THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP WITH ONE THING ON MY mind: how to get one hundred dollars and fast.
Unfortunately, the only job I’d ever had was babysitting neighborhood kids, and even if I scared up a couple little guys to watch on short notice, no way could I make one hundred dollars in one sitting. Ditto Sam. Her parents didn’t allow her to have an after-school job, thinking it would interfere too much with her studies.
That left us with precious few options to earn money in time for the drop. We would either have to (A) steal it or (B) borrow it. Since neither of us were the larceny type, Sunday morning found us standing in front of Sam’s brother, Kevin, pleading our case for a short-term loan.
“I promise we won’t even spend it. We just need to use it as bait for a couple hours, then we’ll bring it right back,” Sam told him.
Kevin blinked, giving her a blank stare. Though come to think of it, Kevin always had kind of a blank stare on his face. He was dressed in jeans and a faded Green Day T-shirt, laid out on the sofa with one foot hooked over the end in a sprawling pose. The TV was showing some nature channel with a bunch of ocean scenes, and the coffee table in front of him was littered with an empty Cap’n Crunch box and half a pepperoni pizza.
“Dude, a hundred bucks is a lot of money,” Kevin said. “You know how many boobies I could save with a hundred bucks?”
I almost hated to ask… “Boobies?”
Kevin nodded. “There are only like a dozen Abbott’s Boobies left in the world. The whole world, dude! That’s, like, really not a lot.”
“Birds?”
Kevin nodded solemnly. “Endangered birds, dude. They’re being killed off by Yellow Crazy Ants.”
Clearly someone had been watching way too much Nature Channel.
“Look, we’ll do anything, Kev. Please? We really need the money,” Sam pleaded.
Kevin raised one eyebrow. “Anything?”
Uh-oh. “Um, well, maybe not anything-” I broke in.
“Okay, how about this?” Kevin proposed. “There’s this job I’m supposed to do this afternoon. It pays a hundred and fifty dollars, and if you two wanna do it for me, you can keep the cash.”
“What kind of job?” I asked. As far as I knew, Kevin’s only real job since graduating from high school two years ago had been keeping the Kramers’ sofa from floating away.
“Just a quick one.”
I narrowed my eyes. “This job is legal, right?”
Kevin did a short laugh-slash-cough thing. “Totally, dude. Look, all you have to do is stand in front of Chuck’s Chicken on Main Street and hand out chicken bucket coupons for a couple hours. Easy, right?”
I had to admit, it did sound easy.
“I don’t know,” Sam hedged. “Main Street is like three miles away.”
“You can take the Green Machine,” he offered, sweetening the deal.
I bit my lip. The Green Machine was Kevin’s puke-green-colored Volvo sedan that was, in fact, an environmentally friendly “green” machine by virtue of the fact that it ran purely on clean-burning vegetable oil instead of fossil fuels. Though the term clean was relative. The only places that had the volume of veggie oil needed to run a car were fast-food joints that threw out drums of used cooking oil. Which meant the Green Machine perpetually smelled like French fries and fish sticks.
But, while I had a moment of pause over being seen driving around town in Kevin’s car, the truth was if we wanted to catch our cheat seller and figure out who killed Sydney, we had little choice.
“Okay,” I finally said. “We’ll do it.”
Kevin grinned, showing off a piece of pepperoni stuck in his back teeth. “Sweet, dude. The gig starts in an hour, and the suit’s in the Green Machine’s backseat.”
I paused. “Wait-suit? What suit?”
Kevin blinked at me. “The chicken suit, dude. You didn’t think you could hand out coupons looking like that, did you?”
I closed my eyes and did a mental two count while I yoga-breathed, telling myself that this was all for a good cause.
Forty minutes later, Sam and I were parking the Green Machine at Chuck’s Chicken in a haze of fried food-flavored smoke. Sam cut the engine, and we got out and stared into the backseat. Laid out across the cracked vinyl bench was a huge mass of yellow feathers.
I bit my lip. “So…”
“Yeah, no way,” Sam said, reading my mind. “I’m so not being a giant chicken, Hartley.”
“It’s just for a couple hours.”
“N. O.”
“I think the feathers match your hair color better than mine.”
“Nice try. We have the same color hair, Hartley.”
“I’m allergic to feathers?”
“Liar.”
“I’m allergic to looking like a dork?”
Sam grinned. “Ditto. Besides, I’m already putting my academic reputation on the line to buy these cheats.”
She had a point. “Fine.” I sighed. “I’ll be the chicken.” So not words I’d ever wanted to say in my life.
Reluctantly, I picked up the suit and held it up. Yellow feathers covered the torso, wings sticking out the sides with little arm holes for my hands. A pair of orange stockings attached to huge webbed feet covered the bottom half, and a hat with a mass of yellow fuzz sticking into the air capped off the outfit.
I gave Sam one last pleading look.
“You sure you don’t want to wear the suit?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
“Sigh,” I said out loud.
“Tell you what,” she offered, taking pity on me, “you can keep the extra fifty bucks.”
“Swell.”
I took the suit into the bathroom of Chuck’s Chicken, and after maneuvering uncomfortably in the tiny metal stall (and almost dunking my tail feathers into the toilet), I finally had the thing on. I purposely did not look in the mirror on my way out, sucking up the odd looks and snickers from the patrons enjoying their fried poultry and biscuits as I walked back out through the restaurant to find the manager.
He turned out to be a short Indian guy with a pinched nose and a unibrow hunkering down over his eyes in a frown.
“You’re not Kevin,” he observed, squinting past the costume to look at my face.
I shook my head, molting a few yellow feathers onto the floor in the process. “He couldn’t make it. He sent me instead.”
The manager paused, gave my suit a scrutinizing stare, then shrugged. “Whatever. Here, just hand these out to people on the street.”
He handed me a stack of coupons.
“And try to dance around a little,” he added. “You know, attract attention.”
Trust me, there was no way I wouldn’t attract attention. An older couple in the corner was laughing behind their palms, two junior high kids were openly staring, and one toddler was asking Mom if she could go hug Big Bird.
I grabbed the coupons and trudged outside to find Sam already sitting on the curb outside the restaurant. She took one look at me and grinned. Then pulled out her phone.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Just one little picture. Just to send to Kyle.”
I rolled my eyes. Sending “one little picture” to Kyle was like cc’ing the entire world. If you Wikipedia-ed gossip, I’m pretty sure Kyle’s face popped up. “If this ends up on YouTube, I’m totally disowning you as my best friend,” I warned.
Sam just grinned wider. “Say ‘feathers,’” she said, snapping a photo.
An hour later, my stack of coupons was gone, taking my dignity with it. I stripped off the molting suit and put my street clothes back on before collecting our payment from the manager. Then we jumped back into the Green Machine and headed for the mall, where we were supposed to drop the money in half an hour.
After circling only ten minutes for a parking spot (and stalking a woman with a Macy’s shopping bag all the way from the door to her red sedan), we made our way inside and toward the back corner of the mall.
The kid’s playland was an enclosed area full of slides, climbing equipment, toy cars, and little puzzles all made out of foam where the under-four-foot set could run wild between Mom’s shopping sprees. Everything was rounded and owie-free, including the giant six-foot-tall foam kangaroo guarding the entrance.
Sam acted as lookout as I slipped the hundred bucks I’d made playing chicken under the back left paw of the kangaroo, then we both took a seat on a bench across the walkway to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Fifteen minutes later, no one had touched the paw.
Sam squirmed in the seat beside me.
“Hey, how long do you think this is gonna take?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” Honestly, I’d hoped the guy would have been there by then. “Why?” I asked.
Sam pulled her cell from her pocket, checking the time. “I have a tutoring appointment in an hour and a half.”
“I didn’t know you had a tutor.”
She nodded. “She’s helping me study for the SATs.”
I turned to her. “Sam, SATs aren’t until May.”
“My dad believes in being prepared.”
Clearly.
I glanced at the kangaroo, still standing by his lonely self. “Go,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“Just go. I’ll wait and watch for our cheat seller. I don’t want you to miss tutoring,” I said, even though the fact that our cheat seller was also likely a killer made me kinda shudder at the idea of facing him alone.
Sam looked at her cell readout again. She pursed her lips. I could see a serious mental debate waging in the crease between her eyebrows. But finally, she put her phone away and shook her head.
“No. I’m not leaving you alone. What if he tries to run, like Chris? You’re gonna need backup.”
I gave her a quick hug. “Thanks.” As much as I didn’t want her to get in trouble for missing tutoring, I was definitely glad she was staying. Truth? I had no idea what I was doing. I totally needed backup.
We settled in to silence again as we watched kids filter in and out of the playland, tired parents in tow. No one stopped at the kangaroo. Well, once a curly-haired little blond boy shouted at it and tried to bite its tail, but that was about it.
I was just about to give up and concede that he wasn’t coming when a girl in a hot pink tank made her way to the entrance to playland.
Without a kid.
She had her back to us, so I couldn’t see her face, but from where we sat, I could tell she was about our age. Her hair was stick straight blond shot through with pale pink highlights, and she had on black skinny jeans, black slouching boots, and about a dozen silver bracelets on each wrist.
She walked into the playland, then did a quick look over both shoulders before crouching down (with difficulty, due to the tight jeans), next to Mr. Kangaroo’s back left paw.
Bingo.