One Smart Cookie

by Kym Brunner

  “But if you act like a lady today, he will want to be your boyfriend, so then on Saturday, after you introduce me, maybe I will buy you something from there.” Her voice is beguiling, as if she thinks this is a wonderful offer.

  I laugh. “Like what—a spoon?”

  She looks at me, yards of hurt lying right between her eyebrows. “I don’t know. Whatever they sell. You shouldn’t be so quick to say no. Don’t be a beggar—be choosy, right?”

  I fight not to roll my eyes. “Yes, Mom. And I appreciate the offer, but if you don’t mind, I’ll take the cash instead. Apparently, I need to start a college fund for myself.” I start rifling through my drawers, holding things up. The sparkly green T-shirt with the lion on the front with the words “If I said I wasn’t a nerd, I’d be lion”? No, bad first impression. I toss it on the bed. Mom’s old yellow V-neck with the plunging neckline? Another shirt with the wrong message. That goes on the bed as well. I finally decide on the white tee with black swirls. Although it has a tiny ketchup stain on the front right side, I’m banking on Giovanni not being super observant.

  “Let’s not talk about that now. I think it is important that I meet the new boy so I can make sure he’s good enough for you.” She folds the shirts I tossed on the bed and heads toward my dresser.

  “Wait! Don’t put those shirts back. I’m going to donate those. I’ve had them since junior high.” I smile as a great idea comes to mind. “Speaking of which…do you think you can give me just a little bit of money to buy new summer clothes? I only have two pairs of shorts.” I pull out my jean shorts and slide them on before grabbing my deodorant stick off my dresser. Not that I’ll be doing much exercise today. But just like in gym class, I’d rather get a C than a B.O. I give myself a thick coating and race toward my closet to find some shoes. Only ten minutes left until I have to leave.

  “I’ll buy you new clothes, but only if we shop together.” She sets the shirts onto my bed and sits down. “We never do things together anymore.”

  The thought of walking around the mall with my mom dressed like the 1969 Playmate of the Year makes me shudder. “Fine. But only if you wear normal clothes.”

  She waves off my concerns. “Normal? You mean boring? I am a sexy woman, so I’m going to show it off.” I start to protest when she holds up her hands. “I will buy you a whole new wardrobe—up to fifty dollars,” she adds quickly, “but I will dress how I like. You need to stop telling me what to wear.”

  Guess I’d rather shop with Middle-Aged Barbie than be stuck with my old clothes. Fifty dollars won’t get me much, but maybe I can squeeze a little more out of her if I do a lot of begging. “Okay, it’s a deal.” Dropping to my knees, I paw through a mountain of shoes looking for two that match. I toss about six shoes out of my way, finally finding two black flip-flops.

  “Wonderful.” She sighs, a smile on her face. “So, tell me, what is the new boy’s name?” She crosses her arms and leans against my wall.

  Peeking out the window, I see the blue landscaping truck at the other end of the mall. If I don’t give her a few tidbits, she’s going to keep asking questions. “His name is Giovanni. He’s cute and nice. I have to go now, or I’ll be late.” I rush past her and head toward the kitchen.

  “Wait for me! You say he’s Italian? They can be veerry sexy.” She follows me down the hall. “What kind of job does he have?”

  I’m about to snap that I don’t have time to talk when I remember Busia’s deal. I’d better not argue with her, not with a possible love connection so close. I soften my tone. “Yes, he’s very sexy, Mom, but why does it matter what kind of job he has? You’re not the one dating him.” Grabbing my purse off the back of the kitchen chair, I stride toward the stairwell.

  “His job is important because you should only date rich boys! That way you won’t be sad your whole life.”

  That’s it. I stop and turn around. “You’re such a hypocrite! You want me to date, but you’re being picky about who I choose. And you urge me to pick a career that makes lots of money, but then you refuse to pay for college so I can do that. Make up your mind!” I check my cell phone for the time. Six minutes until the magic happens.

  She looks indignant. “You think I should send you to university when you get Ds on your report card? D is for Dumbelina.”

  My face burns with indignity. “I might not be the smartest girl in school, but I got that D in physics because the teacher sucked, not because I’m dumb. And I’m not going to marry someone just because he’s rich. Look how that worked out for you. Three husbands and counting, and you’re still not happy.” I need to leave now before Dola turns Giovanni into a toad.

  As I race down the stairs, my mother shouts after me, “None of them were rich! They only pretended!” As I reach the bakery floor, she yells one final comment. “Make him buy you lunch. And whatever you do, don’t kiss on the first date!”

  And she calls me Dumbelina? That’s the worst advice I ever heard.

  Chapter 5

  AFTER WAVING GOOD-BYE TO BUSIA, who sits sipping a cup of coffee next to the Virgin Mary statue, I head through the bakery and step outside. When I turn to close the door behind me, a white cardboard sign in the window catches my eye. I yank the door shut with a bang. I’ve told Mom a million times that handmade signs in our window look unprofessional, but she’s too cheap to pay someone to make them. My jaw drops when I read what it says.

  I Need A Hard Man

  or Lady To Work Here

  3_11 a.m. M_F

  Ten doller and hour

  Mowimy Po Polsku

  “I need a hard man”—is she serious? That’s sure to attract a ton of porn star wannabes. Not only that, but I can already hear her complaining about how much she’s spending on this person, and she hasn’t even hired them yet. Not like there is anyone who will want to work here anyway. If she were telling the truth, the sign would have read: No Breaks / No Raises / No Fun

  Good luck and good riddance is all I can say. When I get back from lunch, I’m going to look for a job—one I can walk to. I know already Mom will bitch up a storm if I ask to borrow her car every time, and there’s no way I’m taking the bus. No matter what job I get, it can’t be worse than working for my mother, even if I do have to travel a bit farther to get there.

  As I head down the sidewalk toward my maybe-date, my intestines become as twisted as the bow-tie chrusziki cookies we sell. What if Giovanni’s the type of guy who invites a different neighborhood girl to lunch every day? What if he suggests that we hop in the back of his truck and get it on for dessert? Or worse, what if he doesn’t? I’ve almost convinced myself that Giovanni might be too hot for me to handle when Andre pops his head out of The Hair Affair.

  He waves a hand towel at me. “Mmm, mmm. You’re looking mighty tasty, girl. Your date is going to eat you up.”

  I smile, feeling a bit queasy. “Let’s hope there are other things on the menu besides me.”

  He grabs my arm and leans forward conspiratorially. “Did you hear what that shampoo skank, Modica, did? She went to lunch and never came back. Called and said she quit. Now Khatera wants me to shampoo my own clients until we find a new girl.” His upper lip curls into a grimace. “Me! Shampoo hair? Unthinkable!”

  My ears perk up. “Wait. A shampoo girl? How much do they make?”

  “Two bucks over minimum.” He squints at me. “Why? You need a job?”

  “Totally! My mom was driving me crazy, so I quit!” There’s no way I’m making the same mistake twice. I saw the look in Giovanni’s eyes when I said that my mother fired me.

  Andre claps. “That would be purr-fect, my little kitty. Come meet the owner.”

  “Now?” Glancing down the block, I see the landscaping truck, but there’s no sign of Giovanni. “But I have to, you know, meet that guy in like four minutes.”

  Andre’s perfectly plucked eyebrows curve upward. “For your kinda-sorta date? He can wait. Besides, it’ll only take two minutes. Say hi, tell her you want the job, and
then off you go.” Before I can object, he pulls me inside as a sleek woman in her late thirties with inky black short hair, thick black eyeliner, and high-heeled boots bustles toward us, her flowy long sleeves billowing as she walks.

  Andre says, “Khatera, this is my friend, Sophie and—”

  She eyes me for a split-second. “No friends while you’re working. You know the rules.” She pops open the register without a smile.

  “But she wants—”

  “If she wants anything but to pay for a haircut, out she goes.” She waves her fingers toward the door before extracting a handful of bills. She folds them and shoves them in her back pocket, walking brusquely past us.

  Andre rolls his eyes while her back is turned. “Khatera, darling,” he purrs. “She wants to be the new shampoo girl.”

  “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Her quick gait makes her boot heels reverberate against the wood floor as she strides toward us. She hands Andre the broom. “Sweep.” She puts her hands on her hips and looks me over from my toes to my head. “So, you need a job, eh?”

  My smile is still frozen on my face, but my excitement is draining faster than rain down a storm sewer. It doesn’t seem possible, but this woman might be even worse than my mother. “Yes.” I quickly add, “ma’am.”

  Andre holds the broom at arm’s length between two delicate fingertips as if it were a mouse corpse. “She’d be perfect, Khatera.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” She eyes me suspiciously. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Are you lazy?”

  “No,” I say, flinching only slightly. I’m hoping she doesn’t ask for references.

  “Can you start today?”

  I glance at Andre and then at Khatera. “Um, well actually, I have—”

  “Good,” she interrupts. “You’ll make minimum wage, and I’ll give you a dollar-an-hour raise after two months…if you do a good job. You’ll work noon to six, Monday through Friday. Saturdays, nine to five. Let me show you what you’ll have to do.”

  I swallow, teeth clenched, fighting to keep the horror that’s on the inside of me from showing on the outside. It’s less money than Andre had said, and she wants me to work a trillion hours more than I wanted. I need some summer cash, not a down payment on a casino. Of course, there is that nagging college fund issue. “That’s fine, but I uh, well…I have to go now.”

  “First, the rules,” she continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “No sitting around, no phone calls, no freebies, no friends. If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean. You got that?” She stares at me with unblinking black-rimmed eyes, waiting for my response.

  I nod, afraid to speak. I quickly sense that my mother and Khatera could host the Business Industry Tyrants of Chicago Headquarters, better known as the BITCH organization, right here in our strip mall.

  “Good.” Khatera turns and heads toward the back of the salon. “Follow me. I’ll show you what you’ll be doing.”

  I shoot Andre a desperate glance and mouth, “I gotta go!”

  He shrugs and whispers, “Just do it. It won’t take long. I promise.”

  I’m in a quandary. I need a job badly, but I also need to go to lunch and see if anything yummy develops with Giovanni. If I walk out now, I’ll lose this opportunity and have to waste all day looking for another job somewhere else. And with my mother’s declaration that she doesn’t have any college money saved up, I need to start socking away my own funds, or I’ll end up being the next under-dressed owner of Dumbrowski’s bakery. Besides, Andre promised it wouldn’t take long.

  Surely Giovanni will wait five minutes for me.

  Some time later, I stumble out of the beauty shop, drenched and miserable.

  “And don’t come back, you ungrateful little wretch!” Khatera shouts at me from the doorway of the salon.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t, you mean old hag!” I yell over my shoulder, heading toward International Gourmet.

  Five steps later, my heart falls out of my chest. The landscaping truck is gone! Stupid Khatera! Not that Giovanni and I were going to magically become the perfect couple, but there was potential. Now I’ll never know.

  I look up at the clock on our strip mall tower. Twelve twenty-eight? Damn it! I don’t blame him for leaving. He must think I blew him off. How did I let Khatera keep me there so long?

  Depressed, I head to the Buzzy Bee to get myself an ice cream cone, hoping to lift my spirits. Ha, spirits. I wonder which one of Busia’s spirits was mad at me now. Quitting another job—this one before I even started. But there was no way I was touching that greasy guy’s hair dotted with all those white specks. Could have been dandruff, but could have been head lice, too. Cruella Khatera can take her shampoo girl job and stick it down the sink with all the other disgusting black hairy gobs that she tried to get me to scoop up. No thanks.

  After putzing around the aisles of the Buzzy Bee for a few minutes, I purchase my favorite half-bubble gum, half-vanilla soft serve swirl cone. I decide to sit on one of the four new park benches outside of International Gourmet to eat my cone. I take several rapid-fire licks, the ice cream melting fast in this June heat. My fingers quickly become coated with blue and white sludge. Despite my heroic lapping efforts, several big drips land on my tank top. I furiously dab them with my napkin, but it’s no use. Combined with the water Khatera carelessly splashed on me, my tank now resembles a kindergarten paint smock. Looks like this top will also be heading to Mom’s favorite store.

  I can’t help but laugh at the huge mess I’ve made of myself, when someone behind me says, “So, you blew me off for the ice cream man, eh?”

  “Giovanni!” I leap to my feet, my skull connecting with something solid. I grimace when I hear the unmistakable sound of teeth clashing together, followed by a loud groan. Dropping my cone onto the ground, I spin to face Giovanni.

  He holds his jaw. “Whoa! I didn’t expect that reaction.”

  I wince, reaching out to console him, but see that my hand has a big streak of melted ice cream on it. Sick! I wipe it on my shorts, rushing to get the words out. “I’m so sorry! I had no idea you were leaning over my shoulder. Are you okay?” Looks like my mother’s Dumbelina pronouncement was accurate after all.

  “I’m fine.” He’s half-smiling, so I think he’s forgiven me. “But it looks as if you had a catastrophe.” He points to his neck and nods toward me, as if indicating a place I need to check.

  Reaching up, I discover Lake Disgusting beneath my chin. Seeing how I didn’t think to grab a napkin, I use the inside edge of my shirt to wipe my neck. “Geez! I must be the dirtiest girl in Chicago.”

  Giovanni chuckles, his left eyebrow kinked upward. “Oh really?”

  I rewind what I say and my face heats up. “Oh! I didn’t mean—”

  “I know. I was just teasing you.” He puts his foot up on the bench. “So…are you also the tardiest girl in Chicago?” He sounds a little miffed, but his eyes tell me he’s willing to listen.

  “About that.” I clear my throat, my brain reeling. I hop onto the bench and sit on the top ledge so that I’m eye level with him. “So, I was totally on my way here five minutes early, mind you, when my friend Andre who works at The Hair Affair stopped me when I was walking by.” I turn and point. “See the place with the neon scissors in the window?”

  He glances over there and nods. “Uh-huh.” He leans his elbow across his knee, listening. I have to look away a second because he is so completely adorable that I forget what I’m saying.

  “Where was I? Oh yeah.” I launch into the whole sorry story, wanting desperately to make him gift me with another one of his smiles. “And so, because my crazy mother fired me and said she doesn’t have any money for me to go to college, I had no choice but to go inside and try to be my friend Andre’s new shampoo girl.” I take a deep breath since I’m out of oxygen.

  “Makes sense,” Giovanni says, shrugging.

  “That’s what I thought, until
I met the woman who owns that place. She’s a complete witch who gets off being mean to her workers. Completely unreasonable too! She actually wanted me to touch some guy’s hair that had dandruff! Gross, right? So, I walked out—without the job, obviously—and, well, that’s why I was late.” I sigh, looking him in the eye so he knows how bad I feel. “Anyway, all that to try to tell you that I’m really, really sorry.”

  He tilts his head back and laughs. I mean, a full out, gut-busting laugh.

  I’m confused and a little worried by this. Do I still have ice cream on me, or did I say something stupid? Or worst of all, doesn’t he believe me? “What? What’s so funny?”

  “You. Your storytelling.” I think he’s teasing me, but I can’t tell for sure.

  “Funny like crazy-psycho-insane? Or funny as in ha-ha?” I smooth my hair nervously.

  “Funny as in completely adorable.” He smiles as he takes his foot off the bench. “Wish I could hear more, but my uncle’s here.” He looks toward the parking lot.

  I’m adorable? Every cell in my body wakes up, making my heart race. I follow his gaze and see his uncle walking toward us. Giovanni’s break is obviously over, and I barely got to talk to him. “That sucks.”

  Giovanni pretends to be offended. “You think my uncle sucks? I’m going to tell him you said that.” He fake-shouts, “Hey, Uncle Tony! Sophie says you suck.”

  I smack his arm, which I gleefully note is like hitting the side of a cement truck. “Stop! I didn’t say that!”

  “I heard it with my own ears.” He grins, rubbing his chin. “But I tell you what.”

  “What?” I bite my lip to keep from giggling, wondering what he’s up to.

  “If you promise to stop insulting my family, maybe we can try this again. I mean, if you wash up first.” He holds back a smile.

  “Ha ha.” I say, faking anger. Inside my chest, my heart must be dancing the polka with my lungs because I can barely breathe. He wants to try this again!

  Giovanni looks down at his feet and then back at me. “Seriously, though. You want to hang out sometime?”