The Babysitter Murders - By Janet Ruth Young Page 0,8
about Gordy is to spare him the insult of being parallel to Meghan. Gordon is super competent. In addition to singing in the Hawtones he plays French horn in the band. He’s been captain of the All-State band and even played on the lawn of the White House. He hasn’t told a lot of people, but Malia Obama smiled at him. Malia has a great smile, Gordon said.
When Dani heard, that it was like a knife going through her; that was how she first knew she liked him.
“I think her favorite fruit is raspberries,” Shelley is saying.
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Dani watches the Deagle bus pull up and their coach greet the Hawthorne coach. Malcolm Pinto slouches on the handball court, hiding his cigarette, watching the girls hop off the bus.
The Deagle captain, Zoe Brightman, already has a great tan, and her legs glow with lotion. Dani knows which girls are attractive, but it’s hard to imagine liking girls more than boys.
Look, here’s the lesbo! I’m playing tennis with a lesbo! These words ring in Dani’s head, a nasty taunt in a nasty voice like the one in the music store. No! Dani protests inside. No! Trying to push the words away before she says them. That’s awful. That’s cruel. That’s disgusting. She has never thought anything so wrong.
What is this? Am I going crazy? How hideous it would be if Dani outed Shelley—not just by whispering her secret to one Hawthorne kid, but by shouting the crudest thing she could think of before a major tennis match in front of her teammates, the Deagle varsity and junior varsity teams, both coaches, Malcolm Pinto and some of his nic-addicted friends, five members of the student council leaving a meeting, and three parents walking to their cars? The fear that she’s going to yell “Lesbo!” builds inside her. Dani has searched her soul and is pretty sure she’s not homophobic, but would that stop her from yelling something? Why has Shelley placed this lavender egg in Dani’s hand? Shelley winds up for her serve, shaking the bangs out of her eyes. Has Dani yelled
“Lesbo!” She touches her mouth to make sure her lips aren’t moving. Then she focuses on the ball’s thwop, like a metronome. She touches her mouth a few more times, but by mid-match, thank God, she’s forgotten about outing Shelley.
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A Deagle player leaps in the air to deflect a ball that would have dropped behind her. Malcolm shares the joy she must feel. Inwardly he knows he’s athletic, even though he he’s never developed that facet of himself. I know what they think of me, he acknowledges, while the players switch sides on the court. I know I seem like a skinny fringey guy who doesn’t have much going on. But when I enroll in the academy they’ll see who I really am.
Malcolm’s dad, uncle, and grandfather have all been cops.
Like boot camp, the police academy takes raw material and molds it into steel. But although he knows he can handle the physical part of training, his true talent lies in the psychological and foren-sic side of the job. He will become a detective and bust up narcot-ics networks, fencing schemes, and child-pornography rings.
His dad, Michael, was lucky to work on some cases that went beyond the normal run of small-town crime. Some drug dealers from Boston once rented a beachfront motel and attempted to whet the local appetite for crack cocaine. They brought a sixteen-year-old girl, the relative of one of the dealers if you can believe it, to offer as a prostitute. While the feds went after the drug evidence, Michael carried the girl out in her shortie nightgown.
That night the bust appeared on all the Boston TV stations.
Michael and Malcolm watched while Mrs. Pinto sat beside her JANET RUTH YOUNG
husband on the arm of the couch. The perps, in handcuffs, had pulled their shirts and jackets over their faces so they couldn’t be seen. Naïve summer tourists witnessed this walk of shame.
Michael pointed to the astonished tourists and the blurred-out face of the girl.
“You see them?” he said. “Those innocent people? They’re like sheep.”
He pointed to the perps in handcuffs. “They’re the wolves who go after the sheep.”
He turned to Malcolm. “People like you and me, we’re the sheepdogs. We keep the wolves away from the sheep.”
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Dani studies “Old Cape Cod.” Her mind fast-forwards to the concert, where she sings the lead perfectly while smiling a better smile than Malia Obama’s. During the final bow Gordy sneaks