Curse of the Wickeds (The Cinderella Society, Episode 2) (7 page)

But I still wished I didn’t have to read about Heather’s dad, the town drunk. Or that her mom had died when she was born, leaving her with no female role model and a father who could barely care for himself, much less a daughter. At least she’d had her grandparents until she was ten. There hadn’t been much of anything in the way of support since then, making her an easy target for the Wickeds.

And therein lies the problem.

Lexy and her minions wouldn’t waste their time on an easy target. Which meant Heather was strong in their eyes. She was either a threat or had something they wanted. I just didn’t have a clue which one.

Paige excused herself to deal with a system issue, and I stole a minute to search the Cindy database for Mom. Given that she’d never mentioned a word about the Cindys since I’d joined their ranks, it wasn’t very likely she was a Cindy herself. But if people like Sarah Jane’s mom could be lifelong Cindys, making Sarah Jane a legacy, part of me still clung to the hope that Mom might be. Just to give us something in common, something the babies couldn’t take away from us.

The search came up empty. My insides felt a little like that too.

My gaze fell on the board again. Looking at it from across the room gave me a different perspective. Up close, they were people I knew. Maybe not personally, but I’d passed them in the hall or seen them in a yearbook. From farther away, the pictures were a pattern. Groups of rectangles sorted around the board in various ways.

My math-geek tendencies came out of hibernation. Success leaves clues. If the Wickeds had been successful at growing the ranks of the targeted, it wasn’t by accident. Not if all the communication evidence from Fortissima was any indication. There was a pattern to what they were doing: systematically targeting people who fit into the bigger plan.

If we could uncover the pattern, we could unravel the plan. Just like the Albuquerque Cindys were doing with the Wickeds’ code.

I moved toward the board and studied it, looking for patterns. Paige had said I could move the targets around as long as they all stayed up, so I shuffled them around in different ways. By grade level, by last name. Even tacked up a map of Mt. Sterling and grouped them according to where they lived.

I stepped back again. There was something about how they grouped on the map that called to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. What would location have to do with it?

In less than a minute, I’d printed off a roster of the Wickeds, complete with addresses. Maybe that was the connection. Start near home and move out, so you’d have easy access? I used little black magnets to mark where the Wickeds lived compared to the Reggies.
 

There were a few clusters in the nicer parts of town, but nothing that seemed organized. With income came status, though, so maybe that was the key. The Wickeds were all about status, even when it meant stealing someone else’s to give them more power.

Shuffling them by social status was harder, because I didn’t know people the way the Cindys did, so I peeked into our office and asked for Paige’s help. I pulled off the black magnets—bye-bye, Wickeds—and Paige helped me break the targets into groups by popularity.

“I wondered about that,” she explained, “but there wasn’t anything obvious that sent up a red flag when I broke it down.”

There were three groups: those at the top of the social pecking order, those at the bottom, and those in the middle. Paige was right. Not exactly earth shattering.
 

Rather than group them by where they seemed to be in the social hierarchy, we started looking at them individually. What did the Wickeds have to gain by targeting them?

“We looked at that too,” Paige said. “Some are pretty easy to figure out. Like the student-council president and the editor of the school newspaper. They’re in power positions the Wickeds would want to control.” She pulled out those two, plus a few other Reggies in key positions, and lined them up along the left edge of the board. “But the strategy falls apart there. Not every target is a power player at school.”

Maybe that was our problem. We were looking for an explanation that would justify every target.

“If it’s true targeting instead of random bullying, there’s got to be a reason for it. But it doesn’t have to be the same reason for everyone, right?” I asked. “What does each of them have that the Wickeds want?”

Paige and I shuffled things around and looked for more groupings that seemed logical, but nothing gave us that “Aha!” moment we were looking for.
What made the girls desirable targets if they didn’t hold a position of power?

“What about connections to high levels that
aren’t
targets?” I wondered aloud. If you couldn’t get to the person you wanted, getting to a person close to them would be the next best thing, right?

Paige pulled a clipboard off the wall that contained more detailed profiles of each target. She flipped some pages, nodded, flipped some more. The more she read, the faster the pages started to flip.

A slow smile spread across her face. “You might be onto something.”

“Yeah?” My face broke into a grin. There was nothing a good math puzzle couldn’t fix.

Paige wrote
KEY PLAYERS
above the first column of people she’d lined up on the left. Next to that, she wrote
KEY FRIENDS
and moved nearly a dozen targets to the new column.
 

“If you’re right, that means they’re definitely targeting the power positions first. Either directly targeting those people or targeting people close to them as a way of getting to them indirectly.” Paige beamed at me. “First day on the job and already putting the pieces together. Throw in a confirmation of what they’re targeting Heather about, and you’ve got a game changer on your hands.”

Chapter Twelve

By the time Thursday night rolled around, I was pretty far gone. I’d already done the new-Jess look twice—using two of my best outfits from the mall for Kyra’s birthday party and our first date—and it hadn’t been enough to keep me out of the corner in Ryan’s life.

If this was my last chance to cross the barrier of acceptance into Ryan’s world, I wasn’t going down without a fight. It was time to shake things up a little and go for
fun-flirty-sporty
.
Flirty
was really just
flattering
kicked up a notch.

The doorbell rang, and I heard Dad answer, the male voices drifting upstairs as I swept one last brush of powder over my cheeks and kissed my Cindy charm bracelet for good luck. I headed downstairs, and we made a quick escape when I saw Mom waddling forward for the Great Date Intercept. After our less-than-stellar first date and my Chunky Monkey woes, Mom wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of round two.

“You look amazing,” Ryan said, letting go of my hand to open the car door. “But I didn’t plan anything fancy. Is miniature golf still okay?”

“Oh, this old thing,” I joked, trying to climb into his white Escape as gracefully as possible without showing off my new undies. Fine, Kyra’s flirty dress choice and two-inch wedge heels may have been a tad much for the occasion. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s great.” Ryan’s smile made it clear just how great. “But you don’t have to dress up on my account. I think you look great no matter what you wear.”

A nice sentiment, but I knew better. Even if he wouldn’t admit it.

The Fun Zone Family Fun Park is crammed with everything from go-carts to batting cages, arcade games to a miniature golf course complete with a two-story waterfall. It’s a couple towns over from Mt. Sterling, so I’d never been there before. The night wasn’t too buggy, which meant that every rug rat in the tri-county area had begged to come out for a night of fun. Not exactly romantic.

It turned out Ryan was every bit as competitive as me. Not in an out-for-blood way, but in a fun, teasing kind of way. By the sixth hole, the competition was fierce, and I had my game face on. “If you hit it up the left side, it’ll bounce off the clown’s nose and shoot through the tunnel in his arm,” I offered, as Ryan lined up his shot like Tiger Woods.

“And risk having it ricochet off the squirting flower on his suspenders?” He never took his eye off the ball. “Not a chance.”

He hit a graceful shot up the right side. The ball rebounded off the back wall, hit the bounce peg in the middle, and made a clean shot into the tunnel. We leaned over the edge of the clown’s bed and watched it shoot out the tunnel and straight for the—

“Hole in one!” Ryan shouted, thrusting his putter to the sky.

“Lucky shot.”
 

Ryan grinned. “Luck got me here with you tonight, so I’ll take it.” He helped me line up my shot, then stepped back. “I’d go a little more to the right if it were me. You may need to bend more so you can see straight up the clown’s nose.”

“I can see it fine.” But I leaned over a little more, because he was kind of right. The heels were a definite disadvantage. “Better?”

He paused long enough that I glanced up to find him totally checking me out.
Clown’s nose, my butt.

Literally. That’s what he was checking out. (My butt, not the clown’s nose.)
Fun-flirty-sporty
was officially a hit.

I held still, trying not to let my knees knock and give away my nerves at being checked out. As much as I appreciated Ryan’s attention—especially after our first date disaster—it was also a wee bit unsettling. I couldn’t imagine how it must feel for Fake Blondie to have guys’ attention focused on her cleavage instead of on her. In the deepest depth of my soul where my compassion for clingy girls lay cold and dormant, I felt a tiny flicker of sympathy for Gennifer with a G.

For all of a millisecond. But still.

I refocused my attention on the ball and opted for a banked shot that bounced around in the clown’s leg and wobbled out onto the green below. I putted it in for two.

“Thirteen to thirteen,” I said, letting Ryan pick my ball out of the cup. “Looks like we’re evenly matched.”

Ryan kissed the top of my head. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I was lining up my shot at the pirate-ship hole when I heard someone call Ryan’s name. I sighed and looked up, wondering who the intruder would be this time. For once, Ryan seemed genuinely pleased with the interruption.

The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve, but he already had the makings of a heartbreaker. Adorable dimples, a charmer of a grin, and the kind of lanky walk where you knew he’d just hit a growth spurt.

He and Ryan fake-boxed a few moves before Ryan scruffed up the kid’s hair. The boy looked back and forth between us. “Sorry. I didn’t know you were on a date.”

“Matt Taylor, meet Jess Parker.”

Matt ambled over and shook my hand, a firm handshake and good eye contact that would make him aces with a girl’s dad someday. “Nice to meet you, Jess. Is he treating you okay?” he asked, with a nod in Ryan’s direction. He rubbed his hands together. “I can rough him up for you if you need me to.”

“Save it for someone your own age, Romeo,” Ryan mocked. He gave Matt a joking punch on the arm. “This one’s taken.”

Faint. I feel faint.

Matt pretended to be insulted, then grinned like the kid he was. Oh, boy, the girls were going to love him in a few years. Although if they were half as boy crazy as I’d been, they probably already did.

Ryan and Matt exchanged a few more playful barbs as the people behind us came up to wait their turn at our hole. We stepped aside to let them play through. Ryan and Matt leaned their heads together for a minute, did some kind of guy bump-bump-pop handshake thing, and Matt waved a friendly good-bye.

Ryan helped me off the tee area to give the other players more room. I leaned close to Ryan’s ear, his warm hunky scent filling my lungs. “He’s adorable. Is he your neighbor?”

Ryan kept his eye on the players, obviously trying to get tips on how to beat me on the hole. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me until he bent down toward my ear. “I’m his mentor.”

“You’re a mentor?” Could he
be
any more Charming? “That’s awesome. Especially with school and football and working two jobs.”

Ryan shrugged off the compliment. “He’s a good kid—just has a rough home life. He’s an only child, so I’m more like a big brother.”

“Well, I think it’s really cool.” How many times had I wished for a big sister to talk to? Yet another reason I was grateful for Sarah Jane.

Ryan still wasn’t looking at me, so I turned his head. “You’re my hero, Ryan Steele.”

Big mistake. We’d been whispering, so our heads were close together. Now our faces were inches apart. His lips were so close I lost my breath, prayed he’d lean in. But one look in his eyes, at the pain there, and I knew something was wrong. His blue eyes pierced mine, and he closed them before giving me a quick peck on the forehead. “You’re up, Equal Girl.”

It took a few more holes for the tension to ease. I’d never been more grateful for the easy banter and playful rivalry. The last thing I wanted to do was smack down the magic.
 

We ended up tying after twelve holes—twenty-five to twenty-five—which seemed a fitting end to the game. Ryan handed our clubs and balls to the attendant, then treated us to the massive Winner’s Circle sundae: a mountain of ice cream large enough to hide small children. Only on a date could you eat dessert before dinner and not feel the slightest bit guilty. Would the perks never end?