Don't You Trust Me? (10 page)

Once we had decimated her stock of canned goods, we moved on to cereals, pancake mixes, macadamia nuts, and evaporated milk. Soon I was staggering under the weight of the groceries, and my new friend guided me back to the front door.

“Oh! Can you wait a second? I'd like to give you a check, too. Let's see, I should make it out to—”

It was actually probably a good thing that at that moment she spotted the handout Emma had left a few days ago and used it to copy down the proper name on the check. Otherwise I might have been tempted to divert the funds to myself. I mean, I did get all that food for the poor starving children. I deserved
something
for my trouble, right?

She tucked the check in under one of the cans and waved me off cheerfully as I stammered my thanks.

“No, thank
you
! It cheers me up to see such outstanding kids in my neighborhood. Bye! Bye-bye, girls!”

Brooke and Emma got out of the car to help stow the carton in the trunk. Wide-eyed, they goggled at the check, which was for two hundred dollars.

“What did you say to her?”

Mentally I reviewed the conversation. It is my principle to try to tell the truth where possible.

“I thanked her for her donation,” I said. “I told her how much we appreciated it. She asked if we were volunteers. Then she thought she might have some other stuff in the kitchen, so we went in and looked around in her pantry. Do you think the homeless will eat smoked oysters?”

Brooke was elated at my cleverness. “Oh, Morgan, how wonderful! It's true, you should be a lawyer. You could talk a jury into anything!”

Emma was slightly more restrained. “So . . . you mean, what you did was, you walked up to her door like Oliver Twist with his empty bowl of gruel and said, ‘May I have some more, please?' ”

I considered this. “Yeah, basically,” I agreed.

“Wow.”

I smiled. “I could do it again, I bet.” I said as they turned to me with hopeful faces, “No, not right here. How about driving a few blocks over to where we picked up some bags a while ago?” When they looked perplexed at this, I explained, “It needs to be the right kind of house and we need to see a car in the driveway or the garage so we know somebody's home.”

They nodded, satisfied. Actually, I just didn't want Ms. Generous to look out her window and see us hitting up her neighbors the same way I'd hit her up.

In the end we got three more big boxes of food, two more checks, and two twenties (which I pocketed). I didn't use the “somebody stole your donation” line every time, for fear they'd know one another and compare notes. No, sometimes I pretended that I couldn't believe that absolutely nobody on their road had had the common decency to give unwanted canned items to charity and threatened to blubber all over them, while expressing my heartfelt belief that they were the only decent people in the whole neighborhood. None of the results were quite as spectacular as the first house, but they were solid donations.

Not a bad afternoon's work, and I was the unquestioned heroine of the hour.

Saturday morning, and we were up at dawn again, wending our way out to the stables. I had taken care to research cantering and galloping online beforehand. I thought I could manage them, being sure to blame any awkwardness on the fact that I was riding English style for the first time. The weather wasn't quite so idyllic this trip; there were ragged clouds racing across the sky, and the air felt damp with promised rain. Coming from the dry state of California, the dampness in the air felt good; I could feel my skin plumping up with moisture. Summer was gradually giving way to autumn, and the tips of the leaves were turning color.

Still, it stayed dry for our lesson. Amazingly, Brooke only required one stable hand to get her up on her horse. Bounce had offered her a pony, but she turned down the suggestion, sure she would succeed this time. Once again she wobbled around in the saddle (Bounce wasn't going to push her into an English saddle for a while yet) but managed a soggy trot several times around the ring as we watched and applauded. I tried my canter while Bounce was working with Brooke, and found it actually easier and smoother than the trot. It was faster, which I liked too.

Chessie had not been overjoyed to see me but had apparently decided that I was relatively harmless so long as she appeased me with strict obedience, which was precisely what I wanted. She seemed familiar with the canter, and as soon as I clucked at her and dug my heels in, she broke into a nice rocking rhythm that carried us rapidly around the ring.

“Great job!” bellowed Bounce from her position aiding Brooke.

The next day when I woke up, I was hardly sore at all.

And that was pretty much how that whole week had gone. I wasn't only managing to avoid detection and expulsion; I was making an enormous success of my new life.

MY FAME AS A FUND-RAISER
spread like a forest fire up a parched hillside. When I returned to school on Monday, it had preceded me.

“Excuse me, but are you Morgan Johanssen?” A dark girl with glasses and an intense expression stepped out in front of me as I walked toward my locker before homeroom.

I was about to reply in the affirmative when another girl, this one with lots of red hair and makeup, dressed in a weird outfit that looked like it had been formed out of black duct tape, cut in.

“Serena Jones, don't you
dare
! You know perfectly well it was my idea to talk to her about raising money for the art festival!”

“The animal shelter needs the money a lot more!”

Now Emma was approaching, with a look of thunder on her face.

“No poaching, Serena, Melanie. Morgan is collecting money for the
food pantry
!”

“I hear she already did! Why can't you share the wealth, Emma?” demanded the duct tape girl, who must have been Melanie.

“Well, hello, ladies,” drawled a voice coming from somewhere near the ceiling. I looked up. Sandy hair, blue eyes, a lazy grin, all attached to a male body that just wouldn't quit. He must have been at least six foot five, I decided, and every inch of him was a tribute to good nutrition and keeping fit. Craning my neck, I smiled up at him. I was the only one doing this, however. The other three “ladies” were looking annoyed.

“The basketball team sure doesn't need a fund-raiser,” Melanie blurted out. “The taxpayers give you guys a free ride, practically.”

Blue Eyes lifted his eyebrows. “A fund-raiser? Sorry, not sure what you're talking about. I stopped by to say hello to the new member of our academic community. Morgan, isn't it? The name is Brett Elway.”

“Hello, Brett,” I said, looking at him from under my lashes. My, but he was tall!

“I suppose you're after money for away-game transportation and uniforms,” Melanie said bitterly. “In art
club we have to pay for every little thing. Why can't your parents chip in? Or why can't you get a job after school to pay for that stuff?”

Brett turned and regarded her with a wondering gaze. “And miss practice? What would be the point in that?”

“Notice he's not denying it anymore, Morgan,” said Emma. “They're all of them after you for one thing, so don't think it's because they
like
you!”

I said nothing but gazed at her, wide-eyed. She blushed.

Brooke had been hovering near us, listening. Now she burst in with, “I'm sorry, Emma, but I think you all are being . . . being—” Brooke halted, thwarted by her inability to say anything even slightly critical to anyone. She tried again, and put her back into it this time.

“Here Morgan is, brand-new to our school, making a huge effort to help out and do good in a community where she just moved. And what do we do? We act like she's a commodity that one of us can gain a monopoly over.
Poor Morgan!
How do you think this is making her feel?”

Poor Morgan
was feeling like she had never in her life been so popular and so in demand.

However, the girls in our group were looking a bit abashed at this extremely mild tongue-lashing. Only Brett seemed unfazed by Brooke's scolding. He went on smiling his sunny smile and regarding me with big blue
eyes. Undoubtedly this tactic had worked his whole life and he saw no reason to alter it now.

“Maybe,” I said, smiling around at my circle of admirers, “I can help you all.”

This charity scheme was wonderful. Not only was it going to help me achieve my goal of being admired and respected, but I got to rake off any cash donations into my own pocket. Sure,
some
people might have gotten greedy and wanted a larger cut of the take, but I figured that since my basic needs were being catered to so well by Brooke's family, I didn't
need
a lot of money. Janelle's parents had apparently given Aunt and Uncle some funds for a weekly allowance for me. It was three times the amount my own parents used to dole out. What with that and a twenty here and a twenty there from my charity work, I would be doing quite well.

On the other hand there was my future to think about. It wouldn't do to be
too
generous.

“The important thing,” I explained to my friends-in-philanthropy at lunchtime, “is that we don't want a particular neighborhood suffering from donor-fatigue, so we can't squeeze anybody too hard. The image we are projecting is of a bunch of kindhearted, well-intentioned teenagers collecting for a good cause.”

Emma narrowed her eyes. “We
are
a bunch of kindhearted, well-intentioned teenagers collecting for a good cause,” she pointed out. “Or at least Serena and Brooke and I are.
Brett and Melanie want somebody to underwrite their after-school activities.”

I waited for Melanie's furious riposte on the deplorable state of the arts in America to die down before responding.

“Of course we are,” I agreed. “And we don't want anybody to get any other ideas. What I want to do is a kind of charitable carpet bombing. We six descend on a neighborhood, fan out, and hit every house. If you see people in their gardens or yards or garages, go and talk to them. It should be on Saturday, not a weekday afternoon, so people are home. We can make it after our horseback riding lesson, Brooke. We should try a different neighborhood this week and not go back to yours, Emma, until we've extracted everything we can get from the other developments. And don't forget—guilt is an important motivator, and donations from upper-income families are likely to be bigger, so I want the most affluent streets first.”

“Hmm,” said Emma. “Why do I feel like we're planning to rob a bank instead of carrying out a fund drive?”

However, when Melanie and Serena pointed out that she didn't have to participate if she didn't want to, she grumbled a bit but made no further objections. “Morgan is just being
practical
,” they said. “She is absolutely right.”

We decided that Brett should drive, as he owned a large minivan appropriate for the task. He had been paying little attention to our discussion, occupied as he was with shoveling huge amounts of meatloaf and mashed potatoes into his mouth with the mindless concentration of a backhoe digging a foundation, and, in his spare moments, waving at a brunette in a pink sweater at another table. He was therefore unaware that he had been elected to provide the transportation, until Melanie joggled his elbow.

“What?” he said. “Okay, I guess. But Helena will expect to come too.” He made us a present of one of his huge smiles. “I can't drive you beautiful young women around without a chaperone.”

“Helena is his
girlfriend
,” Emma informed me. She seemed determined to drive a wedge between me and Brett. I had already figured out that the pink-sweatered girl believed herself to have some claims on him, but I felt certain I could pry him away from her, given half a chance.