Free She's So Money by Cherry Cheva Page A

do out in public,” I muttered. He had to duck his head to hear me. “I have to be at work in like, two minutes, so just give me whatever you have for tonight, and I’ll take care of it.”
    “Here,” he said, reaching into his book bag and handing me his Algebra book and a ratty looking assignment sheet. “But don’t do too good a job, or else it won’t be convincing.”
    “Duh,” I said, examining the book. Either he or a previous owner had covered it with an impressive amount of graffiti, mostly doodles of transparent boxes and a couple of cartoon robots. “What do you usually get?” I asked.
    “Zero out of ten,” he answered cheerfully.
    I rolled my eyes. “I’ll aim for a four.”
    “Sweet.”
    “And then I can sort of gradually make it look like you’re improving from week to week.” I was getting ahead of myself, but I guessed I had to if I was planning on making any real money off of this little scheme.
    “How soon can you have this done?”Camden asked.
    I glanced at the assignment sheet and flipped his book to the right page to check out the problems. “I’ll do it at work tonight.”
    “Cool. I’ll come get it around eight.”
    “Only if you don’t bring your friends.” The last thing I needed was a replay of the other night.
    “Free country. I can if I want,” he said.
    “Private restaurant. You can’t if I don’t want,” I shot back. He smiled good naturedly as I crammed his stuff into my backpack, went over to my car, and headed to work.

    It actually took me longer to do a convincingly bad job on Camden’s quadratic equations than it would have taken me to do them right, especially since I tackled all my own homework first. I ended up having to stow his books underneath the bar as the dinner shift got under way, and I did the problems in between refilling water glasses and carrying plates of food. Luckily, Nat wasn’t even remotely close to noticing that I was working out of a math book from a class I’d taken two years ago—he was too busy going over to Table Twelve every five minutes, where Star was camped out. She was sort of reading a book and sort of eating all the free food he kept on bringing over to her, but mostly she was exchanging flirty glances with him whenever his waiter duties landed him in her line of vision. Gross. Good for my little brother, I guess, but gross.
    I was just putting the finishing touches on Camden’s problem set by randomly changing some digits when the phone rang. “Hello, Pailin Thai Cuisine,” I said.
    “Hello, it’s Mom. Everything okay? Any customers yet tonight?”
    I looked around the restaurant. “Yeah, it’s pretty good. A couple takeout calls, too.”
    “Are you and Nat okay? You’re not scared to be staying in the house by yourself?”
    I laughed. “No, we’re not scared.”
    My mom chuckled as well. “Okay, okay. How’s Krai? Dad talked to him last night and said he sounded stressed.”
    “What?” I sputtered, then closed my eyes and willed myself to remove the panic from my voice. I reached out and pressed the back of my hand to the side of a water pitcher, letting the cold from the ice calm me down a little.
    “Why?” Deep breath. “Everything’s fine,” I said. “He’s fine. It’s just, you know, it’s really busy because he has to cook everything himself, what with Dad being gone.” Oh God. If Krai had told them about the letter yesterday even after I’d said it was nothing to worry about . . . if he’d gotten suspicious and said something . . .
    “How’s the trade show?” I asked, changing the subject.
    “Oh, good.” I heard my dad’s muffled voice in the background, telling my mom something. “Oh,” she added. “Dad says we might order some new silverware if we find some that’s not too expensive, and there are lots of booths with free food samples.”
    “Oh, man. Nat would—”
    “He would love that, I know. And of course, we love it too, because it’s free.” My mom chuckled to