She's So Money (14 page)

“He’s actually been paying me to do his homework for him,” I continued. Underneath the table, my feet were tapping nervously.

“Shut. Up!” Cat leaned to the side to give me a full body shove. “How much do you charge?”

Everything that had happened in the last week flashed before my eyes: the restaurant, the fine, Camden’s homework, everyone else’s homework, the money, the red numbers on my mom’s computer, Camden pointing out that I could take money off the top from my friends if I wanted. . . .

“It depends on the assignment,” I lied. “Usually seventy five.”

If I’d been going to hell before, now I was going to superhell.

“Shut up!” Cat said again, sounding thoroughly delighted. “You vixen! You cheating little whore! You immoral, vile, foul fiend . . . ess! Fiendette! Fienderina!” She took off one of the six silver rings she was wearing on various fingers and gleefully plunked it on the tabletop.

“That’s cheating,” Sarah said flatly. Inside her sleeves, I could see her hands beginning to curl into fists.

“It’s profitable cheating,” Jonny pointed out. “Seriously, dude,” he said, turning to me with a look of grudging admiration. “That’s kind of a lot of money. I mean, even if you did just like, two extra homework assignments a day for a week . . .” His fingers started inching toward his calculator, then stopped—it wasn’t like he couldn’t do the math in his head.

“I know,” I said. Jonny’s and Cat’s relaxed, even positive attitudes were making me feel much better about the entire thing, although the fact that Sarah’s eyes were shooting daggers at all of us was dampening my mood slightly.

“So the question is, do you guys want in?” I looked at the three of them, hoping against hope.

The door opened and Leonard bounced back into the room. “Into what?” he asked.

“Into bowling this weekend,” I said quickly. Christ, had he heard anything? I moved one hand under the table and crossed my fingers that he hadn’t.

“You guys bowl?” he asked.

“We do. Big time,” I answered. Jonny and Cat both vigorously nodded their heads. Sarah just sat there.

“Cool, well, maybe I’ll take it up and we can all go together sometime. Or just, you know, you and me, Maya.”

He grabbed a pencil case off the table—“Forgot this”—and took off again.

The door clicked shut. We waited. He didn’t come back.

“Hey, Maya,” Cat said, nudging me with an amused glance. “Put your head between your knees. Your face is like, totally white right now.”

“God, that was close,” I said, shaking off my panic.

Yikes, if he’d heard . . . “Anyway,” I continued, “Camden’s friends are totally in on it now too, and they’ve got just as much money as he does, and it’s really easy to do, because it’s not like you have to do a good job, so . . . what do you guys think?”

“How long have you been at it?” asked Jonny.

“I don’t know, not that long,” I said. “We haven’t been caught yet, but yeah . . . not that long.”

Jonny and Cat looked at each other, and Cat shrugged.

“All right, hook us up,” said Cat. “Why the hell not?”

“Yeah . . . I guess,” Jonny said hesitantly, then realized something. “Oh, dude, I could pay my insurance off so much faster. . . .” He’d rear ended someone the very first time his parents had let him drive alone, and they’d immediately told him that the raised rate was his problem. “Yeah,” he said, more definite sounding now. “Yeah, okay.”

“Sweet,” I said. We all looked over at Sarah, who shook her head emphatically. Then she glared at me.

“Well, I’ll talk to Camden tonight and figure stuff out and let you guys know tomorrow what the deal is,” I said, guiltily avoiding Sarah’s eyes.

“Cool,” Jonny said. He and Cat grabbed their books and backpacks and got up. Sarah didn’t.

“You coming, Sare?” Cat asked, pausing with her hand on the door handle.

“In a minute,” Sarah answered quietly. She waited for them to leave, then shut the door, sat back down, and turned to me.

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Oh my God, you never yell—” I started.

“I do when you’re being like this! You’re gonna get caught, and you’re gonna get expelled! And even if you don’t, it’s still wrong!”

“Sarah, calm down—”

“I will
not
calm down!” Her face was beginning to turn red. “I just witnessed my three best friends going completely nuts on me!”

“Sarah!”

“I’m totally turning you guys in. I’m turning you in.

I’m turning you in right now—”

I grabbed her arm, even though she hadn’t actually moved anywhere. “Sarah. You can’t turn us in.”

“Fine,” she said, yanking her arm away while violently scooting her chair a foot back. “I’m not turning you in. But I can’t believe you’re doing this. What do you need the money for? You work at the restaurant. You get tips all the time.”

“Come on, you know how it works. When’s the last time my mom let us keep any of that?” I asked. “It’s for college.”
And according to my mom’s computer, there doesn’t seem to be that much of it,
I mentally added.

“So?” Sarah asked.

“So,” I said, trying to think of why I would be doing something so illegal if I didn’t have that stupid fine to pay off. “So maybe you don’t realize this, but it’s sort of a pain to work my ass off every single day of my life and not be allowed to buy
anything
nice or
anything
cool for myself with any of the money that
I’m
earning! Okay? So maybe I’m moonlighting!” I stood up, getting into it now, and started pacing back and forth. “Maybe for once I wanna go to the mall and buy something cute and not have to ask my parents for the money, even though I just worked a five hour shift making
them
money! Okay? God! If you don’t want in, you don’t have to be in, but you also don’t have to get all judgmental on me about it!” Wow. I had been making all that stuff up to try and convince Sarah that I was pissed off enough about my life to do something this shady, but now that I heard what I was saying, I was even convincing myself.

Apparently not her, though. Without saying anything, she got up, grabbed her stuff, and left the tutoring office, and instead of carefully closing the door behind her as usual, she left it wide open—Sarah’s version of a slam.

I stood there, stricken for a moment. Sarah and I had fought probably twice in our whole lives, and I’d never seen her even
nearly
this angry. I pondered running after her and spilling the entire story about the fine, but I knew that she wouldn’t think it justified the cheating, and I also knew she’d probably give me at least a smidge of “Well, it
was
your fault.” Nope, I couldn’t tell her, especially not now. But . . .did I just lose my best friend? Was she never going to speak to me again? Cat and Jonny were in on this now too . . . she couldn’t just not talk to
any
of us, could she?

Should I even be worrying about this right now, given all the other stuff I had to worry about?

I didn’t know.

I sighed, put my books into my backpack, and trudged to the bus stop to go to work. That night I texted Camden that I had two more people to do homework assignments; he texted back almost right away, saying that he had plenty more people who wanted in. I did another few calculations, and it looked like, if I kept on doing the homework and also took money off the top of everything Jonny and Cat did, I would just barely make my goal in time.

Well. Here went nothing.

chapter ten

“First of all,” I whispered to Camden the next morning at
his locker, “if you’ve really got like, twenty people who want in, we have to start organizing this better.” Across the hall, a couple of sophomore girls were decorating some guy’s locker with a long vertical pink and red WILL U GO 2 SPRING FLING WITH ME? banner. Ah, life imitating
Laguna Beach
. Although it wasn’t that surprising—prom at our school is only for seniors, so even though the Fling was still a month away, it was a much bigger event, given that there were an extra three grades’ worth of kids who got to flip out about it. I watched as the owner of the locker showed up, looking half happy and half terrified at the flurry of activity and the accompanying chorus of shrieks. He gave the girl who’d asked him a cutely embarrassed hug.

“Why are you whispering?” Camden whispered back at me.

“Because I’m paranoid,” I whispered back.

“Nobody can hear you over those screaming chicks,” he whispered back. “Are you sure it isn’t just an excuse to lean in really close to my ear?”

“YEAH!” I yelled into his ear as loudly as I could, which was actually much louder than anything else going on in the hallway. Everyone within twenty feet turned to stare at us, but it was totally worth it to see Camden jerk away and fall back against the edge of his open locker. He glared at me and rubbed his shoulder. “Jesus CHRIST! What’s wrong with you?”

“It amuses me to see you in pain,” I said. “Although I don’t really think of that as wrong.” I leaned back against the row of lockers and smirked at him the way he smirked at me ninety percent of the time, which was enjoyable and got even more so when I realized he had noticed exactly what I was doing and was annoyed by it.

Camden sighed and lowered his voice as the rest of the hallway went back to activities much more fascinating than listening to us. “You know,” he said, “I actually agree with you. We should talk about this somewhere else. After school? My car?”

“Sure,” I answered. “You’ve got me for half an hour before I gotta go to work.”

“You’re a smart girl. You’ll get the plan a lot faster than that.” Camden closed his locker door and slung his messenger bag over his shoulder.

“Wait, there’s a plan?” I asked.

“There’s been one.” He shrugged, running a hand through his hair and then starting off down the hallway.

“And you’re only telling me this now?” I asked.

“No, I’m telling you after school.” He swaggered away, low fiving Derek as he passed him and sending a random group of freshman girls into a fit of giggles with a flirty grin.

I stared after him for a bit and then started trudging to class. Fine, I could wait. Mostly what I’d wanted to tell him was that I’d given Jonny and Cat the lower price, just like we’d agreed, and that he shouldn’t say anything about it if he ran into them, but I figured the odds of Camden seeing either of them around and then actually speaking to them were about zero. Of course, if he did run into them and said something sketchy, I would lose all my friends. Sarah was already mad at me, but if Jonny and Cat knew I was about to totally rip them off . . .

My paranoid, self doubting train of thought was derailed for a moment as I ducked under a giant pile of wooden sticks being carried by two crew team guys. Ah, so they were reinstating the bonfire for this year’s Fling. I wondered if Cat was going to have a problem with that, being as how two years ago the thing had burned out of control and almost caught her scarf on fire. Speaking of Cat, if she and Jonny found out that I was about to exploit them for profit . . . Camden knew why I was doing it, and it seemed like he wouldn’t tell, but what if something slipped out? They’d hate me forever. I’d lose all my friends. . . .

No,
I told myself.
You’re doing it again.
I couldn’t think of it that way. Justifiable homicide, dammit. Casualties of war. I could hurt my friends a little to help my family a lot . . .just as long as they never found out.

“All right,” Camden said as soon as I got in his car after school. “Here’s how it’s gonna work.” He already had his seat belt on, and he looked all business.

“What, no ‘how was your day’? You’ve changed,” I deadpanned, letting my backpack drop down by my feet. “I feel like we’re not connecting anymore.”

He rolled his eyes and summoned up a fakely jovial tone of voice. “How was your day, honey?” he asked.

“Great!” I said cheerfully. “My belly ring got caught on my outfit this morning, so I had to cut off the bottom two inches of my shirt, but that’s okay, because I accidentally put on too much glitter lotion anyway and somebody might as well see it. It’s flavored! Want to taste my rib cage?”

He sat there, looking at me with exactly zero expression on his face.

“That was my impression of Stacey,” I said.

“It was actually pretty accurate,” he admitted with a small smile. “Although you forgot to adjust your boobs.”

He waited. I didn’t move.

“Worth a shot.” He shrugged, then turned away from me and started the car. “We’re gonna do laps around the block,” he explained, knowing as well as I did that, now more than ever, we needed to avoid starting more rumors. “Or, I dunno, maybe I’ll just drive randomly again.” I nodded as we headed out of the parking lot. He deliberately slowed down as we went past the football field where the cheerleaders were practicing—not surprising at all, since today’s weather was warm enough that they could ditch wearing leg warmers under their little skirts—but then sped up again as we drove off school property.