She's So Money (23 page)

Ugh
.

I looked at the bar, where the bottles that Camden had been drinking out of were still sitting, and matter-of-factly drained them both into my mouth before tossing them in the recycle bin. It would have been more dramatic if there’d been more than a teaspoon of wine left in either of them, but I figured it was the gesture that counted.

Saturday morning, when I got a text from Bella’s friend Darren asking me to call either him or Lucas, I figured they just had a routine question about payment dates or their next assignment. Of course, bad things seemed to be happening to me lately, not so much in threes as in three hundreds.

“Darren, what’s up?” I said into my phone when he answered. I’d ducked outside the restaurant during a lull in the lunch shift, and was huddled near the mailboxes, trying to stay out of yet another round of spring drizzle. At least nowadays it was usually warm spring drizzle.

“Hey, Maya,” said Darren. “Look, Lucas and I don’t think we’re gonna be able to finish our papers this weekend. Can you get someone else do to them?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling my neck tense up and my stomach drop to my feet.

“Yeah, I mean, thanks for the extra work and all. We love the money—”

“We do,” chimed in a voice from the background;

Lucas was apparently there with him. “But it’s kind of too much to do right now, especially since the S.A.T.s are coming up and we’re both taking a Kaplan course.”

“No problem,” I said, struggling to remain upright; I’d never fainted before, but I was pretty sure this is what the moment before passing out felt like. “Thanks for letting me know.” I hung up, then mentally screamed, “
Aaaaaah-hhhhh!
” before flinging myself dramatically against the mailboxes, which made a muffled clanging sound. Cat had already emailed to tell me that Bella was begging off because of the extra off season workouts her volleyball coach had just instituted, and now these guys? There was no point in arguing, though, or trying to convince them otherwise—who could blame them, really? Everyone already had their own work to do, especially as it was getting to be so late in the semester, and it wasn’t like anybody besides me needed, or even wanted, to make more than a few hundred bucks a week, tops. I couldn’t stop people from flaking. I just had to pick up the slack.

Me.

Myself.

I.

Yeah, there was no way that was going to happen.

“We’re totally screwed,” I whispered to Camden on the phone late that night, after work. I was under the covers of my bed; my parents were asleep, but there was no point in taking chances.

“We’re not,” he said. “I’ll write some of the goddamn papers if we have to, but we’re not screwed.”

I literally dropped the phone in surprise, although since I was lying down, it only had about two inches to fall.

I picked it back up. “You’ll what?”

“I’ll write some. They’ll be bad,” he warned. “But if we need to, I can do it.”

“Oh my God. That’s so sweet of you,” I said, my voice squeaking through the whisper.

“Or,” he said, “we could go with my original plan and kick Leonard’s ass.”

“Yeah, right. Man, I wish there was some other way. . . .” I used the glow from my phone to go over the assignment lists for Greenbrook and Weston again, wondering where the hell I might be able to cut corners. And then it hit me.

Everywhere.

As long as nobody from Weston ever talked to anybody from Greenbrook . . . there was a good fifty percent overlap between assignments, especially on the history papers where people could pick their own topics.

“Camden?” I whispered, hardly able to breathe; I was at once ecstatic and terrified, and I wriggled my head out from under the blankets in order to get more air. “What do you think the odds are of us getting caught if we start selling the same papers to the Weston kids and the Greenbrook kids?”

There was a long pause. “Well,” he said carefully, “a lot higher than they were before, for sure.”

“So you don’t think we should do it?” I asked.

“Please,” he said. “I’m bummed we didn’t start doing it earlier.” But his voice didn’t have its usual bravado.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“You’re worried, aren’t you?” I said finally.

“Actually, yeah,” Camden answered.

We both knew we had to do it anyway.

chapter sixteen

I wish I could say that our grand decision to sell duplicate
papers cut my work in half. Well, actually it sort of did, almost. We were able to double up on just over a third of the assignments, once all was said and done. But “horrifying train wreck” divided by two is still half a horrifying train wreck, especially when it is preceded by several weeks of preliminary train wreckage. I skipped a few classes for the first time ever, figuring that I could always get notes from someone else, whereas I needed this money now. Besides, Stanford wouldn’t care if I had a few unexcused absences on my attendance record (I assumed), but I was pretty sure they’d care if I got expelled for cheating. I didn’t know what scared me more at this point—missing out on Stanford if Leonard ratted me out for cheating, or missing out on Stanford if my parents found out about the fine and shipped me off to Thailand. The prospect of either kept me motivated to churn out the papers, even though the circles under my eyes were threatening to invade the rest of my face, while the blood churning through my veins was probably about eighty percent Mountain Dew.

My daily schedule that week, from the end of school until work, and then again from the end of work until I passed out for a few short hours, went a little something like this: typing, typing, reading, vision blurring, typing, typing, wrists cramping, fingers gnarling, falling asleep on the keyboard, lather, rinse, caffeine, typing, repeat. Jonny, trying to help, gave me this funky voice recognition software that he downloaded illegally, but after I started off somebody’s paper by dictating “While ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ would have been effective even without Harry’s memories,” and it ended up on screen as “White shows kill a manger flex evening with a hairy man or ease,” I gave up on that. Jonny, Cat, and the others had their own methods for dealing with the hellish work, but we were all too busy to even commiserate with one another, except for the occasional bitchy text message. It sucked. Everything sucked.

But Camden saved me. Any time I started feeling so exhausted that I wanted to cut corners, he would either talk me out of it or pick up the slack. When I forgot to highlight the assignments with obscene pictures to force our clients to copy them into their own writing before turning them in—still a serious security compromise—Camden would make sure to do it. His favorite method was to write,
Please tell the guidance counselor that I am contemplating teen suicide and this is a cry for help,
and his second favorite was the phrase
I have syphilis
. When I didn’t have time to print out papers and give him hard copies, he told me to start emailing them to him so that he could do it himself, and—once again thinking of security—created new fake email accounts for both of us just for this purpose. Even when I was two seconds from passing out for the night after having written yet another C-level paper on why “Madame Bovary was
so
justified in being a big ho,” I had to giggle when I logged in as [email protected] and sent files to [email protected].

It sucked, and it sucked, and I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t sleep some more, and then, suddenly or finally, I couldn’t tell which, F-day arrived. F-day being, of course, the absolute last day to pay off the Health Department fine before the penalties started kicking in. I owed Leonard, too, but I was taking care of that tomorrow. (Technically I’d owed him a few days ago, but I’d managed to convince him to give me an extension by standing really, really close to him and whispering my request directly in his ear. It was the closest to prostitution that I’d ever come.) The important part was, I now had the money for both payoffs—$15,000 in cash (and a little extra, actually, that I was planning on using to buy myself a little something extremely frivolous and to-be-determined) hidden in various places around my room. Camden had been good about making sure to pay me in crisp new hundreds, so at least the money didn’t take up that much physical space; most of it was tucked between my mattress and box spring—a cliché but effective hiding place—and the rest was in random spots around my closet.

That Friday morning, I put together two fat envelopes of cash and stuck the Health Department one between some books in my backpack, praying that I would make it through the school day and then to the Health Department without getting robbed, or into an accident, or waylaid by a plague of locusts, or distracted by the sudden appearance of Christian Bale declaring his love for me. I then used a clip to pull my hair out of my face and dressed in an outfit—black pants, a pale blue sleeveless shell, a black cardigan sweater, and black heels—that I thought would hopefully make me look at least marginally older and therefore less suspicious when I walked into the Health Department. I checked myself out in the mirror. Okay, now instead of seventeen I looked . . . like a college sophomore going to a summer job interview. Well, better than nothing. I threw my rarely used fake Coach purse into my backpack as a finishing touch on my “disguise” and prepared to take off for the Health Department the second the sixth period bell rang.

“You look like my mom,” Camden said. He was already in the car by the time I got there after school, and he looked at my outfit with a mixture of amusement and barely disguised revulsion as he turned the key in the ignition.

“Guess we shouldn’t make out then,” I said dryly. He was right, though—I’d added a strand of fake pearls that I’d dug out of my fourth grade dressup box to my official fine paying outfit at the last minute, resulting in a vaguely sad “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have” sort of look. I buckled my seat belt as Camden peeled out of the parking lot and headed downtown, then took the fake Coach out of my backpack and threw the envelope of cash into it. Of course, when we got there, Camden dropped me off at the door of the building and then decided to circle the block in lieu of waiting in the adjoining parking structure, and I forgot that I had put the cash into the purse and ended up carrying both my backpack and the purse into the Health Department. This meant that as I walked in, I had to ditch my backpack by the door and kick it under a crappy end table in a way that I hoped was subtle, but probably wasn’t. Whatever, I was here. Finally.

I walked up to the drab gray counter. In terms of its general atmosphere, the Health Department was pretty much a facsimile of the D.M.V., though with a lot fewer people waiting around. So far, so good. The only thing standing between me and freedom was the disheveled, fortyish woman manning the window, whose nametag said MANDY and whose overall demeanor said, “Is it the weekend yet?”

“Hi,” I said to Mandy. “I’m here to pay off the fine for Pailin Thai Restaurant.”

Mandy looked at me skeptically. “Usually that’s done by mail. Do you have the citation number?”

“Uh, yeah . . .” I fumbled through my purse for the original letter from Richard (or, as I had been calling him for the past month and a half, Dick) R. Jenkins. “Here it is,”

I said, handing her the now fairly crumpled paper.

She glanced at it. “And will you be paying by check or credit card?”

“Cash.”

Mandy raised an eyebrow at me. I smiled sweetly.

“Okay,” she said warily, and handed me a form to fill out. “I’ll need to see some ID.” I put the envelope of cash and my driver’s license onto the counter, trying to look casual. Mandy opened it, her eyes widening a little, and then took a very, very long time counting everything out. A line began to build up behind me. I hoped everyone was as bored as they looked and not paying attention to what was going on, as Mandy had to call a supervisor in to back up her own counting by recounting, as well as to mark every single bill with one of those anti-counterfeit pens.

“You’re all set,” she finally said, after what seemed like forever but was actually just long enough for blisters to start forming on both of my feet from standing there in my heels and shifting my weight around nervously.