She's So Money (24 page)

“Thank you!” I said, gratefully taking the receipt she handed me. “So we’re clear? We won’t be getting any more notices in the mail?”

“You shouldn’t. At least, not until you flunk another inspection,” she said.
Ouch
.

My heart still felt about a million pounds lighter.

I went outside, and Camden pulled up to where I was waiting on the sidewalk. I got back into his car with a literal spring in my step. I kicked off my heels, yanked off the cardigan and the fake pearls, took my hair down, let it fall over my shoulders and into my face, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“One down,” Camden said, leaning over and pressing his forehead to mine.

“One to go,” I answered.

I floated through that evening’s restaurant shift, trembling with the happy knowledge that the nightmare of the fine was behind me, but keenly aware that I still had the Leonard issue to deal with the next morning. Would he ask for more money? Would I have to keep the cheating ring going? I didn’t want to think about it; I was looking forward to my first full night’s sleep in almost a month.

Of course, when you’re that sleep deprived, even ten-hours feels like two, and Leonard was already sitting at a corner table, engrossed in a copy of
Entertainment Weekly
, when I rushed into the downtown Starbucks where he’d told me to meet him. I was armed with the other envelope of cash that I’d prepared yesterday, and oh-so-ready to put the rest of the nightmarish last few weeks behind me. I only hoped that he wasn’t planning on pulling some incredibly obnoxious last minute move, like charging me interest for being twenty minutes late.

“Hey there, you finally made it,” Leonard said, waving me over with a big grin. “Sit down. You want anything? On me. This thing is apparently a peppermint Frap.” He indicated the rather girly looking drink on the table in front of him.

“I just want to get out of here A.S.A.P.,” I said icily, and watched as his face fell for a moment before turning back into a now fake looking grin. “Here.” I shoved the cash at him without bothering to sit down. He started to open the envelope. “Oh my God, seriously?” I asked. “You’re gonna count it
here
? It’s not like you don’t know where to find me if I screwed it up somehow.”

“Of course I’m counting it here,” Leonard said pleasantly, making a big show of rolling up his sleeves. “I mean, you’re a cheater. You obviously can’t be trusted, and I already gave you a few extra days. Why don’t you just calm down?”

I resisted the urge to snap his reedy little neck and instead sighed deeply and plunked myself down in the chair across from him. He opened the envelope and started counting the bills; to his credit, he did it by sticking his hands inside the envelope and keeping them there, so that no one could tell what was inside if they didn’t bother to really look . . . which the coffee downing, noisily chattering morning crowd around us wasn’t bothering to do.

“Did you know that Derek Rowe’s sister got a boob job?” he asked conversationally as he counted.

“No,” I said coldly, while silently filing that information away in my head to tell Cat later. No wonder Bella said that Abby Rowe had missed an entire week of volleyball practice toward the end of the season. Probably didn’t want to be jumping around with all the extra new weight. Or, God forbid, having to dive for a bump. “Are you done yet?” I asked.

“I am,” Leonard said, closing the envelope and tucking in the flap. “It’s all here, thanks. This’ll work for now.” He got up, throwing a twenty on the table. “I gotta go, but if you want, get yourself a cappuccino or something. It’s on me.”

“You already said that, and I already ignored you,” I said, shoving his money back at him. “And what do you mean by ‘this works for now’? I’m done. I’m retired. I’m not doing this anymore.”

“You might have to,” said Leonard. He was smiling, but there was an ominous hint in his voice. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll give you plenty of advance notice.” I stared at him in disbelief as he walked off, literally whistling a jaunty tune. He couldn’t—he wasn’t going to—screw that! I was graduating in two months. If he thought he was going to have time to blackmail me any further, he was mistaken.

Well, actually he wasn’t mistaken, since he had two months to blackmail me further, but for now . . .

For now, it was over.

Oh my God. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.

Okay. It was over. I was so angry at Leonard’s last minute threat that I wanted to throw a chair at his skinny little back as it disappeared out the door, but—it was over.

Oh my God, it was over!

A spontaneous grin broke out on my face, and it grew even wider when I heard my phone chime and I opened it to find a text from Camden:
Everything go ok?

I called him. “Everything indeed went okay,” I said happily, leaning back and kicking my feet up on the chair that Leonard had just vacated. I looked around at the crowd of cheerful Starbucks faces, and even the few grumpy ones, and knew that I had just seamlessly transitioned from being one of the latter to one of the former. “I mean,” I continued, “he sort of threatened that he might—but you know what, don’t even worry about it. Everything went okay.”

“Awesome,” Camden said. “Uh, so . . . what time do you think you’re gonna be over here later?” Spring Fling was that evening, and even though I would be stuck at work while Camden was getting his dance on with Dani and the rest of his pals, I was still supposed to head over to the after party he was throwing at his house. It was probably going to go all night—his parents were out of town again, as usual.

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering why he sounded a little tense before chalking it up to my own recently alleviated paranoia of the past few weeks. “Depends on how crowded the restaurant is tonight. Probably some time after eleven. Maybe closer to midnight?” I checked my watch and started to get up; speaking of the restaurant, it was almost time for my lunch shift.

“Well, you know where I’ll be,” Camden said.

“Facedown on the floor drunk?” I asked.

“Actually, I’ll probably drink in the hot tub. Quicker that way.”

“Try to stay conscious until I get there.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll save you a spot.”

I giggled. We said good-bye and hung up, and I fairly skipped to the bus stop to head to work. The lunch shift ended up being brutal, and the dinner shift was our most crowded night in weeks, but I somehow managed to juggle everything perfectly—no missed orders, no mistakes, nothing but a smile for every single customer. My parents and Nat all commented at one point or another on my great mood and the sunshine radiating from my voice; I just smiled mysteriously and asked, “What, can’t a girl be happy every once in a while for no reason?”

“No” was Nat’s answer.

“You are my favorite little brother!” I squealed at him;

I reached up and ruffled his hair, all the while balancing an entire tray full of lime sodas. He looked at me strangely as I giggled like an idiot, practically drunk from my good mood. I hadn’t thought it was possible to be any happier than I was a few weeks ago, when I’d gotten that letter from Stanford, but that had lasted only a few minutes before Leonard ruined it, whereas my present giddiness had been steadily growing for hours now.

The delirium from being so tired for so many days in a row certainly wasn’t helping to calm me down, and neither were the four Thai iced coffees I drank during the dinner shift, so when Cat and I got to Camden’s house later that night, I practically ran down the stairs ahead of her to the basement, low fiving people on the way like a huge dork, hollering, “Hey!” at anyone who glanced in my direction, even downing a shot that someone handed to me on the fly. At the basement door, I squeezed in between Stacey and Nate, who were both examining the fake henna tattoo she’d just put around her belly button.

“Nice, Maya!” Nate hooted as I rushed past them, peeling off my T-shirt to reveal the top of that cute little red bikini I’d bought a few weeks back, in preparation for hopping into the hot tub with Camden. I should have felt self conscious—there were a few other girls in bikinis, but most of the people were still in their Spring Fling dresses or suits, albeit in various states of disarray—but by that point I was in too good of a mood. I grinned at Nate and did a little mock shimmy at him, eliciting an appreciative whistle, and then turned back to the hot tub. I got two steps closer before I realized what was going on in it.

Camden and Dani were making out.

I stopped dead in my tracks, my eyes widening, my heart pounding, my breath catching and sticking in my throat. They say when you’re about to die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. Well, now I know that when you’re about to kill someone, the same thing happens. Except that instead of your entire life, it’s just the moments you had spent with that person, and as every moment flashes by, it now contains a chain saw.

“You
asshole
!” I screamed, so loudly that everyone in the room could hear me over the music. They all turned to stare as I took a few steps closer to the hot tub, staring daggers at Camden and Dani the whole way, and just barely resisting picking up a beer can off the floor and throwing it.“I can’t believe I ever trusted you!”

Camden calmly disengaged himself from Dani’s lips, just long enough to turn in my direction and smirk. “Yeah, I can’t believe you ever did either,” he said.

The room was silent. I stood there for a moment, silent as well. Furious. Devastated. Wanting to kill. Wanting to die.

Then I turned around, not caring that everyone could see that I was crying, and walked out.

chapter seventeen

I spent the rest of the weekend mentally beating myself
to a pulp. How had I, a smart girl with a good, practical head on her shoulders (if I did say so myself), fallen for the biggest man-whore in school? How had I let him use and humiliate me like that? Had he and Dani been hooking up the whole time? Had everyone known and been laughing at me for weeks? Worst of all, did I deserve the pain? Was it my own fault for being such a colossal idiot?
Yeah
, I answered myself.
Yeah, I do deserve it
. I was just as stupid as every other girl in the history of time who thought that a sketchpad had finally changed because of her. Lesson learned. Lesson brutally, mortifyingly learned.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from spending all of Sunday obsessively checking my cell and email every two minutes, in case Camden called or texted or wrote. I wasn’t planning on picking up or texting him back—while I desperately missed what had become an almost constant electronic stream of snarky flirtiness, or flirty snarkiness, I wanted the satisfaction of
not
doing any of that—but he never did send any communication, so the satisfaction never came. The only calls I got were from Cat, which I let go to voice mail; the only texts I got were from Jonny, none of which I bothered to read—they probably wanted to console me about Camden, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone, including them. Basically, any time on Sunday that I wasn’t working at the restaurant, I was holed up in my room, calling through the door whenever someone knocked to say that I was fine, just doing a lot of homework, when the reality was that I was crying into a pillow, and occasionally yelling into it—at myself. At one point, when all my tears seemed to have run out, I tried catching up on all my own homework that I’d been ignoring lately; the attempt lasted about fourteen seconds before my body found some sort of hydration reserve and I started crying all over again. And when I
was
at work, I had such a fake smile of complete happiness pasted on my face that I single handedly brought our tips to forty percent above the average for a Sunday.

Wow. I should’ve dated sketchpads and had them cheat on me the entire past month or so—I could’ve paid off the fine without having to do anything illegal.

But then Monday morning came, and I couldn’t hide anymore. I listened to Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” several times as I was getting ready, mostly because “I Will Survive” seemed a little too middle aged divorcée, and carefully chose an outfit—my lowest rise jeans, a dark gray fitted sweater with a deep V-neck, and chunky black shoes that made me two inches taller—that I hoped walked the line between “I look so freakin’ hot, it doesn’t matter that I got publicly cheated on two days ago” and “I don’t care about same.”

By the time I arrived at school, I had pasted on my fake cheerful smile from the weekend, but it quickly disappeared as I heard the murmurs in the hallway, from “Dude, did you hear?” to “Yeah, Camden and Dani . . .” to “Brutal, just brutal, man.” My smile failing, I aimed for an expression that I hoped looked convincingly neutral, and for a moment, I thought it was working.

And then Cat and Jonny approached my locker.

“Hi,” they said, their faces grim and their voices hard. Around us, everyone was in a rush to get to first-period, because the bell was about to ring, but when I shut my locker door and turned to look at them, Cat and Jonny were both standing stock still.

“Hey,” I said hesitantly, not really sure what those oddly focused looks on their faces meant; Cat was standing with her arms crossed, and Jonny’s hand was poised at an odd angle on his backpack strap. They both stared at me. “Sorry I didn’t answer your calls yesterday,” I started. “I was—”