Disclaimer: Characters property of JE and are used without permission.
A/N: I'm suffering from writer's block on NT and DM. This is something I thought of a while back after I read Twelve Sharp…
-oOo-oOo-oOo-
A Different Perspective
Tomorrow was the last day of school. All the schoolwork had been completed, the books were returned, the room was straightened. Most of the other classes were watching movies or doing silly art projects. In this classroom the teacher had another approach. She'd asked the children to think about their future, and what they wanted to be when they grew up. Then she asked them to take turns telling the rest of the class.
One by one they'd volunteered, with those who'd like to go next holding up their hands when the current speaker finished. The teacher gently coaxed the shy or less verbal students, genuinely interested in what each had to say.
There was only one student left now, a girl with dark hair who had been very quiet of late. She'd been a normal chattering girl earlier this year -- until she'd been kidnapped. The teacher didn't know the whole story, but she had overheard the girl snap at one of the boys once when he'd said something about her birth father stealing her. She'd sharply corrected him that her father hadn't kidnapped her, he'd nearly died saving her.
"Julie," the teacher prompted softly, "Would you like to tell us what you'd like to do when you grow up?"
Julie slipped out of her chair and made her way to the front of the class, turning to look out over her classmates. She took a deep breath and began.
"I don't really know what I want to do when I grow up yet," she said clearly, "but I do know who I want to be like when I grow up. I want to be like Stephanie Plum."
A questioning murmur ran through the classroom and Julie turned towards the teacher. "It's hard to explain this unless I explain the whole story. Is that okay?"
"Is this from when you were kidnapped?" the teacher asked slowly, stumbling over the word kidnapped. Julie nodded. The teacher nodded, hoping she wasn't making a mistake. "Okay, if you're comfortable telling it."
"Okay." She turned back to the class. "I guess everyone knows about me getting kidnapped. At first everyone thought it was my birth father who'd taken me -- the police thought it was him and even my mom wasn't sure."
She paused a moment, as if trying to get it to come out right and make sense. "My birth father runs a security company in New Jersey, with offices here in Miami, and in Atlanta and Boston. He and the men who work for him sometimes recapture criminals who are hiding from the police to keep from going to jail. He's pretty successful, I guess. I've only seen him a few times a year since I was little, so I didn't know him very well. Most people call him Ranger."
"The man who kidnapped me was named Scrog and he was, um, not right mentally. He kind of looked like Ranger. A few months earlier he saw Ranger and his team capture a guy. For some reason he decided he could become Ranger and take over his life. He started following him and found out about me. So he kidnapped me, and later on he kidnapped Ranger's friend Stephanie Plum. He wanted to kill Ranger, and keep me and Stephanie."
By now the whole class, the teacher included, was listening intently. Julie took a deep breath and continued.
"Stephanie let the crazy guy, Scrog, kidnap her so she could protect me until Ranger could rescue us. She's not a cop, and my father didn't pay her. She'd never even met me but she fought Scrog to protect me, even he when beat her. She probably could have gotten away from him by herself but he had me chained, so she stayed. She never gave up and she wouldn't let me, she had faith that Ranger would find us. She said we just had to be strong and wait for the right moment."
"In the end, Scrog set a trap with us as bait. Ranger had to walk in unarmed or he'd shoot us. We knew Scrog would kill him. Stephanie figured out that the drugs he'd given me had worn off and I was only pretending to still be asleep. She whined and acted all cry-baby at Scrog to keep him from noticing me, and at the last minute she managed to knock into him and mess up his aim - which helped save my father's life."
"From her I learned that being brave doesn't mean you're not scared. "Brave" means even if you're so scared you're crying, you do something anyway."
"Because of her, I learned I could do whatever I had to do. Because of her, my birth father is alive and recovering. I'm home and safe, and I still have a chance to get to know him."
"So, whatever career or job I eventually end up with, I know what I want to be. I want to be like Stephanie Plum."
-oOo-oOo-oOo-
The end