She's So Money (16 page)

“Oh, lemons, lemonade, you know,” I said, smiling as I watched him.

“I mean, you should get paid for even having to talk to Camden,” Cat added, taking the new xeroxed assignment pages I had pulled out of my backpack. I felt all the blood drain from my face as I realized the implication of what she was saying, and I prayed that neither of them noticed. Christ, I was a horrible person, wasn’t I? I should be shot. Hanged. Drawn and quartered. Cheating the school system was fine; I mean, it wasn’t, but whatever, I was over that. Cheating my friends—I was having a bigger problem with that.
No
, I told myself. I couldn’t think of it that way. Camden and I
did
deserve some extra cash for masterminding and running this operation. Plus, I was only doing it to save my parents’ business, and it wasn’t like Jonny and Cat weren’t making a
ton
more money than they would have from tutoring. Sure, I felt guilty, but they were
psyched
to pocket that much cash for so little work, and indeed, my guilt dissolved as they both stuffed their new piles of twenties in their wallets with satisfaction and gleefully looked at each other.

“Mall?” asked Cat, theatrically pulling some oversize shades out of her purse; it was a sunny day.

“Mall,” answered Jonny with a grin. “No reason not to spend this all in one place.” He turned to me. “Wanna come, Maya?”

“I have to work,” I said.

“I know, but it’d be wrong if we didn’t at least invite you.” He and Cat cheerfully took off as I reached into my pocket and clutched the money that I’d made off of the work that they’d done. Nope. They weren’t doing anything wrong. The person doing that, even though it was for a good cause, was me.

chapter eleven

Once we had everything in place, it was kind of easy to
fall into our new cheating ring schedule. Camden and I would ignore each other at school—no point feeding the rumors and thereby attracting attention—but after sixth period every day, I’d find a sheaf of papers in my locker: assignment sheets and xeroxed copies of the necessary book pages from Camden and his friends, covered in multicolored Post-it notes detailing what needed to be done. This meant that Camden was either eating the cost of xeroxing, or he’d managed to figure out the code to the machines in the library. I was assuming it was the latter, because otherwise the copying would’ve really been adding up, and there was no way he wouldn’t be figuring it into the “operation costs” or some other fancy business term. I’d distribute the assignments to Cat and Jonny before heading off to work, get them the next morning, and then stick everything back in Camden’s locker before school started. He’d distribute them back to his pals, and then it was just up to each of his friends to make sure they copied the assignments over in their own handwriting before handing them in.

Which, of course, was my first mistake. A few days in, Derek got lazy and totally didn’t bother to copy his over; he just handed in the exact problem set that Jonny had done for him, in Jonny’s handwriting. Nothing of note happened to him, and Camden purposely told me about it in order to try and stem my constant jitters that we were always just millimeters away from getting caught, but after that I got even more paranoid and came up with a preventative measure—I started drawing obscene highlighter doodles all over the pages that I gave to Camden, so that there was no way his friends could just hand in the same stuff we gave them without copying it over first.

“Here,” I said, the morning after the lazy, stupid Derek incident, as I intercepted Camden on his way to his locker shortly before the first-period bell and dragged him into an empty physics lab. I handed him three problem sets with the words
PECKER
and
BALLS
written all over them in multicolored highlighters, plus pictures of stick figure people having sex in different positions. “This is to force your douche bag friends to copy over the stuff in their own handwriting before they hand it in. There’s no way I’m letting us get caught just because our clients get lazy.” I crossed my arms and stared at him, daring him to get mad.

He didn’t. He just looked at the papers, surprised, then looked at me. “That’s actually a really good idea,” he said, sounding impressed.

“I know,” I said.

“And these pictures you drew are weirdly hot.”

“I don’t disagree,” I said. “By the way, I’m charging you for the highlighters I bought.”

I think he might’ve said “I love you” as I walked out of the classroom, but the hallway was noisy, so I couldn’t be sure.

At least it was easier for typed papers; I just printed them and handed them off, no highlighting necessary. I was already in the habit of throwing in spelling mistakes that the spellchecker wouldn’t catch, like the wrong version of
affect/effect
, but after a while, Cat and Jonny took to amusing themselves by getting even more creatively shameless. One time, Jonny handed in the reading comprehension questions for Tim O’Brien’s
Tha Thingz They Carried
, and Cat emailed me a file for Brad’s
Red Badge of Courage
paper with the title “
T
error
I
n
T
he
S
oldier.”

“Not subtle,” I told her.

“Dumb kids aren’t.” She shrugged.

“That’s not even a good title,” I added.

“That’s the beauty—it doesn’t have to be.”

This was true.

Word started getting around, and our client list grew. Some customers actually started wanting a
good
job done on their assignments, which we charged more for, but which took a lot longer, of course. Once, somebody even wanted an A, which meant that I basically had to do my three page history paper twice, trying just as hard both times. At least it was to the tune of nearly two hundred bucks. And while Jonny and Cat were eager to do more once they realized, after a few days, just how easy it all was, I couldn’t really manage it all, because I was still holding down a waitressing shift every night, and Camden’s pals’ demand was starting to outweigh our supply.

“Can’t you get some of your other friends in on it?” Camden asked about a week in, after I explained to him that some of our clients were just going to have to do their own work some of the time, because Jonny, Cat, and I couldn’t handle the workload. We were in his car, doing our usual thing of using it as an office where we could discuss business, only now we’d added the extra precautionary measure of him picking me up about a block away from school and randomly driving around town, so that nobody would see us leave together. “Wait,” he stopped himself, simultaneously braking for a red light. “Do you
have
any other friends? Oh my God, you only have like, three friends, don’t you?”

“Only three that I trust with this stuff and only two who are willing to do it,” I said matter-of-factly. Sarah had reached an uneasy truce with the three of us—that is, after the first big blowup, she’d just opted to pretend that nothing had happened—but I occasionally noticed her narrowing her eyes whenever she saw us exchanging assignment papers or cash, and she absolutely
glared
at Camden whenever we happened to pass by him in the hallway, although he never noticed. She didn’t say anything to anybody about the cheating ring, and I knew she wouldn’t, but along with her “Don’t tell” was a whole lot of “Don’t ask.”

“Are you sure?” Camden raised his eyebrows at me. “Have you asked around?”

“It’s just—no, I haven’t, actually,” I said.

“Well, why not?”

“Because . . .” I trailed off. I didn’t really have an excuse, actually. As far as I knew, we weren’t even remotely close to getting caught, and everything was running like clockwork. If this were any other business, it would
absolutely
be time to expand. And I could certainly use the extra money—the way things were going, I might almost make it to my goal in time, but I’d probably have to supplement the money by skimming tips at work without my mom seeing. I’d been doing it anyway lately, just as an extra precaution, but in tiny quantities so that she wouldn’t suspect. (At least, I assumed she wasn’t suspecting—sometimes it seemed like she had eyes not just in the back of her own head, but in everyone else’s as well.) As I got closer to the fine’s due date, depending on our clients’ workloads, I was definitely going to have to ramp the tip skimming up. Unless . . . well, unless we expanded the cheating ring instead.

“Let me think about it,” I said. “I’m not sure who else I can ask.” Maybe Cat’s little sister? Maybe Jonny’s? Maybe some of the other tutors? Maaaybe Sarah again?

I pictured the look on her face the day she’d blown up at me. Okay, not Sarah.

“You’ll think of someone,” Camden said, reaching over to fiddle with the radio station; there wasn’t anything on his presets that wasn’t a commercial, so he punched the power button off. “Hey, maybe if you get enough people, you could retire, you know? Live off of the commissions. Like a real estate agent. Or a pimp.” He grinned at me.

“Doubt it. I need all the money I can get,” I said flatly.

“Well then, remember you can get more money if you get more people,” Camden said.

Damn him for always having good points. He could probably convince me to become a meth addict, if he were given enough time to think up some smooth arguments.

“I’ll ask around, okay?” I said, sighing. “I’ll see what we can do.”

“Okay. By the way, Stacey and Dani wanna take you shopping, so I gave ’em your number.”

What?

After school that day, I hit up the tutoring office and pulled Jonny and Cat into one of the study rooms as usual. Sarah was the only other person in the office; her student hadn’t gotten there yet, so she was on the couch, busily working her way through her copy of
The Aeneid
, the pages already covered with a ton of those little colored tape tabs she liked to use. I thought about how fast she could write an English paper, and I started to hope against hope that I could possibly be as persuasive as Camden and make her change her mind.

“Sarah, do you wanna maybe come in?” I asked tentatively, pausing in the doorway, my hand on the doorknob.

“What’re you talking about in there?” she asked, looking up and brushing her hair back from her face.

I didn’t say anything—I knew that she knew.

“Okay, then no,” she said, looking back down at her book again.

“Sorry, I just thought that maybe . . .” I trailed off.

“Nope,” she said, into the pages instead of to me.

“Okay, thanks anyway,” I said, inching into the study room and closing the door. I turned to Cat and Jonny, leaned back against the door, and sighed.

“She’s never gonna do it,” said Cat.

“I know,” I said.

“But she’s never gonna tell, either,” added Jonny.

“I know that too. We all know that.” Bless her freakin’ heart.

Cat and Jonny settled into chairs, Cat opening up a bag of Goldfish crackers and offering it to the both of us. I perched on the edge of the table and threw the idea of getting more people in on the action at them.

“So . . . I dunno,” I said. “What do you think? Hell,
who
do you think? Anyone?” I crunched on a goldfish; it helped me to seem casual instead of nervous.

“What about Nat?” suggested Jonny.

Oh, no way. Too close to home, literally. “No,” I said flatly. “I’m not involving him, and you guys better not tell him, either,” I added.

“Okay, but—”

“But nothing,” I said, cutting Jonny off. “He’s my little brother, and if this thing goes down in flames—which it won’t, but if it does—I’m not dragging him down with me.”

That was the truth, actually, but mostly it was because if Nat heard that I was suddenly trying to make scads of money illegally, it would probably take him all of three seconds to put two and two together and figure out what had happened at the restaurant. No, it was better that he stayed in the dark about everything. “Besides, he’d probably react like

Sarah and tell my parents. I’m not having it, so, end of discussion,” I added.

I knew Jonny and Cat were looking at each other and wondering why I was so paranoid—I could feel it in both their raised eyebrows. “What about your sisters?” I asked them both quickly.

“Dude, my sister’s a freshman,” said Jonny.

“So? Half our clients have the brains of freshmen.

Some of ’em
are
freshmen.”

“Really?” he asked.

“They will be if we get more people to do this work,” I said. “Trust me. Clients aren’t the problem. Camden knows everyone.” I twirled a pencil nervously in my fingers.

“My sister would totally do it,” Cat said, eyeing the pencil I was twirling and then trying to do it herself with a pen. It flipped out of her fingers almost immediately and fell to the floor. She made a face at it.

“Sweet,” I said, putting my pencil down. Bella, Cat’s sister, is cool. She’s a year younger than us and could practically be Cat’s clone . . . if Cat were five feet ten inches tall and a volleyball player.

“I guess I can ask Jill,” said Jonny. “Although, if
you’re
scared about Nat getting in trouble—”