The Boyfriend Thief

by Shana Norris

  “He didn’t rope me into anything. I merely saw an opportunity to turn things into an advantage for me. If this matchmaking thing takes off, all three of us will have our money problems solved. You could go to Costa Rica five times a year if you wanted.”

  “I’ll be lucky if I even make it there once.” I collapsed across the counter, sighing. “This whole thing is getting way too complicated.”

  “I have the complicated part, building your website,” Molly said. “Even though it’s not that hard, a bit of tricky coding in some parts—”

  “I don’t mean the website,” I interrupted her. “I mean—you know. This thing with Zac is getting way over my head.”

  Molly raised her eyebrows. “What? He’s not perfect enough to live up to your standards in fake boyfriends?”

  I threw my washcloth at her, hitting her in the face.

  “Relax,” Molly said, rolling her eyes. “It was a joke.”

  I yawned. “Sorry. I’m a bit grouchy today. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  Molly clasped her hands over her heart in mock horror. “You? Not sleep well? Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m exhausted from being up until after two A.M. Zac took me to see his midnight comedy show. And then we got slushies.”

  “I didn’t know you drank slushies,” Molly said.

  “I don’t. It was my sleep deprived state causing me to do insane things that I wouldn’t normally do.”

  Molly tilted her head to the side as she looked at me, a strange smile on her face.

  I scowled. “What?”

  “I think this whole winning Zac over thing could work out great for you. Open you up to a few new ideas. Get you out of your comfort zone.”

  I shook my head. “I’m done. I’m not chasing Zac around town in the middle of the night to get him to break up with Hannah. It’s over.”

  “So you’re kissing Costa Rica good-bye?” Molly blew a kiss into the air for emphasis.

  I wiped a smudge off the glass of the corn dog display next to the register. “I’ll find a way to get there.” But I didn’t sound sure of myself. Hannah’s offer was my last hope for making it there this summer. If I didn’t get the money on my own before June, I could give up the hope of adding it to my college applications for the pre-med programs I planned to apply to. It would be one less thing to distinguish myself from the thousands of other prospective students applying, all of whom I was certain didn’t care about it as much as I did. Being a doctor had been my dream since I was a kid and this summer program was one step closer to getting there. And maybe it was the only chance I would get to be closer to my mom.

  “If Hannah decides she wants someone who can get the job done, let me know,” Molly said as she gathered all her books. “For five hundred bucks, I’ll make out with Zac Greeley and convince him I’m the greatest person alive.”

  I shot a glare at her. “Get out of here if you’re not planning on ordering anything. I have to get back to work. Someone probably needs another hot dog.”

  Molly waved her fingers at me with an evil grin as she turned and headed out the front door of Diggity Dog House.

  “Was that Molly?” Elliott asked, coming out of the kitchen and looking toward the front door even though she had already disappeared.

  “Are you spying on me?” I snapped.

  Elliott gestured toward the broom in his hand. “I’m working, Avery. I can’t help it if doing my job takes me within five feet of you.”

  “Whatever,” I said, grabbing the washcloth from where it had landed after hitting my best friend in the face. “It wasn’t Molly anyway.”

  “Looked a lot like her,” Elliott said.

  “You must be imagining things. Molly doesn’t even like hot dogs.”

  “She likes Diggity Dog Shakes. And I can almost surely bet you would call her over here to yell at her for speaking to me last night.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Honestly, Elliott, my entire life does not revolve around you. You are barely a miniscule iota of the things I have on my mind at any given point in the day.”

  Elliott leaned on his broom, shooting me a smirk. “But I’ll bet you’re now dying to know what Molly and I talked about, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all,” I said, turning my back to him.

  “In case you were curious, I asked Molly out. She said no.”

  I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep back the smug smile that wanted to spread across my face. I focused on scrubbing a bit of dirt out of the seam in the top of the register. “Maybe your overuse of cologne drove her away.”

  “You are so funny, Avery,” Elliott said in a monotone voice. “No wonder you have guys pounding down your door. Oh, wait, you don’t, do you?”

  If only the broom wasn’t clenched so tight in his hand. I would have loved to smash Elliott over the head with it.

  “No one except Zac Greeley,” Elliott sneered. “You really caught yourself a prize there, didn’t you?”

  “At least Zac doesn’t sneak around behind his girlfriend’s back,” I said.

  “No, you’re right,” Elliott said, straightening up and beginning to sweep the floor nearby. “Zac would never do that to his girlfriend. Other people’s girlfriends, on the other hand, are a different story.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, crossing my arms.

  Elliott shrugged and continued sweeping, as if he had grown bored with the conversation. “Why don’t you ask your friend Zac? I’m sure he remembers the entire story very well.”

  Mr. Throckmorton walked into the counter area and spotted Elliott and me. “Reiser!” he shouted. “Get back to work and leave flirting to after-hours.”

  Ugh. Mr. Throckmorton didn’t know how far off he was in his guess as to what Elliott and I were doing.

  Chapter 18

  “Remember, a vote for me is a vote for integrity!”

  Hannah stood on a makeshift platform of six physics books in the middle of the Willowbrook High main hall. Behind her sat a table full of voting jars for class king and queen, with a large poster of Hannah’s smiling face above her own jar.

  Her friends stood in a half circle around her, each holding up their own “Vote for Hannah” poster, with her name written in red glitter and encircled with sparkling silver stars.

  “I have served faithfully as class queen these last two years,” Hannah went on, ignoring the fact that no one was listening to her speech. Not that it mattered. Hannah enjoyed any opportunity to make a speech, whether or not people listened. Her voice could be heard over the din of conversations around me as people pushed through the hall toward their lockers or the cafeteria for breakfast before the first bell.

  Class king and queen was a secret vote, so the jars had been painted black and it was impossible to tell who was in the lead. But still, Hannah had to know she was the most likely candidate and this whole campaigning thing in the middle of the hall was all for show.

  “Can you believe we have to listen to her mouth first thing in the morning?” Molly fell into step next to me and wrinkled her nose toward Hannah and her gang. “A day that starts off this bad can only get worse.”

  “She wants attention,” I said, leading Molly away before she did something crazy. “Hannah thrives on attention.”

  “I can’t see what Zac sees in her.” Molly looked over her shoulder back at Hannah, who was still leading her voters toward victory from the top of Mount Physics. “She’s so irritating and stuck up. Has she ever had one fun day in her entire life?”

  A series of images flashed through my head at Molly’s words: Sleepovers. Skating as fast as we could down the sidewalk in front of our houses. S’mores in the middle of the night, shrieking so much we woke my parents when the marshmallows exploded in the microwave. Whispering secrets to each other in the dark as we lay side by side in her big bed.

  “Probably not,” I mumbled.

  I could ask myself what had happened to Hannah and me, why were we so focused and serious all the time,
but the truth was I knew already. I had been there, had heard the words, and had seen the look of pure hatred Hannah had given me that day she threw her half of the friendship necklace in my face. Everything changed after that moment and we stopped being the giggling, carefree kids we had once been.

  You could stand to loosen up a little every now and then, Zac had said. His words still rang in my ears, accusing me of being as uptight as Hannah.

  But what was the other option? Becoming a failure, never making it to Costa Rica, never becoming a doctor.

  Never becoming anything that would make people want to stay.

  I had already failed once. It wasn’t going to happen again. Uptight or not, I would make everything better for myself and my family. And I would do it by depending on the only person I’d ever been able to depend on: myself.

  Molly rattled on throughout my zoning out, oblivious to the fact that I hadn’t heard a word she’d said. I blinked, trying to focus on her voice.

  “So I think I’m going to throw out the entire code and start over,” Molly said. “All the tables in the database aren’t communicating the way I want them to and it’s not giving me any logical matches.”

  It didn’t take me long to figure out she was talking about the website for A to Z Love Matches again.

  “There is nothing logical about matchmaking,” I told her as we pushed our way down the hall. “It’s a scam, it’s always been a scam and it always will be a scam. A computer can’t ever predict romance between two people.”

  “You’re the one running a matchmaking business,” Molly said with a shrug. “I’m just the person building your website.”

  I pulled at my hair. “I am not running a matchmaking business. Zac is. I’m the unlucky person stuck with him as a partner for a fake business that doesn’t exist even though he can’t seem to figure that out.”

  Molly pulled me to a stop in the hall. “Hey, you’re not about to combust, are you? Because your face is starting to match your hair again.”

  I forced myself to take a few deep breaths. Distal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, proximal phalanges, metacarpals, carpals. I recited the words over and over in a steady rhythm, forcing the tension out of my body in a long breath.

  “I’m fine,” I said, when I finally felt as if the last bits of my sanity weren’t about to explode out of my skull. These last couple of weeks with Zac had messed me all up. He’d ruined my perfect sleep patterns and distracted me in class. My blood pressure had probably skyrocketed. I wished Dad had listened to me and bought that blood pressure cuff I’d asked for last year for my birthday instead of a gift card to The Gap.

  “Good, because I don’t want you blowing your berries right here in the hall.” Molly’s gaze moved to something behind me and her smile widened. “Hey, there’s Elliott.”

  My fists clenched and all the breathing in the world wouldn’t help calm me down now. “Is this morning going to get worse with each minute?”

  Molly pinched my arm. “Be nice.” She smiled so wide her teeth looked likely to fall out of her head at any second as Elliott drew closer.

  “Hello, ladies,” he greeted us. He looked like a slithering snake as he returned Molly’s wide smile. I could almost see him waiting to sink his fangs into poor, naive Molly as soon as I turned my back.

  “Hey,” she said. “Ready for the quiz in trig?”

  “As ready as I can be, I guess,” he said. “I stayed up until two studying last night. I figure I’ll either pass the test or else collapse on my desk from exhaustion.”

  “Your brain retains less information in a sleep deprived state,” I told him. “Which is why late night cramming sessions never work.”

  “Thank you, Dr. James,” Elliott said. “I don’t know what we’d do around here without your medical input.”

  I glared at him when he grinned my way. Why couldn’t Molly see him for what he was? She laughed along with his stupid joke, which wasn’t even the least bit funny. He could learn a thing or two about jokes from Zac. At least Zac actually knew something about comedy.

  Why was I thinking about Zac?

  I pushed past Elliott, not caring that my backpack hit him in the stomach. “I have to get to class.”

  “See you later,” I heard Molly say to Elliott. Then she was at my side again, almost running to keep up with me.

  “What is your problem?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “My problem? You’re the one hanging all over Elliott Reiser like a pathetic lovesick idiot.”

  She stepped in front of me, blocking my path. Molly may have been small, but she was a force to be reckoned with when she was angry. “You don’t have to be so rude to Elliott all the time.”

  “Then maybe he should stay away so I won’t have to be.” I tried to move past her, but Molly anticipated my movements and slid to the left along with me.

  She crossed her arms, scowling up at me. “I’ve listened to your complaints about Elliott for two years now. And I haven’t yet seen him do any of the things you accuse him of. What exactly do you have against him? It’s something more than what you’re telling me, I know it. Out with it.”

  I almost told her everything. About the little gumball friendship ring with the plastic purple stone in the center that I had buried in the bottom of my jewelry box because I had never been able to throw it away. I almost told her about how in the end, everyone had turned their backs on me. How I wasn’t good enough for any of them. Not for my mom, not Hannah, and not Elliott.

  And one day, not Molly either.

  But I couldn’t say the words. If I told her about what had happened, she wouldn’t see me as the person she knew. She’d understand then how imperfect I really was.

  “I lost all confidence in him long ago,” I whispered, my gaze locked on the toes of my shoes.

  “That Lila Mahoney thing?” Molly waved a hand, dismissing it. “That’s ancient history and Elliott says it got blown way out of proportion. You can’t always believe the things you hear.”

  I didn’t bother to correct her. If I opened my mouth, words I was too afraid to say might come spilling out.

  Chapter 19

  Hannah always had a way of appearing out of nowhere around me. An empty bathroom, a shadowy corner under the stairs in the junior hall, even a carpeted basement den where I’d thought she wouldn’t be nearby to see what I was about to do. Hannah had some kind of sixth sense about me and she always knew exactly when I didn’t want to see her.

  Diggity Dog House was crowded, as it usually was after school when everyone stopped for a milkshake or chili cheese fries on their way home. I stood at the back wall behind the counter, scrubbing drops of sticky soda off the drink dispenser with my back to the register. It should have been impossible for me to even hear her low voice when she said my name. But my head turned before I’d had a chance to reconsider acknowledging the call and there she was, standing on the other side of the counter.

  I wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen her and go back to my scrubbing, but I knew Hannah Cohen wouldn’t let me go that easily. If Mr. Throckmorton saw me ignoring a customer, he’d have a coronary anyway, so it was best to suck it up and head into the lion’s den.

  All day I’d been trying to work up the nerve to speak to her, to tell her I was done with this whole boyfriend thief deal, and she could have her money back. The check weighed heavily in my pocket, taunting me. Could I give up Costa Rica for Zac Greeley?

  “Welcome to Diggity Dog House. What can I get for you this Diggity Dog day?” Every time I said those words, I wanted to shove my hot dog hat down my own throat.

  Hannah tossed her hair back and lifted her chin as she looked at me. “I thought I paid you to steal my boyfriend.” How did she always manage to look cool and sweat-free even in the scorching heat? A sweaty, miserably hot Hannah was less intimidating than one who didn’t seem to be susceptible to heat like everyone else.

  “You did.” My teeth clenched together as I fought against the part of me that wanted to
hang onto the check and the other part that wanted to end this all. And for what? A guy that couldn’t keep himself still, never took anything seriously, and who somehow managed to insult me every time he opened his mouth even when he didn’t intend to? I had let him drink a slushie in my car. I had let him drag me around town in the middle of the night instead of being tucked into my cozy bed getting the necessary sleep I needed to function properly. This was not me. I didn’t do things like that. I could feel the fringes of my life beginning to fray and tangle into the mess I had fought hard to fix. I couldn’t let Zac step in and tear up all the work I’d done these last four years.

  “Then why is it that he still thinks I’m his girlfriend?” Hannah crossed her arms and stared at me, waiting for an acceptable answer.

  But I didn’t have one. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the check, which I’d folded into a perfectly straight rectangle, the folds crisp and neat.

  “I can’t do it. Take your money and figure out a way to get rid of Zac on your own.”

  Hannah laughed. “You’re giving up? Just like that? What happened to the Avery James I’ve always known, the one who takes what I have without worrying about the consequences?”

  I swallowed. “I didn’t take Elliott from you.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day someone will believe it.” She nodded at the check I held between my fingers. “You’d rather be stuck here for another year than to be at that medical program or whatever it is?”

  I pretended to punch an order in on the register in case Mr. Throckmorton looked out of his office. “I don’t want to do it. Find someone else to do your dirty work.”

  Hannah studied me for a long time until I became uncomfortable and started tapping my fingers on the side of the register.

  Finally, she leaned over the counter, her dark eyes locked on mine. “He’s exhausting, isn’t he? You can’t focus when he’s around. His constant movement is irritating. He doesn’t care about anything in life except what makes him feel good. And if you have to listen to one more ridiculous idea of his, you’ll rip your own ears off.” She straightened up, her gaze still boring into me.