The Mall - Megan McCafferty Page 0,19

King’s earliest promo photos on the cover for the single “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Drea had a talent for knowing the perfectly disarming thing to say to the opposite sex, and Sam Goody was no exception. He blushed at the compliment—and the kiss—in a way that might have been endearing if I weren’t still pissed at him. He didn’t deserve my thanks. He deserved to be mocked as he had mocked me.

“Of course you’d learn a useless language like German,” I said. “Someone so deep, so dark needs to read The Sorrows of Young Werther in its original melodramatic, melancholic tongue, right?”

Then I turned on my heel to make what would’ve been the perfect exit if I had made it to the register. But I hadn’t paid for the cassette, so the antitheft tag set off a security alarm that was somehow even louder and more obnoxious than Michael Bolton.

“Go! Go! Go!” Drea shouted.

In a panic, I hurled The Broadway Album at Sam Goody’s head and got the hell out of there before I got arrested for shoplifting.

Drea and I ran up an escalator, all the way through Upper Level Concourses F and A, zigzagging past packs of stroller pushers, power walkers, and unaccompanied preteens. If sprinting in stilettos were an Olympic sport, Drea Bellarosa would win all the gold medals that she could later turn into earrings and a matching statement necklace. We didn’t stop until we reached a satellite kiosk for Orange Julius, far away from the food court. The two of us, bent over, hands on our knees, breathless. Me, with exertion. Drea, with laughter.

“OHMYGAWHAWHAWHAWHAWWWWWWWNK.”

Orange Julius was manned—or more accurately, boyed—by a freckle-faced kid who was barely tall enough to see over the industrial blender he was working with.

“That was hilarious!”

“What part of almost getting arrested was hilarious?”

“All of it! You should’ve seen the look on your face when the alarm went off!”

Without being asked, the boy behind the counter of Orange Julius offered Drea a large Styrofoam cup that she very graciously accepted.

“Thanks, Dom.”

“You’re welcome, D-d-d-drea.”

The boy could barely say her name, as if he were unfit to speak it.

Drea walked away without paying and took a few satisfied sips of her recovery drink before launching into the next phase of the treasure hunt.

“Fun Tyme!”

She slipped map #2 out of her bra, where it had been nestled between her glistening breasts. If Dom had been around to witness this maneuver, I’m pretty sure he would have died and gone to masturbation heaven.

“I should’ve figured it out.” Drea poked a nail at the X marking the spot on the map. “I know exactly where this is! It’s the prize cases behind Skee-Ball!”

As I said, the map was very poorly designed. Tommy was not a master cartographer. There was no way I, Drea, or anyone else could determine the location from the drawing alone. But once we knew where to look, the map made enough sense to Drea to fulfill its purpose.

“Here’s the plan.” She sucked on the straw. “We wait until the arcade clears out at closing. You distract Sonny Sexton while I get the next clue.”

While Sonny Sexton’s habit of waking and baking would certainly put him on the most distractible end of the attention spectrum, I doubted very much that I was the right girl for this task.

“I think you’ve got our roles reversed.”

“How many days, nights, and weekends have you spent at Fun Tyme Arcade supporting your boyfriend as he prepared for a Donkey Kong tournament?” She tossed the empty Orange Julius cup into a trash can. “Are you intimately familiar with the inner workings of Fun Tyme Arcade?”

I had a feeling that word “intimately” was not an accident on Drea’s part. I definitely did not want to know the details of what went on between rounds of Donkey Kong.

“I can get in and out of there faster than you can,” she said. “You won’t even have to flirt with Sonny that long…”

I stopped dead in my tracks. The withered old man handing out free samples for Hickory Farms mistook this vegetarian for an interested customer.

“Summer sausage?”

Blech. I didn’t know what was more stomach-turning. Dead cow or Sonny Sexton.

“I have to flirt? I don’t know how to flirt!”

I’d seduced Troy with my Mock Trial cross-examination skills. He’d found my Odyssey of the Mind ingenuity irresistible. The closest I’d ever come to a flirty move was “borrowing” his scientific calculator without asking.

“I’ll coach you!”

Then, as if to prove her bonafides, Drea lustily licked her