Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher (10 page)

“Not a problem,” she says over her shoulder.

Now, she’s being kind of cagey with her answers, and I’m worried that I’m coming across like I’m grilling her. Still, I’ve got to find out what happened to the phone so I can tell Billy if he’s off the hook. But before I can think of some smooth way to interrogate her without
sounding
like I’m interrogating her, she starts laughing like she’s totally
demented
.

I jump back a little and look at her like, Whoa! and then suddenly she stops laughing and blushes. “Sorry,” she says, like, Oops! Didn’t mean for
that
to slip out!

“You okay?” I ask.

She giggles, then whispers, “That thing has definitely made its last transmission.”

“So you … broke it? Got rid of it?”

She nods, then pops out her little finger and says, “Pinky swear you won’t tell.”

I’m thinking,
Pinky
swear? The last time I did a pinky swear was, like, third grade.

But what can I do?

I lock my little finger with hers and tell her, “Pinky swear.”

Now, even though part of me is ecstatic and can’t wait to tell Billy that he’s free, part of me is feeling uneasy. I mean, sure it was just a silly little pinky swear, but Sasha’s obviously dead serious about it, and I feel like I’ve just locked myself inside a cage with some unknown exotic animal.

One that looks cute and fuzzy on the outside, but that has some serious fangs and is not afraid to use them.

It took me most of lunch to track down Billy. I checked the tables, the cafeteria, the whole outside area in between.… He was nowhere.

Then I started asking people if they’d seen him and went from one “I think I saw him over here” to “Did you check over there
?
” until I finally found him holed up in the drama room.

Now, the drama room’s really about three rooms run together as one, with a wannabe stage in the middle. Every thing’s donated or mom-made, so it has that wish-we-were-more-professional look to it—something you tend to forget when you’re in the middle of dropping your lines.

Besides being big, the room’s packed with junk. Boxes, costumes, props, sound equipment … plus big tubs of lost-and-found clothes. So it’s a small miracle that I even noticed Billy sitting on the floor near the lost-and-found, all by himself.

“Hey,” I said, scooting in beside him. “You are off the hook.”

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“The wicked witch is fresh out of blackmail.”

“What?” He perks up. “How?”

I grin at him. “Let’s just say her phone’s gone missing.”

His eyes get huge. “Like, permanently?”

“Like, yeah.”

He throws his arms around me and squeezes tight, then plants a great big smackeroo on my cheek. “I love you! You’re amazing!”

I laugh. “Too bad I can’t take credit for it. It wasn’t me.”

He lets go. “It wasn’t?”

I shake my head. “And here’s the deal. You can’t talk about it. Not at all. If you tell anyone, it’ll come back and bite me, ’cause I told you, so I must know something, right?”

“But … so who got it? And where is it?”

“I promised I wouldn’t say anything, okay? But the person who got ahold of it destroyed it without even looking at what was on it.”

“But … why?”

I laugh. “Because I’m not the only one who’d like to land a house on Heather.”

I can see the wheels whirring in his head. “You’re
sure
?”

I nod like I’m positive, but in the back of my brain there’s a little tickly feather of doubt.

I mean, I didn’t actually
see
her get rid of it.

And as my conversation with Sasha flashes through my head, it hits me that she never actually said, YES I stole Heather’s phone and YES I destroyed it and NO I didn’t check it out first.

A quick nod and a pinky swear didn’t exactly add up to a sworn confession.

Still. I didn’t want to pass the doubt along. I mean, why worry Billy when I was ninety-nine percent sure?

So I stood up and said, “Now get back to being Billy, would ya? No more hiding in the lost-and-found!” Then I head for the door, saying, “Give me a few minutes and go out a different way, okay?”

He gets right away that I don’t want Heather or her wannabes to happen to see us and put two and two together. “I owe you big-time!” he says with a great big Billy Pratt smile.

“Nah,” I tell him. Then I laugh and say, “It wasn’t me!”

So I leave there feeling pretty good, and on my way over to the lunch tables, it hits me that it was actually
nice
to be so caught up in Billy’s mess because I’d completely forgotten about my own.

But now I’m remembering about Casey being on our fire escape, and that I have no idea what he was doing there. I mean, he doesn’t even know what apartment I’m in or what
floor
we’re on. And even though I’d really felt like I could trust Casey with the secret that I was living illegally with my grandmother, now I was worried.

So the instant I found Holly, I plopped my backpack on the lunch table and said, “Okay. I want to know every detail about Casey being on the fire escape.”

“Wait a minute,” Marissa said. “Where have you been? Lunch is almost over, and
Heather
was looking for you.”

My eyebrows go flying. “
Heather
came over here?”

“Yeah, and she was, like,
nice
to us. She said she’d give us a hundred dollars if we could get her phone back. No questions asked.”

I laughed. “Oh, really. Well, that’s because she thinks
I
have it, which I don’t.”

“Can you imagine getting your hands on that thing?” Dot whispers. “You could check out all the texts she’s gotten and sent. You could probably totally blackmail her!”

I blink at her.

Marissa blinks at her.

Holly blinks at her.

“What?” Dot asks. “There’s gotta be a
ton
of juicy stuff on her phone. Way more than a hundred dollars’ worth.”

Now, the funny thing is, she’s right, but giving Heather some blackmail of her own had never even crossed my mind. “So true!” I tell her. “And I wish I had it, but I don’t.”

And, yeah, I’m
dying
to tell them about Sasha tripping Heather and all that, but I stop myself. It feels weird keeping it from them, but I really don’t want to get Sasha in trouble. I mean, she may not know that she saved Billy from blackmail, but I do. Plus, if word slips out that I know
anything
about it, I’m dead. Heather won’t rest until she finds a way to destroy me.

So I switch the subject back to the one we’re
supposed
to be on in the first place. I turn to Holly and say, “Details, remember? Tell me about Casey.”

Her answer’s not exactly what I was hoping for. “I think I’ve told you everything.”

“No, you haven’t! What was he wearing? Did he, like, stand there for a while thinking or just go up and turn around? Was anyone with him?”

“Of course no one was with him! And what does it matter what he was wearing?”

I look down and shrug. And I’m suddenly feeling really stupid, because for some reason what he was wearing when he was sneaking up the fire escape mattered to me.

So I frown and say, “Was he in shorts? Jeans? A T-shirt? A flannel?”

She rolls her eyes. “Jeans and a flannel.”

“So nothing flashy?”

“Definitely nothing flashy. And he was moving cautiously, okay? I don’t think he really knew what he was doing. And, yeah, it took a minute for him to turn around.”

All this helped.

I don’t know why, but it did.

“Look,” she says gently, “you should call him.”

“But I
have
called him! A bunch of times! He hasn’t called me back for
weeks
.”

“Well, that was because he was supposed to be keeping the secret about your mom and his dad, right? Have you tried calling him since then?”

“Yes!”

“Did you leave a message?”

I just look down.

“Sammy, it’s obviously killing you. Stop being so stubborn and call him.”

“Yeah,” Dot says. “Call him.”

Marissa nods. “It’s a no-brainer, Sammy. Call him. Like,
now
.”

Dot slides her cell phone over, and when I finally pick it up and punch in Casey’s number, they all hunch forward like a flock of love vultures.

I wait through four rings.

Five.

“It’s gonna roll over to voice mail.”

They vulture in closer. “Don’t you dare hang up!” Marissa says.

“Leave a message!” Holly tells me.

“But—”

Dot says, “Just do it.”

So I take
another
deep breath, and after my stupid heart goes wacky over Casey’s “Leave a message” message, I say, “Holly says she saw you going up my building. Would you please call me back?”

Then I snap the phone closed and slide it over to Dot.

The three of them look at each other for a minute, and finally Holly asks Marissa and Dot, “Would
you
call her back?”

Dot shakes her head. “Not me.”

“She’s calling from someone else’s phone,” Marissa mutters, “and she doesn’t even say who she is.”

“Or that she misses him,” Dot throws in.

“Or even hi,” Holly says.

“Nah,” Marissa says, “I wouldn’t call her back.”

“Stop it!” I snap. “I’ve called him a
bunch
, and he hasn’t called me back. What am I supposed to do, beg?”

They all look at each other like, Not a bad idea.

“Stop it!”

“Aw, come on, Sammy,” Marissa says. “You could’ve tried a little harder.”

Dot nods. “Been a little friendlier …”

“Maybe not jumped in like you were accusing him of something,” Holly says.

I plop my head into my hands, and it feels like it weighs a ton. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want to take it all back and try again. I feel so stupid and pathetic.

“Aw, Sammy,” Dot says, wrapping her arm around me. “It’s easy to fix. Just—” But she’s interrupted by her phone vibrating in her hand. “This is probably him now!”

Only it’s not a call, it’s a text.

And as she reads it, her face goes white.

“What?” I ask. “Is it from Casey?”

She tries to hide her phone from me, but when I wrestle it away from her, what I see makes my heart drop through the floor.

The text is from Casey all right.

It’s short and to the point.

Stop calling. We’re done
.

I just hand the phone back to Dot and tear out of there. And even though Marissa chases after me, nothing she can say will fix this.

It’s over.

Officially over.

Making it through the rest of the day was not easy. I mean, as if getting the text wasn’t bad enough, having Heather in both classes after lunch was brutal. Not that she harassed me. She actually didn’t say boo to me, which was scary in its own way. But just her being there was hard. It was a constant reminder that she’d been right—Casey had moved on, which is exactly what she’d wanted.

And something about Casey and me being “done” before we actually had the chance to start felt really … unfair.
Cruel
. Like someone had wrapped barbed wire around my heart and was twisting it tight.

Marissa tried to talk about it again during drama, but it just made things worse. I didn’t
want
to talk about it or
think
about it or try to figure out some strategy to win him back.

We’re done
didn’t leave much room for strategizing.

And even though it was nice to see Billy in such a good mood during drama—especially while Heather was obviously in a bad one—the lump in my throat kept getting bigger and bigger, and I was dying to get home so I could finally just let go and cry.

So after school was over, I tore out of there as fast as I could. I did all right while I was pumping like mad on my skateboard, hopping curbs and dodging cars, but once I was off my board and going up the fire escape, I couldn’t help it—my eyes just overflowed. Casey had walked these very steps the night before. Had he been hoping to run into me on the fire escape?

But why?

So he could tell me we were done in person?

By the time I’m sneaking down our hallway, I’m a soggy-faced mess. And I’m dying to just flop onto the couch and flood a pillow, only I can’t.

Someone else is already on the couch.

Someone
I
sure didn’t invite.

“Oh,
great
,” I moan. And before my mother can finish her sarcastic little “Why, thank you,” I dump my stuff, charge into Grams’ bedroom, and slam the door.

The apartment’s a one-bedroom, with a tiny bathroom, kitchen, and a one-couch “family” room where I sleep. There really is no place to escape to. But whenever someone unexpected or troublesome or
scary
is at the door, my go-to hiding place is Grams’ closet. And since my mother
kinda covers all those bases, I find myself diving into the closet and closing the door.

How sad is that?

My cat, Dorito, is already there because he likes my mother about as much as I do.

Smart cat.

Anyway, there I am, surrounded by shoes and dangling clothes, hugging my cat, when my mother opens the closet door and sighs. “Honestly, Samantha.”

I pull the door closed.

She pulls it back open. “Please. Show me you’re more mature than this.”

I pull the door closed, and this time I hold on tight.

“Samantha!” she snaps when she can’t open the door. “Get out of that closet this instant!”

I can hear Grams’ voice. It’s quiet and calm, and it sounds like she’s trying to convince my mother to leave me alone for a little while.

“This is ridiculous!” my mother says. “Are you telling me you let her get away with this kind of behavior?”

Grams’ voice is louder now. “Give her a few minutes, Lana. Didn’t you see she was already upset when she came through the door?”

Things get quiet out there. And after maybe half a minute of silence, I’m starting to feel a little foolish for hiding in the middle of a bunch of shoes with my cat. But then my mother starts up again. “This is completely unacceptable!”