She's So Money Read Free

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.