My Own Worst Frenemy

by Kimberly Reid

  I love how Paulette came right back with that. She obviously doesn’t take Justin’s crap even if she does work for his father.

  “Whatever.”

  “Can I help you?” she says, full of attitude.

  “No, you can’t help me with nothing.”

  “Is that what they teach you at that school, how to speak in double negatives?” She directs this to Marco and me, but we have enough sense not to get in the middle of this.

  “My father asked me to pick up his briefcase. He left it in his office.”

  “Well, you know where his office is. Next door over. Same place it’s been for twelve years.”

  Justin gives Paulette a dirty look and leaves.

  “I can’t stand that kid,” she says, not even trying to say it under her breath or anything. “Acts like someone owes him something. Never mind him. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Are we going on our first solo trip?” Marco asks, doing a great job of pretending we didn’t just witness a little Mitchell-family dysfunction.

  “Not quite. We have two pairs of snowbirds who need an assessment today.”

  “What’s a snowbird?” I ask.

  “Retired folks who go south for the winter.” She looks at her clipboard and adds, “In this case, Boca Raton. Most snowbirds duplicate everything in their winter homes, but a few like to move items back and forth.”

  “That seems like a lot of work, and expensive, too.”

  “They don’t move furniture, but they like to take electronics—televisions, stereos, computers—the kinds of things popular with burglars. You’d think living in a gated community with state-of-the-art security systems would ease their worries about leaving their homes empty for six months.”

  “I can see their point,” I say. But then, I worry about everything.

  “We’ll do the assessment this one last time, but I’ll stay in the background. It’s an easy job. The two couples are neighbors here and at their winter homes. I guess that’s an old-people affliction—doing everything with your friends, even taking extended vacations together.”

  “So we’ll pack today?” Marco asks.

  “No, they don’t want us underfoot. We’ll wait until next weekend after they’re out of the house. They leave town on Monday for a ten-day cruise, so we have plenty of time to get things packed and moved before they arrive at their winter homes. You’ll do the packing Saturday. You know how Mr. Mitchell feels about kids working during the week.”

  “If it’s only an assessment, what will I be doing?” Marco asks. I’m crushed because this means another weekend of us working apart. After overhearing—not eavesdropping on—his conversation with Justin, I think he may be as disappointed as I am.

  “You and Malcolm will go out on a job. But I promise next week will be the real thing.”

  When we leave Paulette’s office to go our separate ways, Justin is closing up his father’s office.

  “You’re still here?” Paulette asks. “I thought you were just getting a briefcase.”

  Justin doesn’t say anything, only holds up the briefcase, smiles, and heads in the other direction.

  “That boy is up to no good. Been a bad seed since birth. Did you see those bloodshot eyes? High as a kite at nine in the morning. I don’t know how he can afford it since his father cut him off a few weeks ago.”

  “Cut off his money?”

  “Him and his sister. Mr. Mitchell’s trying to teach them some values, but it’s probably too late for that.”

  Cutting off Lissa from her money supply is like cutting off her oxygen. She must have had some stashed away to be able to afford that face cream she was showing off in Ms. Reeves’s class. I’d love to know what kind of allowance they got before Mr. Mitchell came to his senses. I’m sure Paulette knows, but I figure this is a new job and I’d better not get too deep in the gossip so I just keep my mouth shut as we walk to the van. Which is just fine because Paulette keeps talking as though I’m responding.

  “It’s all because those children had no mother. The girl is just as bad. I mean, Mr. Mitchell is a good man, but children need their mother,” she said, getting into the car.

  I was just about to ask what happened to Mrs. Mitchell, but she answers my question before I can open my mouth.

  “She died when they were young. With the business just starting out, too. She was the original office manager. That’s how I came to work for Mr. Mitchell. To take her place. Not take her place,” Paulette says, slowing down just long enough to get a little flustered. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  I think I do. Paulette’s been pining for Mr. Mitchell, and hating his kids, for years. I almost tell her I know how hard unrequited love is, until I remember that’s not me anymore. Marco is just as hot for me as I am for him, if Justin’s instincts are to be believed. While I wouldn’t trust anything about Justin Mitchell, especially after what Paulette says about him, I’m going to believe him on this one. But on everything else? I definitely need to watch my back, and maybe Marco should, too.

  Chapter 22

  On Monday, everything at school is different. I’ve only been at Langdon a couple of weeks and never really got in the groove of it; still, nothing feels the same today. People are staring at me in the halls like they did when I first arrived. But they’d gotten used to the new scholarship girl pretty quickly, so the stares I’m getting today are different. I hope I can find Marco before first bell so I can ask him if he’s getting the same treatment, and if he knows why. Maybe they’ve found something new to hate on the scholarship kids about.

  Smythe is standing at the door of the main office and when she sees me heading for my locker, motions for me to come over. Now what?

  “Chantal, I want you to know that I still have my eye on you until we resolve the issue of the Langdon thefts.”

  “But I caught the thief. She admitted her guilt and you fired her last Friday, right?”

  “Thank you for alerting us to Ms. Reeves’s actions. She gave us quite a lengthy confession, even confessing to taking things that hadn’t been reported missing. She did not, however, mention a Montblanc pen or a tennis bracelet.”

  Pregnant pause, for effect.

  “I asked her about these items and she knew nothing.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “Why would she lie about those items and be so contrite about everything else?”

  “Maybe because the value of the bracelet would be a class-one felony charge instead of a misdemeanor. More jail time.”

  “It’s certainly to your advantage that you know the justice system so well. You’re going to need it,” she says, all cryptic, before walking into the office.

  Bethanie is coming down the hall toward me, and the minute I see her face, I know the school isn’t hating on all the scholarship kids—it’s only about me. Lissa and Justin must have spread the story about me going to jail. I’m about to ask her what’s going on when she just passes right by as though she didn’t see me. Okay, we had a little falling-out at the party, but now I know we have more in common than I thought, even more than the secrets we share. We come from the same place. She really is a scholarship girl, even if she’s working hard not to be one. So I follow her.

  “Bethanie, what’s going on? Did Lissa tell everyone about me going to jail?”

  She looks at me as though she’s Supergirl and I’m Kryptonite, and considers whether to even talk to me. “You mean the first time or the next time?”

  “Next time?”

  “Whatever you did over summer break is old news. What the hell were you thinking, Chanti?”

  “About what? Speak English, would you?”

  Bethanie takes my arm and pulls me into an empty classroom.

  “They’re saying you did it, Chanti, and you know, you used to be my girl and I trust you to keep my secret about the lottery money and I want to not believe them, but it looks bad.”

  “What looks bad?” I’m on the verge of a major freak-out now, and sti
ll don’t know what for.

  “The burglary at Annette’s house Friday night.”

  “Somebody broke into Annette’s house?”

  “She’s saying the somebody was you.”

  “What the hell? Y’all were there. Did you see me break into Annette’s house and steal something? I mean, this doesn’t even make sense.”

  “We weren’t there the whole night, and neither were you.”

  “Right. I was home in bed, no thanks to you.”

  “Yeah, but what did you do before you got home? It happened while we were out getting food. You should’ve just gotten in the car with us, and then this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I didn’t do it, Bethanie.”

  “Whether you did or didn’t, if you’d been with us, no one could accuse you of it. Look, I have to go. I’m sorry to leave you hanging, but I’m not trying to get kicked out of Langdon.” She looks around the hall nervously, as though she’s afraid to be seen with me.

  “Wait, at least tell me what happened. When you got back to Annette’s house, what did you find? Any signs of a break-in?”

  “Sorry, Chanti. I’m out of it.”

  First bell rings and I’m left wondering what just happened.

  I tried to find Marco before I ditched school, just to explain to him what little I know, which is that I had nothing to do with a burglary, and give him the real story behind my brief incarceration. But I couldn’t find him before the second bell, and I couldn’t stand being there with all the staring, all the accusations flying across classrooms and hallways. I just have to hope that Marco knows enough about me to know I couldn’t be any part of this. There are only two people in the world I can trust to help me, and one of them won’t talk to me. So I call the one who will always help no matter what kind of trouble I get myself into. And I need some help, because I’ve got a feeling it’s all about to go down.

  This is where my embellishing skills prove useful.

  “Lana, I’m sick. You have to come get me,” I say when she answers her phone.

  “You were fine this morning. What happened between then and now?”

  It’s times like this when I wish I had one of those mothers who hears the words I’m sick and just drops everything to come get their kid—no interrogations, no need to make up a lie.

  “I guess I must have picked up something. This girl in PE just came back to school after having mono. Maybe I . . .”

  “Mono?” she says, sounding worried. “Seems like the school should have told the parents there was a student there with mono.”

  Caller, you’re a winner. But just in case she hasn’t fully bought it, I add some insurance.

  “I’m at the coffeehouse near my bus stop. While I was walking to the stop, I had to puke in someone’s yard, so I was afraid to get on the bus and get sick on whoever sits next to me.”

  “All right, give me twenty minutes.”

  It’s hard to fool a detective, and I only manage to half the time, but that still says something about my special talent for storytelling. But I have to tell Lana the rest of this story in person and away from Langdon Prep because she will absolutely lose it when she hears I’m about to become a B and E suspect.

  As soon as I get in the car, Lana slaps her hand against my forehead.

  “You don’t have a fever. It must not be the flu. Does it feel like a cold?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s a cold.” I have to keep the lie going until we get home because we’re only a mile from campus and if I tell her everyone at Langdon is fingering me for the burglary, she’ll go right back up there and turn Langdon inside out. That’s the last thing I need right now. But by the time we reach home, she’s onto me.

  “So what’s really going on, Chanti? I was in the middle of a stakeout.”

  “Soon you might be trying to solve a case a little closer to home,” I say, trying to make light of it, but Lana’s not smiling.

  “Please tell me you haven’t gotten yourself into some new mess. That’s why I sent you to that school, to keep you out of trouble. But you always seem to find it.”

  “Trouble finds me.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  I relay what little I know, which is my impending arrest for a crime I didn’t commit, since I don’t have any details of Friday night past the point of seeing Bethanie’s taillights fade in the distance. Lana listens intently, but doesn’t look nearly as distressed as I’d expected.

  “So you think you’re going to jail because a girl’s house you’d been to earlier that night was later burglarized, and because of the way kids were looking at you in the hall.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Chanti, there’s nothing in that story that points to you. If the girls didn’t lock the house before they left—like one girl I know who got our TV and stereo stolen last year—anyone could have gone in there.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Or it could have been some other girl at the party, for that matter. Even that girl you went to the party with.”

  “Bethanie? No way. She’s my friend.”

  “You claim she tricked you into going to a party she knew you’d never want to attend. Doesn’t sound like much of a friend to me.”

  I can’t see any way Bethanie could be involved in this. She rescued me after I wrecked that birdfeeder and tried to cover for me by giving Smythe that pen she bought. I’ve only known her a short time and she did ditch me so no one would think she was involved with the burglary, but I know she wouldn’t set me up like this. Then I remember what she said in hall this morning: “You used to be my girl. . . .” Not to mention I really have no idea who Bethanie is after she revealed her Dirty South persona.

  “But how?” I ask, a little more open to the idea that I truly may have been betrayed.

  “Unless they pulled in there with a moving van and took everything, an inside job would be easy. If there were only a couple of small things missing, it could be anyone who was there that night. What was taken? Were there signs of forced entry?”

  “I never found out all that. I just got out of there. Those kids were persecuting me with their eyes.”

  “Oh, the drama,” Lana says, sounding tired. “You’re not going to jail, but you are going back to school. And I need to get back to my stakeout.”

  Suddenly I feel the need to defend myself, even with Lana, because when she lays it all out like she has, there really is no case against me. Well, at least not based solely on the alleged burglary at Annette’s house.

  “Something’s going on, Mom, and I know when you break it down the way you just did it doesn’t sound like it. But there’s other stuff happening.”

  “What other stuff? That business with the thefts around school? The teacher did it, right?”

  “That’s another thing,” I say, remembering Smythe’s warning. Ms. Reeves confessed to the thefts, but not all of them.

  “They can’t tie those thefts to you,” she said, sounding like a cop when I wish she’d sound more like a mother.

  “Yeah, but I just have this feeling.”

  “So do I, a feeling you hate that school and you’re looking for a way to get out of it so you can go to North High with your friends.”

  “At Annette’s party, this bi-atch named Lissa—”

  “Watch the language.”

  “I am. That’s why I said bi-atch. Anyway, somehow Lissa found out about my little incident over summer break and she told everyone at the party. That ticked me off, so I left.”

  “How did she find out? That was all expunged, there’s nothing on your record. You have no record.”

  “Exactly. The only way I figure it is Smythe told her.”

  “Who?”

  “The headmistress—the one you arrested for something.”

  “Don’t get sidetracked, Chanti.”

  “Well, when she called us into her office to falsely accuse us, she said she knows something about my past, and this morning she says she has her eye on me.
And Smythe loves Lissa. I don’t put it past her telling Lissa about me.”

  “But there’s nothing to tell. If they were to do a background check on you, they’d find nothing. You never told your friends at school, did you?”

  “I don’t have any friends at school.”

  Bethanie has made it clear she wants nothing to do with me, and I figure Marco has heard the rumors by now and he’ll be the next victim on my friendship list. Maybe hearing I have no friends causes Lana to have some pity for me (though not much) because she lets me stay home.

  “I still think you’re blowing this out of proportion and it’s more about you not wanting to attend that school. You’re going back tomorrow,” she says, heading out the door. “Do the laundry since you’re home.”

  I can’t believe Lana thinks I’d go through all of this just to create a reason not to go to Langdon. Okay, maybe my history might lead her to believe that, but couldn’t she see everything I’m telling her is on the real this time? So much for thinking my own mother would have my back.

  Chapter 23

  Until today, I thought only one other person knew about my arrest outside of Lana and the cops. I didn’t even tell Tasha. I knew she’d have nothing to offer but “I told you so” because she never liked MJ from the get-go. I’d always trusted her to keep my secrets, but once she started hanging out with Michelle, I didn’t know if the best-friend rule about keeping secrets was still in play, though I know differently now. So that leaves MJ, and how could she have told Smythe or Lissa when she doesn’t know anything about them? Besides, she’s the only person other than Lana who I’d trust with my life because after all, she’s already saved me twice.

  After Lana forced me back into the holding cell, claiming she had to do it to keep her cover, though I knew it was to teach me a lesson. Then I discovered she had put way too much confidence in the guard’s knowledge that I was her kid. Either that or the guard knew and didn’t care because when I returned to the cell and saw that MJ was gone and the girl I’d recently called a skank was waiting for me, the guard was not at all interested when I told her about my looming death. She left me there to figure out how to keep myself from getting shanked or skived or whatever they call it when a fellow inmate takes you out with a knife made from a Popsicle stick.