Hey!

Disclaimer: I own nothing. If I did, I would probably have a lot more money.

"So you must be Rebecca." The man across from me at the dinner table said.

"Beck." I corrected him. Anyone who gets my name wrong goes down in my estimation very quickly. Especially if they've been told it many, many times, like certain Californian draftees I could mention. I'm not even that keen on Cathy calling me Becky, but I guess old habits die hard.

"I've heard so much abut you." Clearly not enough to know my preferred name. Something about Pete's tone put me off.

"I wish I could say the same about you." I forced a laugh and hoped it sounded genuine.

"So, are you going to be living here from now on?" This, I realized, was a man who did not like children, or at least didn't know how to act around them. Rather than acting interested in me as Beck McIntyre (although I have long since stopped referring to myself as that, at least in the privacy of my notebooks and around my family), the fourteen-year-old with a personality of her own, he acted interested in me like I was some sort of test subject or freak of nature.

"Nope." Thank God. "Just for the week." Is this how people feel when they're being interrogated?

"John and Dr Pierce are in Canada." Mom interjected, trying to enter the conversation. Cathy just looked like she was in pain.

Pete looked me in the eyes and I tried not to squirm. "Beck," he lowered his voice, as if he was about to disclose the secrets of the universe, "just between you and me, don't you find your current living arrangements a little odd?"

"What do you mean, odd?" I tried my best to look clueless.

"Nothing, nothing."

"Because if you're insinuating anything about the relationship between my dad and Hawkeye, you're mistaken." I delivered the carefully-practiced lie and resisted the temptation to stare Creepy Pete down. "We needed a place to live and he offered to put us up for a while. I think that if there was anything more to it than that I'd know about it, wouldn't you?" Cathy looked at me from across the table and we exchanged glances. Yep, he suspects all right. Crap. I stared at my plate, but somehow I'd managed to lose my appetite.

"So what do you think?" Cathy asked, once The Thing had vacated the premises. For three hours I'd endured him patronizing me, interrogating me, sliming around my mother, and generally being intolerable.

"Is it too late for me to spend the week in Mill Valley?"

She laughed. "I told you so."

"He thought I was twelve years old."

"Well, you are kinda small."

"Shut up!" I shoved her, and she fell against my bedroom wall, giggling. We were sat on the floor, hoping Mom wouldn't hear us.

"It's true!" Then she got serious. "Becky, I'm honestly getting worried here. You wanna know what he said to Mom just before he left? He said, and I quote, "I really don't think Rebecca's a good influence on our Catherine, with her upbringing and all."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means he suspects. I always thought that, but now I know for sure. If word gets out about the truth..." She doesn't need to finish that sentence.

"So what do we do?"

"What we need, Becky," my sister said with a glint in her eye I'd never seen before, "is a plan."

"Awesome."