It's a Mall World After All (2 page)

"Everything in department stores is so gauche," the redhead said. "But it's not like my tutor will be able to tell the difference anyway. 'Les proletariat ne feront pas la difference.'"

This caused both Blondie and the redhead to laugh. Definitely Leland Prep girls.

"Get her this one." Bryant held up a green wallet."Because nothing says Merry Christmas quite like fake crocodile skin."

Another tug on my shirtsleeve. The kid had followed me over to the new rack. "Will my mom need the box to exchange the shoes?"

Since I didn't work in the shoe department, I wasn't sure, but I figured anything could be returned with the receipt. "I don't think so," I whispered.

"Why are you hiding over here?" the boy asked.

"I'm not hiding," I said.

"Then why are you whispering?"

"I'm not." Okay, I was. "Sore throat," I told him.

Over by the wallets, the blond girl took the box from Bryant's hand and swatted him playfully in the arm with it. "You're too funny," she purred. "But no goofing off at Candice's party. Everyone has to be on their best behavior or her parents won't let her rent out the club again." He grinned. "I'll use my best club manners the whole time."

Which pretty much answered the question of whether he was cheating on Brianna.

Jerk.

I turned my back to them and half leaned against the sweater rack. Poor Bri. How was I going to tell her about this when I knew what it would do to her?

I ought to walk right over to the group, snatch the crocodile
wallet from Bhndie's manicured hands, and smack Bryant
with it. I ought to
—

That's when I noticed the kid walking toward the back exit. He glanced from side to side. One of his hands held on to a lump underneath his jacket.

And then I understood. He had never meant to buy the shoes. He'd planned on stealing them all along.

I hurried after him, not calling out because I was afraid it would make him bolt outside. Just before he opened the door, I reached him. I grabbed hold of his jacket and yanked him backward. "What are you doing?"

He turned and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. "Nothing."

"Nothing? You're shoplifting. Don't you know it's against the law?"

His eyes, still just as wide, filled with tears. "Her feet hurt really bad when she comes home."

"Where is your mother right now?"

The tears spilled out onto his cheeks. He didn't answer.

"Is she here at the mall?"

He shook his head.

"Who's watching you?"

He shrugged as though he didn't know. I suspected he didn't want to give me any more information than he had to. "Do I need to take you to mall security so they can find out who's supposed to be watching you?"

He looked down at the floor and mumbled. "I told my grandma I was going over to T.J.'s, but I rode my bike here instead."

There weren't any homes close to the mall. I wondered, but didn't ask, how far he'd ridden to get to the mall. "Listen, I don't think your mother wants you stealing things, even if you're doing it for her."

He didn't move or let go of the lump under his jacket. I'd either have to call security or wrestle the shoes away from him myself, and suddenly I knew I couldn't do either.

I bent down to be closer to his eye level. "What's your name?"

"Reese," he said.

"Look, Reese, if you want to earn those shoes, I'll buy them for you."

His gaze shot up to my face, the tears at once stopping. "How would I earn them?"

Yes, how? I glanced around the department store in search of something for him to do, but there wasn't anything. I mean, if I made him squirt perfume on people with me, both of us would get in trouble. "Um, you could pick up trash from inside the mall and put it into garbage cans."

"And then you'll buy the shoes for me?"

"Right."

He pulled the shoes from under his jacket and handed them to me. "And you'll give me the box for the shoes?"

"I'll get you the box and the receipt. That will come in handy if she needs to exchange the sizes." I tucked the shoes under my arms and looked over at the shoe department to see if anyone was around who could retrieve the box for me. "I'll buy these now. You come back when the trash is picked up from the mall. I'll be downstairs in the cosmetics department spraying perfume on people." Assuming, that was, the manager hadn't noticed I'd gone AWOL, and was just waiting for me to come back so she could fire me. Which was another reason to use my employee discount now, while I still had it.

The kid took off across Bloomingdale's without another word from me, and I walked over to the shoe department. Once I had bought the shoes—box and all—I went back downstairs with my bottle of Midnight Star. Bryant and friends were nowhere around, but I didn't care where they'd gone. I had enough information to bust Bryant. He had met another girl at the mall, flirted with her, and made plans to go to Candice's party.

Candice. I repeated the name to myself as I took the elevator back downstairs. I knew a Candy who went to Leland Prep. Could it be the same person?Maybe everybody else called her Candice. I only knew her as Candy because that's what my ex-boyfriend Greg, called her when we used to hang out together. Although come to think of it, Greg had been friends with her since they were little, so that might just have been his nickname for her. After all, Greg had called me Char the entire time we'd gone out. This caused Bryant and several of his football cohorts to also call me Char, with an added snooty accent. From there they've progressed to calling me Shar-Pei, Charlatan, and Chardonnay.

Brianna kept telling me they were just teasing, which is like flirting, so I should have felt complimented. Like yeah, it's really flattering to be called after a dog, a cheat, and booze.

You see what I mean about the guys from my school?

I tucked the bag with the shoes behind the Estee Lauder counter, took my spot in front of the cosmetic aisle, and tried to forget about Candy and Greg. That was the nice thing about Greg dumping me for Candy. I no longer had to think about either one of them again.

No one seemed to have noticed my absence or missed the cloud of Midnight Star I kept spraying. I stood there for the next fifteen minutes pushing perfume, but all the time I kept one eye on the mall. Every now and again I caught sight of Reese running back and forth across the hallway to the garbage cans. It wasn't like there was all that much trash lying around to begin with. The maintenance crew kept the inside of the mall pretty clean. Still, every once in a while he held up his hand and waved an empty soda cup or dropped receipt like it was a piece of treasure.

I had to smile at his enthusiasm.

And then Bryant, Colton, and the girls showed up again. They must have been to the food court because Colton and the redhead carried soda cups while they walked. When they came to the benches by the fountain, they sat down with their backs to me.

Bryant sat close to Blondie with his arms spread out across the back of the bench, so he almost had his arm around her.

As I spritzed passersby I squeezed the perfume bottle so hard, several women probably smelled like Midnight Star for a week.

Reese ran up to me, breathless. "I'm done now. Can I have my shoes?"

"Sure." I walked to the Estee Lauder counter and handed the bag to him.

He looked in it as though he didn't quite trust me and had to make sure the shoes were really there.

"Let me give you some advice," I said. "If you tell your mother a stranger bought these shoes for you, she'll probably come down here and give them back to me. If you want her to keep them, tuck the receipt in the box, put them on your doorstep, and pretend you don't know anything about them."

"Okay." He clutched the bag to his chest and gave me a smile. "Thanks, Perfume Lady."

"Thanks for picking up litter. Now the mall is trash free." I looked back over in Bryant's direction. He leaned over to tell Blondie something, and their shoulders brushed against one another. "Well, almost trash free."

Reese followed my gaze to where the group sat, then zeroed in on the soda Colton had plunked down on the bench between him and Bryant. "Oh. I didn't see that cup before. I'll go get it now."

"You don't have to," I said. "I think it still has soda in it, and if you were to accidentally spill some on Bryant, he might melt like the Wicked Witch of the West."

Reese blinked at the group. "Really?"

I smiled at Reese's amazed expression. "No, not really. He's not quite as bad as a wicked witch, so he'd probably just fizz a little."

Reese nodded slowly. "I've never seen a person fizz before."

"Neither have I, but at this moment I'm seriously considering conducting an experiment."

Now Reese blinked at me. "You want to throw soda on one of those boys?"

"Well, actually both of them, but I don't suppose there's enough in the cup for that. Besides, my boss wouldn't like it if I left my perfume spot to throw soda on people. Bosses are totally unreasonable that way." I took a quick look around the cosmetic department in case anyone was watching me talk to a little boy instead of spraying perfume on passing women. "Which reminds me, I'd better get back to work."

Reese tucked the box underneath his arm and turned away from me. "Okay. Bye. I'll do it for you."

I thought he meant he'd go so I wouldn't get in trouble. I really did. It never occurred to me that little kids take everything you say so literally. I mean, all right, so I might have told him Bryant would fizz if you threw soda on him. Certainly Reese ought to have known I was joking. Aren't they teaching basic scientific laws in elementary school? Evaporation. Condensation. And the fact that you can't actually melt people with soda.

While I watched, Reese walked up behind the group, took the cup of soda, and dumped it down the back of Colton's shirt.

I let out a gasp, which thankfully no one paid attention to because everyone was too busy listening to Colton yell. He jerked forward in surprise, then jumped up as though this might help him escape from the soda dribbling down his neck. Which, judging by the way he pulled at his shirt, didn't work.

Reese dropped the cup—which technically he shouldn't have done, since I'd just paid him to pick up the litter in the mall—then sprinted down the hallway toward the exit. Colton followed Reese with his eyes, debating, I suppose, whether to go after him, but the kid was fast. In another moment he was lost among the flow of shoppers.

The girls and then Bryant stood up. As they walked away, the girls flanked Colton, fussing over him and his dripping shirt.

I watched them leave with my fingers pressed against my lips. I berated myself for not telling Reese I was just kidding about the soda. And then I berated myself for not making it clear which guy to throw soda on.

two

I
called Brianna as soon as I got home from work and told her everything. Well, minus the whole Reese incident. Partially because he'd aimed wrong, and partially because I knew Brianna would start to feel sorry for Bryant and Colton if she knew I'd sicced a soda-throwing six-year-old on them. And I was not going to give Bryant even a little advantage in this issue.

By the end of the phone conversation, she was crying, which almost made me cry too. "How could he do this to me?" she asked. "After six months of telling me I was the best girlfriend in the world, how could he"—her sniffling blotted out a good portion of the sentence—"and I was just sitting here working on his Christmas present."

I knew what the Christmas present was. A blue and green afghan she'd started at the beginning of November.

Crocheting. Yes. I felt partially responsible for this because she'd learned the skill from my mother. Mom is an interior designer, which means she can do all sorts of artsy-craftsy things, like sew curtains, dye lampshades, and faux paint walls to make them look like slabs of marble. She's known how to crochet since shortly after yarn was invented, but she only does it now for special occasions.

One day while Brianna was over, she caught sight of Mom working on a baby blanket, and Mom told her she was making it because she wanted her gift to be unique and something her friend would treasure forever. When Brianna heard the words
treasure forever,
you could almost see the idea settle into the folds of her mind. She had to learn how to crochet. It didn't matter how many times I pointed out to her that Bryant was a guy and thus wouldn't see the difference between a fleece blanket you could buy at a department store for twenty bucks and a crocheted afghan that would take you like a million hours to make out of balls of yarn. Brianna wanted her Christmas gift to be sentimental.

She spent the next hour sitting beside my mother, a string tethering her hand to a skein of yarn while she struggled to make her loops the same size. When she'dfinally mastered this task, she learned the blanket pattern. When I say "learned," what I really mean is she would crochet a row, wail about it being all wrong, and then pull the whole thing apart. Half the time she looked like a yarn explosion had gone off around her.

Now after three weeks of working on it, she had only begun to leave in more rows than she pulled out. And I could just imagine her slouched over the afghan as she talked to me.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "But you can give it to someone else. I mean, your dad likes blue and green, doesn't he?"

"I need to talk to Bryant," she said, and hung up without saying good-bye.

I didn't hear from her the rest of the night. I thought about calling. I thought about going over, but I figured maybe she needed time alone.

Which probably matched the look I gave him.

Brianna pulled herself away from Bryant and smiled at me warily. "Now don't you guys start fighting. It was all just a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding?" I asked.

"Yes," Brianna said firmly.

Bryant bent down and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "I'd better get ready for class. See you later, Bri."

Meaning he didn't want to stay here and talk with me. He threw me another dark look in case I hadn't clued in to his attitude, then left.

Brianna watched him walk away, then turned to me with a dark look of her own. "Charlotte, you really ought to get your facts straight before you accuse people of things. You upset me so much last night I probably cried for a half an hour before Bryant came over." Brianna spun her combination and flung her locker door open. "Those girls at the mall were just Colton's friends. Colton is interested in Olivia, so when Bryant and Colton ran into Olivia and her friend Shelby, they all hung out for a while together. That's all it was."

"Bryant flirted with the girl."

Brianna sifted through the clutter in her locker until she found a math book. "Her name is Shelby, and he didn't flirt with her. He was just being nice to her for Colton's sake."

I gripped the books in my hands. "I saw Bryant. He was . . ." But I didn't know how to put it. How exactly do you describe flirting? He hadn't done anything blatant. It was just the little things you can't describe and yet know when you see them. The smile. The look. The way he leaned close to her. Flirting.

Brianna pulled a notebook from her locker. " You know, I hate to say this, Charlotte, but I think Bryant is right about you. He's told me since we started going out that you'd do something to try to break us up."

"Me?" I sputtered out. "So his flirting with other girls at the mall is my fault?"

She turned to me, eyelids fluttering with emotion. "See, that's exactly what I mean. You're trying to make me fight with him. I might have broken up with him if it hadn't been for Colton."

"Colton?"

"Yeah, he came over with Bryant to explain the whole situation and, you know, vouch for Bryant."

I gripped my books harder. By now I'd probably left fingerprint indentations on my calculus notebook. "Colton is Bryant's best friend. Of course he told you nothing went on. How come you're willing to listen to Bryant's best friend, but not your own?"

Brianna shut her locker with a thud and turned to me with exasperation. "Colton is right. You're too suspicious. You have it out for the guys at our school."

"This is not about the guys at our school," I said.

"You've never liked Bryant," she said.

Which is not entirely true. There was a time, say fourth grade, in which I held no ill will toward Bryant.

"What about the party at Candice's?" I asked. "You think it's okay for your boyfriend to go with Shelby?" She rolled her eyes at me like I was being childish. "He's not going to that. Only Colton is. To see Olivia. Bryant is going to a wedding reception this Saturday with his family." How convenient for Bryant.

Brianna let out a long sigh. "Look, Charlotte, we've been friends for a long time, and I don't want to fight with you, but you can't keep attacking Bryant this way."

Cant keep attacking?
I repeated the words in my mind like they'd been spoken in a different language and I was trying to interpret them.
Cant keep attacking?
She thought I'd hurt him?

"You have to get over junior high," she went on. "So some guys were mean to you. So Bryant was one of them. That was a long time ago. We've all grown up since then."

Cant keep attacking.
Maybe she meant the way I went silent when Brianna and I were talking together and he walked up to us. Or the way I winced whenever he called her "Babe."

"It's not healthy to hold grudges for so long. Colton even said so, and he's your friend."

Apparently not

I'm not sure why this thought hurt so much. I shouldn't have expected any of Bryant's friends to take my side in an argument. But still, by taking Bryant's side, Colton had made me look like a suspicious, bitter busybody. Right there and then I swore to never drink another diet root beer at his house.

"Bryant is my boyfriend and I love him," Brianna went on. "Just don't make me choose between the two of you, all right?" She said the last part softly, like it was a plea and not a warning, but that didn't matter. She'd said the words, which meant she'd already chosen.

She smiled at me then, a consolation prize, I suppose. "Are you ready to go to class?"

Nope. I couldn't walk through the hallway with her now, making small talk as though nothing had happened. I shook my head. "I have some other stuff to do before first period. I just stopped by to see if you were okay." And then I turned away from her before I could say anything else. Not that I knew what else to say. At the moment my brain was only producing one sentence, and that was,
Are you insane?

But that phrase got a lot of mileage in my mind.

How could she believe him and not me?

He was the one who had something to hide.

And hadn't I been incredibly forgiving to even speak to Bryant after the way he'd treated me in junior high?

Okay, maybe I had laughed and not believed Bri­anna when she'd first told me they were going out, and maybe I had even said the words, "Are you insane?" out loud at the time, but you couldn't really hold that against me. It was the obvious question and had apparently turned into her life's theme song.

I hugged my books against my chest, hard. Yeah, you learned all sorts of things at the mall. The first chapter of my doctoral thesis will be entitled "Why girls believe good-looking guys, and other marketing strategies in life that simply aren't fair."

I walked into AP calculus and saw Colton sitting at his desk. I tried to set fire to him with my eyes. Who was he to judge me and any grudges I might carry? He wasn't even around in junior high. He'd transferred to Hamilton High freshman year. He didn't know what I'd gone through.

First of all, despite what Brianna said (and where had she shelved her memory, anyway?), it wasn't just a few guys who were mean to me. It was most of them—Bryant being the supreme leader in this cause. And the guys who weren't mean didn't do anything to stick up for me, so they were jerks too.

You see, Charlotte is an unfortunate name to have if your sixth-grade class puts on a school play based on
Charlottes Web
and you happen to be tall with sort of spindly arms and legs.

I heard every spider joke on earth. Every day for the rest of sixth grade. In junior high it progressed to insect jokes. After all, I wore glasses, so I already had four eyes. Spiders have eight eyes. Dung beetle larvae have six. Ants have two compound eyes, each made up of smaller eyes. I heard all the statistics just like I heard the speculations that I caught flies in my braces. People buzzed as they walked by me in the hallway.

Sometimes boys tease girls they like—you know, act all goofy to get a girl's attention. Let me assure you, this was not what I'm talking about. Using animal kingdom comparisons, this wasn't peacocks ruffling their feathers. It was wolves picking off the weak deer in the herd. These guys were going in for the social kill.

Even other girls distanced themselves from me—like talking with me would tarnish them by association. All in all, the whole experience was like hell, with the added perk of a bus ride to and from home every day.

At the end of eighth grade, my family took a two-year sabbatical to Argentina. I was still taller than everyone else, but the Argentineans thought I was cool anyway. They called me Charlotta, told me I had beautiful green eyes and exotic red hair. It isn't really red. It's auburn, but I guess in a country full of brunettes, it looked red.

In those two years I got rid of my glasses, braces, and fear of the junior high wolf pack. I stopped growing and my figure filled out. My face, well, let's just say when you place my eighth-grade photo next to my sophomore photo, they look like before and after pictures in some ugly duckling contest.