The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “You’re Alex’s daughter,” he said.

  “Well,” Josie replied. “And yours.”

  Through the open doorway, Josie heard the shriek of a child still dizzy and delighted from being chased. A woman’s voice: “Logan, who is it?”

  He reached back and closed the door so that Josie couldn’t see into his life any more. He looked incredibly uncomfortable, although in all fairness Josie imagined it was a little off-putting to be confronted by the daughter you’d abandoned before birth. “What are you doing here?”

  Wasn’t that obvious? “I wanted to meet you. I thought you might want to meet me.”

  He drew a deep breath. “This really isn’t a good time.”

  Josie glanced back at the driveway, where Matt was still parked. “I can wait.”

  “Look . . . it’s just that . . . I’m running for political office. Right now, this is a complication I can’t afford—”

  Josie tripped over that one word. She was a complication?

  She watched Logan Rourke take out his wallet and peel three hundred-dollar bills away from the rest. “Here,” he said, pushing it into her hand. “Will this do it?”

  Josie tried to breathe, but someone had driven a stake through her chest. She realized that this was blood money; that her own father thought she’d come here to blackmail him.

  “After the election,” he said, “maybe we could have lunch.”

  The bills were crisp in her palm, the kind that had just come into circulation. Josie had a sudden memory of being little and accompanying her mother to the bank: how her mother would let her count the twenties to make sure the teller had gotten the withdrawal amount right; how fresh money always smelled of ink and good fortune.

  Logan Rourke wasn’t her father, not any more than the guy who’d taken their coins at the toll booth or any other stranger. You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them.

  Josie realized, fleetingly, that she had already learned that lesson from her mother.

  “Well,” Logan Rourke said, and he started toward the door again. He hesitated with his hand on the knob. “I . . . I don’t know your name.”

  Josie swallowed. “Margaret,” she said, so that she would be just as much of a lie to him as he was to her.

  “Margaret, then,” he answered, and he slipped back inside.

  On the way to the car, Josie opened her fingers like a flower. She watched the bills fall to the ground near a plant that looked, like everything else here, as if it was thriving.

  * * *

  Honestly, the whole idea for the game came to Peter when he was asleep.

  He’d created computer games before—Pong replicates, racing courses, and even one sci-fi scenario that let you play online with someone in another country if they logged onto the site—but this was the biggest idea he’d conceived of yet. It came about because, after one of Joey’s football games, they’d stopped off at a pizza place where Peter had eaten way too much meatball and sausage pizza, and had been staring at an arcade game called DEER HUNT. You put in your quarter and shot your fake rifle at the bucks that poked their heads out from behind trees; if you hit a doe, you lost.

  That night Peter dreamed about hunting with his father, but instead of going after deer, they were looking for real people.

  He had awakened in a sweat, his hand cramped as if he’d been holding a gun.

  It wouldn’t be all that hard to create avatars—computerized personas. He’d done some experimenting, and even if the skin tone wasn’t right and the graphics weren’t perfect, he knew how to differentiate between races and hair color and build through programming language. It might be kind of cool to do a game where the prey was human.

  But war games were old hat, and even gangs had been totally overdone, thanks to Grand Theft Auto. What he needed, Peter realized, was a new villain, one that other people would want to gun down, too. That was the joy of a video game: watching someone who deserved it getting his comeuppance.

  He tried to think of other microcosms of the universe that might be battlegrounds: alien invasions, Wild West shootouts, spy missions. Then Peter thought about the front line he braved every day.

  What if you took the prey . . . and made them the hunters?

  Peter got out of bed and sat down at his desk, pulling his eighth-grade yearbook from the drawer where he’d banished it months ago. He’d create a computer game that was Revenge of the Nerds, but updated for the twenty-first century. A fantasy world where the balance of power was turned on its head, where the underdog finally got a chance to beat the bullies.

  He took a marker and started to look through the yearbook, circling portraits.

  Drew Girard.

  Matt Royston.

  John Eberhard.

  Peter turned the page and stopped for a moment. Then he circled Josie Cormier’s face, too.

  * * *

  “Can you stop here?” Josie said, when she really didn’t think she was going to be able to spend another minute riding in the car and pretending that her meeting with her father had gone well. Matt had barely pulled over when she opened the door, flew through the high grass into the woods at the edge of the road.

  She sank down on the carpet of pine needles and started to cry. What she’d been expecting, she really couldn’t say—except that this wasn’t it. Unconditional acceptance, maybe. Curiosity, at the very least.

  “Josie?” Matt said, coming up behind her. “You okay?”

  She tried to say yes, but she was so sick of lying. She felt Matt’s hand stroke her hair, and that only made her cry harder; tenderness cut as sharp as any knife. “He didn’t give a shit about me.”

  “Then you shouldn’t give a shit about him,” Matt answered.

  Josie glanced up at him. “It’s not that simple.”

  He pulled her into his arms. “Aw, Jo.”

  Matt was the only one who’d ever given her a nickname. She couldn’t remember her mother calling her anything silly, like Pumpkin or Ladybug, the way other parents did. When Matt called her Jo, it reminded her of Little Women, and although she was pretty sure Matt had never read the Alcott novel, secretly she was pleased to be associated with a character so strong and sure of herself.

  “It’s stupid. I don’t even know why I’m crying. I just . . . I wanted him to like me.”

  “I’m crazy about you,” Matt said. “Does that count?” He leaned forward and kissed her, right on the trail of her tears.

  “It counts a lot.”

  She felt Matt’s lips move from her cheek to her neck to the spot behind her ear that always made her feel like she was dissolving. She was a novice at fooling around, but Matt had coaxed her further and further each time they were alone. It’s your fault, he’d say, and give her that smile. If you weren’t this hot, I’d be able to keep my hands off you. That alone was an aphrodisiac to Josie. Her? Hot? And—just as Matt had promised every time—it did feel good to let him touch her everywhere, to let him taste her. Every incremental intimacy with Matt felt as if she were falling off a cliff—that loss of breath, those butterflies in her stomach. One step, and she’d be flying. It didn’t occur to Josie, when she leaped, that she was just as likely to fall.

  Now she felt his hands moving under her T-shirt, slipping beneath the lace of her bra. Her legs tangled with his; he rubbed up against her. When Matt tugged up her shirt, so that the cool air feathered over her skin, she snapped back to reality. “We can’t do this,” she whispered.

  Matt’s teeth scraped over her shoulder.

  “We’re parked on the side of the road.”

  He looked up at her, drugged, feverish. “But I want you,” Matt said, like he had a dozen times.

  This time, though, she glanced up.

  I want you.

  Josie could have stopped him, but she realized she did not intend to. He wanted her, and right now, that was what she most needed to hear.

  There was a moment when Matt went still, wondering if the fact that