Roux reached over and slammed it with her fist. It popped open.
She just shrugged when I gaped at her. “I saw it in a movie once,” she said. “I didn’t think it would actually work. Do you still hate me now?”
“No, I don’t hate you,” I said. “I didn’t hate you and I don’t now. I’m just having a terrible day, as you can probably tell.”
“I can tell. So what, your parents want you to do stuff? Like chores?”
I was pretty sure that chores were a foreign concept to Roux. “Sort of,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, what isn’t?” she said. “Y’know, you can always come stay with me if your parents are being lame. You can have your own room and your own butler.”
“Really?”
“No. At least not the butler part.” She smiled at me. “But you can borrow Harold.”
I rolled my eyes but grinned back at her anyway. “No way. Harold hates me.”
“Harold loves you. Don’t let that skinny, bony old-man exterior fool you. He’s a softie. A softie with an attitude problem, but a softie nonetheless. Hey! You should come over tonight! We can watch movies.”
“I can’t,” I told her. “I’m sorry, it’s just everything with my parents right now … I should probably lie low for a while.”
“Or maybe I could come over to your place?”
There was something in her voice that I couldn’t quite identify. Jealousy? Envy? Maybe even hope? From everything I had seen and everything Jesse had said, I knew that her parents were rarely home, and knowing that Roux could never meet my family only made me feel worse.
“Not today. Between school and tests and college stuff”—I didn’t know what “college stuff” even meant, but I could make something up if I had to—“my parents just want me to focus.” (That was putting it mildly.) “I’m sorry.”
The hurt look on her face lasted for only a second before it smoothed back into Roux’s casually arranged coolness. “That’s fine,” she said. “Harold loves watching Manhattan with me.” The bell went off over our heads. “Damn, I have to go to history. I failed the quiz last week and my parents weren’t home to sign off on it. Hello, detention, my old friend.”
“You need a signature?”
“If you fail, yeah. I mean, it’s good they’re not home because now they don’t know that I failed, but yeah.”
“Why don’t you just forge it?”
“I’ve done it so many times that they’ve figured it out.”
I set my books on top of the lockers and gestured to her. “Here, let me try. Do you have a copy of your parents’ signatures?”
Roux flipped through her textbook and produced a half-folded piece of paper. “Here, I failed this one two weeks ago.”
“Why do you keep failing?”
“Because I don’t study.”
I just sighed and took the old quiz. It was her mom’s signature, loopy and wide, almost like Disney handwriting, not too difficult. “You didn’t see me do this,” I told her, then proceeded to do a near-perfect signature on Roux’s test. The Y could have had a bit more of a curlicue, but a high school history teacher wasn’t going to notice.
Roux looked at my work, then up at me. “Is there anything you can’t do?” she cried.
“Not really, no.”
“Can I buy you a delicious off-campus snack to say thank you?”
“Roux.”
“So sue me for trying. I’m persistent, you know. I’m a runaway black truck semi covered in ice, or whatever you said.”
“You’re crazy.” I laughed. “Have fun.”
“You know it. Tell Jesse Oliver I said bonjour.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me and I shoved her shoulder, both of us giggling as we went our separate ways.
Chapter 19
The French quiz turned out to be a bigger nightmare than I could have ever imagined. For starters, Jesse ended up sitting directly across from me, and although I have been trained to do many things in my life, clearly flirting was not one of them. I managed to spend the entire class blushing and averting my gaze and wanting to look at him but not wanting him to catch me looking, but then wanting him to look at me. The whole thing was so exhausting that I needed a nap afterward.
Oh, and also? The quiz was an oral exam. So not only was I a stammering mess every time the teacher picked me to answer a question, but I get sort of self-conscious about speaking French in public because I’m always afraid that I’ll sound insane, like the chef in The Little Mermaid movie. You’d think that the gene pool would have done me a solid and let me inherit at least some of my dad’s linguistic genius, but no. All I got was tongue-tied and embarrassed.
Jesse, of course, did great and spoke French like he had been speaking it since birth. Maybe he should be the spy, I thought as I waited for the bell to ring and release me from my misery. He could be all dashing and suave and I could sit home with my old textbook and conjugate verbs.
(Okay, my self-pity was starting to go off the rails, I admit it.) He waited for me after the bell, packing up his bag twice before I realized that he wasn’t going to leave without me acknowledging him. “So are you ignoring me, or are you playing hard to get?” he asked when it was just the two of us left in the classroom. “I always get the two confused.”