The Mall Read online

  “You’re acting sneaky,” she says. “Like, conspicuously so.”

  “I am not!”

  “Okay, whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “You better work on your stealth skills if you’re going to be any help to me on the treasure hunt.”

  I ran my finger along the rows of cassettes, searching for Streisand.

  “Lustig Zeit,” Drea said. “How is anyone supposed to know what that means?”

  “It probably doesn’t mean anything,” I replied. “Lustig Zeit sounds like nonsense to me.”

  “Why would Tommy go to all the trouble of making a map if Lustig Zeit didn’t mean anything?”

  “Cocaine,” I answered.

  Drea arched an eyebrow. “Touché.”

  “Looooooove is a wonderful, wonderful thing…”

  “Aha!” I called out.

  “You figured out what Lustig Zeit means?”

  “No,” I replied, showing off The Broadway Album. “I found what I was looking for.”

  Drea scowled, equally bothered by my purchase as my lack of treasure-hunting purpose. I took two steps toward the register when none other than my pompous pompadoured nemesis emerged from behind a larger-than-life-size cardboard cutout of Paula Abdul.

  “Lustig Zeit is German,” said Sam Goody matter-of-factly.

  Drea didn’t waste a second. “What does it mean?”

  “Lustig Zeit.” He took in Drea for a moment before returning his attention to me. “Means ‘Fun Time.’”

  “Fun Time!” Drea whooped. “Fun Tyme Arcade! I told you it meant something!”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, she gave Sam Goody a wet kiss on the cheek.

  “Thanks, Elvis!”

  Like I said, Drea knew nothing about Morrissey. She had no way of knowing he idolized Elvis or that The Smiths had used one of the 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 lips, pinched a toothpicked mini-sausage from the old man’s tray, and plunged it into her mouth.

  “Yummmmy,” purred Drea.

  Hickory Farms’ finest was not at all prepared for such provocation.

  “Gurgle,” gasped the geezer.

  What a shame to survive World War I only to be taken out seventy years later by a ruthless temptress young enough to be his great-great-granddaughter.

  “You’re not as hopeless as I thought you’d be,” Drea said as she blithely sauntered away from what was probably a heart attack in progress. “I actually saw a sexy spark when you faced off with that mopey guy in the record store.”

  “I was angry, not s—” I couldn’t bring myself to use the word “sexy” in reference to myself. “I was pissed at him!”

  “Well, whatever it was, it was something I could work with.” Drea let the toothpick dangle between her lips like a cigarette. “Flirting with Sonny will be great practice for when it really matters later on. Because you want to show Troy you’re totally over him, right?”

  I did want to show Troy I was better off without him. But I was also nervous about what that would entail. As I debated, Drea kept chewing on the toothpick, putting her gorgeous smile in jeopardy. Wooden toothpicks were no-nos at Worthy Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry. Even when used properly, they were never an acceptable substitute for dental floss. I was relieved when she removed the toothpick from her mouth and chucked it into an ashtray.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll flirt with Sonny Sexton. And when I fail m
iserably at our mission, you’ll never ask me to do it again.”

  “You won’t fail because you’re an excellent student,” she said, “and I’m an even better teacher.”

  Then she carefully refolded the map and stuffed it back in her bra.

  10

  SEXUAL QUID PRO QUO

  Though I was technically still working at Bellarosa for the next four hours, not much accounting was accomplished. Drea kept disrupting my progress by popping in to give so-called seduction instructions between customers.

  “Keep the conversation short!”

  “Look up at him through your lashes!”

  “Play with your hair!”

  “Touch him on the arm!”

  Her interruptions came every ten minutes or so. My conservative estimate of two dozen flirtation tips was roughly twenty-three too many for me to handle. The instant I was off the clock, she raced to the back office. I think she was afraid I’d escape before completing our mission.

  She was right to fear this.

  Drea shook a glittery napkin at me.

  “Wardrobe!”

  I flashed back to the humiliation I felt the last time Drea selected my outfit.

  “Ohhhh no,” I protested. “Nononononono. I am not wearing that.”

  “But you can’t wear”—she grimaced—“that.”

  I was wearing black jean shorts and a 10,000 Maniacs T-shirt.

  “I am not changing.”

  Drea must have decided it was not worth the effort to fight me on this.

  “Fine.” Drea sighed. “At least let me work a little bit of my magic on you.”

  Then, without permission, she yanked the hem of my shirt.

  “Hey! You’re gonna stretch it all out!”

  I loved that shirt, printed with elephants from the cover of the band’s most recent album, Blind Man’s Zoo. The ethereal lead singer, Natalie Merchant, was a vegetarian, just like my beloved Morrissey, Michael Stipe from R. E. M., the Indigo Girls, and other musicians on T-shirts Drea found equally appalling.

  “It’s either this or the Parisian special,” Drea warned, shaking the hanger at me.

  So I let her tie my tee at the waist, exposing my midriff. Then she rolled my jean shorts so they rode high on my thighs. I was showing approximately 25 percent more skin than I had ten seconds earlier.

  She took a step back to observe her work.

  “If Sonny were a tougher target, I’d do your hair and makeup,” she said. “But he doesn’t require that kind of effort, and we don’t have that kind of time even if he did.”

  It should be noted that we had two more hours before Fun Tyme closed. Two hours was not enough time, in Drea’s estimation, to make me over properly. But it was enough time for me to make some headway on Bellarosa’s expense reports—off the clock—while Drea finished her shift.

  “It’s Fun Tyme!” she announced when the clock struck 8:00 p.m.

  As we hurried to the arcade, Drea explained that it would stay open past closing for any player who still had lives left on the quarters already put in the machine. We just had to hope that at least one super gamer was going for his highest score or we’d have to put off our ploy for another day.

  The arcade’s metal security gate was pulled halfway.

  “They’re closed!” I said.

  “They’re open!” Drea said.

  As the optimist ducked under, the pessimist had no choice but to follow.

  Drea went straight for the Skee-Ball ramps while I stood lookout. The arcade was nearly empty—just a shoulder-length mullet behind the wheel of a stationary Daytona race car—but you wouldn’t know it from the noise. A cacophony of screeching tires, gun shots, and laser blasts vied with Guns N’ Roses in eardrum-shattering competition.

  “Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games…”

  It was way worse than the record store. I didn’t know how anyone could spend more than a minute in there without going totally insane. I’d lost all sight of Drea when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Heeeeeeey.”

  It was

  Sonny

  friggin’

  Sexton.

  “Heeeeeeey,” he repeated.

  He didn’t give any signs of kicking me out. In fact, he was already drinking something aromatically alcoholic out of a red Solo cup. This certainly contributed to his untroubled reaction to my presence in the arcade past closing. We’d never spoken before. Why would he start now? Maybe he was coming over to apologize on behalf of his diabolical gerbil of an ex-girlfriend?

  “Oh … um … hey.”

  Even in a slouch, Sonny Sexton stood taller than expected. He had to bend over to talk to me, so he must have towered over Helen when they were together. My gut twisted at the thought of whatever kinky contortions had made their sex fests possible on, like, an anatomical level. Over his shoulder, I glimpsed Drea perilously climbing a stepladder in stilettos to reach the upper prize shelves. I just had to stall long enough for her to steal the doll and get away.

  “Never seen you in here before,” he said.

  His eyes were so heavy lidded, it was a wonder he could see anything, which would definitely work to our advantage if he suddenly decided to turn around in time to catch Drea sliding open the glass case. She’d told me to flirt with Sonny. But I decided to go in a different distraction direction.

  “Your ex tried to kill me the other day.”

  It was fascinating to watch the effort put forth by the single functioning brain cell that comprised the entirety of Sonny Sexton’s intellect.

  “Mono Bitch?” he said slowly. “That’s you?”

  “That’s me.”

  He took a long drink from his Solo cup, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Well, holy shit.”

  “I thought you might want to apologize,” I said.

  “Apologize?” He looked into his cup. “For what?”

  Did he not remember me just telling him that his ex-girlfriend had tried to murder me?

  “For Helen!”

  Blank stare.

  “She stole my boyfriend and tried to kill me!”

  Drea carefully descended the ladder with the familiar box tucked under her arm.

  “You think I got any control over Helen?” Sonny Sexton let out a long, low whistle. “Helen is the wildest girl I’ve ever been with. And I’ve been with a lot of girls.”

  He wasn’t bragging. He was merely stating a fact.

  “That girl keyed my Mustang and burned my entire record collection in a bonfire on my front lawn! Last week she kidnapped Pink Floyd! Then she mailed me a picture of him in pajamas just to piss me off!”

  “Pink Floyd?”

  Was Sonny Sexton high on ’shrooms? What did the psychedelic British band have to do with anything?

  “My cat! Cats shouldn’t wear clothes! It’s not natural.”

  I was far more surprised to discover Sonny Sexton was a cat person than I was to hear Helen had taken his beloved pet hostage.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said, surprised by how genuinely I meant it.

  “She’s got some anger issues.” Sonny shuddered. “Cookie Boy doesn’t know what he’s in for.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh when he called Troy “Cookie Boy.” A lock of lank black hair fell across Sonny’s brow, and he grinned like a kindergartener who just learned to tie his big-boy shoes. That smile ruled out the possibility that Sonny Sexton was suffering from post-breakup devastation. Also, what he said next:

  “We should have sex.”

  I nearly fell over. It felt like a lifetime ago that I’d used those same exact words in my failed attempt to seduce Troy. But what else should I have expected from a twenty-year-old Fun Tyme Arcade employee whose God-given name literally couldn’t be spelled without S-E-X?

  “You know,” Sonny continued, “to get back at them.”

  Drea tiptoed between Ms. Pac-Man and Street Fighter II.

  “Like … like…�
�� I stammered, “some sexual quid pro quo?”

  This didn’t make sense. But I doubted Sonny Sexton would call me out on my misuse of legal terminology.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he said, “but 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.