Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lazlo.”
    “Who’s Lazlo?”
    “The gorgeous guy who asked you if you thought abortions should be illegal.”
    Kid shrugs. “Okay, sure. I’ll give him the interview. But … why? He seemed like kind of an idiot.”
    “He is an idiot.”
    “Then … because he’s an idiot?”
    “No, silly,” Nancy smiles, running her finger down his arm a second time, “I want you to give him the interview because he’s my boyfriend.”
    Turning in the aftermath of one last smile, Nancy walks away and doesn’t look back. Kid watches her go, knowing he should never have sex with her and knowing he was inevitably going to have sex with her.
     
    4
     
    In the old days of seven weeks ago, Jason would simply walk down to the basement and fire up one of Francis’ state of the art computers and rifle through secret government data to check out Nancy Cathall. But this was a “New Chapter in Jason’s Life,” so he sits in the public library and relies on Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos, Google, MSN Search, and AskJeeves to paint a picture of her.
    There isn’t much.
    She was going to be a junior. She was a local. She looked fantastic in a bikini. She was photographed at a club with Leonardo DiCaprio after the Miss Teen Nevada beauty pageant last fall. She was a member of a sorority. She’d written a series of articles for the college paper talking to out-of-state freshman about the culture shock of coming to Vegas that he printed out to read later.
    There was more information about the people around her: Her father owned Cathall Construction, a successful builder of apartment complexes around southern Nevada. Donated large sums of money to the Mormon church in the name of his dead wife and Nancy’s dead mother. Her boyfriend was a back-up third baseman on the baseball team with a DUI arrest and a bad shoulder.
    When he’s seen every picture of her the internet has to offer, he checks the clock on the wall and instantly forgets it. He shuts off the computer to clear his browsing information, and rises to his feet, yawning and stretching. He looks at the clock again: 6:42. Good, there is time to get dinner, shower, and take a short nap before he hits the city for his nightly patrol.
    “Don’t forget these,” a young woman’s voice says.
    Jason turns to see a cute, bespectacled librarian approaching him with the printouts of Nancy’s stories. “Thanks,” he says, taking them from her.
    “You should be careful,” she confides in him. “We can see what you search on the internet. My boss sent me out here to check on you to make sure you weren’t some kind of pervert.”
    “Um … thanks,” he says, looking at her name tag, “Becca. I was just …”
    “Relax,” she grinned, giving him a wink. “You weren’t masturbating, so you’re okay.”
    “Do people do that?”
    “At least twice a week.”
    Jason looks down at his seat and frowns. “You clean the chairs, right? I mean, not you, but someone cleans the chairs, right?”
    Becca smiles. She has short brown hair and a pleasant smile, and Jason guesses she is a shade closer to 30 than 20. Her outfit of a gray skirt and white blouse marks her as a professional, and Jason decides Becca might prove useful. Heroes didn’t just cultivate relationships with reporters, after all, and in a town where few people seem serious, this is a woman who clearly has her stuff together.
    Also, she’s the second woman he’s met in the past two hours with breasts so fantastic she looked like she literally stepped out of an Image comic.
    “Now that we’ve established I’m not a pervert,” he asks, pouring on Kid Rapscallion ’ s charm and not reeling it back in, “do you want to get some dinner with me? Or is there some rule against librarians dating their clients?”
    Becca laughs, but shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but a man has to do more than not jerk off in a library to win me over.”
    Jason tries a different approach. Holding up the printouts of Nancy’s articles, he confides,