Love, Lies and Texas Dips (14 page)

The girl smiled, tucking shiny black hair behind multi-pierced ears—though only one earring per ear was allowed, per dress code rules in the PFP student handbook.

“Hey,” Cindy said under her breath, as Mac set down her book bag and slid atop the stool. “You barely made it under the bell.”

“Tell me about it,” Mac whispered back as she rummaged for her chemistry text and her notebook.

“About yesterday,” Cindy started to say, but the headmistress’s voice interrupted as it poured forth from the intercom speakers, forcing Cindy to zip her lips.

“Good morning, Pine Foresters, and welcome back after your holiday weekend. I trust you’re all well rested and ready to learn,” Dr. Percy intoned. Mac propped her chin atop her hand, pretending to listen, although her mind was somewhere else entirely during the morning messages. She barely realized that Ms. K had begun instructing them on their experiment until Cindy nudged her under the table with the toe of her shoe.

“… what you’ll be doing is sometimes called the ‘Aladdin’s Lamp’ reaction using hydrogen peroxide and solid potassium iodide,” the teacher explained in her usual monotone. “Please find your instructions on the sheet of paper on your table. Do wear the rubber gloves and goggles provided for you. You have fifty minutes. You may proceed.”

Once Ms. K had finished talking, she did her usual slow stroll around the room, looking over everyone’s shoulders. She was at the farthest corner now, so Mac wanted to get started before the teacher wandered their way.

She checked over the instructions, making sure they had the correct ingredients, including a large bottle with a stopper, a tea bag, thirty percent hydrogen peroxide solution, and the potassium iodide.

When she finished her checklist and looked up, Cindy was slipping her cell into her lap. Her eyes glancing down discreetly, she started to text.

“What are you doing?” Mac hissed, feeling like an alien with her goggles on over her glasses and a pair of red rubber gloves on her hands. “We’re not supposed to have our phones turned on during class. They’ll confiscate your phone for that, or suspend you if they’re really pissed off.”

“I just need to answer—”

“Well, answer fast, would you?” Mac urged, glancing Ms. K’s way.

Cindy stopped texting long enough to smile sweetly and say, “Dr. Percy’s not going to mess with me, I promise you. So stop worrying.”

For a moment, Mac stood there mutely, thinking there was more to Cindy Chow than met the eye. She obviously had little fear of authority figures, and she hung out at car shows. She definitely wasn’t a typical PFP girl, and Mac had yet to get a handle on her.

Still, she wasn’t about to let Cindy get her in trouble for not doing her lab work.

They now had forty-five minutes to finish the experiment and write down their results.

That was enough cause for Mac to get antsy.

“Look”—Mac rounded the table, pushing the second pair of goggles and gloves toward Cindy—“we’re using potentially dangerous chemicals here. You might at least want to put on your equipment and pretend you’re helping out.”

Cindy looked up from the cell in her lap, amusement sparkling in her brown eyes. “Okay, okay, I’m done anyway.”

Mac glanced down at Cindy’s slider screen just before the other girl popped it closed, catching something that made her heart skip: a name. Alex’s name, to be precise.

“What’s going on here?”

Oh, crap
.

Mac lifted her head to find Ms. Kozlowski standing not three feet away from their table. She looked fierce with her short black buzz cut, her arms crossed over her chest, a thin-lipped frown on her nut-brown face.

“Were you using your cell phone, Miss Chow?” the teacher asked bluntly as Cindy tried to hide the slider in the pleats of her skirt. “Because if that’s what you were doing, I’ll have to ask you to step out—”

“No, Ms. K, I wasn’t doing anything, I swear,” Cindy said innocently, her almond-shaped eyes wide and guileless.

Heck, if Mac hadn’t known the truth, she would’ve believed her.

“Is that right, Miss Mackenzie?” The teacher turned her attention to Mac.

“Me?” Mac’s hands began to sweat inside her rubber gloves.

“Yes, you, Michelle,” Ms. K said, brow wrinkled with impatience. “Was Miss Chow on her phone?”

“Can I plead the Fifth?”

“No, Miss Mackenzie, you may not.”

Mac felt as if the whole room had stopped working and was staring at her. Cindy certainly was anyway. So what was she supposed to say?

Yes, she was on her cell, and she didn’t care if she got caught!

Okay, that was what Mac wanted to say. But instead of blurting out the truth, she found herself muttering, “I don’t
know. I guess if Cindy says she wasn’t on her cell, then she wasn’t.”

Mac couldn’t believe she’d actually covered up for the girl, and her heart thudded nervously against her ribs. She
so
wasn’t good at lying.

The teacher squinted at her for an eternity before she said, “All right, girls, get to work now, please.”

Then Ms. K walked away to hover over another lab table, and Cindy leaned over to whisper, “Thanks for not ratting me out. I owe you one.”

Mac pushed the goggles and gloves toward her. “Just put your stuff on, okay? I’ll start pouring the hydrogen peroxide into the bottle.”

It took all of Mac’s concentration to get the lab work done—replacing tea in a tea bag with potassium iodide, dropping the modified bag into the hydrogen peroxide, and creating a cloud of oxygen gas and water vapor—with minimal help from Cindy. Mac was still scribbling her notes when the bell rang.

“Gotta run!” Cindy chirped, popping out of her seat like a rocket. She dropped her own notes off on Ms. K’s desk and disappeared before Mac frantically finished up and turned her work in.

Mac grabbed her book bag and took off, hitting her locker since she hadn’t made it there before her first class.

Laura and Ginger were already huddled at their lockers, heads bent together, looking grave and whispering.

“What’s going on?” Mac asked as she approached, quickly unlocking her combination and opening her locker door. She tossed in a few books and removed several others while Laura and Ginger converged on her. “Whatever it is, y’all don’t seem any too happy about it.”

Ginger solemnly informed her, “Word is that Mindy Sue Mabry won’t be debuting in May after all.”

“Looks like her family’s declared bankruptcy,” Laura jumped in, “and the Glass Slipper Club’s worried the Mabrys don’t even have the cash to buy a table at the Rosebud Ball, much less pay for Mindy’s dress or photographs or anything else that goes along with being a deb.”

“Wow.” Mac closed her locker deliberately, thinking what a blow that had to be for someone like Mindy Sue, who’d spent her entire existence at PFP acting like a Jo Lynn Bidwell wannabe; now her chance to be on level footing with the school’s reigning queen had gone up in smoke. That had to hurt.

It almost made Mac feel guilty for accepting her Rosebud invitation when she really didn’t want it, not as badly as Mindy Sue surely had. She cleared her throat. “She’s out for real?”

“Yeah, for real.” Ginger nervously fingered her razor-cut layers of red, nodding. “But that’s not even the worst of it,” she added. “I’ve heard that Mindy Sue might get kicked out of PFP unless she can finagle some kind of scholarship. I haven’t seen her in class today, so maybe she’s already gone.”

“Oh, man, that sucks,” Mac murmured, unable to fathom what it would feel like to get tossed out of school. That idea pained her far more than being dumped by the Glass Slipper Club.

“I caught Tincy yapping on the phone before I left this morning, and it sounds like the GSC has already decided on Mindy Sue’s replacement,” Laura said, one hand loosely cupped to the side of her mouth, as if afraid of being overheard.

“Who’ve they picked?” Mac asked, hugging her book bag to her chest. There weren’t that many more senior girls at PFP to choose from, considering their class totaled all of thirty. Well, twenty-nine, if the gossip about Mindy Sue getting booted was true.

“That’s just it. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else I’ve talked to,” Laura said with a sigh, and glanced over at Ginger, who shook her head and uttered, “I haven’t a clue.”

“Guess we’ll find out at the meeting tonight, huh?” Mac remarked, when she really wanted to say, “Who cares?”

Her head was somewhere else entirely, and it had zilch to do with anything deb.

He’s just about the nastiest little man
I’ve ever known. He struts sitting down.

—Lillian K. Dykstra

Everyone isn’t always worth liking,
but that doesn’t mean you cant be nice.

—Ginger Fore

Eight

The Tuesday-night orientation for new Rosebuds took place at the Glass Slipper Club’s official headquarters on Briar Oaks Lane in Post Oak, just east of the 610 Loop and northeast of the Galleria. The four-story building sat on the same block as the Junior League and up the street from the St. Regis Hotel, where Ginger’s mom and Rose Dupree used to take her for Sunday afternoon tea when she was a child, though it wasn’t called the St. Regis until Ginger had nearly graduated from middle school. That was right about the time she’d begun to feel too old for their weekly bonding over finger sandwiches, teapots, and harp music.

Only now, having glimpsed the facade of the hotel before she turned in to the parking lot at the Glass Slipper Club’s entrance, Ginger’s chest swelled, like a million bubbles floating to the surface. It was amazing to think how much she’d grown since her tea parties with Deena and her grandmother. She’d been so shy back then, maybe too much a daddy’s girl. The past few years she’d come into her own after her parents’ divorce, with Edward Fore moving out of the Castle and in with his then-girlfriend. Ginger had to figure out who
she was, apart from all the junk in her life, and she liked the person she was becoming, even if she made some stupid mistakes now and then.

She’d gotten stronger in so many ways, and she felt like she had something to give to the world. That was part of the reason she was so psyched about being a Rosebud. She wanted to flip the stereotype that all debutantes were ditzy rich girls with nothing better to do than spend their daddy’s money. The Glass Slipper Club’s deb program was about philanthropy, too, and Ginger had plenty of causes she wanted to bring to the Club’s attention. But first she had to find an empty parking space ….

Just as she eased her Prius into a spot between Jo Lynn Bidwell’s shiny Audi and Laura’s red Mercedes, her cell rang. It took a second or two to dig it out of her bag, and when she did, a familiar voice barked at her.

“Where are you?” It was Laura, totally impatient. “The meeting starts in, like, ten minutes and Bootsie Bidwell’s already looking nervous ’cause plenty of Rosebud seats are empty.”

“I’m parking as we speak,” Ginger assured her, “right next to your Roadster. How cosmic is that?” She didn’t mention the fact that Jo Lynn’s Audi was on her other side. Laura would probably urge her to key
bitch
into the door. “I’ll be up in a sec,” she promised.

“Oh, hey, Mac said to tell you she brought that Caldwell yearbook you were wanting.”

“Great!” Ginger said, grinning, before she hung up.

Now she’d have the chance to look up Kent Wakefield’s school picture from middle school and see if it jogged any old memories.

She cut off the engine, snatched out her keys, and grabbed her bag. Then she hurried through the parking garage and through the glass doors leading into the GSC’s lobby.

“Well, hey, pretty girl!”

A petite woman with a lipsticked grin and teased Texas-sized hair called out, and Ginger wiggled her fingers at Laura’s mom, Tincy.

“Hi, Mrs. Bell,” Ginger said, sizing up the GSC’s official greeter, who was as tiny as Laura was tall, and as brunette as Laura was blond. Tonight, Tincy’s copper-streaked chocolate-brown hair was arranged in a typical Houston helmet around her taut-looking features. “Am I late?”

“Not a bit. You’re not even the last to arrive. I’m still waiting on a few others. Oh, yes, and the girl who’s taking Mindy Sue Mabry’s place,” Tincy Bell drawled. Then she sighed and made a little tsk-tsk noise. “Sad about that, isn’t it?” she remarked, though Ginger didn’t think she sounded sad at all. “It’s just amazing how fast things can change. One bad turn and it’s over, just like
that,”
she added, snapping her fingers.

“Yeah, right.” Ginger’s throat went dry. She thought of how she’d barely escaped getting nudged from the Rosebud list when she’d been hauled down to the Villages Police department. If her daddy hadn’t smoothed things over with everyone like he had, she might be in Mindy Sue Mabry’s position right now, meaning O-U-T.

“Well, let’s get you fixed up,” Tincy said, and gave her form-fitting silk blouse a tug so its hem fell neatly over her long black skirt. “C’mon and follow me.” Her high-heeled boots clicked on the peach-colored marble tiles as she strode
toward a table with its
WELCOME, ROSEBUDS!
banner and enough white ribbons to wrap half the gifts in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog.