Meg Cabot - Missing You

“Where did you get this?” she demanded in a small voice.

“From your boyfriend’s closet,” I said when I was done chewing. “You didn’t know you were being filmed?”

She shook her head. The ability to speak had apparently left her.

“He had copies, too,” I went on. “I assume for distribution purposes.”

“Dis…distribution?” Hannah’s face had gone as white as the sheets behind her. “He was…selling them?”

“Oh, not just yours,” I said. “There were lots of different tapes of lots of different underage girls. He apparently had quite a little harem going. You really didn’t know?”

She shook her head again, staring down at the tape.

“Well,” I said with a shrug. “You don’t need to worry about it anymore. He’s in jail now. Or will be until his dad bails him out, anyway. Unless they hold him without bail, like the DA is threatening. Interstate porn trafficking is actually taken pretty seriously, especially when it involves minors, but Mr. Whitehead—Randy’s dad—has a lot of money and power and…well. We’ll just have to see what happens.”

Hannah looked at me. She had a ketchup smear on one side of her mouth. She actually appeared, for the first time since I’d met her, much younger than her fifteen years.

“Randy’s in jail?” she asked softly.

“Randy,” I said, “is very much in jail. You can help keep him there by letting me give your tapes to the police, and agreeing to testify against him. Which I very much urge you to do. But I guess I’d understand if you chose not to. Though it’s not a course I’d recommend. I mean, if he gets away with it, he’ll just do it to someone else, maybe even younger than you.”

I waited for her to light into me, the way she had back in Randy’s apartment. I was, after all, now doubly her enemy—I’d taken her away from the man she loved,and now I’d been instrumental in putting that man in jail.

So, of course, had her brother. But I was willing to take the blame for Randy’s incarceration, since if Rob had had his way, all her boyfriend would currently be suffering from right now was a concussion, not years of legal woes and quite possibly a good deal of jail time.

But to my surprise, Hannah didn’t fly into one of her rages. Instead, still gazing down at the tape, she asked softly, “Did Rob see it?”

I shook my head. “No. Just me.”

“Where are the others?” she asked. “You said there were copies.”

I reached for my backpack, and pulled out the other two tapes with her name on them.

“Right here,” I said.

She stepped forward and took both the tapes from my hand. As she did so, our fingers brushed, and she said in the same soft voice, “Thanks.” She looked down at the tapes. And appeared to come to a decision, if the way her mouth turned into a flat little line was any indication.

“I guess I’d like to,” she said. “Press charges, I mean.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Let Rob know. Or your mom. One of them can take you down to the station.”

“I will. And…I’m sorry.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What for? It’s not your fault.”

“No, not for Randy,” she said, keeping her gaze on the tapes. “For those things I said yesterday. About you being—”

“A huge, giant, überbitch?” I finished for her.

“Uh,” she said. And she actually blushed. “Yeah. That. You’re not. You’re actually pretty cool.”

“Well,” I said. “Thanks.”

And then we both heard Rob call up the stairs, “Hannah? Your mom’s here.”

And Hannah’s face crumpled.

“Mom?” She dropped all three videotapes down on the bed, turned around, and ran for the door. “Mom!”

A few seconds later, I heard her thumping down the stairs, and a woman’s voice say, “Oh, Hannah!” before she was interrupted by youthful, joyous screaming.

I stayed where I was, finishing the rest of my burger. When I was done, I got up, threw the wrapper in the trash, and started for the door.

But I stumbled and nearly lost my balance when my foot caught on something hidden beneath the detritus on the floor. When I looked down to see what it was, I saw a piece of paper with my name on it. So of course I had to stoop down for a closer look.

The paper turned out to be sticking out of an album—green leather with gold-embossed trim. When I picked it up, it was heavy. More paper came out of it. I saw that they were newspaper clippings, and that they’d come loose due to someone’s rough handling.

Someone who, I didn’t doubt, had thrown the album across the room in a fit of pique at me.

I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.

And when I opened it, I saw why she’d done it.

Seventeen

It was all about me. Every page in the album—and there were a lot of them, messily inserted and sloppily glued, even before Hannah had inflicted it with such bodily harm…. The work of someone not used to scrapbooking and with no interest in neatness or even in using the correct kind of adhesive, Rob seemingly having grabbed whatever was handy, including duct tape—was plastered with magazine and newspaper articles about me, starting from the very first story that appeared in our local paper and progressing to a piece that had appeared inThe New York Times after the start of the war on terror, on some of the unorthodox methods the government was using to combat terrorism.

There was even thePeople magazine article—the one I’d refused to take part in—about me and my family (“Though she’s the inspiration for a hit television show, Jessica Mastriani is surprisingly camera shy….”).

There weren’t just clippings, either. There were some photos, too. I recognized a few of them—snapshots Rob’s mother had taken of us at Thanksgiving dinner…even a picture of Ruth and me sitting on Santa’s lap in the mall, giggling like mad. Rob must have talked the photographer into letting him buy a copy of that one, since I know I hadn’t given him one.

But some of the photos I’d never seen before—like a black-and-white one of me, in the center of the book, looking off in the distance, seemingly unaware I was being photographed. I didn’t know where or when that photo had been taken, let alone who’d pressed the shutter.

The final thing in the book was the last piece ever written about me—an announcement in our hometown paper of my winning the scholarship to Juilliard. My mom must have submitted that. She’d been so proud—prouder that I’d won that scholarship than she’d been of any of the other things I’d done, or all the kids—and fugitives from justice—I’d found.

I guess I could understand that. My musical gift was much easier to accept than my other one.

The one that, until recently, I’d thought I’d lost for good.

I could understand my mom keeping an album like this. In fact, she had one just like it.

But that’s because my mom loves me—even if we do have our differences.

The question was, why didRob have an album like this—one he’d obviously kept up with, even after we’d parted ways? What did it mean? Obviously that he’d kept on thinking of me, even after I was long gone out of his life….

But had he kept on thinking of me because he loved me? Or had he kept this album as a sort of trophy he could brag about—I dated Lightning Girl.

But wouldn’t my letters and e-mails to him—the ones I wrote so sporadically while I was overseas—make better material for bragging? And none of those were in the album.

There was only one way I was ever going to find out what it meant. And that was to ask its creator.

Holding the album to my chest—in the hope, I guess, that it would hide the violent hammering of my heart. Though why my pulse should be racing so hard was a question I didn’t dare ask myself—I left the spare room and came down the stairs to find Hannah and a woman I assumed to be her mother huddled together on the couch in the living room. Both of them were weeping, and speaking to each other in hushed voices.