She's So Money Read Free Page B

agreeably. “Hey, you know ‘Maya, May I’?” I winced. I certainly did know it. It was a song he’d written (and, during a few awkward moments that I’d since been trying to forget, performed) for me last year. “I learned another chord, so it sounds a lot better now.” He took off his glasses and breathed on them, then polished them with his shirt, squinted, and put them back on. “It’s a four chord song now. I’ll play it for you sometime, if you remind me to bring my guitar—”
    “Sure, that would be great. Later!” I said, running to catch up with Sarah, then grabbing her arm and walking as fast as I could away from Leonard. I made the mistake of glancing back and saw him energetically waving at me.
    “He hearts you,” Sarah said solemnly when we were out of earshot, then laughed.
    “A year and counting,” I said, shaking my head. Who knew that when I’d volunteered to train the new freshman tutor last year that he’d end up crushing on me this hard?
    “Maybe he’ll ask you to the Spring Fling,” she continued, indicating the glittery poster we were passing in the hallway. It said, SWING THE FLING! and had a badly drawn picture of a Weston High Warrior dancing with a black silhouette of a woman in a flapper outfit.
    “Great, I’ve always dreamed of bringing a date who looks like he’s twelve,” I said sarcastically.
    “Oh, come on,” Sarah giggled. “He looks thirteen, easy.”
    She was still giggling when we got to the tutoring office, but when I miserably plunked down onto the couch in the corner of the main room and went back to wearing my posttest shell shocked face, she immediately shut up, sat down next to me, and passed me a conciliatory half eaten bag of mini Oreos. She patted my arm as I snarfed them down.
    “Come on,” she murmured. “You didn’t flunk.”
    “Maya, you look like medical waste,” a voice piped up from behind her.
    My friend Cat is not quite as nurturing.
    I turned toward the row of study rooms lining the back wall of the tutoring office, from where Cat had just emerged. She gaped at me from behind her glasses of choice for the day, which were purple cat’s-eye frames. She’s got twenty twenty vision, but she likes to make a statement. And today’s, given the blue streaked pigtails, the black and red fingernails, and the deliberately ripped black velvet skirt, was apparently “arty freak.”
    “Study amongst yourselves!” Cat snapped at the two confused looking sophomores whom she’d left in the study room. She closed the door on them and threw herself onto the couch with me and Sarah. A little too enthusiastically—we were still disentangling ourselves when we heard the loud crash of a pile of books hitting the floor.
    “That would be Jonny,” said Cat. I looked up and saw our friend Jonathan just inside the doorway of the main room, picking up his books and a graphing calculator and frantically inspecting the latter for damage.
    “Sorry,” he said, pushing up his glasses and straightening out the front of his green button down shirt. “In my defense, I wasn’t being clumsy. It’s just that I saw all you girls tangled up on the couch, and I got distracted.” He grinned, absentmindedly patted his spiky blond hair, and disappeared into a study room to wait for Hilary, his favorite freshman. We were all convinced he was deliberately tutoring her badly in order to keep her in the program. The girl is fourteen and has a rack as big as my head. Or, I guess, two of my heads. If you want to get technical.
    As Cat went back into her study room to finish tutoring her students, I got up off the couch and rang the bell at the window in the side wall where Mrs. Hunter, the school secretary who runs the tutoring program, usually sits. After a moment, Principal Davis appeared at it.
    “Maya!” he roared. He looked like he wanted to jump through the window and give me a bear hug. Considering he is approximately the size of a Prius, I was glad he