She's So Money (18 page)

I shook my head, feeling a small pang of guilt as I remembered that the last time I’d been outlet shopping was last summer with Sarah; her mom had driven us and we’d spent the entire afternoon trying things on and then ended up just buying two pairs of five dollar flipflops each. I wondered where she was at this exact moment—probably tutoring? Or at home doing her homework? “Can’t,” I told Dani. “I have to work like . . .” I checked my watch. “In like, an hour.”

“Okay, then. Wanna go bikini shopping?”

I opened my mouth to say, “No way,” but Stacey and Dani each took me by an arm and whisked me off to the swimwear department before I got a chance. Cat tagged along, smirking, and faster than you could say “hot tub”— although technically what was said was a rapid fire “You need something to wear in the hot tub at Cam’s house at his Spring Fling after party, so shut up, we know you’re not going to Spring Fling, but it doesn’t mean you can’t go to the after party; now what do you want top wise, halter or string? String it is. We know you didn’t say anything, that was us deciding for you”—I found myself not only trying on a series of bikinis that my mother would have had me drawn and quartered for even looking at, but I actually found myself buying one of them: a simple, sporty little red number. It was no small investment at eighty four dollars—in fact, it was a giant investment—but even I (and Cat, for that matter) had to admit that it looked really cute on me.

Camden was right—Dani and Stacey were some pretty convincing ladies indeed.

They eventually started hanging out with us at school, too, at least in the sense of saying hi in the hallway. Dani would stop me to chat about
American Idol
, or Stacey would ask me if her hair was looking okay (it always was). Sometimes Cat and I would run into them before lunch, and we’d walk to the cafeteria together, which meant there was never a shortage of guys staring right through me and Cat to Stacey’s pushup bra or Dani’s never covered abs. Cat and I didn’t mind—eventually we even stopped trading amused glances whenever it happened—and Jonny minded even less, especially when the girls occasionally started talking to him as well. I almost had a heart attack the first time I saw Stacey give him a little wave in the hallway—if they ever started talking about the homework ring and realized that there was a discrepancy in the amount of money being paid to and from, I was dead—but I had to trust that Camden had schooled our customers well in the art of shutting up, just as I had done with my friends. I just hoped that nobody ever accidentally let something slip out.

“You guys,” Jonny said at lunch one day, puffing out his chest proudly as he sat down. “Dani Davis said hi to me today. It was
awesome
.”

“Just because she said hi?” I asked.

“No, because she was below me on the stairs and I got a look down her shirt.”

Cat and I laughed. Sarah didn’t. “Wow. I guess that
would
be worth having to talk to her,” she said, stabbing her salad viciously with a fork.

“Almost, yeah.” Jonny cheerfully dug into his lunch as I sneaked a sideways glance at Sarah. She was still squarely in her “Don’t ask, don’t tell” mode regarding the homework ring, but I’d never heard a tone that nasty coming out of her mouth before. Was it bothering her that Cat and I didn’t hang out with her as much anymore? I’d invited her along on a few more Stacey and Dani shopping trips, but she always declined so quickly that I’d stopped bothering. Did she want me to start asking again? Was she happy that I wasn’t?

I didn’t have time to answer my own questions, because my phone beeped with a text from Dani, and Jonny immediately asked me if I could get her to come by our table and lean over it.

As for the business that had brought us together in the first place, Camden and I were still trying to stay undercover whenever we were specifically discussing the homework operation, but after forgetting and saying hey to each other too many times in the hallway, we started giving up. And eventually, the rumor mill gave up too, now that the sight of us talking was so commonplace. After I became friendly with Dani and Stacey, it didn’t take too long before Camden’s guy friends were saying hey to me in the hallways too . . . and then hey to my friends . . . and then suddenly, one day, I saw people looking at me and Jonny and Cat when we were walking around together, and I realized that we’d somehow become some sort of weird offshoot of the popular crowd. People knew something was up; they just didn’t know exactly what it was. They knew that we’d somehow managed to become cooler than we’d been a month ago; they just weren’t sure why or how. I think Jonny put it best one morning when we were heading over to the tutoring office to check in with one of his students before a test: “You guys, if this were a movie, we’d all be walking in slow motion right now.”

“We could do it anyway,” Cat said, grinning. She made an elaborate show of deliberately slowing down her steps.

“Dork.” I laughed, shoving her. “Besides, to do it right, we’d have to walk in slowly from around a corner while some badass song is playing, and they always do it with at least four people, so technically we’ve got it wrong.”

“Too bad Sarah didn’t want in,” said Cat.

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad.” I felt depressed for a split second, and started wondering where Sarah was . . . but then Brad Slater sneaked up behind me and yanked the ends of my hair. I turned around and smacked him, giggling as I did it, and was rewarded with a wink before he sauntered away.

“Whore,” said Cat. I elbowed her. “Teach me,” she added. I laughed.

Of course, there were Difficulties in suddenly having ten times the social life I normally did. For one thing, there was explaining it to my parents. The new wardrobe items were easy to get past them without questions, because by the time they saw me every day I was usually about five seconds from changing, if not changed already, into my waitressing uniform of black pants, an apron, and my Pailin logo shirt.

And they were used to losing track of me in between school and work, mostly because they always assumed I was tutoring or in the library. And the times they succumbed to their occasional fits of paranoia, well, that was where Camden’s lying-to-your-parents-on-the-cell-phone training came in handy. Nat was so wrapped up in Star and his own stuff that the only time he appeared to notice was when he said, “Dude, you’ve been dressing kinda sluttier lately. Good for you.” But the week that Camden invited me, and whoever else I wanted to bring, to swing by a party that Derek Rowe was having at his house, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to tell my parents the truth if I wanted to stay at the party any longer than half an hour.

“I’m sleeping over at your house,” I told Cat that Saturday afternoon; I was calling her during a brief lull in the lunch shift action. “My parents are gonna drop me off at your house after work tonight.”

“Are they gonna call the landline?” she asked.

“Almost certainly,” I said. “Actually, maybe not . . .they’ve been going easier on me lately, probably because college letters are going out soon.” It was nearly April, and my parents were just as nervous as I was about my chances of getting into Stanford, if not more so. “But we should probably operate as if they will, just in case,” I added.

“Got it,” Cat said. “Guess we’ll just be fashionably late to this thing.” Cat knew the drill—we couldn’t leave for Derek’s party until my parents called and made sure we were safely at her house. Luckily, they weren’t so insane that they would physically drive over and check, so that Saturday night, once they called around eleven thirty—while both of us were watching TV and hovering right by the phone in order to grab it before it had a chance to wake Cat’s parents—we got in her car, went to pick up Jonny, called Sarah one last time in case she’d changed her mind about going (she hadn’t), and headed over to Derek’s house. He lived in Camden’s neighborhood, albeit on the slightly less fancy side of it (as in, the side of it closer to my own neighborhood), and we heard the party before we saw it—a faint thump of bass coming from nearly a block away, punctuated by lots of yelling and the occasional shriek of laughter. I saw Camden in the driveway, a shadowy figure with a beer in hand, as we parked behind a long, long,
long
line of cars on Derek’s street.

“Yo, you made it . . . finally,” Camden said as we approached. He was wearing jeans and a ratty blue striped polo shirt, making me feel slightly overdressed, even though I wasn’t exactly rocking a particularly fancy look—just dark jeans and a sparkly green and gray striped tank top, under my new black, not quite cashmere but still really soft, sweater. I couldn’t figure out if Camden’s shirt was ratty because he’d bought it pre-distressed, or if it was actually something he genuinely wore a lot, but he somehow made it look good either way—the lighter stripes on the shirt matched his eyes.
Ugh
, there I was, noticing the eyes again.

“Jesus,” I said, having to yell over the music, even though we weren’t inside the house yet. “Are his parents not home?” I hesitated for a split second when Camden held out his beer to me, then thought,
Why not?
and grabbed it, taking a sip.
Yuck
.

“They’re home,” he said, grinning at the face I made at his beer as I handed it back to him. “They just don’t care. Go inside, guys,” he said to Jonny and Cat, who were already halfway through the door. He then turned back to me. “So where’s the bikini?” he asked. We were standing on the edge of Derek’s giant front lawn; Camden drained the rest of his beer and then turned around and lobbed the empty can at the recycle bin sitting against the side of the garage. It
just
made it in. Impressive.

“What bikini?” I asked.

“Stacey and Dani said you guys went shopping and you got one,” he said.

“They
made
me get one,” I corrected.

“So you got one,” he repeated.

“Technically true, yes.” I allowed a small smile and flipped my hair back over my shoulders.

“Well, you know, Derek has a hot tub. I figured you might wear it. Is it underneath this?” Camden made a move for the edge of my tank top.

“Ha! In your dreams,” I said, slapping his hand away.

“How did you know what I dream about?” he asked innocently, then looked me up and down, not as innocently.

I felt my face turning red as my mind bounced back and forth between knowing exactly what he meant and trying to deny that I knew exactly what he meant. Thank God it was dark outside; the only light was coming from a few cracks in Derek’s front hall curtains.

Camden smiled at me—he’d clearly noticed my embarrassment, despite the bad lighting—and guided me toward the door. “Come on, the Jell-O shots await.”

They didn’t have to wait long. Granted, Jonny, Cat, and I had given ourselves a predetermined limit of two drinks each—none of us had been to a party with alcohol before, and we figured we should keep one another from becoming a teen movie cliché—but that didn’t mean we didn’t want to at least blend. The party spanned Derek’s entire house, with the keg in the basement; an impromptu dance floor in the living room, with somebody using one of his hundreds of music channels to D.J. from the giant flat screen TV; and Jell-O shots lining the entire kitchen island. The crowd was mostly kids from our school, juniors and seniors, but there were also a lot of kids from Greenbrook, the private school in town. I had no idea who any of them were, and could barely remember Camden’s rapid fire series of introductions—“This is Kelly, this is Aiden, this is Liz, this is Jeannette, this is Sam, this is other Sam . . .”—so I was
very
glad to have Cat and Jonny there, and vice versa. It seemed like they felt a little out of place despite the fun they were having, and so did I, so at least we always felt comfortable around one another. We circulated around the party with Stacey and Dani, and of course with Camden and his buddies, a little bit, but around two in the morning, the three of us were just kind of huddled in the corner of the living room on what was now a rather trashed looking maroon leather couch, watching people dance drunkenly, make out drunkenly, make out while drunkenly dancing, or gradually fall asleep.

“Is it wrong that I sort of feel like drawing on Nate Rosenberg?” Jonny asked. Nate, who had taken Jonny’s lunch money a couple different times in seventh and eighth grades, was passed out by the TV. One corner of Derek’s Xbox was digging into his ribs. It looked painful.

“If you do it, I’ll help you,” Cat offered, digging into the side pocket of her bag for a pen. She found a black Sharpie and pulled the cap off of it with relish.

“I’m actually getting kinda tired,” I said, stretching my neck and then stifling a yawn. “If you guys wanna leave—”

“Hey, smart chick! Dance with me!” said a voice, as a hand grabbed my arm and dragged me to my feet, then to the middle of the makeshift dance floor. The hand belonged to Dave Markley, whom I’d said hi to a handful of times and actually spoken with probably zero. I glanced back at Cat and Jonny, and they shrugged at me, then started debating between themselves whether to actually put Cat’s Sharpie to use on Nate. Okay . . . nothing to do but break it down to Fergie, I guess.