She's So Money (2 page)

“Maya! Come here!”

Except, I guess, when your mother’s been watching you earn it.

I went over to the cash register, where my mom was glowering. “What did you just do?” She tucked her chin-length hair behind her ears, crossed her arms, and stared at me.

“Uh . . . my job?” I tried to look innocent.

“Your job is
not
to flirt for tips!”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were!” she insisted. “Remember what happened to—”

“Yes, Mom,” I interrupted. “You’ve told me like, a zillion times.”

“A zillion plus one!” she declared, launching into her favorite story about this family we know in Ohio. “Annie was a very good Thai girl until she started going out with an American boy. And she started to lie to her parents, and then, one day, her parents came home to find her”—she lowered her voice—“
with
her boyfriend, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you—”

“And so they sent her to live with her aunt in Chiang Mai, where she was free from the corruption of America. She married a nice Thai man and lived a happy, simple life“.

“Mom, that’s not even true,” I said. “They got divorced and she came back to America and became a travel agent. And you’re worrying for nothing, because between school and work, I have no time to date anyway.”

“Exactly!” My mom slammed the reservations book shut and banged one of the cash register buttons with a flourish. “School and work, but no boys! You must go to a good college, or else you will also be a travel agent, but in Thailand!”

I had no particular answer to that slice of insanity. She was kind of right, anyway—if I wanted the merit based scholarship that would enable me to pay for Stanford, assuming I even got in—
fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed
—I had to maintain my ridiculously nerdy G.P.A. That left me with basically no time to socialize, but hopefully it would all be worth it.

The order bell was ringing at me again, so I headed back toward the kitchen before she could go on any longer about how even talking to members of the opposite sex leads directly to pregnancy, disease, insanity, death, or all of the above. Of course, avoiding her for the rest of the night wasn’t going to work—our restaurant only seats forty two, unless my parents are in a fire code–breaking mood, and we don’t have any booths or screens or anything, so there’s literally nowhere to hide. But as long as I didn’t piss her off any more, there was still a chance I could get to Sarah’s house before her parents booted everyone out.

By nine o’clock we were down to two tables.

“Mom?” I chewed nervously on my pinkie nail for a second. Is it okay if Nat takes over for the rest of the night so I can go to Sarah’s study group? There’s almost nobody left here.”

She sighed, taking off her reading glasses and putting them down on the credit card reader by the cash register. “Why didn’t you study before work?”

“I did, but it’s a really important test.
Please
, can I go? I just need to trade notes with some people, and I know if I get just a little extra time I can get an A.”

Mom looked at me, her expression unreadable. I mentally crossed my fingers.

“No,” she said.

“But—” I started.

“It is not fair to your brother if you leave. Also, it is better for you to study at home with no distractions. At the study group, you just end up chitchatting with your friends.” She put her reading glasses back on and turned to her calculator with finality.

I gave up. Time to aim lower on the totem pole. “Hey, Nat, can you take care of my section for the rest of the night so I can study?”

“What, like you’re just gonna sit here?” he asked. His hand was wet from the water pitcher again, and he made a move like he was going to dry it off on my shirt.

“Yeah, at the bar,” I said, making a face and ducking out of the way.

“Dunno.” He shrugged, then smirked and wiped his hand on his apron instead. “ What’s in it for me?”

“The same deal whenever your next English paper due,” I offered.

“How ’bout you just write it for me?”

“How ’bout I tell your entire class that when you were five, you wore a girl’s swimsuit because you wanted to be just like your big sister?”

Nat glared at me and went to check on my section. Finally! I poured myself a Diet Coke and settled onto one of our maroon leather barstools to review the Revolutionary War. I mouthed, “Suck it,” at him when a party of eight walked in at nine twenty five. He smiled politely while flipping me off from behind a menu—there’s nothing worse than a bunch of customers walking through the door when you’re
this
close to shutting down for the night, especially since my business savvy parents, terrified of alienating anyone who might become a regular, never rush customers out. Luckily tonight, thanks to my dad’s record fast stir-frying, Annoying: Party of Eight exited after only forty three minutes.
Phew
. I put down my flashcards and started blowing out the little white votive candles on the tables as Nat practically sprinted to the front of the restaurant and flipped the door sign to CLOSED.

“Hey,” Nat said, noticing that I was helping with cleanup. “Study if you want. We made a deal.”

“Thanks, but this isn’t me being nice so much as it’s me trying to get us the hell out of here as quickly as possible.” I threw a soapy dish towel at his head and went to the utility closet at the back of the kitchen to get the vacuum cleaner—newly repaired following my recent attempt to suck shrimp tails straight up off the floor so I wouldn’t have to touch them—and started vacuuming the dining room floor. The next thing I knew, Nat was shaking my shoulder.

“Dude, you okay?”

I started. “Wha?”

I looked up and realized that I was standing smack in the middle of the dining room, draped over the vacuum cleaner, half slumped onto the handle.

“You were just staring at the wall like a crazy person.”

Huh?
Is it possible to fall asleep with your eyes open?

“I’m just tired,” I said. He looked at me. “Uh, more than usual,” I added.

“Maybe you should start doing speed.”

“I will take that into serious lack of consideration,” I answered, stretching my arms over my head and jumping up and down a few times to wake up. I kicked the vacuum cleaner and it roared to life as I pushed it with one hand and used the other to punch a button on our espresso machine. Nat walked around wiping tables and pushing chairs out of my way whenever I needed to vacuum under them, as my mom lovingly dusted our restaurant’s good luck charms—two Buddha statues and a picture of King Chulalongkorn—just like she did every night. The coffee finished brewing just as we finished cleanup, and I was pouring it into a thermos when my dad emerged from the kitchen, looking weary and grease spattered, like he always does at the end of the night. He raised an eyebrow.

“We have coffee at home,” he pointed out, rolling down the sleeves of his flannel shirt now that he was done cooking for the night.

“Eh, this is easier.” I dumped a bunch of sugar into the thermos, followed by some half and half, then put the top on and mixed it around. My dad shook his head disapprovingly. “That much caffeine will stunt your growth.”

“Dad,” I said patiently, “I’ve been the same height since the seventh grade. I’m pretty sure the family genes stunted my growth a long time ago.”

“No,” Dad said. “Your brother is six feet tall.” He smiled proudly at Nat, who stood on his tiptoes for a second and grinned back.

“Well, he stole all the good genes. Plus, I need this coffee for my history test tomorrow. Nat just saw me fall asleep standing up, didn’t you, Nat?”

“I did,” Nat said. “She looked like a freaking idiot.”

My dad looked back and forth between the two of us for a moment, trying to figure out if we were messing with him. Then he shrugged, reached into the mini fridge under the bar, and handed me two cans of Mountain Dew. “Okay. Study hard.” He ruffled my hair and gently nudged me toward the front door as he turned off the dining room lights.

“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.