it sounds kinky.”
“Sleeping with me just to get back at Helen is gross,” I said. “How dare you—”
Drea stealthily slipped under the security gate and motioned for me to follow. I stopped my lecture mid-sentence and darted out the arcade with a hasty goodbye.
“She was hidden in plain sight!” Drea showed off the curly-haired blonde in the box but didn’t slow down. “Just another prize on the shelf. No one ever saved up 250,000 Skee-Ball tickets to claim Pieds D’Abord!”
Pieds D’Abord. I slapped a palm to my forehead in disbelief.
“What language is that? French?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. I didn’t expect Drea to know the answer. “Who knew a cokehead could be such a polyglot?”
Drea stopped her trot, cocked a hip.
“Who knew a straight-A nerd could be such a hoochie?”
I opened my mouth to protest but was stopped by the sight of myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors framing the entrance to Macy’s. I mean, if it looked like a hoochie and acted like a hoochie …
“Your point?”
“My point,” Drea replied sharply, “is that maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to underestimate everyone all the time.”
“I don’t under—”
“Pieds D’Abord.” She jabbed a fingernail at the birth certificate. “Feet First.”
Drea, evidently, had taken two years of French.
11
SUMMER STUNNER
The next morning, I arrived for work forty-five minutes late.
“You’re not turning into No-Good Crystal, are you?” Gia demanded to know.
“I’m not!” I promised. “My ride left without me! I’m so sorry!”
I’d woken up for work that morning to find both parents—and even more oddly, both cars—gone. Frank and Kathy had not only left earlier than usual, but in separate vehicles. I didn’t know if they were passive-aggressively punishing me for not delivering The Broadway Album or what. And if I weren’t so pissed at them, I might have called into Worthy Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry to find out what was going on. But I was pissed, so I didn’t.
“It won’t happen again,” I promised.
“I know it won’t,” Gia replied.
Drea stopped pretending to fold lace camisoles and motioned for me to follow her to the back office. Rey Ajedrez, Lustig Zeit, and Pieds D’Abord sat on the velvet couch, waiting for us with open arms.
“Should we hit Feet First on our lunch break?” I asked.
Drea picked up Pieds and sat between Rey and Lustig. I turned on the computer and prepared to address the stack of invoices that had come in since the day before.
“I don’t need your help getting in and out of the orthopedic shoe store,” she said. “But you need my help getting laid.”
“Drea!”
Sometimes my own prudishness took me by surprise. Drea reacted accordingly.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She placed her hands over Rey’s plastic ears. “Not in front of the children.”
“Drea! I do not need to get laid!”
She calmly walked behind the desk and pried an envelope out of my white-knuckled grip.
“You’re right,” she said. “You are totally chill and not at all in need of a release of eighteen years’ worth of repressed sexual tension.”
“Seventeen,” I corrected her. “And I am not repressed.”
“Oh, right.” Drea rolled her eyes. “How could I have forgotten you skipped a grade?”
Seriously, how could she have forgotten? Drea was preternaturally mature for her age. But the extra year she had on me widened the pubescent chasm between us. I remembered a trip we took to the mall when we were in sixth grade, watching in shock as Drea shopped—boldly, shamelessly—for underwire bras at Macy’s and tampons at Woolworths. At the time, I wore Wonder Woman Underoos and was still three summers away from my first period.
“Even your earlobes are clenched.”
I instinctively touched them to see if Drea was right and immediately felt like an idiot for doing so.
“I am not repressed,” I repeated for lack of a better argument.
“Prove it,” Drea said. “Go to the Cabbage Patch with Slade tonight.”
“Slade? Slade Johnson?” My legs buckled, and I sank into the throne that served as my office chair. “You think I’m going to hook up with Slade because you dared me to?”
“No,” Drea replied. “You’re going to hook up with Slade because it will make Troy insanely jealous to see you’ve moved on with someone so much hotter than he is.”
I had to admit that I liked the sound of this revenge in theory, even if I couldn’t actually picture myself getting physical with Slade Johnson.
“If I agree to ask Slade to the Cabbage Patch tonight, do you promise to leave me alone for the rest of my shift so I can actually concentrate on