Life After Theft (16 page)

“I’m just nervous,” she said with a sigh, starting to walk toward the front doors. “This whole stolen stuff coming back thing is creeping me out. It’s like every time I turn around I expect to see . . . I don’t know. A ghost or something.”

I laughed in a way that I hope didn’t sound too fake.
Hoo, boy, if she only knew
.

“Stupid, I know.” She shrugged. “I’m totally on edge.”

I slung an arm over her shoulder. “Well, let’s get you off that edge.” I have the lamest pickup lines in the world.

Luckily, Sera didn’t laugh, probably due to having just almost smacked me in the head. “So what are we doing?”

“I know you’ve only got an hour, but are you hungry? Like, not just halfway hungry, but real hungry?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Actually, yeah. You?”

“Starving.”

“Then let’s go.”

I took her hand and led her to my car, remembering at the last second to open her door, and we drove out of the parking lot. When we got to the In-N-Out, I pulled into the drive-thru. I ordered for us both and handed the warm bags to Sera as she looked at me with a curious smile. She seemed to sense that I had something planned, so she didn’t comment as I pulled away from the restaurant.

Then I drove to the park.

Yes,
that
park. The one where I had the disastrous night that turned out about a zillion times better than any night should have, considering its dubious beginning.

I had hoped to do this on our first date, but I couldn’t find the park. Being semi-sober as she drove me home didn’t change the fact that I had no idea where I was. I’d spent hours driving around looking for it over the past week or so. And I was at least eighty percent sure this was the right one.

That eighty turned into a hundred when Sera smiled and said, “Here?”

I exited the car without answering and came over to her side, taking the bags. “Everybody gets an occasional do-over, right?” I said with a smile. “This one’s mine.”

We ate at the picnic table as if it were the middle of the day instead of nearing ten o’clock at night. “You sure cheer a lot,” I said, reaching for a fry. “Basketball games, wrestling matches. Plus you have practice, too, right?”

“Every day after school. Plus competitions, which are coming up at the end of the month.”

“It seems like a lot of time for someone who says she doesn’t like cheering.”

Her hand hesitated; then she broke a fry in two and studied the ends. “It’s not that I
don’t
like it. I just like parts of it better than others.”

“Like watching Khail wrestle?”

“Yeah. That’s nice. But it also just gives me an excuse to get out of the house. And my parents like it when I’m busy. They stay off my case. Now
that
is worth it,” she said, pointing at me with her broken French fry.

“No joke,” I said, thinking of the brief interludes I’d had with her parents.

“They like you, I think.”

“How can you tell?” I asked with a laugh.

“Oh, it’s subtle,” she retorted. “It helps that you always get me home on time.”

“No that I want to,” I said, leaning forward for a quick kiss. “Ever. Come on,” I said, tilting my head toward the swings. “We can both swing tonight.”

Despite her giggling protests, I pulled her down on my lap and we swung together for a while. I liked the feel of her weight on my legs, the wind blowing the curled ends of her hair against my face. After a while she got on her own swing, and we raced, seeing who could go the highest and fastest.

“I bet I can jump farther than you,” I called over to her, her hair streaming behind her as she pumped back and forth.

“Not a chance!” she yelled back.

I focused on the sand in front of me as Sera counted. On three we both let go of our chains, and for just a second, I remembered the feeling of flying that I hadn’t had since I was a kid, and the thrill of the earth rushing toward me. I hit the ground and rolled while Sera landed gracefully on her feet, but I got six inches farther.

“I win!” I said, pointing to the mark my knees had made when I fell.

“No way,” Sera said, giggling. “You have to measure from here, where your feet landed.”

“You’re only saying that because you didn’t think of falling forward to get farther,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and picking her up to spin her around. Once we were both too dizzy to spin anymore I took her hand and pulled her to the hill we’d walked up after the party. I sat down on the cool grass and patted the spot beside me. She smiled and joined me and I put my arm around her shoulder, drawing her close and laying my head against her hair.

“So was it a good do-over?” I asked, more serious now. “Can we just forget that the other night happened?”

She hesitated and I got a little nervous.

“Is it going to happen again?” she asked seriously.

“What? Going to a Harrison Hill party? Uh, no. Believe me.”

“Not just Harrison Hill,” she said. “Are you going to keep partying?”

I laughed. “You make it sound like I have a habit. Even back in Phoenix, I didn’t go to many parties.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” she said. “I just . . . I’ve tried a lot of stuff.” She chuckled softly. “A lot of stuff. And . . . it’s all bad news, Jeff. It’ll mess you up. It messed me up,” she added softly. “And in the end, I got off easy.” She swallowed hard and for a second the secret-filled silence chilled me. “I think you’re great, but . . . I can’t get involved in that world again. Not even through you. So if getting toasted every weekend is your idea of fun, then . . .” She let the sentence hang.

Although my brain was screaming at me to ask her what a lot of
stuff
was—combined with what the other cheerleader had just said about
watching out for her
—I knew this wasn’t the time. “The hangover sucked big time,” I confessed. “I think I’m off that kind of partying for a while. A
long
while.”

“Okay,” she said, turning and leaning her head against my shoulder.

“
Now
can we forget it happened?” I asked.

“Forgotten,” she whispered. I lay back on the grass, wishing I’d thought to bring a blanket, and Sera curled her body against me and rested her forehead against my cheek. One of her hands rested on my chest for a moment, then after a bit of hesitation, she pushed her hand under my shirt, laying it against my bare stomach and awakening pretty much every nerve in my entire body.

“My hand is cold,” she offered as an excuse.

That was just fine with me.

I brushed her hair away from her face. “Thanks for rescuing me.”

“From the party?” she asked.

“That, too,” I said, leaning close. I wanted this kiss to mean something—to show her how much she meant. I didn’t quite know how to put all that into a kiss, but I tried.

Somehow, she seemed to understand. Beneath the vanilla of her lip gloss I swear I could
feel
how much she wanted me at that moment, and the thrill of it made me light-headed. I wasn’t just kissing her—
she
was kissing
me
. And she really, really meant it.

And that made everything else worth it.

“ARE YOU CRAZY?”

Khail’s words echoed in my ear even though I pulled the phone away.

“Khail, just lis—”

“We can
not
break into the school!”

“Quiet!” I hissed. Who knew who might hear him in his house?

Sera, at the very least.

“I told you he wouldn’t go for it,” Kimberlee said from the passenger seat.

“You’re the one who wanted to do this with
style
,” I said into the phone, waving at Kimberlee to hush. Not that anyone could hear her.

“That’s, like, a professional job, though. And illegal,” he added, as though I hadn’t thought of that.

“And easy when you’re working with an invisible person,” I said.

That stopped him. “Kimberlee? Seriously?”

“Yes! She can get us all the security codes, watch for anyone coming, make sure the school is empty—you know, all that stuff.”

“Just one problem, brain-boy. Master key. Alarm codes are all well and good, but all those doors still need a key, and from what I understand, your little friend can’t touch anything.”

“Bailey,” I said, naming our assistant principal. “She’s got keys to everything, but she’s never in charge of actually locking up. I bet we could steal her master key and she wouldn’t notice it missing for weeks.”

Khail was silent for a long time.

Since he wasn’t arguing with me, I took advantage of it. “Think about it: We go in at night, like, Monday, maybe, open the front doors, you go put in the alarm code, I start unlocking classrooms, we leave a stack of stuff on every teacher’s desk,” I said, grinning even as I laid out the coup de grâce.

“Why the hell would we leave stuff on the teachers’ desks,” Khail said flatly.

“That’s the beauty of it. The thing about getting stuff back is that, like you said, sometimes it’s really important stuff. If even a fraction of the stuff we give back to the teachers is important, they’re going to stop caring so much about catching us and we can take a bunch of student stuff back in the process.”

Silence again, and I forced myself to breathe slowly as Khail considered it. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I get it. This . . . this’ll work! See, this is why you’re the brains of the operation. That is genius, Jeff. Genius!”

I decided against telling him it was Kimberlee’s idea. Her great dream to pull off a true heist.

Only, in this case, it would be an antiheist.

“There are a bunch of details we’ll have to get exactly right, though,” Khail said, sobering now. “Cameras.”

“There’s only the four everyone knows about,” I said, acting as though I
had
known about them all before Kimberlee told me. “Front doors, cafeteria, office, computer lab.”

“We can avoid all of them except the front doors.”

“And the office.”

“Why do we have to go into the office?”

“That’s where the alarm panel is.”

Long pause. “And you know this how?”

I shot Kimberlee an apologetic glance and then said, “I’m working with the klepto; she knows where everything is.”
Everything
. When she first came to me with the idea, I had about a billion arguments, and she had an answer to every single one. A clearly well-thought-out answer. The irony of fulfilling her biggest stealing dream to undo hundreds of small thefts wasn’t lost on me.

“So . . . what about those?”

“That’s the risky bit. Someone’s got to get close enough to cover them, and I think it should be me.”

I could practically hear Khail bristling. “Why you?”

“Because your build is too distinctive. All you guys. Face it: You look like wrestlers.”

“I guess so,” he said grudgingly.

“And everyone will have to wear gloves.”

“Obviously,” Khail said, and I wondered if he was pacing. I stayed quiet, letting him mull it over. “So,” he said after a while, “you and Kimberlee lift the key and get the codes and then what, we all just gather at the school?”

“In your truck. Everyone in the back, where they can’t be seen. I run up and unlock the doors, go enter the codes, and cover both cameras. After that I’ll start unlocking classrooms with the master key and the guys can come in and be assigned one, or maybe two classrooms each.”

“That’ll take too long. You need to let me help, Jeff.”

I pursed my lips, not wanting Khail to risk himself for me anymore.

“How about this: You handle the key; I’ll handle the codes and the cameras. Twice as fast—we’ll be out of there in ten minutes, tops.”

I hesitated, wondering briefly how in the world I’d managed to get myself in this predicament at all. “Fine,” I said softly. “But you have to promise me you’ll stay off camera as much as possible.”

“You think I
want
to get caught?”

Talking to Khail was near impossible when his ego made an appearance.

“When?” Khail said when I didn’t reply.

“How about Monday? I’ll try to lift the key this week, when the opportunity comes along.”

“I’ll tell the guys. Can you sneak out at two a.m.?”

“I think so,” I said. I
hope
so.

“Okay,” Khail said. “We’re on.” Then he hung up without saying good-bye.

I held the phone against my ear for a long time before relaxing my arm and letting it fall. I looked over at Kimberlee, sitting anxiously at the edge of my bed. “He said yes,” I said weakly, realizing that I was hoping Khail would refuse.

Kimberlee just grinned.

“We should do something different today,” Kimberlee said from her spot on my bedroom floor, where she was lounging on her stomach, watching me brush my teeth.

“Yeah, because we haven’t done anything exciting lately,” I said dryly. Kimberlee had finally managed to figure out Mrs. Bailey’s schedule, and when she would be away from her desk. With Kimberlee acting as lookout, I’d managed to sneak into her office and find her key ring lying oh-so-innocently on top of her desk.

Now minus one key.

Twenty-four hours later my nerves still hadn’t recovered.

“Well, it’s Saturday, so how about we hit the mall?”

The mall?
Last time I’d mentioned the mall to Kimberlee, she’d been less than enthusiastic. “I don’t need anything.”

“Not to shop; to take stuff back.”

I groaned as I turned my razor off. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shot me a glare.

“Seriously, Kimberlee, when are you going to figure out that
I
am the one doing
you
a favor and not the other way around?” I studied the mirror again and added quietly, but loud enough for her to hear, “Probably not until you see those bright lights everyone is always talking about.”

Despite my best arguments, several hours later I stood in front of a corner store in the mall and studied the list in my hand. “Claire’s?”

“Oh yeah,” Kimberlee said from behind me. “This place is so easy to steal from. They have these total airhead cashiers who are more interested in their nails than what you’re doing. They don’t even have cameras.”

“Thus the reason you have
four
bags of stuff from them?” I asked out of the corner of my mouth.