Just Like a Man Read Free Page A

been hewn by the hands of the gods, there was more than a drop or two of the Mediterranean in his bloodline, Hannah was certain. A name like Michael Sawyer really seemed too generic a moniker for him. Actually,
he
would have fit perfectly into a Howard Hawks
film noire,
cast as the enigmatic antihero who felled the femme fatale with one brutal, burning kiss.
    CPA, sure,
Hannah mused as she studied Michael Sawyer again, nudging her thoughts back on track. She could believe he was one of those. Provided, of course,
CPA
stood for
Can't Prove Authentic.
    The last of the usual suspects was Alex Sawyer's language arts teacher, Selby Hudson, who was dressed today in her usual—and quite suspect, really—way, a way that Hannah had cautioned her about before. Selby was fresh out of college, embarking on her very first teaching assignment at Emerson, but she had somehow been tugged back in time, fashion-wise, to the 1960s. Today she had the bulk of her chin-length black bob pushed back from her face with a vinyl, hot pink headband, though her bangs still hung down nearly into her eyes. And she wore the grooviest—and briefest—miniskirt Hannah had seen since… well, she had never seen one that groovy or brief, having missed the sixties herself by being born as they were winding down.
    Even so, Selby's parents must have only been children during the sixties, and Selby hadn't even been around for the seventies, so who knew why she was so attracted to the skin-tight, crazy-daisy-patterned, long-sleeved T-shirt and hot pink mini? Hannah was going to have to be a bit more stern in explaining to the young teacher that the Emerson Academy dress code concerning skirt lengths extended to the staff, as well as the students. Selby could almost pass for one of their high school seniors. Except that none of their high school seniors would have dared come to school dressed that way, because they knew they'd be sent home to change.
    Honestly, an overworked, overextended, overdressed, but egregiously underpaid—not that she was bitter or anything—director of a tony private school's work was never done.
    "Now, then, Alex," she began. "Can you tell me why you're here today?
Again?"
she elaborated, just to make clear to the boy that she'd kept track of his numerous visits to her office in his short time at the school. After all, it was only the first week of October. At this rate, Alex was going to end the year being voted Most Likely to Be Living in a Box in the Director's Office for the Rest of His Natural Life.
    "No, Ms. Frost," Alex said. "I don't know why I'm here."
    She glanced at Selby, who had turned to gape at Alex in disbelief. "Oh, yes, you do, too, know why you're here," Selby told her student in a firm but gentle voice, declining to actually vocalize the
buster
with which Hannah felt certain she wanted to punctuate the remark.
    Selby knew, after all, that firm-but-gentle was the one requirement Hannah demanded from all of her teachers. Because firm-but-gentle went a long way with the kind of children who attended Emerson—the kind who were terribly spoiled and even more terribly neglected by self-centered, conspicuously consuming parents who were too busy climbing the social ladder to remember that they had children who needed nurturing and love.
    And considering Alex's monstrous fabrications and his father's apparently incessant traveling, Hannah was reasonably confident the boy suffered from the same sort of home life.
    Really, sometimes she just wanted to round up all the Emerson parents in the gymnasium, line them up single file, and then go down the line, one by one, smacking each of them upside the head and yelling, "What the hell is the matter with you?"
    But she digressed.
    She turned her attention back to Alex. "Miss Hudson seems to think you should know why she requested this meeting between her and you and your father and me. Did she not explain the problem to you?"
    "Problem?" Alex asked innocently.
    "About this latest…