Exposed (10 page)

“From the Internet?” His voice is loud enough that I flinch. “How?”

“I used a Portalpay account.” A hedge, but not a lie. “It’s completely safe, Dad, I swear. Passwords and everything.”

Absolutely nothing from Dad.

Not for a second.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Longer.

He’s still red like a cherry and breathing hard and
strangling the steering wheel. And now he’s frowning, too, big-time.

My heart drops. “I just didn’t want to ask Mom to buy them for me. You know how she gets when I try to talk to her about exercise and stuff.”

This makes Dad frown worse, and I hate that. He doesn’t look at me. In fact, he seems frozen to the SUV steering wheel as he drives—but his face slowly changes from bright red to white again. Then pale. Finally, about a block from the house, he says, “Yeah, I know how your mom gets. I’ll help you talk to her, but I’m not making any promises. She’ll be pissed, Chan. About the fight—and the weights.”

“I tried to talk to her about the exercise thing!” I’m yelling all of a sudden, even though it makes my sore ribs hurt. “I asked to see a nutritionist, and she said no and freaked on the eating disorder thing again. So I did it on my own. I
had
to. If I don’t work at it—” I break off as my brain tilts sideways and closes my mouth just in time.

I so need to explain this to Dad, but at the same time, I don’t. I can’t. What I really need to do is shut up. We can’t talk about this.

What
is wrong with you?
The voice in my head sounds like Devin tonight. I suppose I deserve that.

“I know, Chan.” Dad’s sigh cuts across the whole SUV. “You don’t have to say it.” He pulls into our driveway, stops, and shuts off the engine. Before I open my door, he reaches across the seat and touches my cheek. “I
don’t want you to get as big as me, not now and not ever. So, come on. Let’s talk to your mother.”

“Dad, it’s not—” I start, not wanting him to think I’m calling him fat or thinking of him as fat, but then I don’t know what to say, so I stop. And come up with “Thanks.”

I smile at him. My face hurts, and I feel like running in traffic again.

What
is wrong with you
? the Devin-voice repeats.

Nothing
, I snap back.

But I wish I knew.

“The conversation with Mom sucked,” I explain to Paul in chat that night, after telling him about the Bear’s approval of my training plan—but not the part about the fight in the gym. “The whole time Mom was talking, Lauren kept interrupting with opinions. She yelled at Mom for being mad at me, then yelled at me for upsetting Mom. The kid’s got issues, seriously. I didn’t get grounded—but I only got in three hours of competition practice.”

“I’d rather be shot than lectured.” Paul’s words blink through the blue chat box, pushing shadows around my closet. I shove a few pillows back and forth on the floor. The door’s cracked so I can keep watch for parents and my neurotic little sister, and cool air stirs against my face every time I move.

“I HATE LECTURES,” I type in bright purple letters. “Mom finally calmed down later and admitted maybe, just maybe I have a brain and know what I’m
doing. I get so tired of her thinking I’m six. Or stupid. Or both.”

Paul answers with: “My dad treats me like I’m twelve half the time. Five the rest. I think it’s a parent disease. They don’t get it that we’re growing up. First time I had a girlfriend, I thought both my parents would spaz and die.”

I laugh, but not too loud. “I wasn’t even allowed on alone-dates until I turned fifteen. Devin still isn’t allowed one-on-one dates. It’s ridiculous.”

“Did you wait?” Paul’s question comes through in black-and-white. “I mean, did you really wait? Or did you sneak out on dates before you turned fifteen?”

I remember my first few dates with Adam-P, how wonderful they seemed, and go cold inside.

Why
can’t I stop thinking about that piece of dirt? I hate it, hate it, hate it. Sometimes just the image of Adam-P’s face in my head makes me hurt.

Don’t think about the book of love poems he gave back. Don’t think about the book
—

But that’s all I’m thinking about, and I’m feeling stupider than ever.

I bite my lip hard enough to send currents of pain to both ears. “Sneaked out,” I make myself type, even though my lip’s hurting and I’m shivering and my stomach’s getting all knotted. “Guy was a jerk, though.”

The pain gradually stops, my stomach relaxes—then growls. Thanks to Paul’s training plan, I’m not starving
myself with a lettuce diet, but I still don’t get to eat what I want, like Cheetos. Or the leftover chicken in the fridge. Do I get extra calories for staying up past midnight? Overtime calories. Yeah. That has a nice ring.

“So, were you and Jerk-Guy tight?” Paul asks, and I imagine he sounds jealous. Maybe a little possessive. My toes curl, and I get a bit of that running-with-my-eyes-closed feeling.

“We were tight for a while,” I type, not wanting to spend one more second on Adam-P or any of that mess, not when I’m starting to feel better—not when I’m starting to feel like
this
. “He’s over now.”

Seconds go by, then more seconds.

What … does Paul not believe me about Adam-P being history?

I type it again, in all caps. “HE’S OVER.” Then I add, “Has been for a while, too.”

Paul is typing
blinks, relieving my insta-anxiety a little bit.

“Do you have a new off-computer boyfriend?”

Oh. So not happening. “If I did, I wouldn’t be talking to you.” I cue up a winking smiley. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

Paul is typing….

“Do you want me to be your boyfriend?”

My heart stops. I swear it does. And I stop breathing and typing and moving at all.

What am I supposed to say?

My heart starts a loud, hard pounding.

Yes
, and I’ll look desperate and pathetic.
No
—now, that would be a total lie, and it might hurt his feelings. My toes won’t stop curling over the fact he even asked that question. It takes me a few seconds—forever and a few seconds—to give him the only answer I could possibly give and survive to type another line.

“Maybe.” I hunt up the perfect smiley, too. A sly-looking little vixen smiley with a red rose in her teeth.

Paul is typing….

I close my eyes. Open them. Could Paul type a little faster, please?

His answer starts with a blushing smiley. “Maybe is definitely better than no. Say yes, Red. I won’t tell anybody. You don’t have to either, at least not until you’re ready.”

Oh, God.

When I don’t type anything back, he adds, “If I turn into Jerk-Guy, you can always delete me and never type another word. I’m safe. Calorie-free. Give me a try.”

Double oh-God.

The boy thinks he has to make a case?

My toes curl so hard I almost get cramps in my feet.

“Red says yes,” I type back in a hurry, with a few more vixen smileys.

Then I hit SEND and wonder what I’m supposed to do next.

I have a boyfriend online. And it’s Paul. And he’s so totally a Greek god.

My toes actually start to hurt, so I stretch them out and wiggle them.

“Turn on your camera,” Paul types. “Please? I want to see your face. I want to see if you’re smiling.”

I flush and smile even bigger and click on the camera. A few seconds later, I have it set, and my face pops up in the stream box next to my chat icon.

My hair looks
awful
.

I smooth it down in a big hurry, then wish I still had on makeup. And why did I wear a cartoon pajama shirt tonight of all nights?

“There you are,” Paul says. I can almost hear his voice flowing out of the typed words, smooth like silk, hot like jazz, as if he had spoken them aloud. “You’re so cute. I like looking at you.”

Okay, now I’m pink. Great.

“I like it when you blush,” he writes, and of course, I blush harder. My heart’s pounding so hard I can barely breathe, and for some stupid reason, I want to cry.

Instead, I type, “Okay, your turn. I want to see if you’re smiling, too.”

A second later, Paul’s stream box flickers, and a picture comes through—of his great big grin. I can’t see anything but his lips and teeth and tongue as he mouths,
I like you
.

I mouth back,
I like you, too
.

Paul’s camera pans outward. The lighting in his room sucks, and I can barely see the outline of his face when he moves back from the lens.

“Show me your right hand,” he says.

After giving him an okay-I-thought-you-weren’t-weird look, I hold my hand up to the camera. Then he asks for my wrist and my elbow.

I give him a quick view of those, then write back, “What are you doing?”

“I want to get to know you. All of you. An inch at a time.” His grin fills the stream box again. “So far I like what I see.”

Even the totally idiot grin and the bright pink cheeks?

“Show me your eyes,” I say.

Paul leans forward and gazes directly into the camera. His brown eyes, lit by the glow from his computer screen, are just to die for. They seem different from his picture, a little more crinkly on the sides, but that just makes him look softer and sweeter. Even better.

He shows me his tattoos next. One’s a sad-faced clown crying the single teardrop I had seen above his sleeve before, and the other’s an upside-down pyramid he says was drawn to look like the one at the Louvre in Paris, France.

“Art’s my other big thing. If I can’t play my horn, I want to draw.”

If Paul weren’t watching, I’d put my hand on my chest to squeeze the fluttering muscles. A musician
and
an artist. Too perfect.

“I want to see you better.” I smile into the camera. “Turn on a light or something?”

“My dad can see if I do,” he writes back. “Sorry. We’ll day-chat soon, right?”

“I don’t know if I can do that. My mom might slip a cog.”

“Go here,” he types, and sends me a link. “These look like screen savers, only you can click them on fast by hitting control-enter twice. They hide everything, and erase your tracks, and you can password them.”

Like Mom wouldn’t beat the password out of me with my own batons, but okay. Whatever. I’ll try them.

I click over to the site, scroll through puppy, bird, and cartoon options, and finally start a download of some bouncing kittens.

Then I switch back to the chat screen and type, “Got one. But this doesn’t mean Mom won’t catch me, drive out to where you live, and give you a twelve-page questionnaire to make sure you don’t have any secrets.”

“We all have secrets, Red. Don’t you have a few?” Paul flashes his crying clown tattoo in front of the lens, then leans in to show me his eye and give me a big wink.

I look away from the computer and stare at the closet wall.

All the excitement floods out of me, but I don’t want
to lose it. I want it back right now, so I glance at the computer screen to try.

One word jumps across my consciousness again and again.

Secrets
.

Each time I read it, it feels like a punch, right in my belly.

My thighs start to itch and burn even though I’m not having an outbreak now, and all of a sudden, I don’t want Paul, or anybody, to see me, not ever.

How do you even know for sure you got it from me, bitch….

Yeah, Chan. Sure. Whatever you say….

My throat closes and all of a sudden, I can’t even stand the idea of being on camera at all. In a big hurry, I click it off. My pale face and freckles vanish from the stream box.

I try to breathe without my chest hurting, and I force myself to type a one-word answer to what Paul asked about me having a few secrets.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he types back right away.

Breathing better now, I write, “I’m not upset.”

“Bull. I’m supposed to be your boyfriend now.” His shadowy image moves around a little, like he’s the one getting upset. “Don’t blow me off. You’re upset. I can tell even without the camera.”

I hate Adam-P. I wish I could slap his smirky face.
I wish I
had
given him some disease he’d never get over. Jerk. Asshole. Bastard!

Stuff rattles in my mind. I feel kind of guilty like I do when I hurt Dad’s feelings—like when he told me he knew I didn’t want to get as big as he was. He was right, but what good did it do to talk about it? So, I’m afraid of getting big like him. So, Mom’s afraid of it, too, even though she’ll never say so. I know that’s a big part of why Mom totally doesn’t want to talk about weight or exercise or anything like that. Sometimes, talking about secrets or problems—even obvious, titanic ones sitting in the living room—just doesn’t help anything.

I need to say something, type something, before Paul gets any more upset.

But what?

“I just had … a really bad year last year, that’s all. A bunch of stuff happened I don’t want to talk about. When you said that about secrets, I thought about it and it bothered me. Not your fault.”

He sits still for a while.

Having the camera on helps. At least I can see him there, and I know he hasn’t just switched off his computer and headed to bed because I got too weird. He hits a key on the keyboard and turns his head, like maybe he’s listening for his parents.

My muscles tense on his behalf. I don’t want him to get in trouble on my account. I’m about to tell him that when he leans forward and writes, “After you know me
better, maybe you’ll feel okay telling me. I know I’ll feel okay listening.”

That’s …
really
sweet.

I tell him so, followed by: “Sorry I got freaky.”

“No problem.” He leans back, turns his head, then bends forward and types again. I have a good view of his left shoulder and the sleeve of the white T-shirt he’s wearing. His arms look muscular. “If you want my forgiveness, you’ll have to show me your toes.”

I blink and write, “What?”

“Toes.” He dips close to the lens and flashes that grin. “As in, turn on the camera and let me see your toes.”