The Fruit of My Lipstick (13 page)

“Sounds complicated.”

“The music part is pretty straightforward. It’s finding people who will sit down long enough to rehearse that’s the problem. So I’ll probably go with straight piano, or maybe a duet with piano and harp. I just don’t have time right now to chase down violinists and cellists.” Not with Chem and Math and what would no doubt be another horrific English paper to produce.

“You could always record the harp yourself and play it as background when you do the piano part live.”

I drew back and stared at the phone, then put it to my ear again. “What a great idea. You
are
a genius.”

“I have a T-shirt that says so,” he said with endearing modesty. “So now that we’ve solved that, do you feel like coming to Palo Alto with me on Saturday? The Olympics are three days after finals, during spring break, so my dad’s going to coach me. Maybe you could help us.”

He wants you to meet his dad!
I fought down my rising excitement. The girls could be a bunch of critical sour grapes if they wanted. Lucas really wanted to be with me, to include me in the most important event of his life. And I’d lost half an inch off my waist. I’d make sure I wore something that emphasized it.

“I’d love to,” I said. “What time are you heading down there?”

“Usually I go Friday night, but since you can come, I’ll go Saturday so you don’t have to worry about how an overnight would look.”

Oh, he was so considerate. Only a Christian guy would think of things like this.

“I’ll get the car and meet you at eight on the front steps, okay?”

“I’ll be there,” I said, happiness coloring my voice the way an augmented seventh colors a whole chord and makes it different.

My mood had improved about ninety percent by the time the cab dropped me at the school gates. I took care of the other ten percent by walking around the huge rectangle formed by the streets around the school. If any calories had been lingering in my system after that salad, they’d be gone for sure now.

Even though the slope wasn’t too bad, the muscles in my thighs felt weak and wobbly as I walked up the drive and then climbed the stone stairs to the second floor. Maybe by the end of next week, they’d have gotten used to the extra work they were being asked to do, and toughen up.

I opened the door of our room, expecting to have to dive into Round Two with Lissa, but it was empty. What a relief. All I wanted was to fall into the shower and stay there, letting the jet of water massage my poor abused self.

The envelope lying on the floor bounced off the toe of my sneaker, so that I felt it before I saw it. I bent to pick it up. My name had been typed neatly on the front.

Miss Chang,

If you return before 8:00 p.m., please come by my office.

Thanks and kind regards,
Natalie Curzon

I glanced at my watch, which said seven forty-eight. What on earth could the headmistress want with me? Had Dad gone off the deep end and called her anyway, threatening to pull me out? I didn’t feel like getting in the middle of
that
tug of war. Talk about the clash of the Titans. Dad knew I wanted to stay here, and it would have been easy enough for Curzon to explain what that e-mail had been about.

No, she must want me for another reason. Maybe she needed me to tutor somebody. Or . . . 
ooh!
I stopped in the middle of throwing my uniform back on.

Maybe someone had fallen off the Physics Olympics team and she wanted me to sub in!

Holy cats. Could you imagine Lucas and me on the same team, dazzling them all? All those hours of coaching time we could spend together? I mean, I’m a pretty supportive girlfriend, I think, but I don’t see a whole lot of him. And I don’t complain. I know he’s holed up in his room, studying like a crazed person (to use Lissa’s expression).

I buttoned my blouse as fast as I could, swiped a brush through my hair, and glanced at my watch again. Seven fifty-four.
Move it, girlfriend
.

Ninety seconds, two floors, and three corridors later, I skidded to a halt outside the oak slab that is Ms. Curzon’s inner door. It stood open, and she lifted her head from her computer monitor as she heard my graceless arrival.

“Miss Chang,” she said pleasantly. “Do come in, and close the door.”

Hugging my prospects to myself, I did as she asked and slid into the chair in front of her desk. She took her glasses off and gazed at me.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted anything,” she said.

“Oh, no. I just got back from dinner.”

“I thought you might be studying in the library or with your friends.”

Studying. Wow. Maybe I’d guessed right.

“I have been spending a lot of time on Chemistry this term. And in the Physics lab,” I said delicately.

“Have you, now?” She glanced at the monitor. “I must say, your grades in AP Chemistry are impressive, as are your efforts in Pre-Calculus. What will you do with yourself next year, I wonder?”

I wasn’t sure if she wanted a real answer or not, so I just smiled and waited. This was it, I was sure of it.

“It takes a student with an advanced grasp of both disciplines, not to mention a certain amount of skill with computers, to access the password-protected area of our server and find the examination files.” She looked at me.

I sat there, completely at a loss. “Ma’am?”

“Is that what you’ve been doing, Gillian?”

I stared at her, lost in the horrific crash between expectation and reality. Words refused to form in my brain. “I don’t understand the question.”

“Goodness me. You don’t understand the question. Well, let me rephrase it. Only the most brilliant of the many fine minds at Spencer have the ability to fill out the answers on such a range of examinations. My pool of suspects is, therefore, fairly small. Hence, my request to meet with you.”

Finally, I got it. “You think
I’m
doing this? Selling the answers? Me?”

“Not necessarily. I’m asking everyone on my list the same questions.”

“It’s not me.” How inadequate was that? “Ms. Curzon, you have to believe me.”

“And why is that?”

“Because—because I didn’t do it! I have no idea who did, but we’re doing our best to find out.”

As of now, the four of us were totally on the case. The only thing worse than punishing the whole junior class for something they didn’t do was punishing
me
for something I didn’t do. I’d make it up to Lissa, Carly, and Shani as soon as I got out of here. Apologize on my knees if I had to. Then we’d get to work.

“I seem to remember a conversation last term in which you told me how easy it was to hack into the school server,” she said. “Not the sort of thing you’d usually confide to the headmistress, is it?”

“I was trying to help Lissa,” I said. “That was a completely different conversation. And I don’t even take IT classes, except Intro to Programming, like everyone else. I wouldn’t know how to start hacking into anything.”

Except my brother’s password-protected laptop, just for fun one Saturday when I was at home and bored, but there was no way on earth I was going to tell her that.

“Fortunately, I do have proof of that. Your notebook’s IP address does not appear on the IT logs as doing anything out of the ordinary. Though I must admit a truly smart hacker wouldn’t use his or her own computer.”

“They’d use one of the anonymous ones in the lab,” I agreed quickly. Maybe a little too quickly. “I promise you, ma’am, I’m not the one you want. But we’ll find them. The junior class won’t fail. All of us will make sure of that.”

“Let’s hope you’re right. Have a pleasant evening, Miss Chang. Thank you again for coming to see me.”

A pleasant evening. Was she kidding?

My insides shook. I tried to hold myself tall and use a normal stride, but between nerves and overworked muscles, it was all I could do to put one shoe in front of the other. The corridors on the return trip stretched into the distance, endless. All the doors looked the same. The pictures of celebrities who had gone to school here, autographed to various principals dating back to the early 1900s, blurred into one another.

She thought I was capable of selling exam answers! Me! What kind of a Christian was I if the headmistress could suspect me of cheating and profiting from it? Not that I think I should be above suspicion just because of what I believe. But it should be taken into account, at least, shouldn’t it?

I’d been nothing but honest and nice in dealing with everyone. I didn’t play favorites with people—well, except my group of close friends, and you could hardly blame a person for that. But I guess all that didn’t count in the face of the simple fact that I was smart—and only really smart people were the suspects.

Which goes to show you just how weird this situation was. Well, there was a cure for weirdness, and I took it.

Father, I know You see everything, including people’s hearts. Forgive me for mouthing off to You earlier, and hear me now. Please give Ms. Curzon the confidence that I’m innocent. Help me to be a better vessel for Your love and kindness—and for Your clarity and truth. And Father, please reveal who’s really doing this. I can’t believe You’d want the whole class to be punished and for this person to get away with it. If I can help, I’m in Your hands.

My muscles still hurt, but my heart felt better as I finally staggered into my own dorm. The water was running in the shower, and Lissa’s Marc Jacobs bag lay on the bed.

I took a deep breath. “Lissa?” I called through the shower door.

No answer. A loofah mitt slapped soap energetically. I’d bet a term’s worth of
crème brulée
that the three of them had been in Carly’s room, ripping me from one side to the other just as energetically.

“Look, Lissa, I’m really sorry. I apologize for hurting your feelings and making a total butt of myself.”

“It’s not just my feelings you have to worry about.” Her voice sounded muffled, as if she was exfoliating her face, a task much more important than listening to me grovel.

“I know. I was horrible to Carly and Shani. I’ll apologize to them, too, but it’s you I have to live with.” I waited for a second. “Lissa? Are we okay?”

The water shut off and she reached out and snagged a towel off the rack. “It’s not that simple.” Her voice, even though it was quiet, echoed a little in the tile enclosure while she toweled off. Then she wrapped the Egyptian cotton around herself and stepped out. I moved back into the bedroom to give her some privacy.

“Remember last term, when you tried to tell me how wrong things looked between me and Callum?”

“Vividly,” I said. There were some things you just didn’t forget, and having your friend try to convince herself she could be a technical virgin was one of them.

“Well, this is
déjà vu
all over again.”

Technical virgin. Losing weight. Huh? “I don’t get the connection.”

“The connection is the things we’re willing to do for the sake of having a boyfriend.” Lissa came out of the bathroom in her Life is Good flannel pajama bottoms with hearts all over them, and a matching pink tank top. “I mean, look what I was almost willing to do, and what happened.”

“Lissa, there’s a world of difference between being filmed making out on a webcam video and me losing some weight. In fact, they’re not even in the same universe.”

She waved her hands helplessly. “I’m not explaining this very well. It’s not the what. It’s the why.”

“Uh, to lose a dress size? In my case, the why just isn’t that big a deal.”

“Are you sure?”

Okay, this was getting a little annoying. “You’re all making a mountain out of a mole hill, and getting mad about something that, in the cosmic scheme of things, doesn’t matter one bit. Why should you care about what I do with a trainer?”

Her hands didn’t wave around this time. She put them up in a stop gesture. “Never mind. Forget I said anything. Do what you want. I’m done.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I muttered.

“But if you ever want Carly and Shani to talk to you again, you still need to apologize. You made Carly cry in the cab over that crack about Brett Loyola.”

“I did?” Ouch.

“Yes. Use that brain of yours, Gillian. The girl is hurting enough over the fact that no matter what she does, she’s completely invisible to him. And you had to rub it in just to be mean.”

“I didn’t—” I stopped. Yes, I did. “I’ll go up there right now.”

Before I lost my nerve, I marched up to the third floor, to Room 317. Carly opened the door, and the smile froze on her face.

“Can I talk to you?”

She glanced behind her. “I—uh—”

“She can talk to both of us, if she has the guts,” came Shani’s voice from inside.

Oh, great. Stereo guilt. A two-for-one deal.

Carly went to sit cross-legged on her bed while Shani lounged on the other. All three of us were breaking lights-out, since Shani’s room was down the hall, but some things had to be dealt with before you slept on them and they got all hard inside you.

“I wanted to say I was sorry for being such a
mo guai nuer
,” I began in as steady a tone as I could manage. “You guys are only trying to help, and I hurt your feelings. Please say you forgive me.”

Carly was already up off the bed. She hugged me and said, “Of course I forgive you.”

I hugged her back. It was hard not to. There isn’t an unkind bone in the girl’s body. Some people see this as weakness. I see it as a gift that I really, really want for myself.

Not very likely, at this rate, but there’s always hope.

“Thanks.” My throat ached, but I didn’t tear up. No way. Not in front of Shani, who was looking at us with an expression that told me she wasn’t going to make this easy.

She tossed her braids back, and the beads on the ends of them clicked. “If it were just me, I’d say no problem. But I do have a problem with the way you treated Carly.”

“It’s okay,” Carly began, but Shani cut her off.

“No, it’s not. It’s not okay to rip a person apart and use the thing that means the most to them like a weapon.”

“I said I was sorry.” Man. How many times did I have to apologize? “If Carly and I are okay, then you and I should be, too.” Plus, this didn’t have anything to do with her. She’d just been sitting there when I’d lost my temper. That didn’t give her the right to decide who forgave who.