Free Prom by Laurie Halse Anderson Page A

a funky-looking pastry that smelled like a Cinnabon, only it didn’t have any icing.
    “You’re bribing me.”
    “Yes.” She pumped her accelerator and started the car. The engine bucked and coughed loudly and finally turned over.
    I took a bite and then I took another bite. Wow. It was amazing; butter, some kind of nuts—walnuts?—sugar, but not too much . . .
    “Like it?” Nat asked.
    “’S all right.” I sipped my coffee, which she had doctored up exactly the way I liked it. “You’re on a roll, aren’t you? Breaking and entering, kidnapping, and bribery all before the sun is up.”
    Nat lit a cigarette, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” She watched me take a huge bite. “There’s more in back if you want.”
    I turned around. Layers of pastries separated by wax paper were stacked in two cardboard boxes on the backseat. “Where’d those come from?”
    “My grandma baked them. Eat up and look in the pink notebook. I wrote out a list for you.”

63.
    She started me out with an easy job: delivering bribes, I mean the pastry. First stop: the custodians.
    They were hanging in their “office,” a workshop next to the loading dock. Three guys were playing poker, one was dead asleep on the couch, and the head custodian, an old black guy with a shaved head and thick glasses, was fixing a broken push broom. The radio played Sinatra.
    “Yeah?” asked the guy with the biggest pile of chips.
    I wanted to drop the pastry box and run. If I did, Nat would wake me up even earlier the next day.
    “Yo,” I said. “I’m Ashley. I brought breakfast.”
    They weren’t going to argue with that. I handed out the goodies and chatted them up the way my dad did when he wanted to put the squeeze on somebody. One of the guys remembered my family from a Beef ’n’ Beer we went to at the VFW with my uncle Danny. Turned out that he and Danny were in the Reserves together. Score another point for Team Hannigan.
    The boss guy didn’t eat any pastry. The whole time I was yakking, he stood on the other side of the room, wrapping duct tape around the broom handle.
    “Hey, little girl,” he finally said. “These boys got work to do. What do you want?”
    Don’t screw this up. “You heard about the prom?”
    “They cancelled it,” said the boss. “That young Math teacher stole all the money.”
    The guy who was winning the card game cracked up. “Math teacher.”
    “It’s not funny,” I said.
    The boss sliced through the duct tape with silver scissors. “We got nothing to do with the prom.”
    I swallowed hard. “Yeah, you do. I hope. Let me explain.”

64.
    By the time I left, we had a deal. They wanted an under-the-table cash bonus and more pastry the night of the prom, but they’d come early and stay late and wouldn’t bitch to the administration as long as they didn’t have to mop up any beer puke. Couldn’t blame them for that.
    My second job on my list was scarier. “Chaperones—confirm English teachers.”
    Ugh.
    Why did the chaperones have to be English teachers, you ask? Nat said that English teachers believed in true romance and happy endings, plus none of them coached sports teams.
    Okay, that made sense.
    But would they listen to me? I had a bad reputation with the English department on account of I hated to read. They were so picky about the reading thing. I don’t know why. All the good books get made into movies. They could save themselves a lot of work if they would just show movies in class.
    I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a standing ovation when I barged into their office. On the other hand, English teachers liked to eat, just like normal people and custodians.
    The English office was basically a big closet without any windows. The walls were totally covered by bulletin boards buried under four inches of tacked-up papers. Eight English teachers sat around the long table that took up most of the room. They were all