Chapter 10

"Yeah, Barb, I did the English essay. You did the history assignment? Kewl. I'll trade up with you in the courtyard around eightish."

Frank glanced up from the remainder of his breakfast with a speculative look that held a hint of contempt to it as Mindy flitted about the kitchen gathering the components of her lunch. Or such that it was, considering the (yet another) fad diet she was on lately.

"What's that?" Mindy said into her cell, pausing with the refrigerator door open. "Hmm. Dunno about bio. Chem, maybe? Then you do, ummmm, anthro. Yeah, that'll work!" She closed the fridge door. "Okay, Barb, gotta go. Bye!"

Mindy hung up her cell and turned. She found Frank still staring at her. "What?"

"What the hell was that all about?"

Mindy rolled her eyes. "What do you think?"

"At least I can think."

"You are such a toad."

"And you're a bimbo. We're even."

"I am not a bimbo!" Mindy shouted indignantly, putting a hand on one hip. She smirked. "You think a bimbo can come up with an idea to cut in half the amount of homework Barb and I have to do?"

"So is that it? Each of you does half the work and copies it for the other?"

Mindy grinned. "See, you're not as dumb as you look."

"You're pathetic, Mindy."

"You're just jealous because you didn't think of it first." She whirled around, hair flying out behind her. She grabbed her lunch and sauntered out the door.

Frank finished off the last of his cereal and then waited. After a few moments, he heard the front door open and then close, and then silence in its wake.

He grinned smugly to himself as he rose from the table. He cleaned the table and ventured into the living room. His mother had already left for work earlier and his Dad was still out of town on a business trip. He had the house to himself for another ten minutes before he had to head down to the bus stop.

Frank quickly returned to his room, not bothering to close the door behind him. He grinned as he glanced at the lights flashing on the wireless bridge. Jason had been right. It had been easy to find an unprotected network. In fact, he had found three of them. Now he could surf the web whenever he wanted. However, he was not interested in that right at the moment.

The day before, Frank had returned home after Mindy had sent her boyfriend on his way, and his stepmother had come home soon after that. Where Jenny Darrens insisted that her stepson keep his bedroom door open at all times, this had left Frank no time to look over the video he had recorded of Mindy's latest sexual escapades. This was his only chance to enjoy it.

Yet when he clicked on the video file, it came up utterly blank and silent.

Frowning, he checked to see if the player was actually running. It was. It was simply displaying what had been recorded, which was nothing. He sighed and leaned back in his seat. He knew what was wrong. The webcam had shifted position. Some time ago, the wire into the webcam had separated inside the rubber sleeve. As long as the copper strands inside touched, he got a good signal. If the wire was bent just right, it broke contact. He was saving his money to buy a new one, but had to make this old one work in the meantime.

Frank glanced at the time. He decided to see if he could fix it.

He got up and quickly headed into Mindy's bedroom. He went right to where the webcam ought to be, but when he looked, it was nowhere to be found.

Frank took a deep breath to avoid panicking. It probably just fell behind something. His calm was short-lived, however, when he continued to look and continued not to find it.

He heard a noise. His heart leapt into his throat even before he turned around as the horrifying thought came into his head: I didn't hear her car leave!

Frank stared, a stricken look on his face as he saw Mindy standing at the bedroom door. With a smirk she lifted the webcam in her hand and swung it back and forth from its wire. "Looking for this, Frankie?"

Before Frank could utter a word, Mindy tossed the webcam at him. He fumbled it a few times in his hands before snagging it. Frank finally looked up, incredulous. "How... h-how did you... ?"

Mindy folded her arms and leaned against the door frame, looking insufferably smug. "You seem to assume, dear stepbrother, that your loving stepsister is nothing but an empty airhead. The fact is, I know a little more about computers than you think. I've known about your little setup for two weeks now."

"What? That's... you're lying!" Frank cried desperately. "No freakin' way you could know!"

Mindy rolled her eyes and sighed dramatically. "Oh, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie..."

"Stop calling me that!"

Mindy laughed. "After finding out what was on your little hard drive, I'll call you anything I want. How about pervert for one?"

"You... my hard drive..."

"Well, Frankie, once I found the webcam, it didn't take a genius to figure out what you were doing with it."

"And... you let me take those pics? And the movie..."

Mindy's smile widened. "Try looking at any of them today? Or last night?"

Frank felt his heart drop into his stomach. "Oh no, you didn't!"

He had broken into a dead run halfway through his statement, pushing past Mindy and diving for his chair in his room. Panting in fear, he brought up the "MindyCam" folder. He blinked.

"Wait... it's all still here. What..."

Frank looked up and his next words died in his throat. Mindy was strolling into the room, swinging her hips provocatively and giving him a sultry smile. Frank's eyes widened and he swallowed, leaning back into his chair as if trying to disappear into it.

"Try looking at one," Mindy said in a husky voice that made Frank shudder. She leaned over, letting her bosom dangle under her, affording Frank a view directly into the cleft between her breasts. Her next words were delivered in a sexy whisper. "I insist."

Frank took a few moments to tear his gaze from his stepsister and tried clicking on one of the image files. He received an error dialog telling him it could not determine the image format. "Huh??" He tried another, and then another. Each one did the same thing.

"What... what did you do to my computer?!" Frank cried, his voice cracking. He was near tears. "If you corrupted the hard drive... !"

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of that," Mindy said with a sly smile. "I let my boyfriend loose on it yesterday while you were at your friend's house. They're perfectly fine. Just encrypted."

Frank was incredulous. "Your boyfriend? That slab of beef knows computers?"

Mindy rolled her eyes. "Frank, get over yourself. You think only the dweebs like you know computers. You think you can call yourself a geek and that makes you important because of that. Got news for you. Lots of other people are geeks, too. They're just not dweebs at the same time. Sorry, Frankie. Being a computer geek is no longer an excuse for being a dork."

Frank seethed. He trembled, unable to decide whether to scream or cry. "All right, fine!" he finally said in a shaky voice. "So you found out about it! Why didn't you just delete the damn files instead of this?!"

Mindy gave him a lascivious smile. To Frank's astonishment, she turned his chair around and leaned on the hand-rests. She bent over and smiled, licking her lips and shifting her torso from side to side, making her breasts jiggle under her in her blouse. "Oooo, but Frankie, maybe I don't mind you looking at nudie pics of me," Mindy cooed.

Frank's eyes became saucers. "Huh?... You don't?"

Mindy's smile widened. "Oh, no, of course not. I just love being your only action."

"My only... ?"

"Frankie, no girl is going to look twice at a total dork like you. So who am I to say you can't wank off to pics of me?"

Frank's cheeks became pink. He gave Mindy a look that was part fury and part utter mortification. Yet at the same time, he felt himself getting hard, which only deepened his blush to bright scarlet.

Mindy giggled at this. "Ooo, getting a woody right now, are you?"

"Shut up," Frank growled through clenched teeth. "Just shut up."

"I'm not the one that decided to take nudie pics of your stepsister, you perverted little midget."

Frank fell silent.

Mindy straightened up. "So here's the deal, toad. I can do one of two things. I can tell all your friends about this..."

"What??"

"I have a few friends with little brothers or sisters at Haven High. I tell them about this, and your life will be miserable over there. Think you have trouble getting it on with girls now? Wait til they hear about this."

Frank had to blink back tears. In his mind, that was beyond mean. He knew he had trouble socializing with girls, but if Mindy did this, it would destroy what little chance he had. The more he thought about Jason having a girlfriend, the more he wanted one for himself.

"Come on, Mindy," Frank said in a small, choked voice. "Don't do this. Please."

"Don't want me to do it? Then listen, and listen hard. I need someone to do my math homework for me. Neither Barb nor I are any good at it..."

Frank gaped at her. "You want me to do math homework for you? For a college level course? Are you nuts?!"

"Frankie, you're in advanced placement. I'm on normal track. You're already doing college-level work. It's no big deal for a brainiac like you. In fact, it's so freakin' easy that I want something else from you. I want your wireless bridge."

"No fucking way."

"Yes fucking way. So many of my friends want to IM chat, and Mom won't let me use the dial-up connection after she's home."

"But at least let me get a router so..."

"No. No router. You see, Frankie dearest, part of the deal is, I give you the key to decrypt the files, but I don't want you getting it in your nerdy little head to post them on the internet. You want the internet, you get it through me, and with me watching."

"I... I don't believe this!" Frank cried, his voice cracking badly.

Mindy laughed. "Believe it, midget. Now, will you do what I want or..." She took out her cell phone and flipped it open.

Frank heaved a sigh. It came out as a single sob. "I'll do what you want."

Mindy grinned and snapped her cellphone shut. "See, that wasn't so hard, was it? Well, see ya later. Have a nice day at school."

She laughed one last time and waggled her fingers at him before leaving.

Richie dashed off an answer to the last question from the textbook just as the bell rang.

He smirked to himself and slammed the book shut, then flipped his notebook closed. He was forever grateful for having old Senile Sam, otherwise know as Mr. Sam Bennet, as his math teacher. He was an old codger that spent the class droning on and on and writing formulas on the board. He barely even noticed what the students were doing. Having this right before history let him complete all his homework assignments for that class in final ten minutes of this one.

In this case, "complete" was relative. He answered all the end-of-chapter questions as he was told, but whether the answers were correct or even matched the questions was another story. Some were answered nonsensically with such phrases as "because they said so," or "the voices in their head told them to," or "just because." It didn't matter. If Miss Davis called on him to give his answer, he'll just claim that he had trouble with that one. So long as it looked like he had something written in front of him, it would pass muster when she glanced over to his desk.

Richie grabbed the door frame and let his arm pivot him around down the hallway like being launched from a slingshot.

What was ironic was that he had had a chance to give his history homework more attention on the school bus. It was not like he had had anything else do to. Melinda had made it a point to sit with Jason and monopolize his attention, much of which consisted of cuddling and kissing. Heather seemed bothered by this and was in no mood to talk. That left Richie with only Frank to talk to, and even he had squirreled himself away in the back, looking sullen and resentful.

He snorted to himself. They need not have bothered to come up a name for themselves after all. And what was it again? The Hairbringers? The Hardbinders? He was sorry he had brought that up in the first place.

Richie acted as he did every morning. He ignored Miss Davis until he plopped into his seat, and then bade her a single, disinterested glance before dutifully taking out his textbook and notebook, opening both to the proper places. This was the last class in which he wanted to get into trouble. He could not stand the thought of being disciplined by the likes of her.

And then as the class started, he did the same thing he had done the other days that week. He started to tune out the class.

This was not to say that he did not keep his attention riveted on Miss Davis. To him, she was still a very fuckable blonde. He hardly thought of her as a teacher. While Richie could not normally be called a sexist, he had trouble looking at this particular woman and imagining her as anything other than a hot girlfriend, great in bed but low on brains. She was the kind of girl that you had sex with, not held an intellectual conversation about the causes of the War of 1812.

To his credit, he fully realized that some of this was his anger and resentment towards what he perceived to be false pretense on her part. Knowing the cause, however, did nothing to lessen the strength of his convictions.

Plus it worked to his advantage. He appeared attentive to the lesson, so he was never questioned. Miss Davis tended to call on those that were obviously woolgathering.

As with all classes, it began with a review of the homework assignment. And as always, she first looked over to Richie, her eyes dropping to his desk.

But unlike always, this morning she followed this by sliding out of her seat and slowly walking the aisles between the seats as she went over the assignment. This finally broke Richie out of his complacency -- and his rather risque daydreams about her.

Richie watched her -- really watched her -- as she headed down the first aisle. It was very clear to him after only a few seconds that she was peering down and looking at each assignment in more detail as she spoke.

Aw, fuck, Richie lamented in his head.

Richie struggled to switch modes in his head. Now he had to be attentive for real. He considered trying to clandestinely redo the assignment before she got to him, but from the number of times she shifted her gaze in his direction, this would prove impossible to do.

Finally, Miss Davis paused in her lecture about how another student's answer had been almost right and looked down at Richie's notebook. There was a long pause.

"Mr. Gardner," said the teacher in a low voice.

"Yes, Miss Davis?" said Richie in a dutifully polite tone.

"How long did you spend on this assignment?"

There was no point in lying, he realized. "About ten minutes."

"I see."

Another pause.

"Come see me after class, Mr. Gardner."

Richie sighed. "Yes, Miss Davis," he muttered darkly.

"Miss Kendall? Miss Kendall!"

Cassie lurched in her seat and blinked rapidly for a few moments. She looked innocently at her teacher. "Huh?"

A long sigh was uttered from one Mr. Miller, Cassie's English literature teacher. Several students snickered.

Cassie blushed. She glanced at the clock in puzzlement. She usually had five more minutes before he started the class in earnest, before she had to stop writing in her journal. It lay open before her on the desk, pen still poised halfway through the word she had been writing.

Whenever she wrote in her journal, it was as if she slipped into another world. She had trouble discerning anything else around her. Usually she could time things well to bring herself out of it just as the lesson started.

"Please put that infernal notebook away," Mr. Miller said tersely. "And report to the nurse's station."

"The nurse's... I don't understand."

More snickering from the other students. Mr. Miller sighed again and held up a note with a dramatic flourish. "Delivered to me not five minutes ago. You appear to be the first on Principal Bendon's hit parade."