Hush Money (8 page)

“Not much, really. I wanted to ask you if I
could talk to you—after school—if you’re not busy or anything.”

“Really?”

“Um, yeah, but it’s no big—”

“No! That totally works because I was going
to ask
you
to come over to my house today.”

I glanced around the table. Maddy was talking
quietly to Elizabeth—who I don’t think ever talked any other way
than quietly. They were a study in opposites with Maddy’s rebel
looks and Elizabeth’s classic shy girl chic. Heather caught my
glance, smiled, and moved her chair around the table to get in on
their conversation, leaving Kat and me a little more privacy.
“Your…house?” I stuttered. You’d think she’d invited me to her
family crypt as freaked out as I was by the invitation.

“Yeah, you know, where I live, with my
parents. And I keep my room there too.”

“Huh. Interesting.”

“So…will you come over?”

“Why?”

Kat made a disgusted noise in the back of her
throat. “Because that’s where I keep my Great Big Book of Manners
by Emily Post and I want to beat you with it.”

I was totally confused and just looked at her
blankly.

Which got me another disgusted noise and a
bonus eye-roll. “Never mind. I wanted to talk to you, too. About
some stuff I don’t want to talk about here.” This last was said
with a meaningful look.

“Oh. Well, ok. I guess so.”

She flashed that freakishly charming smile at
me. I could feel the corners of my own mouth want to turn up. I
wondered if it was another Talent or if she was just born with the
dose of charisma the Charm Angel forgot to give me. Though I had
been heretofore convinced that my lack was a genetic defect
inherited from my dad—and not much missed.

“Great! So meet me in front after school—same
place I was yesterday, and my mom will pick us up, ok?”

“I…I should probably go home,” I hedged. “My
mom’s expecting me…” The subject of me going to a friend’s house
instead of walking straight home had never come up before. I wasn’t
sure how that worked.

“Oh, you can call her from my house. And if
it’s a problem, my mom will just drive you home. But it won’t be,
’cause your mom likes me, and wants you to spend more time with
me.”

The fact that that was probably true made me
scowl darkly at her.

“So you’ll come, right? Because I really want
us to talk.”

“Yeah, I’ll come,”
but only because a
chance to talk some sense into you was what I wanted in the first
place.

“Yay!” And then she hugged me.

Geez.

* * *

Joss

There was a lot of pink in Kat’s room. Bright
pink, bright aqua, bright yellow. You get the idea. All matching
white furniture on a wood floor scattered with more bright rugs.
Thanks to my little sister, I could recognize Hello Kitty and
friends when I saw them, but I had no idea who the hunky guys on
the walls were. I was really behind on current popular culture.

Kat had me sitting in a giant hot pink and
chrome chair that resembled a satellite dish but made me feel sort
of like my ass was perched in King Kong’s palm. Or possibly it was
the collection of stuffed animals on the bed that made me feel
threatened.

I had already called my mom from the comfort
of the Dawson’s spacious living room. It seemed like practically
every room in the house got a dose of her mom’s affection for
porcelain dolls and figurines. They were all staring at me and
creeping me out. But anyway, like Kat had said, mom sounded happy
about me spending time over here. “Of course it’s ok for you go to
a friend’s house, Jocelyn. Just be home by dinnertime. Do you need
me to pick you up later?”

Of course, she says, like we do this all the
time. Like Dad wouldn’t flip if he even found out I had a
friend.

Do I? Have a friend?
Kong’s hold was
tightening.

Kat breezed into the room with a bowl of
chips in one hand and a plate of cookies in the other. There was a
small stack of plastic cups lying alongside the cookies and a
2-liter of diet cola dangling from between two fingers. I gave her
the
are you nuts?
look she deserved.

“I could have helped, if I’d known you were
provisioning yourself for the winter.”

Kat laughed. “The others should be here
pretty soon.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Matt’s dropping Maddy, Elizabeth, and
Heather off, but they had to go do something else first, I don’t
know. I think Heather has a thing for Matt maybe, but I’m not sure.
Do you drink diet?”

“Whatever. I thought we were going to talk
about your problem with Marco.”

“Yeah, we are.”

“Because, I still don’t think you understand
how serious this is. He knows what you can do.”

“I know, Joss. I was there too.”

“He’s
blackmailing
you!”

“Again, thanks for the recap. Marco is
attempting
to blackmail me.”

I dropped my face into my hands. “And I’m
attempting
to clue you in on how bad that is. I told you not
to get on his bad side, that you didn’t want him to notice you. But
you just—”

“I know, I know, you told me so. Noted. Now,
moving on, here’s the thing about Marco: he’s a bully.” She dropped
the statement with the finality of imparting some great piece of
wisdom.

“Duh.”

“And the thing with bullies is that they’re
really cowards. All talk, no action. I mean, what’s he ever really
done?
Nothing. Classic bully behavior is to rely on the fact
that people feel threatened and capitulate before they ever have to
bring about any actual consequences.”

Classic bully behavior? Capitulate?
I
felt like I had just walked into a Psych 101 lecture hall. Then I
remembered my dad saying, when they had first moved to Fairview,
that Kat’s father was the new psych prof at the college.
Lord,
save us.

“Plus, he’s just a stupid thug, Joss. We
can’t let ourselves be afraid of an idiot like that. All we have to
do is show him and everybody else that he’s not all that, he’s not
so tough, then it’s going to be impossible for him to push us or
anybody else around any more.”

While she was spewing this insanity, I heard
the doorbell, voices, footsteps on the stairs, and then the Three
Musketeers burst through the door in a fit of giggles that stopped
when they saw me. Maybe I have that effect on people. But they were
friendly enough and said
hi
to me before they hit Kat’s
snacky buffet and started making themselves comfortable. I wondered
whose seat I was occupying.

“We all hate that chair,” Heather said
suddenly. When I looked over at her she was taking a long drink of
soda.

“I’m surprised Kat got anyone to sit in it. I
hope you don’t fall on your head.”

I looked at Maddy, but it didn’t seem like
she was making fun of me, exactly. Still, I just wanted to get out
of there. It had been over ten years since I’d hung out at a
friend’s house with other girls my age. I was pretty sure the rules
were different now, and I didn’t know them. Plus, there’s no way to
hide in a group of five, especially when you’re the novelty.

“So…when is this big party supposed to take
place?”

“Friday night,” Kat said. “Boy/girl,
obviously.”

“I beg your pardon?” It seemed like I was
saying that a lot. “Party?”

“For my birthday,” Kat said. “It’s tomorrow,
really, but the party’s this weekend.”

“Um…oh.”

“I can’t believe you waited this long to
start planning it,” Maddy said.

“Nah, my mom’s already totally on that. She
likes to do parties. All I have to do is invite people. And really,
it’s Fairview, so not like anyone’s got big plans for the weekend.
No big.”

“True enough. Ok, so who’s on the guest
list?”

And then they commenced to pretty much list
every single person in our class from Angela Mason, cheerleading
goddess, down to Rob Grayson, computer geek. I think they even
would have invited me, whether I’d been in on this planning session
or not. And that begged the question, what
was
I doing
there?

“You’re coming, right Joss?” Heather
asked.

“I, um…have to ask my Dad…”

“Ask your mom; she likes me,” Kat
grinned.

I had to smile and roll my eyes at her.

“And of course we’ll be asking Dylan, just
for you.”

I choked on my soda and Heather jumped up to
pound me on the back. “Damn, Kat. I hope you plan to be more subtle
in the rest of your matchmaking scheme. Give the girl some
warning.”

“Matchmaking??” I croaked.

“No. Inviting both of you to my party is as
far as I’m going with it—”

“Yet!” Maddy coughed into her glove.

“—sort of.”

“What does ‘sort of’ mean?” The edge of
hysteria in my voice was so not cool.

“The way I see it,” Kat said, “the biggest
impediment to your future happiness with Dylan—”

“What makes you think I want future happiness
with Dylan??”

“That would be my eyes, dear. Now, as I was
saying, your problem, as I see it, is Marco. Marco’s pissed off at
you for rejecting him, and Dylan can’t make his move because
Marco’s standing between you. The big bully. We get rid of Marco,
problem solved. Do you see what I’m saying?”

She was giving me that meaningful look again,
and yeah, sort of. But where was she getting all this? How did she
know what happened between Marco and me? What made her think that
Dylan wanted to make any move? Or that I wanted him to?

Then I pulled my head out of my butt and
realized that she was making that up. Kat needed some way to get
her friends involved in her problem with Marco. So she was
using
me to do it! She was just making up this nonsense
about Dylan and me out of her own curly little head. It was just a
coincidence that, yeah, I actually
had
liked him forever,
which she couldn’t possibly have guessed. Right?

This was no doubt part of my punishment for
the whole thing with Trina that had gotten Kat into her mess in the
first place. And I still felt so guilty about it that I was
inclined to go along with this—even though she was being an idiot
and this party didn’t have a prayer of helping her. What was a
friend supposed to do, beat some sense into her, or support the bad
plan? I’d have to go with choice B, for the time being, anyway.

“So, what can we do to put Marco in his place
so he stops bothering our friend Joss?”

* * *

Dylan

“I thought you said we were going to do this
in the morning. With Rob.”

“We will. We’ll do it again with Rob, at
least once, maybe more before we do the job. I’m just…” Marco
rolled his neck and shoulders as we wandered up the chip and soda
aisle, “antsy. To get going on this thing. Didn’t want to wait for
the weekend, and I can’t cut anymore school right now.”

I grunted. I really didn’t want to be here at
all. But at least right now, during the after-work/pre-dinner
shopping rush, the store was busy and no one noticed two guys
wandering around and not picking anything up.

“What’s with you lately? You’re jumpy, you’re
pissed off half the time, and you’re way too into this
job
that we shouldn’t even be thinking about. It’s way too complicated
and not worth it. It’s stupid.”

“Hey, I’ll decide what’s worth it and what’s
not, all right? You just do what I tell you.”

“Since fucking when?” I snarled in a low
voice. I was pissed, but not enough not to care about attracting
attention. Still, a few women glanced our way and moved off down
the aisle.

“Since fucking always. I’ve always looked out
for you. And if I wanted to listen to a lot of nagging, I’d be out
with some bitch who would make it worth my while later on.”

We had reached the back of the store. “Hold
on,” I said, and took a few steps over to a stack-out of soda
cases. I waited for the last customer to leave the section, pulled
a folded piece of paper from my pocket, and “accidentally” dropped
it. I bent over behind the soda to pick it up, and when I
straightened up I was invisible.

Hopefully no one but Marco had seen me
disappear, and we had reasoned in the past that as long as nothing
major happened, there was no reason for anyone to be looking at
what cameras might have picked up.
Nothing major.
I couldn’t
figure out why Marco wanted to start that now. For beer? What the
hell?

“
I’ve always looked out for you.”
It
was true. And more and more I felt like I was paying for that. As
kids, it had seemed like we were always equals, two boys who didn’t
have much good going on at home, running wild, causing trouble and
trying not to get caught. Then when we were nine, Marco did
something for me that maybe sparked the change, for both of us. My
mom’s piece of crap boyfriend had seemed all-powerful to me when he
was knocking me around, trying to beat the Talent out of me. When
your best friend takes something like that on for you, yeah, it
shifts the balance. Makes you grateful. Anything you say, bud.
Anything for a friend, right? I guess when a kid takes on something
like that, and comes out the winner…I guess that changes him too.
That’s when Marco really started to believe that the rules just
didn’t apply to him.

I stood next to him and moved us toward the
Employees Only
door at the back of the store. Standing
behind me, no one could see him. He wasn’t as tall as I am and even
though he kind of had a wrestler’s build, as long as he stood
sideways, he was covered. Unlike Rob who was going to have to
crouch down somehow—if I didn’t get us out of this.

The door swung open, a guy came out wheeling
a pallet of cardboard boxes, and Marco and I leapt through the door
before it swung shut again. If there had been someone in there,
Marco would have to think fast, but I think he liked the
possibility of getting to lie when there was no chance of getting
into any real trouble.