old Nicholas Schmidt was a mini Jeff Stevens in every way. Some of the stunts he pulled were quite outrageous. Tracy did her best to disapprove. She was his mother, after all, and the whole reason she’d moved to Colorado was so that Nicholas could grow up to have a different life from the one that she and Jeff used to lead. A better, happier, more honest life. Nicholas must never know the truth about his past, or hers. And yet Tracy couldn’t help but love her son’s mischievous spirit.

I have to direct it, that’s all. Make sure he uses his powers for good.

When Nicholas was three, he scammed a little girl at his preschool out of her lunch money for five days straight. By Friday, the girl’s parents had gotten wise (she was coming home ravenous every afternoon) and the whole sorry story emerged.

“How did you get her to give you the money?” Tracy asked her son gently.

“I told her I would buy her a Beanie Baby. A special one. One that only I knew how to get.”

“I see,” said Tracy. “Why did you do that, honey?”

Nicholas gave his mother a look that seemed to say, Is this a trick question?

“Why did you tell Nora you would buy something for her, if that wasn’t true?” Tracy pressed.

“So I could get the money,” said Nicholas.

His mom really wasn’t on top of her game today, it seemed to Nicholas. Maybe she needed more sleep?

“But that’s dishonest sweetie,” Tracy explained patiently. “You do see that, don’t you? It’s Nora’s money.”

“Not anymore it isn’t!” Nicholas beamed. “Anyway, she’s mean.”

“She is?”

“Real mean. She called Jules ‘fatty’ and said his lunch smelled like poop. It did smell a bit like poop,” he added contemplatively. “But Jules was crying because of her. I gave him half the money.”

Well, thought Tracy. That throws a different light on the matter.

Sadly, the principal of Steamboat Springs’ Sunshine Smile Preschool saw things differently. Nicholas spent the next year finger-painting at home.

Not all of his escapades were quite so altruistic.

There was the time in first grade when he removed the class mice, Vanilla and Chocolate, from their cage and dropped them into his teacher’s purse “to see what would happen.” (What happened was that poor Miss Roderick almost crashed her SUV on an icy stretch of I-90, and her screams could be heard all the way to Boulder.)

Or last year when he skipped school, aged only seven, to go to a hockey game by himself. Spotting a large family group with at least six kids at the stadium, Nicholas slotted himself in among the children and successfully slipped through the turnstiles. The game was almost over by the time a security guard noticed he was actually on his own and called the authorities.

“Do you know how worried everyone was?” a frantic Tracy chastised him afterward. “The school called the police. They thought you’d been abducted. So did I!”

“Because I went to a hockey game? That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”

“You were supposed to be at school!” Tracy yelled.

“Hockey’s educational.”

“How is hockey educational, Nick?”

“It’s part of the curriculum.”

“Playing it, not watching it. You were playing hooky, not hockey.” Tracy sounded exasperated. “But that’s not the point. The point is you were out in the city on your own. You’re only seven years old!”

“I know.” Nicholas smiled sweetly. “Do you know what our word of the week is? ‘Initiative.’ Don’t you think I have a lot of initiative for my age?”

Raising Nicky was a full-time job. The older he got, the more damage control the job seemed to involve, and he was still only eight, God help her! But Tracy’s son was her life now, and she wouldn’t have traded that job for anything. Nicholas was her world, her center, her moon and stars and sun. And she knew she was the same for him.

Ironically, having a child had done all the things that Jeff had said it would do, all those years ago in London. It had filled the gap left by Tracy’s old life. And it had helped her get over him. The scars from Tracy’s marriage, and Jeff Stevens’s betrayal, would never fully heal. But after nine years they had faded, like the other myriad scars in her life, from her mother’s death, to the misery of jail, to the old friends she’d been forced to lose along the way.