School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,80

teacher—we kept urging him to try. We were like, ‘Hey, you have to pass your classes to play football anyway, so why not just a little more?’ And a little more, and a little more. And suddenly, he was taking his SATs and not doing half bad, and he applied to Sac State, and he was admitted. No big scholarship—he was a good football player, but not great—but he was a college student. We were really proud of him. I mean, kids like Ty? He was so bright, we had to wear shades the minute he walked in. But kids like James? He had to work so hard to get something like that. You’re proud of them both, but with James, we really earned our stripes, you know?”

“It’s hard when you lose someone like that,” Jackson said softly.

She nodded and unashamedly wiped under her eyes with a clean napkin. He noticed that she had a stockpile of Kleenex under one of her shelves, and he ran her a box before she had to do that again.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just… I had all those kids. James, Ty… Tage, and I don’t think he did it by the way. To have all those things happen so quickly—it’s hard. We lost a carload of kids in a crash about ten years ago, and this feels the same. It’s like every day I’m mourning all my hope.”

“Well, at least Tage’s been released,” Jackson told her, pretty sure she wouldn’t have heard this yet. “All charges dropped.”

“Oh thank God!” She grabbed a couple of the aloe Kleenex. “Who are you, the happiness fairy?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out to check. When he saw Henry’s text—a series of question marks—he responded with the room number and quick directions from where Henry was out in the field.

“Just doin’ my job, ma’am,” he said when he was done, tipping an imaginary hat.

“Except what is your job?” she asked, and he turned back to the posters.

“You mean besides helping nice folks such as yourself?” He kept the accent to let her laugh.

“Well, you said you were saying hi from Nate and Ty. What was the other thing?”

He hated to even bring it up, so he made sure he’d set the next poster up to tack before he began.

“There’s two things,” he said. “First of all, the party favors getting passed around when Ty got busted were little pink pills with butterflies on them. Is that something you’ve been told to look out for?”

She thought about it. “No, but—” She wrinkled her nose. “—I am not a big fan of our Student Resource guy anyway.” She snorted softly, and Jackson wondered where this woman had been hiding when he’d been in high school. Well, this was the good school district. She’d probably been thanking her lucky stars she’d gotten hired here instead of where he, Jade, and Kaden had gone to school.

“What’s he like?” Jackson asked, pulling his attention back to the job at hand.

“Young,” she said dispiritedly. “And unlike most of the other SROs we’ve had, he got his job because he was connected and it was easy. The last guy was great—we had seminars at the teacher in-services, we’d get newsletters telling us the latest shit to watch out for. This guy just hangs out after school and talks to the kids and says he’s patrolling—he doesn’t even keep out the guys who don’t belong here!”

“Like Ziggy Ivanov?” Jackson said, nose twitching.

“Who even is that kid?” she snapped, and he had to laugh, because she suddenly sounded no older than her own students.

“A pain in your ass?” he prompted, checking the number of pins he had in his hand.

“He does not belong here, and he’s always leering at the freshman girls. It’s gross.”

Jackson hoped she never learned how truly, truly gross it was. “Have you seen that kid lately?” he asked.

“No.” He saw when the question hit her. “Why? Does he have something to do with what happened with Ty and Tage Dobrevk?”

“What if I told you he was at both crime scenes?” he said.

Her frown deepened. “But he and James were cousins. At least that’s what James always said when I told him Ziggy wasn’t a good influence.”

Jackson remembered what Nate had told him. “Did he say they were cousins? Or did he say they were family?” he asked sharply.

And she knew what that meant. “Oh,” she muttered. “Shit. He said family.