“You think?" Rachel asked. "I’d planned on darting suspiciously back and forth down the hallways.”
I walked faster. I didn’t need her sarcasm. I wanted to tell her to forget the whole thing. I’d take care of the posters myself. But the truth was, I needed my friends’ help. I couldn’t risk getting caught taking the posters down myself.
We walked into a hallway that had two Amy posters hanging on the walls. “All right,”
I said. “I’ll stand guard and make sure the coast is clear. If anyone comes this way, I’ll start coughing.”
Aubrie looked past me. “What if someone comes from the other end of the hallway?”
“No one will,” Rachel said, and pulled Aubrie toward the posters. I could tell Rachel just wanted to get the whole thing over with. Maybe she wanted it over so badly she wouldn’t be careful. After all, it wasn’t her presidency at stake. I hoped she’d at least look around before she started ripping things down.
I glanced at them as they walked toward a poster, then turned the other way. It wouldn’t do any good to have me stand guard if I didn’t pay attention.
The hallway in front of me stood silent and empty, but what if someone came? Would Rachel and Aubrie even hear my coughing? Maybe if I also pretended to have a seizure at the same time, it would cause such a commotion that no one would notice Rachel and Aubrie shoving large pieces of poster board into the garbage can.
I scanned the hallway in front of me for a minute and listened to the quiet in the hallway behind me. Were they finished? It seemed like they should be, but I didn’t want to turn around in case I missed someone approaching.
I waited.
And waited.
When I was just about to turn around and check on my friends, a guy from my Spanish class turned the corner and walked down the hall.
I didn’t know much about Bentley Roberts beyond the fact that he spoke Spanish well and was really annoying about it. He’d spent the last summer in South America in a student exchange program and now considered himself an expert on all things Latino. Occasionally he corrected us on our accents in class or told us our d's weren’t soft enough. I avoided him when I could. Now he walked right toward me.
I coughed, and then coughed again. I still didn’t hear anything from behind me, so I coughed louder, this time thumping my chest for added effect.
Bentley paused as he came to me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah—” I coughed again. “I just have”—I added a few more coughs—“—allergies.”
His brows furrowed, as though he expected me to collapse at any moment. “Are you going to be okay?”
I would be if Rachel and Aubrie suddenly appeared. What were they waiting for—the paramedics? “Oh sure—” cough, cough. “It comes and goes.” I patted my chest let the coughing subside.
Bentley nodded, but didn’t go past me. He still wore a look of concern. “What are you allergic to?”
“Um,” this was an answer I should have known. I struggled for a moment to think of something—anything—people were allergic to. “Ragweed,” I said, and then because he seemed to be looking around the hallway in search of a ragweed bush, I added, “Sometimes I just get an attack out of the blue.”
“Oh.”
I tried to think of something else to stall him. “Do you have any allergies?”
“No, but whenever I drink milk, I get indigestion.”
“Oh. Well. Sorry to hear that.” I could think of absolutely nothing else to say to that, so I just stood there staring at him. When he was about to walk past me, I blurted out, “That must be hard. I mean, how do you eat cold cereal in the morning?”
“Usually I don’t. I just have toast.”
I nodded as though I found this a fascinating fact. “I guess I’m lucky ragweed doesn’t belong to one of the food groups.”
“They make non-dairy milk you can put on cereal, but it doesn’t taste the same.”
“Oh.” And that was about as far as I could drag this conversation out.
“Well, I hope you feel better,” he said, and walked past me.
I turned around and looked down the hallway. Except for Bentley, it was empty.
They weren’t even there? I had been talking indigestion with Bentley for nothing? I stared down the hallway and wondered what to do next.
Could my friends have been caught by someone coming up the other end of the hallway? Perhaps right now the principal was chewing them out in her office.
I walked down the hallway and peered into the next one. It was empty too. I tapped my foot nervously, looking around the rows of lockers.
Seconds, minutes, millennia went by. I paced back to the first hallway. And that’s where I found Aubrie and Rachel. They walked casually toward me, as though strolling around the school hallways after school was a normal activity.
When they got close to me, I whispered, “Where have you been?”
“Taking down posters,” Rachel whispered back. “We finished in this hallway and just figured it would be faster to move on to the next one without coming back to get you.”
I hadn’t realized I was shaking, but I suddenly felt it and wrapped my arms around my waist. “Thanks a lot. I’ve been back here coughing my lungs up.”
“Well, you can be happy now. It’s done, and we didn’t get caught.”
“Yet,” Aubrie said.
Rachel and I both got her point. We quickly headed toward the front door.
I didn’t breathe easily again until we reached the parking lot. And then I took several deep breaths. It was done. It didn’t seem like nearly enough payback considering how Amy had smeared my name, but at least now she’d think twice before doing any more dirty campaigning.
Aubrie took her car keys out of her backpack. “Now we can all go home and relax.”
“Yeah,” I said, and suddenly realized I couldn’t. I was supposed to be at work at 3:45.
I looked at my watch. It read 3:42. Not only would I not have time to go to Josh’s store, I wouldn’t have time to go home and grab anything to eat, either. Usually I ate a sandwich or something because I worked through the dinner hour.
Today I’d have to settle for whatever was on the candy rack by the registers. After all of the tension of the day, this was just what my stomach needed—a meal that consisted of Blowcharms and Trident.
I said goodbye to my friends, threw my backpack into my car, and drove out of the parking lot like I was Brad with half a dozen cats roaming around the front seat.
When I walked into the bookstore, I saw Logan standing at the cart. He always drov e to school, which meant he’d been one of the lucky recipients of a flyer with my SAT score on it. He was probably just bursting with happiness and would gloat about my lousy score for the entire shift.
I should have just gone home and called in sick.
I slunk over to the closet and got my vest out. Logan strolled up beside me as I put it on. “Hi, Samantha.”
“Just shut up,” I told him.
“What?” He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What did I say?”
I buttoned up the vest and wished my fingers would stop shaking. “It’s not what you said, it’s what you’re about to say.”
“You know what I’m going to say? Now you’re a psychic?”
“No. I’m obviously not a psychic. A psychic would have done really well on say . . .
the SAT.”
“Oh,” he nodded in an unconcerned manner. “So the report was true?”
“I was having a bad day when I took the test,” I lied. “I had this huge headache, and I couldn’t think straight.”
Logan shrugged. “You’ll do better when you retake them.”
“Yeah, I will.”
I waited for him to say something else to me, some jibe or jest, some commentary on my intelligence. But he didn’t. He just went back to the book cart. I waited a little longer.
Why in the world was he being nice to me now—now when he had really great ammunition to use against me? I decided not to live with the suspense.