She's So Money Read Free Page A

“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.
    “By the way, did you hear that Mr. Dillman is hooking up with that new librarian-in-training?” he added. For a guy who has barely any friends, Leonard somehow knows everything that happens before anybody else.
    “Ew, really?” Sarah said, and we exchanged a grossed out glance.
    “That’s what I heard. I also heard that Taylor Spector got a nose job and is just pretending it was a basketball accident. Be sure to check him out when the bandages come off. Anyway, you should probably go over to the tutoring office and pick up a new student,” Leonard said to me. “Not that you could ever beat my record of twelve students at once. I could walk you.”
    “That’s cool, Leonard, but no thanks.” I started inching away from him. Sarah, who’d already been inching, was already a few feet down the hall.
    “Okay,” said Leonard