As an exchange student from Scotland, a whole new world opens up to Darren Green when he moves to the United States. He'll live with a host family, start at a new school, and he'll have to make new friends. However, what won't be a part of this new...
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IT WAS LUNCHTIME, SO DARREN and Nova sat in the big lunch hall at the end of a table, an empty chair at one side of them separating them from the group sitting on the other end of the table talking loudly with each other. The group ignored Nova and Darren, as they always did. Darren had his laptop open and placed next to his food tray. His food tray had stood unnoticed in the same spot for most of the lunch hour, while Darren divided his attention between his laptop screen and the conversation with Nova.
"How can they even have hid this from you?" Nova asked. "They must have been planning this trip – I can't imagine they just jumped on a plane to surprise you the moment the idea came to them."
"If they'd been planning it, they'd done a good job of hiding it," Darren replied. His eyes remained fixed on the screen.
Rebecca Kingsley and Walter Cox.
"When did you say they arrived again?" Nova asked. She took another bite of a yellow substance of which she had no idea what it was, but it smelled strangely delicious.
"Saturday morning."
"So you had the entire weekend with them?"
Rebecca Kingsley and Walter Cox, Darren repeated to himself again. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he typed the first name in the search bar on Google. "Almost. They left Sunday; I said goodbye to them around noon. With the long time it takes to fly from and to Scotland, we lost much of the time we could've had together."
"That's too bad. How long is the flight?"
"Fourteen to sixteen hours. It depends on the combination of flights and stops you take. I remember I had about four hours layover in between flights when I flew here." He pressed Enter on his keyboard and within a second, thousands of results on the search term Rebecca Kingsley were displayed on his screen. What immediately caught his eye was the profile of a singer on the side that Google had set up for him. A musical artist with the name Rebecca Kingsley.
"Four hours? I've never been on a plane that long, let alone needed a flight with stops."
Could the singer be...? With a few clicks of his mouse, Darren made more information on the woman appear. She was a New York-based artist with three albums out, but what Darren was more interested in, was her age, and if she could possibly be Dakota's mother.
"You can hardly get across the Atlantic without a stop," Darren replied absent-mindedly. It was then he found the artist's age: she was almost ten years older than Dakota. While that was much older, it was not old enough to have given birth to her. This artist was a dead-end for Darren.
What was even worse about that finding was that the artist and her fame clouded the results for the person Darren was actually looking for. Instead of scrolling through the thousands of results, hoping to find a different Rebecca Kingsley than Rebecca Kingsley the singer, Darren started a new search. He typed the nine letters that made up the name Walter Cox and pressed enter.
