Chapter 17

When they got inside their home, their parents were watching TV.

“Hi, Mom, Dad,” Lynette called.

Tom echoed her, “Hi.”

Angela asked, “How did the rehearsal go?”

Tom chuckled. “Mostly okay but Dixon is still annoyed with us cracking up every time Danny pulls another funny stunt in his ‘Little List’ number. She wants us to look surprised, not to laugh.”

Lynette remarked, “The numbers I’m in are really coming together. I just adore Amelia, though; she’s so good at her part and a really hard worker too. And damn, she sure can protect herself, too,” she finished, chuckling.

“Protect? How?” Duncan asked.

The siblings related the incident at the pizza shop.

“So Jeremy told the cops that he’d be their primary contact if they needed any more info,” Tom said, “and it looks like his dad is an embassy bigwig—the U.S. embassy. We got a ride home from Jeremy’s ... I guess it’s his bodyguard or something. They did a background check on our family.”

“Wait ... wait—one thing at a time,” Duncan objected. “So you’re both okay, right?”

They nodded.

“And the police might call us about the assault.”

Lynette said, “Yeah, but Jeremy’s security guy told him that they’d take care of the police report.”

Duncan nodded. “And what’s the deal about a background check?”

Lynette shrugged. “Looks like after I started to hang with Amelia after we began to rehearse together, Jeremy had us checked out. He said that their embassy security people needed to know about their friends. He said it was routine and Amelia’s other friends all have been checked too.”

Duncan looked at Angela, who smiled back at him. Then she looked at the teens. “Looks like you guys are hobnobbing with the upper crust now,” she grinned. “Aren’t they both British knights? Do you have to bow to them?”

“Oh, Mom!” Lynette laughed. “They’re both the nicest kids! On the way home they asked us if we wanted to get together after school on Friday. So we are. And Tom’s talking about studying martial arts with Jeremy.”

“That sounds nice for you,” Angela commented. “So ... You guys hungry? Leftovers are in the fridge.”

“No, Mom,” they chorused.

“Still got some homework, Mom,” Lynette told her as she pulled Tom along with her to their room.

Rehearsals continued after school for the rest of the week as the musical was approaching its performance dates. Now, with a week to go before the dress rehearsals, the cast began working with a small orchestra consisting of twenty of the school’s strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion musicians, replacing the rehearsal pianist. Jeremy, one of the trumpet principals, was in the show’s orchestra. Because the group had a full-cast rehearsal on Saturday morning, there was none scheduled after school on Friday. Jeremy had arranged for Tom and Lynette to meet him at the door to the staff car park.

As they arrived at the door, Jeremy was walking up from a different direction. “Hi there,” he called. “We’re meeting Amelia at her home. She had to go to her Foundation office an hour ago.”

The siblings were puzzled. “Her office?” Lynette wondered.

Jeremy smiled. “Oh yeah. Amelia’s got a secret identity too. She’s a project director in her dad’s—actually it’s Kevin’s—foundation. Her dad’s the head finance guy there. She’ll tell you about it.”

They went outside and got into Jeremy’s car, driven by Mr Jones again.

He welcomed them, “Hi there, Jeremy, Lynette, Tom. Nice seeing you kids again. Buckle in and we’re off.”

“Hello, Mr Jones,” they chorused.

Tom glanced at the driver and then Jeremy. “Hey, any word about those blokes who messed with us?”

Mr Jones snorted, “Yeah, tell him, Jeremy.”

“They all have records,” Jeremy said. “They were on probation from juvenile court so their attack on us was a probation violation. They’re off the street now and that’s all we could find out.”

Jones continued, “Actually we could get more info on them but there’s no point. I did hear that they really wanted to get back at Amelia and Lynette. You two gals really hurt them—mostly in their pride, it appears, so good job there,” he grinned. “I know that Jeremy’s got excellent martial arts abilities, Tom. Jeremy told me about how you handled two of those thugs. You’re a big fella for what? Sixteen, right?”

“Lynette and I just turned seventeen last week,” Tom told him. “I got my dad’s genes. He’s a big guy; played basketball in college and was All-Canada his senior year.”

“You play basketball too? Or with your build, rugby?”

“Nah,” Tom said, “not a fan of team sports. My big brother plays socc ... ah, football; he’s pretty good, too. I like cycling and running. I do cross country.”

Jeremy laughed. “My sport isn’t allowed in school. They consider it to be too violent.”

Tom looked at him questioningly.

“My taekwondo. It’s mostly defensive. But the postures and movements are quite aerobic.”

Tom chuckled. “Oh yeah. I certainly saw that.”

They arrived at a fairly large house and pulled into the driveway.

“Where are we?” Lynette asked. “This is a lovely area. All the parks around.”

Jeremy nodded. “It’s Beckenham. The Bank of Scotland has a field here and there’s a cricket club, a big school, a park ... These are really expensive homes. Amelia’s really lucky; Kevin gave her dad and stepmom a really nice wedding gift. I heard this house was on the market for three million quid. Last year her dad married Kevin’s honorary aunt, she’s the president of his foundation. C’mon in, ya gotta see the house; it’s amazing.”

They went to the door and Amelia opened it and rushed into Jeremy’s arms.

“Hi sweetie,” she said as she kissed him. “Hi guys, glad you could come. We first thought that we’d go to a restaurant but then I had to go to my office, so I thought we could just hang out here. Can you stay for dinner?”

Tom looked at Lynette and they nodded to each other. Lynette answered, “Yeah, we told our folks we’d be with you and not to hold dinner in case we did go out. That’s no imposition on you?”

“Oh, not at all. Come to the kitchen; I’ve set out tea for us. We’ll have a cuppa and then I’ll show you around.”

They walked to the kitchen and Lynette looked around and gasped. One whole wall of the kitchen opened into a garden—almost like a greenhouse—filled with tropical plants and several fountains. Nearby she could make out a small lagoon; the sounds of moving water could be heard.

“Oh, this is gorgeous,” she breathed.

Amelia flushed. “My mom ... stepmom actually, but I think of her like my mom. She designed this to be like her home in Jakarta. She moved here with Dad when the Coris Foundation moved to London.”

“Oh yeah, Amelia,” Tom said, “Jeremy mentioned you have a foundation office?”

“Yeah. Tell you in a bit. Okay, guys,” she responded. “Jeremy and I like you both. Lynette, you and I have really bonded over the show, and I guess with all of us fighting evil assailants together, first you and me and then Tom and Jeremy...”

All four laughed at that.

“ ... well, Jeremy and I met after he clobbered a thug who was trying to strip me on the school’s stage when that Naked in School rot started up. Ugh. That’s actually how Kevin and Denise met too, when their naked thing started for them in their school. So I guess the fighting stuff is a good sign that we should be friends, right?”

Tom smiled at her. “Well, I’ve had some ... um ... fights ... where things didn’t really work out...”

Amelia shot a pouting expression at him. “This is different; I can tell, Tom. Jeremy and I can kinda feel people’s vibes, you know? Kevin called it qi, it’s a person’s aura. Have you heard of it?”

Lynette nodded and Tom responded, “Jeremy told me about it when we were talking about my studying his martial arts. He said you develop sensitivity to feeling it by meditating.”

“Exactly. So you and Lynette, you both seem to have that same aura—a feeling about you that we felt in Kevin and Denise, and we also noticed the same in the newest Avery mentors, Julie and Harry...”

She noticed a start of recognition in Lynette’s and Tom’s faces.

“ ... oh, they’re in your year, right? You know them?”

“Sure,” Lynette said. “We were on that summer program with them too.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Amelia nodded, “Yeah. They did mention that.”

“You keep in touch?” Tom asked.

“Sure. They’re Avery mentors. Jeremy and I train the mentors. That was our role here when Kevin and Denise were setting up the Avery Program.”

“Wow ... this is deep...” Tom mused. “You keep mentioning them. Kevin and Denise. I hear people say their names around school with ... um ... a kind of reverence. What did they do...?”

Jeremy interrupted, “ ... they did everything! They got that infernal naked program stopped in America and then came over here and did the same here. Well, they had help, but still. They were the force that made it happen. Kevin was my taekwondo teacher in Korea when I was maybe nine and ten years old. I studied with him when our parents were working together in the South Korean embassy. It’s a really long story, but you should hear it, because I think you’re gonna get to be part of it, in some way. I just feel it. Amelia, can you answer Tom’s first question? About your foundation office.”

She chuckled. “So Kevin has his hands in everything. He’s the head of his foundation—it’s called the Coris Foundation, an NGO, a non-governmental organization. It used to be in Jakarta, Indonesia, but it’s moved here now. Kevin’s dad got really rich—I mean really, REALLY rich, from the dot-com boom at the beginning of the century and he cashed in before the bust, then went off to the Far East to do humanitarian stuff. He set up this foundation in Southeast Asia to help poor people with legal and medical problems. Then a few years ago, Kevin’s parents were killed in a random terrorist bombing and Kevin inherited everything but he kept the Foundation going.

“Anyway, my dad was hired to do the Foundation’s financial stuff ‘cuz it was getting bigger, and Kevin’s Aunt Janet—um, not his real aunt but he calls her that; now she’s my stepmum—she was the executive director. She’s the president now and chief operating officer. Last year in school, some of us girls were really concerned about the naked program starting ‘cuz a number of us had that awful genital mutilation cutting done to us—ever hear of FGM?”

Tom and Lynette nodded, both listening spellbound.

“I was cut too when I was living in Jakarta after my mum died—my aunt—my mum’s sister-in-law—tricked me, basically kidnapped me and brought me to a cutting ceremony thing. Poppa was warned by my school and he rescued me before they could finish, but I still was left with a painful injury that didn’t heal properly. I came to London last year to get it operated on and now I’m much better—almost normal. So a bunch of us girls at school got together and began working on an anti-FGM project. Jeremy heard about it and began putting the information we collected about it in a human rights blog he was doing and the press began picking up our information. He’s still writing that blog, actually. It covers all the unfair stuff the government does to innocent people. Sometimes the tabloids will pick up something he writes about, but we’ve tried to keep secret who writes the blog ‘cuz of Jeremy’s embassy ties. Anyway, the FGM data we collected for England that he put in his blog, we used as part of our campaign to help convince the British government to stop the Naked in School Program here...”

Lynette interrupted, “I heard that’s why the Queen knighted you and Jeremy.”

Amelia blushed. “Yeah. Also Kevin and Denise, but yeah. I didn’t do all that much...”

Jeremy laid his hand on hers. “Don’t be so modest, darling. Your work was amazing.” He turned to the siblings. “Amelia also came up with the idea about how the Naked in School Program and FGM were similar—analogous actually—and how they were both like torture for the kids involved. She convinced the PM—you know, the prime minister, and her cabinet officials too, and made them see it that way.”

The two teens looked at Amelia in awe.

Amelia waved her hand at him to say “enough”; then she continued, “So when the Coris Foundation moved here to London and got set up, Kevin gave us several million quid to fund a new program to educate people emigrating to here from Africa and Asia about the evils of FGM. He picked me to be one of the program directors, and you may know these girls from school, my assistants are Sarya Mboto, Darra Sekibo, Estelle LeBonet, and Mariama Galina. They, also two other African girls who’ve since moved away, did a huge job on starting up our anti-FGM project last year while the whole school was resisting taking part in the Naked in School thing. We do anti-FGM outreach in London; I’ve learned that there are quite a few groups here that still follow that awful practice and send children back to their villages in Africa to have them cut.”

“I know two of the girls, Darra and Estelle,” Lynette said. “I didn’t know that they were doing that.”

“Yeah, it’s really nice ‘cuz we can pay them; their families can really use the extra money,” Amelia commented. “So that’s the story about my office. I spend about six hours a week there. It’s a good thing I get some school credit for that, ‘cuz it’s a real time commitment.”

Jeremy looked at the siblings. “So you probably heard all about how Amelia and I met.”

Lynette giggled, “It’s kinda like a school legend already. The knight riding in to rescue his damsel.”

“Yeah, but it’s funny that I didn’t even know her then, since my folks knew Kevin and Denise and Amelia was living with them. Do you know the back-story?” Jeremy asked.

They shook their heads.

Jeremy told them about how he had come to the aid of a girl who was being attacked on the school’s stage. He didn’t know that she was the ward of his boyhood mentor, Kevin, and found out about Kevin’s and Amelia’s relationship only after the school incident, when the police had arrived to do the investigation.

“And that’s when I learned about how Kevin and Denise had met,” he finished. “Eerily, it’s an almost identical story to ours in lots of ways.”

Then Jeremy and Amelia told the siblings about how Kevin, Denise, and their college friends had managed to get the Naked in School Program in the States so discredited that it was essentially terminated everywhere, and then Jeremy told them about how Amelia and he had assisted Kevin and Denise in getting the Program derailed in the U.K.

He laughed, “You know, when she was talking to the U.S. president, the PM accused Kevin and Denise of having exported the colonies’ rebellion back to Britain!”

They all laughed at that. Tom asked, “I hope that no one was threatening reopening hostilities over that rebellion, were they?”

More laughter.

Then Jeremy looked at Tom and Lynette. “I know that you guys went to another school before coming here and I heard that you switched schools because of the Program. Did you have a bad experience with it?”

Tom sighed. “Trust him to ask the tough ones.”

Lynette shrugged. “That’s not an easy question to answer—but not ‘cause we want to be evasive. Neither of us wound up having to be in the Program, but being in school with the Program going on was definitely um ... shitty ... or worse. Not that it was as bad as we heard happened at other schools, but it was disruptive and ruined both Tom’s and my social experiences in getting used to school here in England. Neither of us socialized much.”

Amelia nodded. “Ah, is that the reason you two are kinda like an ‘item’?” She made finger quotes.

Lynette blushed, then giggled. “Actually, no, it isn’t, although our being close helped us cope with that miserable school experience. I haven’t told many people about us—just Roberta in year eleven—you know her?”

Amelia nodded. “She’s great friends with Julie, so yes, I do know her but not as well as Julie. Actually I have an eye on her and her boyfriend for mentor jobs but don’t say anything to her.”