Sticky Fingers (8 page)

“Meaning, if you have a drink in your hand, get rid of it quick and you’ll be fine,” says Mat, though I can tell from his expression that he has no intention of having a drink at all. And that he’d just as soon not go to Rick Dando’s party.

“What if we do it the other way around, then?” I suggest, though I hate being the one to bring it up because I am clearly the most party etiquette-impaired of the four of us. “We go to Lucas’s place, dance for a while, talk to everyone, then head over to Rick’s? It’s going to be a lot smaller, so we don’t have to worry about finding one another to leave.”

Really, I’m secretly hoping it won’t be an issue, since if we go to Lucas’s first, the party at Rick’s might be over before we get there—totally wimpy, I know, but I get wigged out by those really loud, crowded parties. And if it’s not over, we all have two a.m. curfews, so we’d still have to leave by one thirty,
which I hope means we’d spend less total time at Rick’s than if we went there first.

I know I’ll have more fun at Lucas’s party, anyway. I don’t think he’s a big drinker, so even if there’s alcohol—which I doubt—it won’t be the focus. It’ll be the music. I went to one of his parties sophomore year, and it was the best. I danced and danced and danced.

Scott shrugs. “Sounds good to me. We should get the bill.”

While he flags down the waitress and Courtney makes a preventive run to the bathroom—because who knows what condition the bathrooms will be in by the time we get to Lucas’s or Rick’s?—Mat turns to me. “So, how’d shopping go for you? Get anything cool?”

I polish off a nacho and shake my head. “Nah—just some lotion. Oh, and a pair of tennis shoes from Filene’s. My old pair are just beat.”

“Courtney showed me the shoes she got. The brown sandals.”

“They were on super sale,” I tell him. “They’ll be awesome this summer.”

“She tried ’em on for me,” he says, then blushes.
It cracks me up that Mat blushes about things like this, but he does. He has an old-fashioned streak that he tries very hard to hide. “Then she offered to let me paint her toes with the nail polish she bought. I took a pass. I draw the line at toenail painting. Some guys like that but”—he shrugs—
“Alegria de uns, tristeza de outros.
One guy’s happiness is another guy’s misery.”

“She has new polish? I didn’t see her buy any.” I say this in an offhanded way, but on the inside I think I’m going to be sick.

Especially when Mat’s gaze drifts behind me, and I realize that Courtney walked up right when I said that I didn’t see her buy any.

“You didn’t show Jenna your new nail polish?” Mat asks her as she sits down. He looks over at me again. “It’s this rusty orange color. Kind of ugly orange.”

“It’s not ugly,” Courtney says. “And Jenna saw it.”

I did?

She gives me a completely accusatory look. “Remember? It was that cheap polish at CVS?”

“Oh. I thought you decided not to get it. I didn’t see you in line.” And it wasn’t cheap.

“I went to the other register. The line you were in was going a lot slower.”

That much is true—my line
was
slower than the other one. But when I looked behind me to the other register, to see if I could check out faster if I switched, Courtney wasn’t over there.

And it hits me. She really did steal the damned nail polish. And worse, she’s sitting there all smug, shoving it in my face and making me look like the bad guy. What is up with that?

“What’s wrong, Jenna?” Courtney says. She looks soooo concerned, too. “You’re acting really weird.”

Me?! Very calmly—because I’m determined to take the high road here, and because she’s been my best friend forever—I tell her, “I guess it’s just that I didn’t see you buy it.”

“I think that’s when you were looking at that guy over by the magazines. The cute one, remember? So you probably didn’t see me behind you.”

Scott glances at Courtney, then at me, and for the first time in our long, long friendship, I have the overwhelming urge to smack Courtney. I’m not a violent person, but hell, she’s so damned skinny now, I
know I could kick her ass. And I really, really want to.

How can someone change so drastically in such a short period of time?

I dig my fingers into my jeans, willing myself to keep it together. Deciding not to have this fight in front of the guys, I smile at her like she’s deranged—in a jokey way—about what she saw me looking at in the store, then say, “Courtney, I have no freaking clue what you’re talking about.” I glance at my watch, then add, “Let’s get to the party. Whichever party. Otherwise we’re going to miss them both.”

Plus, I need time to think about how I’m going to handle this—what I’m going to say when I get Courtney alone. I don’t care if Scott thinks that I should let Mat talk to her about her behavior first. This has gone far enough.

Because if it goes any further—whether she’s acting this way because of her parents’ divorce or because she’s stressed out about school or whatever—it’s going to be the end of our friendship.

“What the hell was that all about?”

Scott’s been glaring at me ever since we got into his car outside Bennigan’s. I don’t know if it’s because I’m sitting here fuming or if it’s because of the crap Courtney spewed in the restaurant about my scoping out some nonexistent hottie at the CVS.

Either way, I can’t help getting madder and madder at her and envisioning various ways I can cause her great physical harm.

“You want the truth?” I say once I can get my anger under control enough not to scream out that
I’ve suddenly discovered my best friend is, in fact, devil spawn.

He lets out a sarcastic snort. “No, just make something up. Damn, Jen, what’s got you so pissed?”

“Courtney,” I bite out.

We hit a red light, and he looks over at me. “Now you’re mad at her for her whacked behavior? I thought you were just worried.”

So he didn’t catch on. Typical guy. “You know that whole nail polish discussion I had with Mat while you were paying the bill at the restaurant? And how Courtney got back from the bathroom right in the middle?”

“Yeah—”

“Well, she stole that nail polish.”

“Stole
it?” Total shock registers on his face.
“Courtney?
But I thought she said she—”

“She lied.” I punch my hand against the armrest. “Flat-out
lied!
I saw her do it. She was looking at one bottle of nail polish, holding it up in the air in her hand and studying it”—I mimic her action for Scott’s benefit—“and at the same time, she used her other hand to knock a bottle into her purse.
Boom. A bottle of ugly orange polish, just like Mat described.”

Scott lets out a puff of air, then reaches for the dashboard and clicks on the radio. “Wow.”

I wait a few seconds, just to see if he’s going to say anything else, then say, “That’s your only comment? ‘Wow’?”

I know I sound like I’m having a major PMS attack, and I know he totally hates dealing with girl drama, but I really need to know his opinion on all this.

He glances at me, then focuses on the traffic light. Very carefully, he says, “Not that I think you’re making this up—you know I would never think you would lie about something like this—but are you certain about what you saw? I mean, we both know how Courtney is. I would never think of her as the stealing type, even for kicks and giggles. She’s way too honest.”

“Dead certain.”

The light turns green, and he hits the gas. “So, if you thought she was shoplifting, why didn’t you say anything to her at the store? Right when she did it?”

“Because I wasn’t sure she did it.”

“You just said—”

“I know what I said.” I inhale, then explain: “I was coming around the corner into the makeup aisle right when it happened, and you know, I just didn’t want to believe it. When she saw me, she put the bottle she was holding back onto the shelf and picked up another one, saying the first one—the one exactly like what she stole—wasn’t quite the right color. She was talking fast and acting all nervous, and then she told me I should hurry up and go buy the lotion I had in my basket because we didn’t have a lot of time. I was so stunned, I just didn’t know what to say. So I went up to the cash register.”

“And you’re sure she didn’t get in another line while you bought the lotion?”

“Nope. She couldn’t have. I kept looking behind me to see if she was coming. I would have seen if she was at the other register.”

As I say this, I picture myself back in the store and try to think of the details of what happened. “And you know what else? When we left, she didn’t have a CVS bag. They always make you take the bag, whether you want it or not.”

“True,” he says, and I can tell we’re both thinking about the time a couple weeks ago when we ran into CVS to grab some batteries and the clerk insisted we take the bag, even though I told him I could put the batteries in my purse.

“Anyway,” I say, “when we walked out of the store, I was hoping I was wrong—that she didn’t knock it in her purse, and that if she did, it was totally an accident and that she saw it and put it back. So I didn’t say anything. But now I know.”

He stares straight ahead, focusing on the taillights of Mat’s car, which is right in front of ours on Route 9. “So just now, when Mat mentioned her new polish …?”

“She figured out that I know she stole it.”

“Unbelievable. Un-freaking-believable. What the hell was she thinking?” He mumbles to himself—I think some of the words are the type that can’t be used on the radio without the station facing hefty FCC fines—and I realize he’s beyond stunned, just like I was. “She must have flipped when she walked up behind you at Bennigan’s, thinking that you were about to rat her out to Mat. Mat would be completely
ticked off too—he’s Mister Morality. Like, even worse than you.”

We ride in total silence for a few minutes, then I turn to Scott. “By the way, you know she lied about that whole looking at the cute guy by the magazines’ thing, too, right? That never happened—totaly made up. I think it was her way of warning me that if I tell anyone, it’s going to be my word against hers, and who’s going to believe she shoplifted?”

“I wondered what that was about. I suspected she wasn’t telling the truth, just from her face, but I couldn’t figure out why.”

“Now you know.”

As I stare at the back of Courtney’s head where it’s peeking over the passenger-side headrest of Mat’s car, I let out a long string of four-letter words, which Scott knows is so not me. Then again, I don’t recall ever being so angry or feeling so betrayed.

“She’s the one who did something wrong, but I’m the one who looks bad,” I tell him. “And it’s screwing with our friendship. Plus the fact she was willing to jeopardize my relationship with
you
by hinting that I
was flirting with some imaginary guy in the CVS … you know, I’m just gonna to have to kill her, and over an ugly-ass bottle of nail polish. It’s just
wrong!”

“Don’t kill her. Give her a few days, and she’ll realize she’s being a bitch.” He shoots me a look of sympathy, then reaches over the emergency brake and puts one hand on my knee. “Really, Jen. I bet if you ignore Courtney for the rest of Christmas break, it’ll freak her out. She’ll start thinking about how she’s been treating you, and she’ll apologize. She won’t risk your friendship over something
she
did wrong. You’ve been friends too long.”

Even as he says it, though, I’m not so sure. “You know I don’t mean it about killing her. But she’s never done anything like this before.”

“Give her a few days, then see. And I hate to say it’s not a big deal, but really, Jen, in the grand scheme of life, a bottle of nail polish isn’t a big deal.”

It’s not really about the polish, though. It’s the lying. It’s the not knowing who Courtney is anymore. Instead of arguing, though, I weave my fingers through his where he has his hand on my knee. “But you believe me?”

“Yeah. You know I do. No comment about you scoping out some fictional drugstore guy is ever going to shake us. Neither will anything else Courtney does or says.” When I work up the guts to meet his eyes, I can see that he’s completely sincere. “Thank you,” I say. I know I should expect him to believe me, but given how my life’s gone lately … suffice it to say, I’m relieved to know I can count on him.

I nod toward Mat’s car. “So what should I do about Courtney tonight? I have no clue how to handle this at the party.”

“Just stick by me. They have their own car, so maybe we can ditch them early and go on to Rick’s party. Rick’s will be such a zoo, it’ll be easy to avoid her there if we—” His fingers tighten around mine. “Wait. I have an idea.”

“What?”

He lets go of my hand and picks up his cell phone, grinning the whole time he’s dialing.

“Who are you calling?” I ask.

He ignores me as the person on the other end picks up. “Hey, Mat?”

I make a face at him and mouth, “What are you calling them for?”

“Jenna left her gloves at Bennigan’s. We’re going back for them, but you guys go ahead to Lucas’s. We’ll catch you there.”

He mumbles a couple uh-huhs, then says, “Okay. And if you don’t see us at Lucas’s for whatever reason, you know, if we get hung up or something, just go on to Rick’s and we’ll find you there.”