Just Like a Man Read Free Page B

ah, news… regarding your father that you've been telling your friends."
    "Oh, that. Miss Hudson thinks I made that up," Alex replied in a voice of complete unconcern. "She thinks I'm not telling the truth."
    "That's the problem, all right," Selby confirmed, turning back to look at Hannah, her expression indicating that what she was really thinking was something along the lines of
Do you believe this kid?,
which of course, Hannah didn't, and that was why there were all here.
    "But I didn't make anything up," the boy insisted. "I didn't make up any of the stories you've talked to me about. I never make up stories, Ms. Frost. I always tell the truth."
    Oh, and there were four more whopping black marks against him in
God's Big Book of Lies,
Hannah thought. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.
    "Ms. Frost," Michael Sawyer interjected, peering at her over the tops of his glasses in a way that might have been benign in a less uberish man, "if I might have a word with Alex in private?"
    Hannah arched her brows at the request, and not just because his voice was as dark and enigmatic as the rest of him. "I can't imagine why you would need to speak to Alex alone," she said coolly. Though how she managed to keep her voice cool with that spontaneous combustion thing happening again was a mystery. "Is there something you want to say to Alex that Miss Hudson and I wouldn't find helpful in some way?"
    Michael Sawyer pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, opened his mouth to say something, evidently decided against whatever it was, and closed his mouth again. Then, "Never mind," he muttered, obviously chastened.
    And Hannah tried not to feel too smug that all the time she'd put in on her overworked, overextended, overdressed, but egregiously underpaid—not that she was bitter or anything—director of a tony private school voice hadn't been wasted.
    Michael Sawyer turned to his son. "Alex," he said, "we've talked about this before. About how you shouldn't say the kinds of things that you've been saying. This happened at your other school, too, and you know what happened there."
    "But the things I say are true," Alex insisted.
    "Alex," his father repeated in a stern voice.
    As his father had done only a moment before, the boy opened his mouth to object to the warning, seemed to think better of it, and closed his mouth again. Hannah mentally applauded the elder Sawyer. She'd heard it was possible for parents to master a brook-no-argument voice and posture, but she'd never seen it in action before—certainly the vast majority of Emerson parents hadn't achieved it. Probably because most of them paid other people to raise their children. But never enough so that those other people actually cared about their children.
    Not that she was bitter or anything.
    Michael Sawyer's voice gentled as he continued. "Look, Alex, I know this is a new school, and I know you think saying stuff like this is a good way to make the other kids notice you and want to be your friend. But that's not the way you make friends. We've talked about this, too. You make friends by
being
a friend first."
    "Mr. Sawyer," Hannah said, "it isn't just the frequency of Alex's, oh, shall we say,
inventions,
that concerns us. Though certainly he does seem to, oh, shall we say,
invent,
more often than the average child his age. But it's also the… what's the word I'm looking for?" she asked the room at large and no one in particular.
"Enormity,"
she finally settled on when neither the room, nor anyone in it, replied, "of the things he makes up that have us most concerned. I mean, telling his friends that his father has hacked into the computers of the International Monetary Fund? Even putting aside momentarily the fact that most children his age don't even know that the International Monetary Fund exists, let alone what it is—"
    "It's an international organization of a hundred and eighty-four countries," Alex offered in as matter-of-fact a voice as Hannah had ever heard. "It was