Free Delusion Road by Don Aker Page B

“I’ve mentioned him before, haven’t I?”
    Willa shook her head. “No. You haven’t.”
    “The new instructor. He’s been giving me lessons.” She looked at the empty glass in her hand, and Willa thought she could see the lines around her mother’s mouth deepen. “Giving
Rachel
and me lessons,” she added.
    “Does this Kyle have a last name?”
    “Of course he has, Willa. Don’t be silly.” Her mother refilled her glass, then turned and crossed the kitchen, opening the garden door and stepping out into the backyard. She would, Willa knew, lie on the lounger beside the pool until the shade from the trees stretched across the patio telling her it was time to prepare dinner, a process that usually involved either warming up something their housekeeper, Evelyn, had cooked earlier or ordering out. They’d had the Brookdale Heritage Inn’s dining room on speed dial for years.
    Finishing her juice, Willa collected her books and headed upstairs to her room, where she hoped to finish her math homework before Wynn came over that evening. Setting her bag on the bed, she pulled out her math stuff, sprawled across the duvet, and immersed herself in a series of questions that she suspected Shedrand had created to encourage less capable students to drop out of the course. It was a strategy that, along with Deadhand, had earned the teacher the name If-You’re-Wrong-You’re-Gone Shedrand.
    As she’d expected, it wasn’t long before her reams of copied notes were useless, and she reached for her laptop to get some online help. When her Facebook page automatically appeared, though, she thought about her mother’s odd response to her question about the golf pro, and she did a quick search for him. She was surprised by how young he was. And how good-looking. Although she wasn’t able to access much of his personal information, she learned he was single and “looking for someone special.” Judging from the photos the guy had posted of himself, two of them showing a bare chest that had been sculpted by something a lot heavier than golf clubs, she was fairly certain he connected with more than his share of special someones.
What you see is pretty much what you get.
    Recalling that comment, she couldn’t help wondering what the new guy had to say about himself, and in seconds she was searching for “Keegan Fraser.” There were a lot of them—three looked to be senior citizens, several were men around her father’s age, but the majority were teenagers. None of them, however, was the Keegan Fraser who’d insulted her in English class and then again in the corridor after school:
One of these days, you’re gonna find out you’re not the centre of the universe.
    Well, she thought as she directed her browser toward the calculus site she’d used last year, that makes
two
of us. You aren’t even on Facebook!
    As she clicked through the introductory page of the math site, another thought tugged at her. Who the hell isn’t on Facebook?

CHAPTER 15
    G riff toyed with the wording for nearly half an hour. All during that time, he couldn’t help thinking that Gil Atkins would get off on the idea of messaging girls on Facebook. Not that convicted killers on death row had the opportunity. And besides, Griff was nothing like Gil Atkins. He was no pervert. Griff—or, more accurately, Kayley Sheridan—was just sharing a concern about a friend, right? And hadn’t they all been friends for months now? That was, after all, the beauty of Facebook.
    He read his message once more before finally clicking Send.
    It took only moments for Sonia Martinez’s reply to appear on his screen:
what’ve u hrd
?
    This, Griff knew, was the tough part. Like Talia, Sonia had met Soccerguy89 weeks ago, and Griff couldn’t risk saying something that Sonia would know wasn’t true. And having hacked into the guy’s computer, Griff had found nothing about the boy that was of use to him. He didn’t even surf porn, not the kind that would raise