Junior Year Box Set

“Me too. I would never trade Greg in for you, but somehow, I felt I’d been cheated when you began to blossom. All I can say is I’m sorry for what I said to Tami, and to the press. I think I just wanted to take you down a notch or two and make you normal like the rest of us. I didn’t intend to mess anything up for your dad. Greg is furious that I did it in such a public way. I knew your mom didn’t take the revelation of Phil well. I should’ve known better,” she admitted.

“Do you need me to talk to Greg?” I asked.

“No. All I have to do is hand him one of the kids if he gets too mad. We’ve gone through too much to chuck our marriage away because I said something stupid. Of course, I did do it on a grand scale.”

“Yeah, thanks, by the way.”

Angie just rolled her eyes at me. What she didn’t know was that I had already made a decision to be more careful when I was around her. She really wasn’t a Dawson in the true sense. I no longer had any idea how much I could trust her. The whole jealousy bit sounded like an excuse to me. I was also pissed she had laid on me that Kyle was her way to trap my brother. I think that was worse than if Angie had told me she had a lover. What was I supposed to do with this?

◊◊◊

The press conference was a success. I was a little irritated that Ms. Dixon used Mr. Fox’s class standing and the fact it took him six times to pass the bar. She did do it in a clever way, though.

“What evidence do they have concerning the rape of the mother of David’s child?”

“I’m afraid I can’t comment on that out of respect to Detective Kitchens and State’s Attorney Mason. What I can do is give you my opinion about the quality of the accusation. We are dealing with an enraged parent who is an attorney. He found himself a young attorney who’s desperate to make a name for himself but isn’t smart enough to figure out what to do on his own, so he’s let the father of the young girl talk him into making a fool out of himself,” Ms. Dixon said.

I thought we’d all agreed not to throw Cal under the bus, but I couldn’t exactly step in front of her and drag her off stage.

“Those are serious charges. Do you have any specifics?” was the follow-up question.

“Without getting into specifics, I want you to follow what has been released to the press. Someone had to leak the picture of the alleged abuse. It wasn’t the police or the state’s attorney’s office. The only thing he could think to do was smear a seventeen-year-old boy who’s a role model in the community. Then the genius decided it would be a good idea to get a restraining order, which prevents the same young man from playing football. I bet the community will be up in arms if they’re unable to win another state championship this year.

“This is the same mental giant who filed a motion to freeze my client’s assets so he could try and get his greedy little hands on them. Why would my client try to hide his funds, when he’s admitted to being the father? He’s willing to support his child, within reason. I can’t wait to see what someone who graduated 330th out of 342 in his law school class thinks is reasonable. For those of you who are math-challenged, that’s in the bottom four percent. It’s no wonder he had to set up shop by himself, no one would hire him. On top of that, he had to take the bar six times. That’s right, six times!

“That’s why I don’t think Mr. Fox could possibly be the brains behind this train wreck,” Ms. Dixon said.

After Ms. Dixon was done, Angie talked about the charity work we did. She also told everyone that she knew I would be a great father, and how much my niece and nephews loved me. While Angie talked about them, Frank’s staff played video of me playing with Kyle, Mac, and Nate. They made it look like old home movies.

Then it was my turn. The first question out of the chute came from a reporter from the East Coast. He went right for the throat. Thankfully, Frank had prepared me, and we put on a little show for him.

“I see on Facebook your status is ‘In a Relationship.’ Our investigation has uncovered that it’s with a girl in middle school. Care to comment?” the reporter challenged me.

“I’m pretty sure that whatever I say, you’ll discount,” I said and then paused, and could see I was right.

I looked perplexed, and all the reporters in the room suddenly paid more attention. This was the moment I was to go down in flames, and they wanted to watch it happen.

“Is there some way I can show them what happened? There’s a video in my cloud storage that’ll clear it up,” I said.

One of Frank’s people hurried out and acted like they did something to his laptop. All she really did was allow its display to be shown on the big-screen TV so everyone could see.

“Okay, everyone close your eyes. I don’t want you to see my login and password,” I said, which made a few of them smirk.

Frank had even written out the dumb joke. He wanted to have me appear as a naïve boy who couldn’t possibly deceive them.