Blues for Zoey (12 page)

35

Zoey Buys a Coffee

When Zoey walked in, she was like a completely different person. Gone were the cut-off jeans, the torn tights, the killer boots, the off-the-shoulder T-shir
t. She was now in a patterned, dark-green ski
rt; simple black tights; brown suede boots, low-heeled and low-cut; and a white
button-up top that hugged her chest in a way you couldn't ignore (at least I couldn't). Her dr
eadlocks, instead of exploding out in all directions, were fastened back in a prim ponytail.

Her makeup was different, too. No more bruise-black eyeshadow and matching lipstick. Now her face was blushing the colors of peaches and plums. If you had never seen her before, you'd take her for a preppy.

“Is that the same girl?” Alana whispered to me.

I nodded.

“I take it all back,” Calen said. “
Definitely
not homeless.”

Zoey waved at me and came straight over. She stood at the table and bent to kiss me on the cheek—as if it were som
ething she did all the time.

Calen jumped out of his seat and pointed at her. “You'r
e Zoey, right?”

“Yep.” Zoey nodded and ga
ve him a blank look. “You're Kaz'
s friend?”

“Uh … we met at Toph's, remember?” H
e sounded disappointed she didn't remember him.

Zoey smiled politely. “There were a ton of people the
re. What's your name again?”

“Calen.”

Alana cleared her throat.
“And I'm Alana,” she said, followed b
y a dramatic pause. “His girlfriend.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“So, uh, what school do you go to?”

“Actually,
I'm home-schooled. My dad knows a ton
of stuff. He teaches at—”

“Falconer,” Alana finished. “Kaz told us.”

Zoey scanned the big chalkboard mounted behind the counter. “
You guys mind if I grab a coffee? I've been working all day.”

Working?
I thought. I
couldn't tell if she meant it ironically
. Did standing on a corner strumming and thumping a weird instrument count as work?

“Sure,”
Alana said, looking at her watch. “Calen and I'll
go get seats. We'll meet you there.”

“We will?” Calen
asked. He was obviously curious about Zoey.

“Y
es,” Alana said sternly. “We will.”
She dragged him away, but not before giving me
a wink, one that meant,
we'll leave y
ou two alone ...

Zoey had wandered over to the counte
r, where she ordered a small regular coffee, the cheapest drink on the menu. She paid, turned to leave, but then stopped.

“
Excuse me,” she said to the guy behind the counter, a pimply kid no older than me.

“Yes?” He raised his ey
ebrows hopefully, grateful for Zoey's attention.

“Can you br
eak a twenty?”

“Sure!”

Zoey handed him a twenty dollar bill. “How 'bout a ten, a five, and five ones. Okay?”

She took the change but she didn't put
it away. Instead, she counted the bills out on the
countertop, laying them down one by one. Then she sta
red at the money, thinking.

“Oh my god!” she said. “I'm so stupid!”

It wasn't only her clothes that had changed; her voice had shifted, as well. It was faster and higher pitched. S
he sounded like she was doing an impression of Christina Muñoz.

“I forgot, my dad dumped all these ones on me when I left the house. I totally need to get rid of them. They're so annoying, don't you think?”

“
Totally
.”

I sort of felt sorr
y for the kid behind the counter. Maybe he didn'
t get much attention from girls, what with his skin being a bit messed up. I also wondered what Zoey was doing. If I didn't kn
ow better, I might have thought she was
flirting—which made me wonder about her taste in men. If she flirted with guys like him, what did it say about me?

“Oh, wait! I know!” Zoey picked the stack of bills off the counter. “I can put all my ones together, then you can gi
ve me a ten, yeah?” She laid a stack of ones on the counter.

The kid gave her a ten from the register.

“Great, thanks! You really helped me out.” She turned to leave, but the kid stopped her.

“Wait,” he said. “You're short one dollar. There's only nine here.”

“Really? Lemme see.” She reached out and I noticed her nails were painted to match her face, the orangish-pink of early autumn.

She took the bills from the cashier guy and counted them onto the counte
r.

“Oh my god! You're right!” Her
voice went even higher and she giggled like a baby. “I am
sooo
sorry. N
o wonder they have you working the register. You're smart.”

“He
y, thanks.”

“Okay, here. I have a
few more ones left from my dad.
Why don't I give you a ten and
a one—that makes eleven—and with the nine ones I gave you, it makes twenty. I
'll put it all together and then I can get my original twenty back,
okay?” She giggled again. “God, I'm
so indecisive
!”

The kid smiled at her. “I'm sorr
y to say it, but you kind of are.”

He should have done that
more often. You didn't notice his skin so
much when he smiled. The register was still open, so
he handed back her original twenty and took the pile of change from her.

Zoey shook her head. “All that for nothing! I'm such a ditz sometimes.”

“We better go,
” I said to her. “The movie'll be starting.”

As soon as we were outside, Zoey's voice went back to normal.
Weird
. Had she really been flirting with that guy? We passed a trash can on the way and Zoey tossed in the cup of coffee she had just bought.

“Hey! You didn't even drink that.”

She shrugged. “I changed my mind. I wasn't kidding about being indecisive. One moment I want something, the next I don't.” She looked toward the cinema. “Anyway, they probably have a rule about outside drinks.”

It made sense, but only kind of. Why would she take all that time to buy a coffee she wasn't going to drink? It bugged me all through the movie.

Which was shit, by the way. I have no idea why we picked it. It was basically a submarine war movie. In space. The good guys drove a space-sub called
The Conquest
(hence the title). That was about all the information you needed before the explosions started. Most of the time, I like explosions in a movie theater, but not
just explosions
. That's what this felt like.

When we hit explosion gazillion-and-two, my brain turned to fermented bean curd. Or rather,
it wandered
. I kept thinking back to what Zoey did with that clerk in the coffee shop. In the middle of the big, spine-cracking meta-explosion of a climax, I figured it out.

36

What Zoe
y Did

Usually
, when you ask for change, it's a two-sided process: One side (in this case, Z
oey) hands in a bill and the other side (the cash r
egister, basically) spits back the same amount in smaller denominations. Simple. Which is why Zoey complicated it—by adding a
third side
to the equation: the counter-top in between. She used the counter in order
to confuse the guy and make him introduce an extra
ten bucks into the mix (which she inevitably ended up with).

It went like this:

37

Sudden Conquest

I leaned over to her, my lips right at her ear. “If you needed ten bucks, you could've just asked me.”

Her body went rigid. “What're you talking about?”

“What you pulled on that guy in the café. It was cool. You totally conned him out of ten bucks, didn't you?”

She let go of my hand.

“Zoey?”

She didn't answer.

“Seriously, I thought it was cool. That guy was an
idiot
.”

Zoey made a hasty grab for her purse and stepped over Calen and Alana to get to the aisle. Calen didn't get it. In his world, you watched a movie to the end. Always.

“You can't go now. There's, like, five minutes left!”

I followed her out, but Zoey wasn't in the lobby. She was d
own on the sidewalk, standing near the road. I went out to meet her.

“
What're you doing?
”

“It's called flagging a taxi.”

“But why?”

Several blocks down, something alarmingly taxi-like crept toward us.

“
What's the big deal?” I said. “It's only ten bucks. It's not like I'm gonna call the cops.”

“
Shut up!
”

“What's your problem?”

“Just leave me alone. I'm going home, okay? I changed my mind. It's a dumb movie.”

“I don't get you.”

“What's to get? You hardly know me.”

“
Exactly!
Why do you think I wanted you to come?”

She turned again and looked for the taxi. It was stuck at a red light. Seeing her like that, turned awa
y, willfully ignoring me, I realized she was right—I hardly knew her. I wanted to change that. A part of me wanted to know
why
she had pulled that thing in the coffee shop, but another pa
rt of me didn't care, and both were tiny compa
red to the biggest part of all: the part of me that just wanted her to sta
y.

“Okay, so maybe you feel guilty about what you did. Maybe you needed the money and you were too embarrassed to ask me to lend you some. Believe me, I know what that's like. Needing money.” I thought I was getting through to her, but she was still staring at the taxi. “I thought it was a cool trick. It reminded me of something my dad used to say, about faking somebody out in basketball. That's what it was like, and … seriously, what's ten bucks? The guy behind the counter was an idiot and you conned him. It's not a huge deal.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Saying what?”

“
That I
conned
him. You're wrong.
I just ripped him off, that's all.” She looked do
wn. “It was just stealing.”

“Looked like a con to me.”

“That's cuz you don't know what it means. H
aven't you heard that old saying? ‘You can't con an honest man.' It
's true. The clerk was an idiot, but he was an
honest
idiot. He was just doing his job.”

Zoey raised her hand for the cab, but I grabbed it to stop her.
“Okay, fine. You
stole
some money. T
en bucks, I don't care. I told you—I
totally
know what i
t's like to need some extra cash. It doesn't mean you have to go home already.”

“Actually, it probably does.”

“
Why?
”

The light was green now and the taxi was on its way.

“I liked it when you
thought I was divine,” she said. “Nice to get mistaken for a goddess, or an angel, or whatever. Something heavenly, anyway
. But then, when you whispered to me in the movie, it felt like I'
d lost all that.”

“You haven't. It's still true.”

“Honest?”

I nodded. The cab pulled to the curb.

“No one's ever figured it out before,” Zoey admitted.

“So?”

“Guess it means you're smarter than most. Apart from my dad, most guys in my life have been pretty thick.”

“You think I'm smarter than most?”

“You are today.”

W
e stared at each other for a second. Neither of us was angry or confused anymore. Strange how fast it melted away.

“You pull that sort of thing a lot?” I asked her.

“My dad says, ‘When you see an opportunity, take it.' ”

I took a step closer to her, but the cab driver whirred down his window. “You guys need a ride or what?”

“Hold on.”

In my head, there had been a kiss coming. A real one. It was a lean-in moment—and I missed it (of course). Because Calen came dashing out of the cinema.

“
Hey!
The movie's over! You guys coming back?”

“No,” I told him, in probably the boldest move of my life. “Zoey's not feeling well. I'm gonna take her home.”

She flinched. “You are?”

“If you're okay with that.”

She bit her lip. “Actually, yeah, okay. My dad's away tonight.”

The driver looked relie
ved when, like a perfect gentleman, I opened the door for Zoey and then climbed in beside her.