Tempestuous (2 page)

“Thanks, Grady, I know.” I flashed him one of my famous smiles, guaranteed to melt butter. “Oh, actually—there
is
one teensy, tiny thing you can do for me….” I paused dramatically. I normally tried not to abuse my power on people as defenseless as Grady, but every once in a while I had to flex my muscles.

“Anything! If it’s something the law and the sweet Lord above allows of course.” He blushed to the roots of his brown hair, which was close-cropped, military-style.

“My request is innocent enough, I can assure you. It’s Ariel’s birthday, and I want to surprise her after work with an ice cream cake from Just Desserts. Think you can swing by and pick it up for me on your rounds a few minutes before nine? I can pay you later,” I added, feeling up to adjust my idiotic chapeau. The Hot-Dog Kabob refrigerator was crammed full of frozen wieners and some rubbery pasteurized processed cheese—I didn’t want a perfectly good mint-chip cake getting tainted by being stored in the same fetid freezer space.

“Weeellllll,” Grady drew out the word as if it contained five syllables, shifted on his heels, then concluded the performance with a broad wink, “I’m really not supposed to do anything like that while I’m on duty. But for you, I’ll make an exception.” It wasn’t as if I was asking him to
steal
the cake for god’s sake, but Grady was a tad obsessed with “protocol.” We were both relatively new employees here, but unlike yours truly, he couldn’t take his job more seriously if he were guarding the perimeter at Fort Knox.

I thanked the rent-a-cop and headed past Treasure Hunt Antiques & Collectibles and its display window full of creepy china dolls, rare coins, and mint-condition baseball cards. I poked my head in to look for Mike, the store clerk who usually worked this shift, but he wasn’t at his usual spot behind the counter. Next door was Hair Apparent, the mall’s only salon with its attached Glamour Puss portrait studio. No matter how many times I passed by, I never failed to snort with derision at the decade-old display photos meant to entice middle-aged moms to doll-up like models for their hubbies. The women were plastered with makeup and wrapped in feather boas like a bad Vegas act, wrinkly cleavage spilling out of low-cut sequined gowns.

“Miranda! Miss Fabulous!” Alfredo burst from Hair Apparent and traipsed toward me for a hug and a swoopy air kiss on the cheek. Dressed to the nines as usual, he sported a purple tie and matching sweater vest. “Check out the cufflinks,” he said, holding out his arm for inspection. “They’re mermaids.” The boy did have exquisite, if colorful, taste.

“Nice,” I said admiringly. “Hey, I’m throwing a surprise birthday party for Ariel after we close tonight. Can you come by?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pushing his long, razored bangs out of his face. “I have a scorchingly hot date tonight.”

“Stop by
, pleeease,
and you can have the challenge of a lifetime—giving Ariel a makeover,” I wheedled.

“Well, you know I can’t pass up the chance to turn that duckling into a swan. I’ll swing by, but just for a few minutes. How old is the tiny thing, anyway? Twelve?”

I made a face.

“She’s turning seventeen and you know it. Oh, by the way, I was going to ask Mike, too, but it looks like he’s on his break. Can you let him know for me?”

“Sure thing.” Alfredo sauntered back inside Hair Apparent and I continued my forced march down the wide hallway. The piped-in easy listening tunes were already giving me a killer headache, and I could hear the faint screeching of kids at the Cheeze Monkey pizzeria/arcade on the other side of the mall. Oh well, I thought optimistically, at least I’m not working again until Tuesday night. I mentally added up the amount I’d make tonight. Five hours of work equaled just about forty-two bucks—it would barely make a dent in what I was expected to pay back in restitution. Back when I’d had an allowance, fifty dollars had been chump change, approximately what I’d spend on a sushi lunch during a shopping spree with my friends. My former friends, that is.

I wondered, a tad wistfully, what Rachel and the “Itneys” were doing today. Probably planning their annual winter ski trip to Aspen or breaking in matching pairs of whatever high-priced boots
Vogue
deemed “must-have” this season. They didn’t have a care in the world that their daddies’ AmEx cards couldn’t fix. As shallow as it sounded, sometimes I wished I could still say the same.

I hung a right at the corner by the Bead Bungalow and headed toward the escalator leading down to the food court. Like the Greek goddess Persephone, I was constantly forced to return to this underworld. A garishly painted plaster arch curved ominously around the escalators as though it were the very mouth of hell. The smell of grease wafting up triggered my gag reflex.

“Hey, Miranda, wait up!” My coworker Ariel’s chirpy voice interrupted my fleeting sense of nausea as she half skipped up beside me, her matching uniform hat swaying level with my shoulder. I teasingly flicked her hot dog propeller and sent it spinning. A gung-ho grin spread across her perky face and revealed the astonishing shimmer of orthodontia, which caused her to speak with a breathy lisp. Ariel’s brown hair curled around her face in waves, and her cheeks were always rosy, as if she was in a constant state of having just finished a ten-yard dash. At a diminutive five-foot-two, she reminded me of a mischievous pixie. She was still wearing a pair of mittens, which were attached to her coat cuffs by Hello Kitty clips.

“Don’t you love the snow? I love the snow!” she as good as squealed. “Snow angels and snowmen and snowball fights and snow forts and snow angels and….”

“Stop! What are you, like, seven?” I remembered Alfredo’s earlier quip about her childish nature.

“As a matter of fact, today’s my….”

“Your birthday. I know. You don’t have to remind me.”

“I just love that it’s snowing on my birthday. It’s like getting the whole world covered with the universe’s magic birthday frosting!” Oh boy. At times, Ariel’s naively chipper disposition grated on my nerves. Her boundless enthusiasm and my healthy sarcasm went together about as well as a helium balloon and a bucket of rusty nails. Then again, her happy-go-lucky attitude had singlehandedly propped up my defeatist one during the duration of my always-hellish shifts. And given that she wasn’t exactly up to speed on my recent academic offenses, it was actually somewhat refreshing to be in her nonjudgmental presence. Truth be told, the girl kind of idolized me, and I knew it.

“Because it’s your birthday, and
only
because it’s your birthday, I won’t make you drain and clean out the fryer.”

“But you hate doing that.” Ariel looked astonished. “Toxic sludge, you called it. You’d do that for me?”

“I didn’t say
I’m
going to do it! We’ll just, you know … conveniently forget! Let Sunday’s crew deal with it.”

Ariel’s eyes widened gleefully, as if we’d just hatched a plan to rob the Louvre.

“You think we can?”

“Of course!”

“Wait….” she seemed confused. “Aren’t I your manager?”

“Semantics.” Ariel had been working at Hot-Dog Kabob for about nine months, which technically made her my supervisor when we worked shifts together. But we both knew who was really running the show.
C’est moi
.

As we hopped on the escalator and started our descent, I glanced over at Got Games and noticed a guy standing just outside the shop. Where had I seen him before? Oh yeah. The creep from the parking lot! I almost didn’t recognize him because he was now wearing a stupid black sorcerer’s cape with glittery crescent moons emblazoned upon it. Given his brooding stance, he could have been mistaken for a bar bouncer or a Secret Service agent. What a ridiculous getup, I scoffed, before it occurred to me that I had absolutely no room to talk. I pulled my back straighter and held my head up trying to project a sense of dignity while simultaneously avoiding eye contact. I could tell he was staring at me again.

“What’s with the Hogwarts dropout over there?” I mumbled to Ariel, out of the corner of my mouth. She immediately whipped her head in the direction of my gaze. “Don’t look!” I said with a groan. “He’ll know we’re talking about him!”

“Well, how am I supposed to know who you’re talking about if I don’t look?”

“Just don’t be obvious about it.” I craned my head in the opposite direction.

“Okay, you can relax,” she said, “Caleb can’t see us anymore.”

“Caleb? You know him?”

“Yes, he started last month, too, which you would know if you’d pay attention to what was going on around here. You’re kind of self-obsessed, you know?” Did I mention that Ariel was also whip-smart and totally called me on my shit? She was the only one who could.

“Whatever. He’s clearly a degenerate, in any case,” I shrugged.

Ariel shook her head as if in protest. “He’s really nice! Last week he helped me find a copy of the new
Unicorn Fantasy III
game.”

“Okay, as if you needed anymore geek credentials,” I said. “Hey, maybe he’s your match made in avatar heaven! I can see where he might clean up okay.”

“Miranda!” Ariel emitted an embarrassed squeal. “Nooo! He’s so not my type.”

“You have a type?” I wondered, curious now. We stepped off the escalator and headed in the glaringly fluorescent-lit direction of the food court, leaving oafish gamer boy in our wake.

Expert matchmaker that I was, I would have liked to press Ariel for more details regarding her ideal mate, but as we approached the throng of tables and chairs arrayed in the center of the food court, I was silenced by the multitude of angry stares aimed in my direction.

Normally chatty, Ariel didn’t breathe a word; meaning she’d noticed it, too. Let’s just say my high school classmates hadn’t been very subtle in their scorn ever since I’d been busted a little more than a month ago. My crime? Running a secret online matching service that paid geeks to tutor athletes and other scholastic underachievers—all for a small commission fee, of course. It had seemed innocent enough at the time. The dumb jocks got passing grades, and the geeks made a tidy profit. How was I to know it would turn into a massive cheating scam? I stared straight ahead as we walked passed Paisano’s Pizza-by-the-Slice and Fro-Yo-Yo frozen yogurt, trying not to let my face show how pained I was to have become my high school’s pariah.
This
was the thanks I got for trying to help people! Was it my fault that their college apps were now dead in the water because of the disciplinary storm that had ensued?

“Nice hat,” said an epidermally challenged junior, Stacy Scott, who was refilling her Diet Coke from Taco Corner’s soft-drink machine. Wow, really creative insult, I mused, giving her a tight, cynical smile.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Reggie Williams dunk his chicken nugget in a massive pile of ketchup. He waved the sauce-soaked morsel of processed meat over his head.

“Hey, Miranda,” he said with a sneer as his friends grinned devilishly. “Have you managed to ‘catch up’ yet? Or should I say …
pay
up?” (School officials had demanded that I pay back the entire $3,920 that I had earned from my little enterprise.) Kids at a few other tables echoed more profane and equally idiotic sentiments that I pretended not to hear.

I noticed Ariel dart me a sideways glance as we hurried along toward Hot-Dog Kabob, and I ignored her imploring, concerned eyes. I threw open the hinged counter separating the customers from the employees, chucked my purse on the shelf under the stack of Styrofoam cups, and raced to the grim, closet-sized bathroom. Slamming the door, I leaned my head against it, no longer concerned about whether or not I was mussing my bangs in the process. Giant tears started to pool in the bottom rims of my eyes, and my face flushed hot.

It could have been worse, I told myself. Brian, Rachel, and the Itneys could have been out there throwing me their accusatory bullshit, as if I’d started this whole mess in the first place.

After about a minute, my breathing had returned to normal. Not being the sort of chick who’d hide out in the bathroom all evening rather than face her detractors, I wet a paper towel and dabbed my cheeks, cursing the fact that there was no mirror in which to check my eye makeup. Hopefully I wasn’t too raccooned-out. I fake flushed the toilet, ran the faucet once more, took a deep breath, and reemerged hopefully looking cool as a cucumber. Couldn’t let ’em think I’d been bested.

“Hot-diggity-dog!” I said, returning to the counter with a businesslike smile on my face. I grabbed my apron and tossed Ariel a package of wooden skewers. Relieved that I wasn’t down for the count, Ariel flashed me a metallic grin and returned to her post. I slid a giant bucket of lemons across the counter and began slicing them in half for the lemonade press. Only four hours and fifty minutes to go.