Spoils (8 page)

Sofia, one of three girls who work part-time at Steeped, is there when I arrive.

“Is Natasha in?” I ask, heading to the back office.

“Just left.” Sofia's a college student majoring in communications. With her Cuban heritage showing in her flawless caramel skin, coal-black eyes and gorgeous hair, she seems made for television, but her dream job is to work for NPR. She volunteers at our local station, and every once in a while she helps out on a story.

The office door's locked.

“Did she say when she'd be back?”

Sofia pauses, thinking about it.

“No,” she finally says. “She said she'd be back before my shift ended. And I'm on until nine.” There's an open textbook and a highlighter on the counter, and while she doesn't sound annoyed at the questions, she must want to keep studying while the tea shop is temporarily quiet and empty.

“Did she seem okay?”

She looks up from her book and studies me for a second. Then she shrugs. “I guess so,” she says. “She seemed in a hurry, kind of stressed, but normal.”

“Oh. All right, then.”

Sofia looks like she wants to ask me something, but then she returns to studying. I slouch over to a corner table by an outlet. I am not a procrastinator by nature and I imagine Michael hovering behind me, fingers tapping impatiently. Squirming, I open my laptop, thinking I'll look into…what? Where can I even start? I feel twitchy with the need to do something but I still don't know what to do about Natasha's confession. Sofia's highlighting a long passage in her textbook. And what exactly can I do to prepare for this? Research angel encounters? Read blogs about the devil? I promised to fix it, but how can I fix a deal made with the devil by my sister? How can I fix my parents' winning the lottery and blowing nearly all of it? I tend to grind my teeth when I'm annoyed and the sound of it snaps me out of my brewing tempest.

Fine,
I think.
Leave it alone and try to think outside the box.

Seeing Sofia study reminds me that I have homework of my own. I need to enter the lab results and write my conclusion. Glad to have something constructive to do, I decide to finish the lab report and turn it in early, my favorite way to turn in an assignment.

But when Google's open-ended, nearly blank search page winks at me, I'm suddenly inspired to investigate a different mystery, one that seems a lot less frightening. Without a shred of conscience, I Google one Gavin Armand. It only takes a few seconds to narrow down the search, weeding out a psychologist who cowrote a paper on kleptomania and a country music artist whose first album is selling poorly on iTunes. My Gavin Armand (and oh, since when had I come to think of him as
mine
?) shows up on the second page of results. I click on the link for an article in a college newspaper. Gavin Armand was a student at Tech, expelled on honor charges. I read the article in disbelief.

While Armand continues to deny the charges against him, and despite the many testimonials in his defense, the honor committee has ruled that overwhelming evidence conclusively proves a major honor violation was committed.

“There was no way he was telling the truth,” said one student panel member, who asked to remain anonymous. “He seems like a great guy and a lot of people like him, but the facts are pretty obvious. He was the first person in his class to check out the book, and afterward the chapter on code-breaking that everyone needed to complete the assignment was cut out. He must have thought cutting it out would cause the other students to fail, but instead he was caught.”

Armand has decided not to appeal the ruling. He is the third student expelled from Tech on honor violations this year.

On the one hand, the article explains why he's back here in Florida, why he's at SHCC instead of USF.

But it doesn't explain what the heck happened. How could someone so smart, a genius-jerk, think he would get away with cutting a mandatory reading out of a book that no one else had read yet? You'd have to be a moron, and whatever else Gavin is, moron isn't one of them. I wonder why no one brought that up, that he's too smart to do something so stupid.

I wonder why he didn't fight to clear his name. I would have thought, after juvie, he'd have done anything to protect his future. And how did he go from juvie to Tech in the first place?

The silver bell on the front door jingles as a middle-aged woman in a short skirt and bright beaded top enters the shop. Sofia pushes her book aside and looks up with a smile. I tune out their chatter. But soon the bell's ringing frequently and the counter begins crowding with customers waiting to put in an order. I save the article to study later and head behind the counter to help.

“Thanks, Leni.” Sofia smiles over her shoulder as she brews two teas. “I'll brew, you take orders, okay?”

I tie an apron on and turn to the next person in line.

An hour passes in a whirl of orders and change and credit-card receipts. Lots of iced drinks and afternoon pick-me-ups. I recommend some drinks and talk up the week's special: iced Moroccan mint tea and chocolate chip cookies. I keep expecting to see Natasha hurrying in to help out with the afternoon rush like she always does, and the longer she stays away, the more uneasy I grow.

After my parents won the lottery, they told us that Natasha and I both had to wait until we were eighteen before we could spend our money. For Natasha, it meant waiting a year. During that year, she planned out exactly what to do with the money. She had always wanted her own shop, and so for a year she searched out the perfect location, signed up for business classes at the community college, and attended the chamber of commerce's monthly meetings as she finished high school. We were sure that as soon as she had her birthday she'd run out and open a store. But she didn't. After she turned eighteen and graduated from high school, she spent the next year and a half traveling to India, Japan and Great Britain to learn about tea. She visited plantations, factories and the world's greatest tearooms. Everywhere she went, she charmed the people she met. Such a young girl, so focused, so rich. She received advice and tips from the best, and secured shipments that other tea shops could only covet. All the obsession she'd poured into Emmett, she turned to the shop. Privately, we all believed she'd grow tired of it. It was so much work, most of it tedious. It hardly seemed possible that the impulsive, temperamental girl we'd all endured would be a good businesswoman. But she was. She opened the store two months after her twentieth birthday, and before the year was up, the store was profitable. By her next birthday, it had won Best of the Bay.

I enter two orders and tuck the bills into the register drawer.

Whatever drama Natasha had going on in her life—and with Natasha, you could always count on the fact that there would be drama—she always kept it out of the shop. She had completely compartmentalized her life. As bad as she looked last night, it's her absence now that really worries me.

In the inexplicable ways of herd thinking, the sudden rush is over and the shop is deserted again. If I ended up studying sociology, I'd write a thesis on it: “Humans and Wildebeests: Common Genetic Heritage and Herd Instincts.”

I smile at the thought and Sofia, seeing the smile, mistakes it.

“I'm glad you're in a better mood,” she says. “You seemed pretty pissed off when you came in.”

“What?”

“You don't have to talk about it if you don't want,” she says, smirking because, of course, she is a budding journalist and notices things like moody high schoolers. “But I'm the same way—being busy is so much better than brooding. Want to talk about it?”

I actually consider telling Sofia that Natasha made a deal with the devil, that an angel came to me while I was meditating. That I have seven freaking days to fix everything, even though I don't even know what “everything” is, let alone how to fix it. And maybe God did create the entire world in seven days, but I'm not God and I don't know what to do. And I want to tell her all about it, not because she'll be able to help but because I hate carrying this huge secret around. For a split second, I imagine how good it would feel to tell her this, and it takes another instant to imagine her response.

So even with all her winning ways, I'm not telling her the real reason I'm “pissed off” and “brooding.” Of course, I have other issues and maybe she'll have insight on any number of things.

“When something doesn't make sense…if you find out something about someone that doesn't fit, what do you do about it?” I gesture at her textbook pushed to the side. “I mean, as a reporter.” Here's a tip: When avoiding scrutiny, always answer a question with a question. Vaguely.

She shoots me an appraising look.

“It's not a juicy story,” I assure her. “There's this guy in my marine chem class at SHCC.” I pronounce it “shek.” “I used to go to high school with him, actually. He's sending mixed signals.”

“Oooh, Leni's got a boyfriend,” she teases.

“No, I mean, he's back in town and he was supposed to be away at college. It doesn't make sense.”

“I'll tell you what my professors always tell us in class.” I lean in, ready for pearls of wisdom. “When something doesn't make sense, follow it. Dig deeper. And whenever possible, go straight to the source.”

I picture walking up to Gavin, looking (way up) into his eyes and digging into why he didn't fight the honor charges leveled against him.

“That's not helpful,” I accuse. “Your professors suck.”

She laughs like I meant her to.

“I'll be sure to tell my Pulitzer-winning professor you feel that way.” She wipes the counter in careful, efficient strokes.

“They give those out like candy these days.”

“I heard that,” she breathes, wide-eyed. “It's such a scandal.”

I snigger as I go to our self-service cart, refill the milk canister and clean up smeared honey and glittering crystals of spilled sugar.

“Seriously, though,” she says. “Going to the source doesn't mean confrontation. That rarely works anyway. You just need to give the person who's at the center of it all a chance to speak for themselves. Let them show you what the view looks like from their side of the story.” She lets it sink in. “If it made the news, that means it's haunting them. And if it's haunting them, then they're itching for a chance to talk about it with someone who'll listen. So listen, don't judge. That's another thing my idiot, Pulitzer-winning professor says a lot.”

I humph, as if what she says still doesn't make sense, except it does. It makes a lot of sense. I know I'd love to talk about my news. If I thought for a moment someone would listen without judging, I'd spill everything.

Sofia returns to studying and I head back to my laptop to work on my lab report, mulling over her advice. And how it can apply to more than Gavin's mystery.

R u alive?
I text Natasha.

She texts back almost immediately.
Unfortunately.

Wanna talk?

No!

As I head home, pushing my bike and fighting the conclusion I keep arriving to, I return to the thought I had when I first saw Natasha at the shop three days ago.

This isn't a problem money can fix.

The tea-shop job started as a desperate measure to get some money. After budget cuts suddenly meant her professor couldn't pay for a student researcher anymore, Sofia had a moment of real panic. Her mom couldn't step in and fill that five-thousand-dollar gap—Phil had lost his job again and her mom needed to pick up a couple of extra shifts at the hospital to keep up with mortgage payments. And NPR, God love them, thought they were doing her a favor letting her intern for free. It wasn't fair to blame them, she knew, but with the internship taking fifteen hours a week, and classes and homework, she wasn't left with many options for a part-time job. Her mom suggested, this time with bite, that Sofia switch majors. A nursing career was reliable, with good pay and a flexible schedule. “You're starting to get a taste of what life can be like, scrambling for money. Trust me, you don't want to go down there.”

Sofia tried to imagine life as a nurse. Drawing blood, changing vomit-stained sheets, taking orders from arrogant doctors, and she shuddered at the thought of that misery stretching out for years to come. What was the point of living if you didn't fight for your dreams? How could she give up on them at age twenty? Her mom had had a rough time, no doubt about it: single mom, two worthless husbands; it's not that Sofia didn't understand where she was coming from. Her mom's nursing career was the only thing that kept them off food stamps and in their condo. Still, it was beyond depressing to imagine living her mom's life.

Sofia had met Natasha during an NPR fund-raiser and had thought she was kind of a bitch, but one with style. When Sofia ran into her a couple of days after the budget cuts, they started chatting and the next thing she knew, Sofia was crying and Natasha, listening with such kindness, gave her a tissue and a job offer with flexible hours and surprisingly good pay. It turned out that Natasha was a pretty great boss as long as you didn't take her mood swings personally. Natasha had taken Sofia's suggestions of serving Taiwanese bubble tea on the weekends and offering weekly tea and dessert pairings. As if she knew, or guessed, the tight budget Sofia kept herself on, Natasha always sent her home with the leftover baked goods at the end of the day. Sofia would freeze them and defrost a muffin each morning for breakfast, and sometimes have one for lunch too. It made a difference.

It was obvious that something was wrong when Natasha came into the store today. Natasha always had this special aura about her. If Sofia had to describe her for a radio audience, she would say that shop owner Natasha Kohn looked like the kind of person good things happened to, not because she was lucky, but because she was extraordinary. Except Sofia would never actually say that on the radio because it would sound like she had a girl crush on Natasha. Which, okay, maybe she did, but that's not something you shared with your radio listeners.