She's So Money (11 page)

“Just them,” Camden said. “But hey, keep up the good work and maybe this turns into something.” He patted me on the head condescendingly, which I couldn’t do anything about because of all the books I was holding, and then he sauntered off, grabbing his car keys out of his pocket with one hand while flipping open his phone and starting to send a text with the other. I leaned against the row of lockers for a moment, struggling with all the weight, then sank to the floor and started piling the books up in stacks.
Yeesh.
Tonight was looking ugly, although lucrative. The first thing would have to be my own homework, of course; I had some extra-credit English questions due tomorrow for a book that I had yet to read, although at least
The Turn of the Screw
only had ninety-six pages. I also had my Physics problem set, my French mini comp (only half a page), and my history reading (just one chapter). Thus far, doable. Then there was Camden’s work: Algebra (a breeze), plus Government and Chemistry, which would hopefully be easy since I’d taken A.P. Chem the year before. There was Dani’s, too: Algebra, Government, history. And finally, Stacey’s: Government, Chemistry, and Spanish.

I’ve never taken a day of Spanish in my life.

El crap
.

chapter eight

It turns out, doing one homework assignment badly in
fifteen minutes is pretty easy. Doing three of them in a row is harder. Doing eight of them in a row is
exponentially
harder. I didn’t sleep much—big surprise—which led me to screw up most of the lines in my half of the French dialogue I was assigned to do with Priti Radatha the next day, leading Simone (she told us that if anyone of us ever called her Madame Lipschitz, she’d flunk us instantly) to ask me, “
Que s’est produit?
” and me to answer, “Huh?” as she shook her head and wrote in a B– next to my name in her grade book.

I got a check minus on my physics problem set as well, which, being just a problem set, wasn’t going to hurt my grade much, but it wasn’t going to help it, either.
Ouch
. Hopefully, whatever damage I was doing to my own G.P.A. could be repaired once I paid off the fine, or else my merit scholarship chances would be headed down the drain, and I could kiss Stanford good-bye even if I did get in.

Plus, at lunch I had a pissed off Stacey Ray to deal with.

“You didn’t do my Spanish!” she whined, after accosting me in the hallway on my way to the bathroom. She yanked on my sleeve and pouted, tottering in her four inch purple wedge heels. I could feel her shimmery beige fingernails pressing through the fabric and into my skin.

“Shhh!” I said, yanking her through the door. I eyed all the stalls suspiciously and ducked my head under to make sure they were feet free, but luckily nobody else was in there. “I didn’t have your number, but I told Camden to tell you that I don’t take Spanish and couldn’t do it,” I said, backing up against the door in case somebody tried to open it. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“No,” she said, turning to the mirror to check out her hair. “Maybe,” she added. “I don’t remember.” She started taking individual ringlets of her hair and curling them around her fingers; the drizzle had turned to rain again today, giving the air enough humidity to make her usually perfect blond coif frizz ever so slightly. She yanked on one ringlet and watched, pleased, as it bounced, just like in a shampoo commercial.

I sighed. “Anyway, if you knew I wasn’t going to do it, would you have actually done it?” I asked her.

“No,” she answered, then looked a little confused.

“So . . . no loss there,” I pointed out.

“I guess,” she said hesitantly, taking a bulging makeup bag out of her purse and setting it on the edge of the sink. She started rifling through it; I counted six lip glosses and four eye shadows in the outside pocket alone.

“And it’s not like I’m still charging you for it. I’m not,” I said, continuing to try and defuse her irritation.

“Oh my God, you’re right!” Stacey’s face lit up, and she swiveled around to look at me. “I just made a hundred bucks!”

“Sure, if you want to think of it that way.” I shrugged.

“That’s so awesome!” she said. She picked up a mascara tube and pointed it at me excitedly.

“I know!” I agreed. Her enthusiasm was actually kind of infectious.

Stacey smiled widely, anger thoroughly forgotten, then rifled through her makeup bag again and turned to the mirror to reapply her Lip Venom. “Ow,” she said as she put it on. “Ow. Ow. Ow.”

“Why do you wear that stuff if it hurts?” I asked.

“Because when boys see big, luscious lips, they think of—”

I left the bathroom to avoid hearing the rest of her sentence.

For the next three days, every free moment of which I spent doing other people’s homework, my mantra was “Sleep is for the weak. Sleep is overrated. Screw sleep.” After the small Spanish gaffe with Stacey, I’d made sure to tell Camden that he had to vet everyone’s assignment requests beforehand, because I enjoyed calling his pals if something went wrong about as much as they enjoyed getting calls from me. My weird pseudo-bonding session with Stacey in the bathroom apparently did not carry over to the rest of our lives, as the next several times I passed her in the hallway, she ignored me as usual. I tried to make eye contact once or twice, figuring I should at least try to be friendly, but after a few unsuccessful tries I started ignoring her as usual again too.

Granted, I was now $1,400 richer, but I was also the owner of some very large under eye circles. Maybe it was time to explore concealer. It was
certainly
time to start figuring out where I was gonna get more money, because at the rate I was going—even with doing Camden’s, Dani’s,
and
Stacey’s work—I was never going to get to my $10,000 goal in time.

The popular kids seemed to have developed psychic powers and sensed this. A few days into my triple strength homework nightmare, I was trudging down the hallway after the welcome ring of the end of sixth period bell, vaguely pondering whether “SexyBack” or “Buttons” would be a better song with which to make my strip joint Amateur Night debut—if it came to that—when I found a bunch of them waiting by my locker: Camden, Dani, Stacey, Brad, and Derek. What the—?

“Hey,” Camden said as I walked up, giving me sort of a half wave. The rest of them just stood there, except for Dani, who gave my sweatshirt and jeans outfit a once over, and then looked thoughtful as she toyed with a piece of her dark, flatironed hair.

“Hey,” I said cautiously.

“Hey,” said everybody else. I glanced at all of them, not bothering to hide my weirded out expression at the fact that like, half the Spring Fling court was surrounding my locker, and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Got some more customers for ya,” said Camden, taking off his baseball cap to bend the brim, and then putting it back on again.

“Wait, she deals drugs too?” asked Brad. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. Apparently, neither could the student teacher passing by us in the hallway; she whipped her head around to stare suspiciously for a moment before either deciding that we were harmless or deciding to stroll on over to Principal Davis’s office in an exceedingly casual manner. Dani and Derek both noticed her paranoid expression; Dani giggled and Derek smirked.

“Oh my God, Camden. Can I talk to you alone for a second?” I took his sleeve and pulled him a few feet away to the little side hall where the Chem lab was. Dani and Derek both continued to smirk as we disappeared out of their line of vision. Stacey and Brad probably would’ve been smiling too, if they hadn’t spontaneously started making out against a TRY OUT FOR THE TALENT SHOW! NO TALENT NECESSARY! poster.

Camden disengaged my fingers from his sleeve, then wandered into the empty Chem lab and sat down on one of the tables, swinging his long legs over the chair in front of him. I followed him and paused in the doorway so I could keep a lookout if necessary.

“Okay, seriously,” I said, my voice low. “How suspicious does this look? Why are you congregating everyone around my locker?” I glanced behind me. There was nobody there.

“It’s a school hallway, and we’re students standing in it. What’s suspicious about that?” Camden stretched his arms over his head and then turned so that he could lie back on the table. He put his hands under his head and stared up at the ceiling.

“Nothing, until one of your idiot friends says something too loudly,” I hissed. “It’s not like we’re talking in code about this stuff. Someone—everyone—could totally hear!”

Out in the main hallway, I heard Brad yelp and say in a disgusted voice, “Jesus, Stace, are you wearing that sulfuric acid stuff on your mouth again?”
Heh
.

“You’re so paranoid,” Camden said, yawning. “Remind me never to let you try weed.”

I crossed my arms and didn’t say anything, just stared at him.

Camden moved back to a sitting position and shrugged. “Look, Derek and Brad want in now too.”

“No way,” I said instantly. “The more people who know, the more likely we are to get in trouble.”

“Come on,” Camden wheedled. “Didn’t we already decide that train of logic doesn’t work?”

“No, you decided that,” I said. But . . . did he have a point? It
was
only a month or so that I would need to do this; and if I didn’t manage to pay off the fine in time, there wouldn’t be any point in continuing anyway. Maybe the odds of getting caught weren’t too bad. Maybe I could make it to ten grand and then just quit the whole shebang before any teachers were the wiser. They couldn’t really punish me if it was already over with by the time they figured it out, right? I started calculating in my head how much I could earn doing five people’s homework at an average rate of twelve assignments per week. Five times twelve was sixty, times—wait, five times a hundred was—wait, twelve times . . . I suddenly realized that I couldn’t do the math. I couldn’t even do simple multiplication. Because my brain was fried. Because I was too sleepy. Because I’d been doing three people’s homework in addition my own for the past several days.

“I’m not sure I have the time,” I said wearily, and then instantly regretted it. I couldn’t stop now, could I? What mattered more—my sanity, or paying off the fine? I had been leaning toward sanity, but maybe that was the insanity talking.

“Aw, man! Seriously?” Camden looked bummed.

“Camden. Look at my face,” I said.

He trained his blue eyes on me and looked. “What about it?”

“I have giant dark circles under my eyes!” I exclaimed.

“Can’t see ’em,” he said, smiling. “Maybe I should look closer.” He got up and walked over to the doorway where I was standing, then playfully started leaning his face right into mine. I started to back away, and then all of a sudden, I heard Cat’s voice behind me in the hallway.

“What’s up, Maya?” she asked, her voice dripping with innocence. I spun around and saw Cat, Sarah, and Jonny all standing there.

“Oh, hey,” I said, springing away from Camden. “Uh . . . I was just . . . do you guys know Camden?” My lame coverup attempt, and then my lame introduction in order to cover up the lame coverup attempt, didn’t matter—Camden had gone past me through the doorway and taken off. I peeked around the corner into the main hall, back toward my locker, only to see him and his friends disappearing in the direction of the exit to the student parking lot.

“We’re headed over to the tutoring office and wanted to see if you were coming,” Cat said as we walked back toward my locker. “What the hell’s all that?” she asked.

Camden, Stacey, and Dani had left a big pile of books on the floor by my locker door, along with a Post-it note covered with scribbled numbers and assignments. I quickly dropped my backpack and jacket on top of the stack to try to cover it up before they could see what it was.

“Nothing,” I said, opening my locker as quickly as I could and shoving all the stuff inside.

“And why were you hanging out with that guy?” she continued.

“Are you trying to get closer to Derek again or something?” Sarah teased.

Jonny turned to her, mouth agape. “She used to like him?” he asked.

“Fifth grade,” she answered, giggling. “Before you got here.”

“Man, I missed out on everything,” he said, shaking his head.

“Not anymore,” Cat said cheerfully, before fixing an appraising gaze back on me.

“I wasn’t hanging out with him,” I said defensively. “I’m tutoring Camden—”

“But you’re never in the office anymore,” Sarah said gently. There wasn’t a smidge of accusation in her voice, but somehow, it still seemed like one.

“True. We’re never in the office because he takes offense to it for some reason, so we always end up going someplace else,” I said rapidly. “And whatever, we were just figuring out the next time we’re going to have a session. So, yeah.” Wow. Not only was I lying to my parents, but now I was lying to my friends, as well. And the ease with which I was spewing completely untrue statements was beginning to scare me. I was a great person. I was a really upstanding citizen.

“Well, I hope you didn’t have to talk to him for long,”