Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,3
sides of the tree, pulling hard against the mud to lift herself up, but the branch wasn’t strong enough. It split with a loud crack.
“Neesha?”
Her hands shot in opposite directions and her balance swung forward. She hit the mud hard, her whole body sinking into it, and rolled onto her back, cracking open like an egg.
Above her, a dark-purple-and-yellow Adidas windbreaker was floating in the breath of God, glaring down.
“I fucking knew it!”
She could see a dark brown face below the hood. “I knew it,” he said again, high and tentative. “Oh, this is so messed up!”
He pulled his hood back. Ahmad Galbia—Zaza, as he had been called since he was seven years old—had a thin layer of black hair that stopped too high on his forehead, and a wide face, but maybe that was because his narrow glasses threw off the proportions. For as many times as she’d seen him, and it was many times—in the lab almost every day, weekends included, for three years—he’d never been this animated.
“As soon as I heard about this, I was like, ‘That’s Neesha’s project,’ I just had to see it for myself and I was fucking right! Do you have any idea how much shit you’re in right now?”
She groaned as she pulled herself up from the ground, bringing her face-to-face with him. He was short, only a few inches taller than her.
“They’ll end you. They’ll confiscate your work, they’ll take away the project, and they’ll ban you from winning the trophy—”
“Money, please.”
He shut up.
Neesha smiled, watching his hand hover over his pocket. “What?” she asked. “Are you going to not buy it?”
He sighed and dropped a clean white envelope on the stump between them.
“What are you even doing here?” she asked as she began to count. “It was supposed to be someone from the basketball team.”
“I am on the basketball team—I do the stats.”
“And the dirty work.”
“I guess.”
He didn’t say anything else. It said an embarrassing amount about his self-esteem that he was willing to run an errand like this for guys who cared so little about him that they asked him to run an errand like this.
“Where’s Emma?”
“Not here.”
“Why?”
“She had to make a phone call.”
“That’s strange.”
“No it’s not,” she said reflexively, but it was a little strange. Part of the agreement she’d made with Emma a week ago was that Neesha would never be the one to take anyone’s money. But tonight, for their biggest sale yet, Emma had begged her to step in.
“How many people know you’re doing this?” Zaza asked.
“Where is this money coming from?” Neesha ignored his question, asking her own as she tucked the first thousand back into the envelope.
“Um.” He rubbed his head. “I don’t know. I guess everybody pitched in. I think somebody’s parents—”
“God, Aiden is so fucking rich.”
“Yep. It’s crazy. He’s completely divorced from any kind of real-life proportionality. His mom will ask him, like, ‘Do you want to order a waterbed for your room?’ And he’ll be like, ‘Yeah, but let’s get two or three, just in case.’ Which sounds like it would be great but it actually creates real problems, like, what is he even gonna do with the extra waterbeds—”
“This is only half of it.”
Zaza’s eyes flipped back and forth in the dark. “Yeah.” He rubbed the top of his head again. “That’s what Emma said. Half for her, half for you.”
“You pay in full. What we do with the money after has nothing to do with you.”
“Are you sure? Emma said to split it up—”
“No, we don’t split it up!”
“Okay, okay,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Feels like we could just go to Emma—”
“Put it on the stump.”
He frowned at her, then reached into the same pocket and removed an identical envelope, staring at it a moment before handing it over. Neesha’s breath steadied as she counted in silence.
“Just for the record,” he said. “You have the same motivation I do to lie, and if I go back to Emma—”
“I’m not lying.”
“—she’d be more likely to believe you, which makes me more susceptible to getting screwed than you. So if you compare the odds that one of us is lying—”
“Shut up.”
He did.
It was an exhaustingly typical attitude. It was always the innocent ones who expected the most, like because they were a television version of nice, they believed they were entitled to everyone’s best behavior, even though usually their manners were being weaponized to some end, like sex, or stealing large sums of money.
“Okay, we’re good,” she said,