Sleight of Hand [Show 'em Who's Boss #1]

20: Scopophobia

After just ten minutes of wandering around the town I bumped into Jamie. What a convenient surprise. He was standing outside of Starbucks, looking as though he was waiting for someone. He didn't see me at first because he seemed to be overly focused on staring at his shoes.

"Jamie," I said to catch his attention. He looked up and smiled. "Are you busy? I need to talk to you," I explained.

"It was only a matter of time," he mumbled as though to himself. "I'm not busy right now. Can I get you a drink?" he asked, gesturing to the coffee shop he was stood outside of.

I glanced around for a minute, wondering if it was wise to be seen so publically with one of my father's rivals. I know that he likes to keep tabs on me so he probably knows exactly where I am right now. In fact, I probably should have thought this through a bit better. I had to improvise.

"No, not right now," I replied. "But I do need your help with something and it's probably not wise for us to meet like this. My father probably has someone keeping an eye on me right now so we can't look too friendly. Can we set a time and a place to meet? Somewhere I can't be followed by one of my father's flying monkeys?"

"The nightclub at the top of the high street. I'll be there tonight at 10pm."

"Okay. Now I'm going to walk away looking extremely angry, you just need to smirk creepily like you usually do. This is just in case I'm being followed, alright?"

Jamie agreed, first protesting that his smirk wasn't creepy, and then he began to smirk. I stormed away as though he'd just pissed me off. Hopefully, if anyone was watching me, this would give them the impression that I really didn't like Jamie. We can't be seen as friends otherwise it could ruin my whole plan.

When I got back to Jakob's I started the next part of my plan. I phoned my dad and told him that I was going to come back home to stay, providing he'd be more truthful from now on and that he had to stop killing people. He immediately agreed, sounding really happy that I'd supposedly caved in. I told him not to get too excited, I was only moving out of Jakob's because I missed my Xbox, not him. Jakob doesn't have an Xbox, which is a big let-down. I suppose I should have bought him one for Christmas. My response to my father didn't change his mood though.

When Jakob got home from work, earlier than usual I noticed, he helped me pack up some of my things.

"Do you want me to stay over tonight just in case your dad pisses you off?" offered Jakob.

"No, it's fine. If he annoys me I'll just stay away from him."

I didn't tell Jakob the real reason why I didn't want him staying over tonight. I didn't want him to insist on coming to the nightclub with me. I needed to make a deal with Jamie before I let Jakob know that I had one of my father's real rivals in on the plan. Jakob would probably explode when he found out the truth, so it was best that I got Jamie on my side beforehand.

When I got back home my father insisted that it was a new start for him and that he was going to try to make things better between us. I just muttered a response and told him that I was going out for the night with Jakob anyway. Then I headed upstairs to change. I usually wouldn't bother that much but tonight I needed to look like a normal nightclub-goer. So I pulled on a little black dress and went crazy with the eye liner, also made my hair look bigger than it usually is. Once I was ready I walked to the club.

The loud music hit me straight away and I tried not to wince at how crap the songs were. Who on earth thought that it would be a good idea to make music by pressing several buttons on a computer to create robotic sounds? Clearly they're an idiot because that is not what real music sounds like. Where are the drums, the guitars and bass guitars? Why do all the singers have overly auto tuned voices? This electronic crap makes me want to be sick.