Gettin' Lucky (13 page)

“Well, it’s always nice to keep hope alive,” marcus said sarcastically.

“Sit, get yourself some chips—the guacamole is homemade,” I said. The doorbell chimed again, causing James to visibly flinch. I, however, jumped right up into the air with excitement.

“I’ll get that!” I insisted, and dashed off again.

“Okay, so,” I began, “we just want to let everyone know that we’d like to tape the game tonight.”

I wasn’t sure whether I expected people to be cool with the idea, or to think it was insanely weird, so I decided to overcompensate by grinning like a maniac and sending my voice into a pitch that only dogs could hear.

I was met with seven blank stares. Kelly and Elliot were in on the scheme, of course. Marcus, James, Jake, Dennis, Andy, and Jesse seemed confused. Alana, on the other hand, was patting her head like she wished maybe she’d done something different with her hair today. She did love the spotlight, Alana.

“What for?” jake asked, seeming completely perplexed.

“It’s for our film class,” Kelly said, jumping in quickly. Smart—everyone in school knew that she was way into movies, so the whole thing would sound much more believable coming from her.

Besides, we
were
doing it for our film class. Sort of.

“Have you started your project yet, Alana?” Kelly asked pointedly.

Alana coughed delicately and tossed her curtain of hair over one shoulder. “Um, no, not yet. We’re still sort of … thinking through some concepts.”

Oh, I am so sure.

Alana was not exactly known for thinking through concepts to their fullest. Historically, I’d always been sort of the “ideas girl” in our friendship. If I had to bet (which, no thanks—there’d be enough of that shortly), I’d say she was waiting for Katy to come up with some kind of epiphany. I’d also say she was in for kind of a long wait.

But I digress.

“Well,” Kelly continued, straining to match my bizarrely enthusiastic tone, “
our
concept was to do, like, a cross between, you know,
Laguna Beach
meets
Celebrity Poker Showdown.”
“Peppy” didn’t hang that convincingly on Kelly—it came off more like “hyper-medicated”—but, points to the girl: She really was giving it her all.

I glanced at Jesse, apprehensive. He appeared to be mulling the whole thing over. He was squinting, which usually meant he was concentrating hard. If we let him go on for too much longer, he was going to wind up cross-eyed.

Alana sidled up to Jesse and nudged him suggestively. “What’s the big deal?” She pouted. “You look hot tonight.

I took that to mean, in Alana-speak, “
I
look hot tonight.” I resisted the urge to barf. At least her charm, repulsive as it was to me, generally worked on members of the male persuasion.

“What the hell?” he said finally. “Could be cool.” Either I was wrong about his scam, or he was more driven by ego than I’d ever even realized.

Once Jesse the high school demigod had spoken, everyone else began to shift in their seats and murmur variations on their agreements. I smiled with satisfaction. “My sentiments exactly.”

Yeah, my ex-boyfriend was not camera-shy
at all.

I mean, I’d kind of always known that Jesse was sort of vain—he was one of the few boys I knew who kept a small mirror on the inside of his locker door. And checked it regularly between classes. And felt totally free to re-apply product as his hair texture evolved throughout the day. But now that there was a camera fixed on him, his obsession with himself shot up to a shocking new level.

“Should I deal you in, baby?” he asked Kelly, winking at her and laughing.

I had to give Kelly credit for not collapsing in hysterics right then and there. She wasn’t exactly the “baby” type. I knew she was concentrating her every last ounce of strength so as not to leap out of her chair and toss the bowl of tortilla chips upside down over Jesse’s head.

“Sure, yeah,” she said, smiling at him flirtatiously. Poor sucker, he had no idea she was joking. “I’m feeling lucky tonight.”

Jesse chuckled at that. “Cass is feeling pretty lucky too,” he said.

I blinked when I heard my name being called. “Hmm?” I asked, munching down on a chip.

“I said, you’re feeling lucky,” Jesse repeated. He pointed at my chest.

I crossed my arms over my boobs self-consciously. They weren’t exactly tiny, and it tended to weird me out when people just pointed at them outright. “Um, what?”

“Your lucky tank top,” he said.

Oh, right. That. I used to wear it whenever I had a test. Jesse would know that. Seeing as how he was my boyfriend for two years, until I caught him sucking my former best friend’s face off.

I was surprised that he remembered. Surprised, and a little bit touched. But mostly grossed out. Jesse sucked. It wasn’t too hard to keep that in mind these days. Particularly given that he and his friends were now pretty much staring at my chest. I rolled my eyes and shook it off. “Well, we all have our little rituals,” I said, pointing at his lighter. As usual, it sat on the table next to him. It never moved position, even when he was dealing. Talk about a security blanket. And he didn’t even smoke, the freak.

“Touché,” Jesse said, winking at me. He really was getting a little too free with the winking tonight. Someone needed to tell him that it was sort of repulsive.

Jesse slapped two cards down on the table in front of Kelly, who managed to turn up the corners of the cards without revealing even the slightest hint of emotion. I was in awe of her poker face, for real. He dealt for the rest of the group, who reacted to their cards with varying levels of impassivity. Elliot, of course, was cool and calm as always. I decided he might be my poker hero.

I hoped I was managing to keep it
together, but on the inside, my heart was beating so intensely that I was pretty sure everyone could see it through the tank top. Lucky, my ass. I could have used a lucky ski parka or something. Either the telltale heart or my sweaty forehead was going to give me away, and soon.

My cards were crap, but I didn’t care. I was way into exposing Jesse. There was no doubt in my mind that he was cheating. It just seemed so much like something he would do. Mind you, I may have been just a touch biased, but Jesse did not strike me as the most trustworthy person. At least, not these days, anyway.

By the third hand in, Jesse was up twenty dollars. It could have been good playing. It could have been good cards. It could have been both. But I doubted it.

Kelly was awesome. Every hand, she’d get up and reposition the tripod. Dad had lent me his digital video cam for the night. (I’d told him I was working on my film class project, which—hey—wasn’t a lie.)

It was funny to see how people reacted when they knew they were being filmed. Elliot basically shrank back into his seat in concentration. Which, like, for him, was
totally normal behavior. Dennis’s features were frozen into this crazy Cro-Magnon expression that I—m guessing he thought was sexy. Alana ran to the bathroom every twelve seconds or so to reapply a healthy dose of Lancôme Juicy Tubes: Desert. Seriously, her lips were so glossy they looked like they were going to slide right off. I would have given her the heads up if it weren’t for the economy-size grudge I was still holding.

I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought that Jesse looked like the guy from
Smallville.
(Clark Kent, not Lex Luther. Though the guy who plays Lex Luther is
really
drool-worthy too. I’m just saying.) The longer we played, the more his eyes were flashing and the brighter his grin got. He teeth were totally threatening to devour his face. And Alana had taken on the slack-jawed gaze of a drugged religious fanatic.

It was astonishing. Once upon a time, I was close to both of those people. And if you’d told me then that, sometime soon, they’d both betray me and I’d find myself befriending an intense but cool Goth-chick and her quiet, sweet, slightly geeky technonerd friend, I would have told you you were
sipping some very toxic Kool-Aid. But, nonetheless, here we were.

Jesse cackled and scooped up a pile of poker chips.

“Man!”
Marcus exclaimed, slapping the flat of his palm against the table.

Jesse leered and leaned forward, managing to get in all of our faces at once. I was psyched; this had to make for good footage. “Another hand?” he asked, practically drooling on the cards. He palmed his lucky lighter and caressed it in a manner that made me feel actually sort of dirty.

I forced down the bile that threatened to spew from my throat and smiled like a morning news anchor. I was down fifteen dollars and had almost depleted this month’s allowance. This was the beginning of the end, for me.

I looked at Jesse, forcing myself to gaze directly into the hypnotic,
Magnolia-
Svengali light. I was impervious. I was all-knowing. And I was
so
going to catch him in the act.

“Totally,” I said. “Deal me in.”

Eleven

“I think the thing to do is to just, um, freeze-frame right there … no—rewind …”

“Cass, please. It’s late. We’re tired, and the frame, she has been frozen for fully twenty-seven minutes. There’s nothing on this tape.”

Kelly had been a trouper for the first hour or so of our post-poker video rehash. Obviously she had a Mac, so it took no time for us to upload the evening’s footage onto her hard drive. She was fully familiar with iMovie, as was I, and Elliot … well, Elliot plus computers kind of always equaled no problem. But as Kelly so delicately pointed out, we’d been going over the footage for, um, a while now, and though I was carefully
scanning for any unsavory activity, so far, I had come up with a big, fat zero.

Still—I held out hope.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, leaning forward toward the monitor and holding my finger down on the mouse so that the video was stuck in an endless loop of fast-forward/rewind. “I know everyone at school thinks that Jesse is like some kind of omnipotent being. I mean, I thought it myself for a while. But even I know that no one could possibly be
that
lucky. He and Dennis totally cleaned house in the last two poker games. That’s ridiculous.”

“I agree,” Kelly said. “Maybe he’s a wizard. Maybe it’s voodoo. Maybe we’re all just figments of his twisted imagination.” She arched an eyebrow at me dryly.

Elliot shook his head. I could tell the whole conversation was killing him; it was bad enough that we were speculating about luck, but to drag magic into the discussion was just plain heresy.

“He must be unmasked,” I insisted, frowning. “If for no reason other than the fact that he was acting like such a jackass tonight. I mean, really—the way he was
making out with that cigarette lighter? Boy doesn’t even smoke ….”

I stopped.

And looked up.

I was having a “eureka” moment.

“Cass?” Elliot said, sounding concerned. “Are you okay?”

I cocked my head to one side, lost in concentration. Then I leaned forward again, poised to rewind the video.

“Ugh.” Kelly sighed. “You are only torturing yourself. Yes, I get that he is, like, your arch nemesis, and I get that what he did with Alana is totally repulsive, but Cass—let it go.”

“Shh!” I said, waving at her frantically. I beckoned the two of them toward a tiny spot on the screen. “Look.”

They grudgingly obliged me, each leaning over one shoulder. Kelly smelled liked that shampoo from the semi-pornographic commercial. Elliot smelled like Ban. I knew it was Ban because my dad uses it, too. For a moment I kind of wished Elliot smelled like something other than my father.

“What are we looking at?” Kelly asked,
sounding bored and impatient, and taking me out of my little olfactory reverie.

“You tell me,” I said. “I pose this question: Why would my ex-boyfriend, an insanely fit, compulsively competitive athlete-type, be grabbing at a cigarette lighter so intently? Considering, you know, that he hasn’t taken a puff off a cigarette since his twelfth birthday, when a friend nicked a pack from his mom’s dresser and dared Jesse to try one.”

Kelly shrugged. “You said it yourself. Everyone has their little lucky totems. You’re wearing that tank top. And the eyeliner to match.”

“The eyeliner’s not lucky, just cute,” I corrected her. “And, anyway, you’re missing the point.”

“That’s because it’s one fifteen in the morning,” Kelly said, yawning. “Seriously, I need my beauty slee—”

“Hold on,” Elliot cut in, sounding excited. “Freeze-frame right there.” He reached over my shoulder and did it for me. Now it felt like we were engaged in some kind of alternate, vaguely flirty version of the game Twister. “Do you see it?”

“See me losing my entire babysitting
fund in one night? Yes, I see it. In fact, I lived it. So maybe I don’t need to be
re-
living it,” Kelly suggested, half-joking but half really not.

“Look closer, Kells,” Elliot said, using a nickname I didn’t even know existed. Kelly didn’t strike me as a “Kells” kind of girl, but she let it go, so what the heck did I know, anyway? “Look at the lighter.”

Suddenly Kelly shifted herself closer to me. Now I could smell the orange Tic Tacs on her breath. “Oh, man,” she murmured. “What an ass.”

“I will resist the urge to offer a hearty ‘I told you so,’” I said smugly.

Elliot thrust his index finger toward a point on the screen. “The lighter. It’s working like a mirror for him. The way he’s got it poised just in front of the deck when he deals—”

“He can see what cards he’s passing to all of us,” I said. My heart quickened.
What a
total
ass.
I mean, I’d completely known he was cheating, but somehow, the proof still grossed me out, big-time.

Kelly grabbed the mouse out of my hand and scanned the tape forward a few
minutes. “There—now he’s sending some kind of signal to Dennis. No wonder the two of them have been raking it in.”

Sure enough, when you looked carefully, you could see Jesse ever-so-casually splay out one, two, or three fingers on his free hand. There also seemed to be a complicated system of knuckle raps and finger taps that to the casual observer would appear to be nothing more than a tiny physical tic. They obviously didn’t think we’d ever play the tape back and study it so intently. But, yeah, Dennis was completely reacting based on the hand signals Jesse was feeding him. And they’re staring off into the distance “nonchalantly,” as though nothing were amiss at all.