Operation Beautiful

Chapter 17: it's Trevor...in the flesh

Chapter 17: it's Trevor...in the flesh

“So Matt,” Jessica says during our unusually early dinner. “I was talking to Emma today.” Matt looks up and glares at her, but she doesn’t back down. “And she said she was having some trouble in math. She was looking for a tutor.”

Just that sentence. That one sentence and everything goes Jessica’s way. Mr. and Mrs. Hansen immediately coo and say that since Emmaleigh is over so often anyway, why doesn’t Matt help her out? Matt eyes his sister but can’t really say no to his parents. She just smirks at him.

“Speaking of Emma, when are her parents taking their honeymoon this year?” Mrs. Hansen asks.

“Honeymoon?” I question. “Isn’t that a newly married thing?”

Mr. Hansen rolls his eyes. “He asked. Why did he ask?”

“It’s so romantic!” Mrs. Hansen gushes, smacking her husband lightly on the arm. “They were too poor to have a proper honeymoon when they got married so now they take a week off every year for their anniversary, just the two of them. And then Emma comes to stay with us!” She turns to her daughter. “Usually it’s around January/February, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” says Jessica, putting a forkful of peas into her mouth. “Emma said something about two or three weeks from now?”

“I’ll call Bob and ask,” Mr. Hansen says. “That seems right. You’d think we’d have had the dates memorized by now.”

The rest of the dinner is silent, Matt still glaring at his sister for the tutoring set up.

“That wasn’t the deal,” he mutters to her as the three of us climb the stairs. I pretend not to have heard.

“Well, if we’re going to do it, we might as well do it right,” she smirks.

“You are just plain evil,” Matt hisses.

“I get it from you.” And with that, Jessica disappears into her room, presumably to call Emmaleigh and tell her the good news.

“What was that about?” I ask as Matt sits down with a flop onto his bed. He eyes me for a minute then gets up and starts pacing. I stay silent.

“Corey,” he says finally, looking me in the eye. “I need you to do me an enormous favor.”

“What favor?” I ask. He starts pacing again.

“When does soccer season end?” he asks, not looking at me. I think about it carefully.

“Well, technically, it ended last semester. But there’s an inter-scholastic tournament thing next week we’ve been training for.”

“So at the end of next week you’ll be done?” he asks. I can see the gears turning in his head.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. “This could solve everything.” He nods his head quickly. “Yeah...Corey, you have to swear you won’t tell Jessica about this.”

“About what?”

“I need you to tutor Emma.”

“What?!” I stand up in shock, annoyed at the twinge of pleasure in my stomach. “Why? I thought you and Jessica made a deal!”

“Forget the deal,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t sign up for extra math, okay? And you’re pretty good at math and you and Emma seem to get along all right. Jess won’t even know. You can set up the tutoring sessions to be during cheerleading practice.”