Watcher by Valerie Sherrard

he’d decided, knowing he wasn’t going to help me. “I can do it. I will do it. I swear.”
    And then the miracle.
    â€œIf I do this for you, you will come here every week and I will ask you questions and you will never , ever lie to me again. If you take so much as a puff, you will tell me so. If you’re late for a single class, I want to know it.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, and I meant it.
    â€œI’ll talk to the Crown,” he said. Whatever that meant, it must have worked, because there were no more charges.
    From that day on everything changed between Daniels and me. I owed him , but for some reason that made a bigger difference in how he treated me than the other way around. And, instead of doing the in and out routine, we started to talk.
    First thing every appointment, he asked me the two questions he’d promised. He’d watch me like a hawk when I answered, looking for any sign that I wasn’t being truthful, or that I was holding anything back.
    I never lied or hid anything from him. I never had to.
    We talked about other stuff, too, and sometimes he made me mad, like the time I got talking about what it was like not to have a father.
    â€œOh, boo-hoo,” he said. “ My old man was drunk most of the years I was growing up. He made life at our place pure hell, no two ways about it. Nothing you can do about that stuff; you’ve just got to get on with it.”
    â€œI wasn’t looking for sympathy,” I said hotly. “I was just saying that’s how it is.”
    â€œYeah, okay,” he said. His voice got quieter. “Things aren’t always easy, I know. Where is your old man anyway?”
    â€œNo idea. He took off when I was a kid.”
    â€œWhy don’t you look him up? Maybe you can find him, ask a few questions.”
    â€œYeah, maybe,” I said, but I knew I never would.
    I sometimes wonder how different things would have been if Daniels hadn’t helped me, and I’d ended up getting sent away somewhere.
    One thing is sure, it wouldn’t have been good. And none of the stuff that happened when The Watcher came along would likely have taken place at all.

chapter nine
    E ven though, like I said, I’d mellowed out a lot since back then, I was no pushover. And I wasn’t what you’d call excited at the thought of spending my Saturdays in a stupid bakery — for zero pay.
    â€œYou know we’re just going to be wasting our time,” I said to Tack. “That girl has to have a boyfriend already. There’s no way someone who looks like her is just kicking around free.”
    That was when he told me that he knew for a fact that she didn’t — because he’d checked her out. Weirdest thing was, he’d persuaded his ex-girlfriend, Teisha Johnson, to get the information for him. If I asked someone I used to date to do something like that, all I’d get would be a slap in the mouth.
    Before I could spend much time thinking about that, though, he dropped another bomb. According to Teisha’s sources, the girl, whose name was Mira, went to a private school and wasn’t allowed to date.
    â€œ You mean to tell me …”
    But Tack waved off my protests. He actually insisted that once Dunja got to know him, she’d be only too happy to have her niece dating him. I thought of the aunt’s unfriendly face and knew he was hallucinating.
    Even so, just before five o’clock on Saturday morning, off we went, Tack whistling and me plodding along half asleep. I muttered a few things about how this girl was clearly going to be trouble and he was a mental case if he thought otherwise, but he just kept on smiling and whistling.
    It occurred to me at one point that if he was crazy to be doing this just to be around this Mira person, then I must be even crazier than he was, to be going along for absolutely no good reason. Except, he’d do the same thing for me if things were