She's So Money Page 6

  I nervously grabbed a handful of my own hair and twisted it, then kicked violently at the table leg closest to my right foot. Why had I chosen last night to skimp on the cleanup? Why hadn’t I been nicer to those awful women despite their evilness? And where was I going to get $10,000? Because there was no way I was going to show my parents this letter. No. The restaurant meant too much to them. It was my family’s entire source of income. Not to mention the trouble I was going to get in if they found out. They’d ship me off to Thailand, and I’d never get to go to Stanford. And even if they didn’t ship me off, I wouldn’t be able to go, because we wouldn’t be able to afford it, because we couldn’t afford a $10,000 fine. There was no way. We’d go out of business.

  I blinked back more tears, then looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath, followed by another. I pressed my hands, still cold from having been on the steering wheel a little while earlier, to my forehead, then put them down again, then folded the letter up and put it back in the envelope. No. I wasn’t going to tell my parents. Or Krai, or my brother, or anyone else who might decide that the best course of action would be to ’fess up. No way. No how. This was my problem—this was my fault—and I was just going to have to fix it myself. I went back to the kitchen, where I smiled brightly at Krai and told him that the fine was minimal, that we’d pay it off with tonight’s tip jar, and that he shouldn’t worry about it. I then asked myself how the hell I was going to make ten grand in a month and a half.

  Stripping?

  No.

  Prostitution?

  No.

  Selling my eggs to infertile couples who are really gung ho about having kids with smart DNA?

  Maybe.

  And then the solution dawned on me. And it was much, much worse.

  chapter six

  Ring. Ring. Ring. It wasn’t until later that night, after the dinner shift, that I got up the courage to do what I had to do. Although the knowledge that the Health Department letter was in my backpack, probably burning a hole through the already worn canvas, did help. I nervously scrunched myself into the fetal position on my bed, flipped a corner of the blanket over myself, and jiggled my cell phone impatiently, waiting for a pickup. Instead, I heard,“Hey, it’s Camden. Leave a message, and maybe I’ll call you back.”

  Argh! Fine, I’d talk to his voice mail. I had called once already, but had chickened out and hung up, so his phone was going to have two missed calls from me anyway. I wasn’t about to make it three.

  Beep. “Hey, Camden, it’s Maya. Uh, your tutor. Or I guess, technically, your old tutor, although that was just—I mean, I just had a question for you, if you could give me a call back. Thanks. ’Bye.” I started to close the phone, then remembered something and kept talking. “Oh, I got all your texts. Sorry I didn’t answer them before. I guess this is me answering them now. Uh, ’bye.” Yeah, I didn’t sound like a douche bag or anything. It actually didn’t matter, because he never called me back that night, even though I stayed up until one in the morning, and went to sleep with the phone right next to my head. Fine. It wasn’t like I didn’t know where his locker was.

  “Hi!” I said brightly as Camden approached his locker the next morning, looking very sleepy; his hair was sticking up in all directions and he took several long blinks before registering who I was. “Can I talk to you about something?” My voice was as perky as I could possibly make it, even as I nervously clutched my books to my chest.

  “Whatever,” Camden said, having woken up enough to realize that I was standing right up against his locker door. He put a hand under each of my arms, picked me up without any apparent effort, and moved me aside, then started spinning his combination.

  I forged ahead with my plan—if I didn’t, I was going to lose my nerve. “Okay, so remember when you offered to pay me to do your homework for you?” I asked. The footsteps and chatter of people streaming past on their way to first-period was noisy enough that I didn’t bother to lower my voice. Nobody was paying attention anyway; the ballots for Spring Fling King and Queen were going out this morning, and almost every conversation was some form of who to vote for, or why it was stupid to vote for anyone.

  “Not really,” Camden said, noisily transferring the contents of his book bag to his locker, except for his iPod nano, which he put in the back pocket of his jeans.

  “You were in your hot tub,” I said helpfully, then, remembering, blushed and started nervously twirling a piece of my hair.

  Camden turned to me and smirked. “I’m in my hot tub a lot.” He took off his coat and threw it in the locker as well, then shut the door and started off down the hallway.

  I tagged along, steeling myself to the possibility of begging if necessary. “Well, anyway, you asked me, and I said no,” I continued, trying to sound casual. “But I just wanted you to know that I changed my mind, and I’ll totally do it now.”

  “Oh really?” he said, continuing to walk extremely fast. He gave Derek Rowe a casual punch in the shoulder as he passed us going in the opposite direction. Derek looked at us askance for a split second, obviously surprised to see us walking together, but he didn’t slow down.

  “Really,” I said, quickly ducking in between some band kids in order to keep up with Camden, and earning myself a bonk on the elbow from one of their trumpet cases. Ow! I had the cushioning of a cable knit cardigan over a long-sleeved T-shirt, but that was still going to bruise.

  “So you decided you couldn’t resist me after all?” Camden asked. He turned to look down at me as he walked, a hint of a smile on his face.

  “Yes,” I said sarcastically, rolling my eyes, “that’s exactly it. I could not get the image of your hotness out of my mind. All I could think about was how happy it would make me to add convenience to your life by doing your homework for you.” Now that we were talking about it, I actually was having some problems getting rid of the mental image of him basically flashing me in his basement, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “Now you’re talking,” said Camden. I suppressed the urge to smack him upside the head. Seriously, I actually used my left hand to pin my right hand to the books I was carrying. Behind him, Leonard passed by us and waved energetically at me, before realizing who I was with. He stared at both of us suspiciously as he slowly moseyed away.

  I waited until Leonard was out of hearing range, then asked Camden, “So, do we have a deal?”

  “Nope,” he said airily.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Too little, too late, sweetness. I already got another tutor.” He paused outside of a classroom. “This is me,” he said, indicating the door.

  “You couldn’t have gotten another tutor,” I said, stopping with him. “The tutoring office said I was the only one qualified to teach Algebra II.”

  “Yeah, well, they sent me some kid,” he shrugged. “Lenny somebody. Or Leo, maybe.”

  I cringed. “Leonard? The guy who just walked by us?”

  “No idea. Little Asian kid? Glasses?”

  “Yeah, but . . .” My mind searched frantically for a way to get around this unexpected turn of events. “Okay, well, if you just explain to the office that my quitting was a mix up, then maybe they would let us—”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.” He flashed me a cocky smile. “Say please.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You’re asking me for a favor, not the other way around.”

  I sighed. “Please?”

  “How ’bout pretty please?” he asked.

  “Pretty please,” I said flatly, suppressing the urge to vomit.

  “Pretty please with a really, really hot naked chick on top,” he said.

  I glared. He grinned. “Meet me in the parking lot after school and we’ll talk,” he said. He opened the door to his classroom and stepped inside. “And by the way?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re late for class.” He slammed the door just as the bell started to ring.

&
nbsp; “Hey,” Sarah’s voice called out, as I stood at my locker, jacket half on, frantically throwing stuff into my backpack. Surprised, I jumped and spun around. It was the end of the day, and my state of controlled panic had turned into a state of uncontrolled panic. If Camden didn’t come through for me when I met him in a few minutes, I was either going to be dead when my parents found out about the fine and killed me, or screwed when they found out and shipped me to Thailand. Either way, I’d be college education–less when the fine shut down the restaurant and took my family’s livelihood and all our savings down with it. I felt sick to my stomach, and it took all my strength to greet Sarah back as if there were nothing, instead of everything, wrong.

  “Hey!” I said. “Hi there! Hi. I mean, hey.”

  “Whoa, you okay?” Sarah asked, searching my face. Yep, I’d failed to conjure up an even remotely normal voice.

  “Fine, fine,” I lied, nervously chewing on my thumbnail. I fought the urge to spill the entire story to Sarah immediately. It wasn’t like I didn’t trust her. I knew she wouldn’t tell, but she was also the type to encourage me to tell, and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

  She raised her eyebrows and peered at me through her bangs. “So . . . you wanna go?” she asked.

  I looked at her blankly.

  “You said you’d give me a ride home before you went to work?”

  “Huh?” I asked, pausing with my backpack halfway up on my shoulder. “Yes? No. Uh, I can’t. Sorry, I—Nat texted me during sixth period, and apparently we both have to go straight there today. Like, literally now, because, you know . . .” I trailed off, hoping that she wouldn’t notice that I had totally not given her a real reason.

  “Oh, okay. No problem. Oh, I should probably run for the bus then!” Sarah started buttoning up her coat.

  “Oh my God, yeah. Sorry, go!” I waved her in the general direction of the school doors.

  “Going!” Sarah took off down the hall, trotting at first and then switching to a run, or at least as much of a run as she could handle given her giant book bag and clunky Mary Janes.

  I yelled, “Sorry! Come by later and I’ll give you free food!” to her retreating back, made a mental note to ask Krai to fry up some extra Shrimp Tod Mun (her favorite) in case she did stop by, and then practically sprinted to the parking lot to meet Camden. This time I made sure to stay far enough away from his car door that he couldn’t lure me in and drive off someplace random; I was hovering about ten feet away from the Escalade’s fender as he walked up.

  “What are you doing,” he asked, “standing far enough away so I can’t lure you into the car and drive off someplace random?”

  Observant bastard. “Just paranoid that your STDs have jumping skills,” I said, covering. “So have you decided about this homework thing?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve decided yes.”

  Yes!

  “Except . . .”

  No!

  “I’d need to see a sample of the work first, you know.” I stared at him. “What?” he asked. “That’s standard business practice. Don’t look so insulted.” He threw the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and yanked the strings—it was beginning to drizzle a little.

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” I said. “If you’re rocking a D average right now, I’m pretty sure I could pump that up for you with both hands tied behind my back.”

  Apparently, somebody passing by only heard the last half of my sentence and started laughing uproariously. I stepped closer to Camden and lowered my voice. “Okay, so discussing cheating on homework for large sums of money probably isn’t the smartest thing to do out in public,” I muttered. He had to duck his head to hear me. “I have to be at work in like, two minutes, so just give me whatever you have for tonight, and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Here,” he said, reaching into his book bag and handing me his Algebra book and a ratty looking assignment sheet. “But don’t do too good a job, or else it won’t be convincing.”

  “Duh,” I said, examining the book. Either he or a previous owner had covered it with an impressive amount of graffiti, mostly doodles of transparent boxes and a couple of cartoon robots. “What do you usually get?” I asked.

  “Zero out of ten,” he answered cheerfully.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’ll aim for a four.”

  “Sweet.”

  “And then I can sort of gradually make it look like you’re improving from week to week.” I was getting ahead of myself, but I guessed I had to if I was planning on making any real money off of this little scheme.

  “How soon can you have this done?”Camden asked.

  I glanced at the assignment sheet and flipped his book to the right page to check out the problems. “I’ll do it at work tonight.”

  “Cool. I’ll come get it around eight.”

  “Only if you don’t bring your friends.” The last thing I needed was a replay of the other night.

  “Free country. I can if I want,” he said.

  “Private restaurant. You can’t if I don’t want,” I shot back. He smiled good naturedly as I crammed his stuff into my backpack, went over to my car, and headed to work.

  It actually took me longer to do a convincingly bad job on Camden’s quadratic equations than it would have taken me to do them right, especially since I tackled all my own homework first. I ended up having to stow his books underneath the bar as the dinner shift got under way, and I did the problems in between refilling water glasses and carrying plates of food. Luckily, Nat wasn’t even remotely close to noticing that I was working out of a math book from a class I’d taken two years ago—he was too busy going over to Table Twelve every five minutes, where Star was camped out. She was sort of reading a book and sort of eating all the free food he kept on bringing over to her, but mostly she was exchanging flirty glances with him whenever his waiter duties landed him in her line of vision. Gross. Good for my little brother, I guess, but gross.

  I was just putting the finishing touches on Camden’s problem set by randomly changing some digits when the phone rang. “Hello, Pailin Thai Cuisine,” I said.

  “Hello, it’s Mom. Everything okay? Any customers yet tonight?”

  I looked around the restaurant. “Yeah, it’s pretty good. A couple takeout calls, too.”

  “Are you and Nat okay? You’re not scared to be staying in the house by yourself?”

  I laughed. “No, we’re not scared.”

  My mom chuckled as well. “Okay, okay. How’s Krai? Dad talked to him last night and said he sounded stressed.”

  “What?” I sputtered, then closed my eyes and willed myself to remove the panic from my voice. I reached out and pressed the back of my hand to the side of a water pitcher, letting the cold from the ice calm me down a little.

  “Why?” Deep breath. “Everything’s fine,” I said. “He’s fine. It’s just, you know, it’s really busy because he has to cook everything himself, what with Dad being gone.” Oh God. If Krai had told them about the letter yesterday even after I’d said it was nothing to worry about . . . if he’d gotten suspicious and said something . . .

  “How’s the trade show?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Oh, good.” I heard my dad’s muffled voice in the background, telling my mom something. “Oh,” she added. “Dad says we might order some new silverware if we find some that’s not too expensive, and there are lots of booths with free food samples.”

  “Oh, man. Nat would—”

  “He would love that, I know. And of course, we love it too, because it’s free.” My mom chuckled to herself. “Okay, we’ll call back later tonight. ’Bye.”

  “’Bye, Mom.”

  I hung up the phone and closed my eyes, breathing a sigh of relief. When I opened them, a party of four was standing in front of me, and I pasted a smile onto my face and kept it there for the rest of the evening. Right before closing—that is to say, nearly two hours after he said he would—Camden showed up to collect his homework, and I
met him outside the restaurant before my brother could see what was going on. Again, not that he would have, since he and Star were now both camped out at Table Twelve, quizzing each other on the periodic table for Science Olympiad and looking like they were actually having a really fun time doing it.

  “Here,” I said, handing over the homework. “You’ll probably want to copy it over in your own writing.”

  “Thanks,” Camden said. He had a coat on over his hoodie now; it was a cold night and the drizzle from the afternoon had turned into straight out rain. He folded the papers up and shoved them into his front pocket before they got too wet.

  “Aren’t you even going to look at it?” I asked, shivering a little; I’d come outside in just my waitressing outfit. “Wasn’t that the point?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know whether you’d done it right or not anyway.”

  “True,” I said.

  “But if we don’t get caught, we’re in business. Okay? Because I actually took a shot at doing my government essay just now, and, man . . . I would rather pay you to do it.”

  “Okay.” I nodded and ducked back into the restaurant as he got into his car and drove off.

  The next afternoon, between fifth and sixth periods, I found Camden standing by my locker with a hundred dollar bill stuck to his forehead.

  “We did it,” he said, grinning, holding out his hand.

  “I did it,” I answered, shaking his hand.

  “Same difference,” he said, taking the money off his head and handing it to me. “Not that I was worried. I didn’t even bother copying the whole thing you gave me and it still worked out. Now I can fire that Leonard kid and never go back to tutoring again. So, nice job.” He impulsively hugged me, and I instinctively backed away.