She's So Money Page 2

  “Thanks, Dad.” I smiled, putting my thermos of coffee under my arm. I popped open one of the cans right away and downed a huge swig. “I will.”

  And I would have, if I hadn’t fallen asleep on my desk.

  chapter two

  The numbers on my blinking, beeping alarm clock were sideways from my perspective, since my head was resting on my desk in a puddle of drool. My eyes were open, but my brain wasn’t quite functioning yet, so I stared glumly as the little red digits on the panda’s stomach counted steadily forward. School started in forty five . . . forty four . . . forty three minutes. At forty minutes, I attempted to move my head and succeeded only in moving my eyeballs, giving me a lovely view of the bed that hadn’t been slept in and the piles of textbooks and papers from the night before strewn all over the carpet. Nat flung open the door and yelled, “Alarm, dumbass!” just as I was finally able to move my neck and stand up.

  Everything was a blur after that, from finding questionably clean clothes on my floor, to cramming in a last minute study session during homeroom, to completely missing the bell and having to race through the halls to make it to class on time.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” Sarah’s round, porcelainskinned face looked up at me as I sprinted through the door of our history classroom, where she was already set up with her usual test taking paraphernalia: two hair clips doing their best to hold back her silky, long brown hair, two ballpoint pens, three #2 pencils, and a little carton of orange juice. “You look terrible,” she said. Her arms were scrunched inside her sleeves as always, and her wide blue eyes got even wider when I threw my books on my desk, sat down, and then collapsed face first onto them.

  “Then I look how I feel,” I mumbled into my notebook. “I fell asleep after work last night and didn’t study for this like, at all.”

  Sarah patted my arm sympathetically. “Shut up,” she teased. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

  Yeah, well . . . I didn’t.

  “So much for Stanford,” I said an hour later, after the carnage was over. “I’m gonna be slinging Tom Yum soup for the rest of my life.” We gathered up our stuff and walked out of class, me looking shell shocked, Sarah looking chipper.

  “As previously mentioned, shut up,” she said. “You always do this. You always panic prematurely.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said glumly, yanking out the pencil that I’d been using to hold my hair up and shaking the tangled bun loose.

  “What’d you get on our freshman year Bio midterm?” Sarah asked.

  “An A,” I said.

  “Sophomore year Government final?”

  “A,” I admitted, narrowing my eyes at her. I knew where this was going.

  “Eighth grade first semester Social Studies presentation? Sixth grade science fair project? Third grade shoe box diorama on the rain forest? First grade book report on Green Eggs and Ham? Preschool finger painting?”

  “Yeah, yeah, all A’s. You made your point,” I said as she grinned at me cheerfully. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t still fail miserably just now. Good-bye, Stanford!” I said dramatically, pausing abruptly midstep to fling myself against a locker. Our school lockers are green, dingy, overwhelmingly covered in graffiti, and haven’t been painted in about ten years, so I immediately regretted it and turned around so that I was facing the hallway.

  “Shut up,” Sarah said. “We’re still getting into Stanford, we’re still going, we’re still rooming together, and that’s the end of it. Fingers crossed,” she added.

  “You’re going, Miss I-Could-Flunk-Everything-and-Still-Be-a-Shoo-In-for-Valedictorian. After that test, I won’t be going anywhere but Miss Havisham’s Hooker School for Delinquent . . . Hookers.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “That is very much the theme of this morning, yes.”

  Sarah took my arm and steered me toward the cafeteria, which was a pretty good idea, considering that the only thing I wanted to do was drown my sorrows in Cheetos. But we only managed to take two steps before we were waylaid by Leonard Chang, a sophomore who works for the school tutoring program with us. Harmless? Yes. Annoying? Totally.

  “You’re fired,” Leonard said to me. He’s exactly my height, and his face was very close to mine—I could see my reflection in the lenses of his round, black framed glasses.

  I backed away and stared at him, too zonked to figure out what the hell he could be talking about.

  “Danny Gray just got an A on his last test and his parents don’t want to pay for tutoring anymore, so he quit,” Leonard explained in his slightly nasal, rapid fire voice. “Which is just as well, because he was never gonna beat my G.P.A. anyway.” He energetically pushed up the sleeves of the waffle weave he was wearing underneath his T-shirt before pulling them down again. “I just saw him in the tutoring office. He asked me to tell you. He didn’t ask me to tell you that you look great today. But you look great today.”

  Sarah giggled and I tried not to roll my eyes. “Thanks,” I said. Leonard tells me I look great about half the time he sees me. The other half of the time, he opts for “hot.” It’s sweet, but come on.

  “By the way, did you hear that Mr. Dillman is hooking up with that new librarian-in-training?” he added. For a guy who has barely any friends, Leonard somehow knows everything that happens before anybody else.

  “Ew, really?” Sarah said, and we exchanged a grossed out glance.

  “That’s what I heard. I also heard that Taylor Spector got a nose job and is just pretending it was a basketball accident. Be sure to check him out when the bandages come off. Anyway, you should probably go over to the tutoring office and pick up a new student,” Leonard said to me. “Not that you could ever beat my record of twelve students at once. I could walk you.”

  “That’s cool, Leonard, but no thanks.” I started inching away from him. Sarah, who’d already been inching, was already a few feet down the hall.

  “Okay,” said Leonard agreeably. “Hey, you know ‘Maya, May I’?” I winced. I certainly did know it. It was a song he’d written (and, during a few awkward moments that I’d since been trying to forget, performed) for me last year. “I learned another chord, so it sounds a lot better now.” He took off his glasses and breathed on them, then polished them with his shirt, squinted, and put them back on. “It’s a four chord song now. I’ll play it for you sometime, if you remind me to bring my guitar—”

  “Sure, that would be great. Later!” I said, running to catch up with Sarah, then grabbing her arm and walking as fast as I could away from Leonard. I made the mistake of glancing back and saw him energetically waving at me.

  “He hearts you,” Sarah said solemnly when we were out of earshot, then laughed.

  “A year and counting,” I said, shaking my head. Who knew that when I’d volunteered to train the new freshman tutor last year that he’d end up crushing on me this hard?

  “Maybe he’ll ask you to the Spring Fling,” she continued, indicating the glittery poster we were passing in the hallway. It said, SWING THE FLING! and had a badly drawn picture of a Weston High Warrior dancing with a black silhouette of a woman in a flapper outfit.

  “Great, I’ve always dreamed of bringing a date who looks like he’s twelve,” I said sarcastically.

  “Oh, come on,” Sarah giggled. “He looks thirteen, easy.”

  She was still giggling when we got to the tutoring office, but when I miserably plunked down onto the couch in the corner of the main room and went back to wearing my posttest shell shocked face, she immediately shut up, sat down next to me, and passed me a conciliatory half eaten bag of mini Oreos. She patted my arm as I snarfed them down.

  “Come on,” she murmured. “You didn’t flunk.”

  “Maya, you look like medical waste,” a voice piped up from behind her.

  My friend Cat is not quite as nurturing.

  I turned toward the row of study rooms lining the back wall of the tutoring office, from where Cat had just emerged. She gaped at me from behind
her glasses of choice for the day, which were purple cat’s-eye frames. She’s got twenty twenty vision, but she likes to make a statement. And today’s, given the blue streaked pigtails, the black and red fingernails, and the deliberately ripped black velvet skirt, was apparently “arty freak.”

  “Study amongst yourselves!” Cat snapped at the two confused looking sophomores whom she’d left in the study room. She closed the door on them and threw herself onto the couch with me and Sarah. A little too enthusiastically—we were still disentangling ourselves when we heard the loud crash of a pile of books hitting the floor.

  “That would be Jonny,” said Cat. I looked up and saw our friend Jonathan just inside the doorway of the main room, picking up his books and a graphing calculator and frantically inspecting the latter for damage.

  “Sorry,” he said, pushing up his glasses and straightening out the front of his green button down shirt. “In my defense, I wasn’t being clumsy. It’s just that I saw all you girls tangled up on the couch, and I got distracted.” He grinned, absentmindedly patted his spiky blond hair, and disappeared into a study room to wait for Hilary, his favorite freshman. We were all convinced he was deliberately tutoring her badly in order to keep her in the program. The girl is fourteen and has a rack as big as my head. Or, I guess, two of my heads. If you want to get technical.

  As Cat went back into her study room to finish tutoring her students, I got up off the couch and rang the bell at the window in the side wall where Mrs. Hunter, the school secretary who runs the tutoring program, usually sits. After a moment, Principal Davis appeared at it.

  “Maya!” he roared. He looked like he wanted to jump through the window and give me a bear hug. Considering he is approximately the size of a Prius, I was glad he didn’t.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Principal Davis. Where’s Mrs. Hunter?”

  “On a break, on a break,” he said jovially. “What can I do you for, smarty pants?”

  Smarty pants? Seriously?

  “I was wondering if you had anyone on the list,” I said. “Leonard Chang just told me that Danny Gray quit because he got an A in Geometry.”

  “An A? Because of you? Wonderful! Of course, we’ll get another student for you right away!” Principal Davis punched a few keys on Mrs. Hunter’s computer. “How about Camden King?” he asked.

  Ew. That guy.

  “Is there anyone else?” I asked quickly. Principal Davis’s hand was poised on the mouse, looking like it was ready to click a doom sealing button.

  “There is,” he said, “but you’re the only free tutor who’s qualified to teach Algebra II.”

  “I just mean that Camden King is kind of—”

  “Difficult? True. You’d be his sixth tutor in a month.”

  My eyes widened. “His sixth in a—”

  “But if anyone can turn that boy around, it’s you!” Principal Davis clicked the mouse, punched a few more keys on Mrs. Hunter’s computer, and then grabbed a few sheets out of the printer. He stapled the papers to Camden’s information folder and shoved it across the counter at me. “Remember, our cumulative G.P.A. is the third highest in the state. Our funding has almost doubled, thanks to students like you helping out students who are . . . not so much like you. So go forth and conquer, for the good of the school!”

  He came out from behind the window, patted my shoulder energetically, and swept out the door past the returning Mrs. Hunter with a hearty “Tutor hard, everyone! Keep up the good work!”

  Sarah and I rolled our eyes at each other as I sat back down on the couch next to her and stared at Camden’s information folder with distaste. Technically I’d never spoken to him, but I’d seen him around school a lot, and I could believe the stories. His family is loaded, he’s been popular since birth, and the license plate on his Escalade says PIMP CK. You know those guys who are really, really hot, but at the same time you’re pretty sure they’ve got crabs? Colin Farrell comes to mind. And so does Camden King.

  “Christ,” I muttered, flipping through the folder and seeing various transcript pages with grades ranging from C– to F. “Are they serious?”

  “Maybe they’re confident you can handle him,” Sarah said hopefully. She peered over my shoulder into the folder.

  “That’s not the point. The point is that I hate him . . . even though I’ve never met him.” I looked up. “Is that wrong? Is that shallow?”

  “No shallower than the shallow end of his giant backyard swimming pool full of whores,” Cat called through the cracked open door of her study room.

  “Thanks, I feel better,” I said.

  “No problem. It’s what I do.” She ducked her head back into the study room.

  “Well,” Sarah ventured, again trying to find the upside. “At least he’s cute. I mean, he’s tall . . . and he’s got the body of a water polo player, and he doesn’t even play water polo.” She blushed a little as she said this, then deliberately let her long brown hair fall over her face.

  “Irrelevant,” I said glumly. “Being an ass trumps being a piece of ass.” I went back to looking through his information folder. “Wow, he’s even dumber than I thought. No wonder all the other tutors quit on him.”

  “Come on, Maya.” Sarah wasn’t giving up. “We don’t know who his other tutors were. Maybe he’ll be really nice to you. Maybe it’ll be . . . fun.”

  “Suuure,” I said.

  “You know,” Camden said as he walked up to the study room where I was waiting for him, “you should be wearing a tighter shirt.”

  He plunked down in the chair next to me, elbowed the door closed, and looked me over from head to toe.

  “Uh . . . what?” I stared at him, hoping that either:a) I’d heard him wrong or b) I’d heard him right, but he had a reasonable explanation for his annoying comment, and that he was about to elaborate in a very polite manner.

  He kicked his Pumas up onto the table and leaned back. “You’re pretty cute, but you don’t really have much going on up in this area,” he said, waving his hands in the general direction of my chest. “Tighter would help. Emphasize what you do have.” He put his feet back on the floor, glanced up and down at my outfit of jeans and a black crewneck sweater, and then turned to check out his own hazy reflection in the study room window. He yanked off his hoodie to expose a blue and gray ringer tee underneath, and then ran a hand through his purposeful bedhead of blondish-brown waves. I would’ve admired his biceps if he hadn’t already been doing it himself.

  “Maybe you should worry less about what I’m wearing and more about the fact that you’re flunking Algebra,” I said icily.

  “I’m not flunking,” Camden said, flinging his hoodie over the back of the chair next to him. “I’m getting a D. Didn’t they give you all my info, uh . . .” He leaned over and looked at the cover of my notebook. “Mayo?”

  “Maya.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Your handwriting sucks.”

  “As do your grades, so we should probably get started,” I said, yanking my notebook away from him and taking out some pencils. “Do you have any homework you want to go through?”

  “Homework? Sure,” he said agreeably. I would have been surprised at the sudden attitude shift, except for the fact that it lasted about two seconds—his cell phone beeped, and he spent the next several minutes sending ten different texts to various people. Somewhere in the middle of the process, he pulled an algebra book out of his backpack with his non-texting hand and shoved it in my general direction without looking at me; it slid off the table and I leaned over to grab it.

  “Nice butt,” Camden said from behind me. I quickly sat up. “Too bad your personality doesn’t match it,” he added.

  “And too bad your brains don’t match your dad’s bank account,” I shot back. “If they did, we wouldn’t be here.”

  Camden stared at me for a moment, opening his mouth and then closing it again before breaking into a grin. “Wow,” he finally said as he got out a mechanical pencil and started clicking it noisily.
“You’re an interesting one. Most girls are so stunned by this whole business”—he waved the pencil at himself—“that they can’t even attempt to be bitchy.”

  “Well, I’m not and I can,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I like you or hate you.”

  “Hate me. It’ll make us even,” I said. “Now shut up and open your math book.”

  He raised an eyebrow, looking at me with what appeared to be half admiration and half desire to throw the book at my head, but by the time he started to say something, his phone beeped again with yet another text. He checked it, and then snapped his phone shut with finality.

  “Sorry,” he said, getting up and lazily stretching his arms over his head. “We’re gonna have to reschedule this little shindig.”

  “Fine,” I said, scooting back in my chair. “You still have to pay me for the hour.”

  “Not according to school policy, but nice try at swindling me.” Camden grinned and threw down some cash anyway, then pocketed his cell phone and opened the study room door. “I’m off to sexually harass some cheerleaders.” And with that, he peaced out.

  I sat there for a minute, both angry and amused at what had just happened. Camden had not only lived up to his reputation, but he had actually surpassed it. I shuddered, pondering how horrific it would be the next time I had to hang out with him for more than ten minutes; eventually I decided to just be glad he was gone for the moment. Stuffing the relatively effortless fifteen bucks I’d just made into my pocket, I started to pack up my stuff, then saw that Camden had left his book bag. Huh. I casually bumped it with my hip on my way out, making it fall off the table.

  Good thing the trash can was there to catch it.

  chapter three

  Thanks to Camden bailing early, I was able to finish all of my homework before my restaurant shift even started, and thanks to the speediness of machine test scanning, I found out I’d gotten an A– on my history test. Fine, so I’d been overly paranoid . . . but any senior year G.P.A. slippage could jeopardize the whole merit based scholarship thing, so it wasn’t like I could really slack off. At all.