She's So Money (12 page)

Sarah said, making a face at the thought. She blew a puff of air upward to get her bangs out of her eyes. “He and his friends are just a bunch of jerks.”

“Yeah,” said Cat. “I think half my brain cells die if I come within ten feet of that Brad guy.”

“Stacey Ray has huge boobs,” Jonny said cheerfully. We all looked at him. “What?” he asked. “I’m allowed to state facts if I want.”

“Jonny’s oversexed,” Cat said instantly.

“Jonny’s a tool,” I added.

“Jonny’s a dork,” Sarah said at almost exactly the same time.

“See? You guys are allowed to state facts too.” He grinned at us. “So, I take it you’re not coming, Maya?” He tilted his head down the hallway in the direction of the tutoring office.

“No,” I said. “I’m . . . I’m just gonna meet Camden at Starbucks later.”

“All right, slut,” Cat said cheerfully, as Jonny matter-of-factly started pushing her down the hallway.

“Okay,” Sarah said, eyeing me curiously as she started to follow them. “IM me later if you wanna trade history notes.”

“Sure, absolutely,” I said, guiltily avoiding her eyes. The three of them wandered off, and I waited until they were out of sight before heading toward the public bus stop to catch my usual ride to work. Too bad I was halfway there before I realized that I’d forgotten Camden’s and everyone else’s books in my locker.
Argh!
I sprinted back to school to get them, but by the time I got back outside, it was clearly too late. I had to wait for the next bus, shivering in the dreary drizzle, which meant there was no way in hell I was getting to work on time. It figured, with the way the rest of the day had been going.

When the bus finally got to my stop, I jumped off and practically sprinted into the restaurant, throwing my backpack on the floor behind the bar. I tore off my jacket, grabbed a Pailin shirt, and changed right there instead of going into the bathroom.

“Maya!” my mom said. She took off her reading glasses and glared at me.

“What? I’m late, I know. I’m sorry!” I said. Next to my mom was a giant stack of freshly laundered napkins that Nat and I were supposed to have had folded before the shift started; Nat had gotten there before me and had folded about twenty or so (he was glaring at me from his seat at the bar), but clearly they’d both been waiting for me to help. I rushed back out to the other side of the bar, tripping over my backpack on the floor in the process, and grabbed a stool to sit down next to him. I took a foot high stack of napkins and started folding them into our usual elaborate standup shape as quickly as I could.

“Did you get the mail?” Mom asked.

Dammit!

“No, I forgot. I’m sorry. I’ll go grab it!” I started to get up.

“No, it’s okay. I can do it,” said my mom. She punched a few buttons on the cash register, made a note to herself, and got up.

“No, I can do it.” I was standing now.

“You fold, I get mail,” she said, coming out from behind the bar and gently pushing me back down onto the stool.

She grabbed her ring of keys and headed for the door.

Oh God.

Obviously, the chances of there being another letter from the Health Department were low. The deadline was still over a month away, so it wasn’t like they had to send a reminder notice. But I wasn’t sure. So I was terrified.

I watched my mom go out the front door and disappear around the corner. Okay. I told myself that I shouldn’t panic, nonetheless folding a napkin completely wrong as I started to panic. The odds were with me. The odds were with me. The odds were with me. . . .

My mom came back around the corner, shuffling through the mail. She paused on one envelope and my heart stopped . . . then she started shuffling again. She paused on another and I had another mini cardiac arrest . . . then she moved on to the next one, as she came through the door and back into the restaurant.

“Anything for me?” I asked brightly. My hands were shaking. I violently clutched one of the napkins I was folding to try and hide my nerves.

“Catalog,” my mom said, handing me a J.Crew catalog. I’ve never actually bought anything from there in my life—way too expensive, even the sale stuff most of the time—but I like to look. She put the rest of the mail on the bar next to the reservations book, and I tried my best to look casual as I reached over and flipped through the stack. Bills, junk mail, more bills . . . and nothing from the Health Department.
Phew
. That was too close. Waaay too close. It took me a second to realize that my eyes were filling up with tears, and suddenly my mom was looking at me with concern.

“Are you okay?” she asked, putting her hands on my cheeks and gently brushing my hair out of my face.

“Fine,” I said. “Just a little stressed out.” I blinked and looked up at the ceiling as she patted my hand sympathetically.
Don’t cry
, I told myself.
Everything’s fine. Don’t cry.

Don’t cry.

And I didn’t . . . at least not then.

That night was a late one at the restaurant; in spite of the rain, which had been steadily elevating over the last few hours from a drizzle to a full storm, or perhaps because of it, the last customer didn’t leave until ten thirty. And thanks to the vacuum cleaner breaking down right when we needed it the most—a pair of unruly toddlers had been so kind as to accidentally-on-purpose smash one of our glass candleholders, scattering glittery, dangerous shards all over the carpet beneath Table Nine—my entire family didn’t get home until well past eleven.

Nat got out of the car, went right up to his room, and passed out, and if all I’d needed to do was to finish up my own homework, I could’ve done the same shortly thereafter. But no, I had three other people’s work to do as well.
Sigh
. I leaned back against the inside of my closed bedroom door and looked around my room: at the books piled up in every corner; at the dozens of multicolored Post-it notes I’d been using to keep track of other people’s homework logistics; at the little flash drive that I’d been shuttling all the typed assignments around on, sitting forlornly by itself in the middle of the worn carpet . . . and suddenly, the tears started.

I threw myself onto my bed and shoved my face into my pillow, covering my head with my comforter and hoping that my parents couldn’t hear. I sobbed, exhausted from lack of sleep, exhausted from being plagued with either panic or guilt twenty four hours a day for the past week and a half. I had never felt so completely worn down in my entire life. It was hopeless. Everything was hopeless. I couldn’t stop crying, and after a while, I couldn’t breathe.

Forget it. I had to tell them about the fine. I’d give them the money I’d earned so far to help pay it off, but I had to tell them. There was no getting around it.

I had to confess.

I
would
confess.

But first, I had to calm down. I still had to do all these people’s work so they wouldn’t get mad at me tomorrow.

Fifteen minutes, Maya,
I told myself, forcing a deep breath into my lungs.
You’ve got another fifteen minutes to freak out, and then you gotta pull it together for one more night.
It ended up being thirty minutes of freaking out, but by one in the morning, I was calm. Composed. Full of resolve, if completely dehydrated from the torrent of tears. Just a few more assignments to do tonight, then confession tomorrow. The consequences would be dire, but at least I’d be able to sleep again . . . probably on the plane to Thailand, where I’d be stuck in boarding school as all my friends went off to college and had great lives and forgot all about me. But at least I wouldn’t be lying anymore. I wouldn’t
have
to lie anymore. I put my hair up into a no-nonsense bun, then peeked out my door; the house was dark. Time to get a Diet Coke from the kitchen and then suck it up for one more night.

I tiptoed down the stairs, congratulating myself on keeping their creaking to a minimum, although I had to hold in the urge to swear when my foot slipped off the edge of the bottom step and I was forced to grab the railing to keep from falling. I headed toward the kitchen, but then saw a sliver of light shining from the den.
Huh
. Were my parents awake? My mom usually does all her accounting stuff in there, at a big used desk my parents bought when they first came to America. On the wall over it, all of our restaurant memorabilia is hung on a big corkboard—mostly copies of the reviews we also have hung up at the restaurant itself, plus some reviews of the other Thai restaurants in town if there’s something negative in them. (It makes my Dad laugh.) There are also copies of the first order slip they ever took, the first personal check, and the first credit card receipt from back when credit card machines were actually those big plastic and metal things you had to manually slide. But my mom usually works on accounting first thing in the morning, so maybe she or my dad was just having a bout of insomnia or something. Nope, not so much—as I approached the den and gently pushed open the door to peek in, I saw my mom asleep, half slumped over the computer keyboard.

They say you look younger when you’re asleep, but my mom didn’t look younger. She just looked tired.

I pondered waking her up, then pondered getting a blanket for her. Not that it was at all necessary, given that the den, which is barely bigger than a closet, traps heat like crazy and is the warmest room in the house by far. At a loss for the moment, I glanced at the computer to see what she was doing. On the screen was an Excel worksheet, and there were a bunch of red numbers throughout it. Wait, was our restaurant losing money?

Neither Nat nor I knew much about our income, because my parents pretty much subscribed to the “keep the kids in the dark” theory of family finances, but I had to assume that we were doing
okay
, at least. Nobody was starving, and we had a roof over our heads. On the other hand, businesspeople everywhere didn’t use the term “in the red” for nothing. Red numbers were bad.

I took a few steps closer to the screen. I knew we weren’t exactly rich, and I knew that Nat and I needed all the scholarships and financial aid we could get in order to pay for college, but . . . were we broke? Were we too broke to pay the fine? Were we too broke to pay for
anything
? I squinted, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, wishing I knew better how loans or credit cards or running a business worked, then tentatively reached out a hand to hit the down arrow button.

My mom moved. I froze.

“Hi,” I said softly.

“Hello,” she said. “Whoops. Fell asleep.” She smiled at me, rubbing her eyes and then her arms in their nightgown sleeves. She reached for the mouse to click her Excel sheet closed, then shut down the computer and yawned and stretched while the not exactly state of the art machine went through its usual series of tired sounding hums and buzzes before finally powering down. “Why are you still awake?” she asked, putting her arm around me and steering me toward the door.

“Homework,” I said wearily, leaning the side of my head against the side of hers. It was the truth, after all.

“You work too hard,” Mom said sleepily.

“So do you,” I said.

We walked up the stairs together, giggling a little bit at the extra creaking that was being created by four feet rattling up the steps simultaneously, and for a split second I considered moving my planned confession to right that very moment. But then, as I thought about the string of red numbers I’d seen on the computer screen, I suddenly knew I was
never
going to tell my parents about the fine. Not if our restaurant was going down. Not if we were broke. They had enough to worry about; they had two kids to support. I couldn’t make it worse.

This was my $10,000 mess, and it was up to me to get us out of it.

chapter nine

So. Assuming a generous rate of fifteen assignments per
week for the next month, I was still only going to have made about seven grand by the time I needed to pay off the fine. Plus, I was almost certain to be hallucinating from lack of sleep; that morning when the alarm went off, I could have sworn the little panda clock was advancing steadily toward me, having grown bloody fangs inside its mouth and somehow acquired an AK-47 and a grenade. As I got ready for school, I pondered calling the Health Department to see if I could get an extension or pay in installments, but I was always the worst at prank phone calls during our middle school slumber parties (leading Sarah and Cat to
always
force me to make them whenever we played Truth or Dare), and I wasn’t convinced that I could make the Health Department believe I was an adult on the phone. They’d probably hear one sentence and ask if I was trying to sell Girl Scout cookies. Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. I needed to be able to do this simply—just go over there, hand them the money, make sure the restaurant’s record was clean, and move on.

So I needed cash, and fast.

Looked like Camden’s other friends were gonna get their wish.

Hey need 2 talk 2 u about something. Meet me after school?
I texted him at lunch, as I headed toward my usual table by the window with Cat, Sarah, and Jonny. He answered almost immediately with
Sure what about?
, which meant that I had to do an abrupt about face and go in the opposite direction in order to answer him—I didn’t need my friends looking at my phone over my shoulder and seeing what I was doing. I walked back outside the cafeteria door and hovered in the hallway as I texted Camden back with
Tell u when I c u
. This time, there was no answer, so after a few minutes of standing around, trying to look casual while repeatedly looking at my phone, I headed back into the cafeteria and sat down to eat lunch.