Clutches and Curses by Dorothy Howell Page B

past, I couldn’t afford brain freeze at a time like this.
    I opened my laptop and logged onto my bank account. I needed facts. Then I could proceed calmly and quickly to a solution.
    I checked the balance of my checking account and nearly launched myself out of my chair. Only a couple hundred bucks. I checked my savings account. Jeez, did that “minus” symbol mean I’d overdrawn it? How had that happened?
    Maybe I should take an accounting class next semester.
    Anyway, no time to worry about that now. I checked the balances on my credit cards and found I had some—not a lot—of available credit on all of them.
    I dug a pen and paper from my tote and made a quick list of upcoming expenses and things I needed to buy. I had to get the tire that had blown last night repaired. The fender that had been scraped in the Holt’s parking lot had to be fixed, too. There was that traffic ticket I’d gotten. It would be expensive, plus I might have to go to traffic school. I needed to eat while I was here, so I’d have to have money for that, too.
    I looked at the calculations I’d made. Yikes! No way did I have enough money to cover everything.
    A horrible vision flashed in my head. I was in Vegas, for God’s sake. What about seeing a show, or hitting a great buffet? What about shopping?
    An even more horrible thought bloomed in my brain: what if I found that Delicious handbag but didn’t have enough money to buy it?
    Oh my God. This was a crisis of staggering magnitude. Where was my best friend when I needed her?
    I drained my frappuccino. I desperately needed another one. But should I spend the money for it?
    Immediately, I disregarded the notion. I had a massive problem to solve involving not only basic survival and high finance, but the acquisition of the season’s hottest handbag. This was no time to worry about a couple of bucks.
    I got another frappuccino and sat down again. By the time I was half finished with it, I felt calmer. Not because I’d come to any brilliant conclusions or flashed on a fantastic solution of what to do. I just decided to forget the whole thing for a while and move on to something else.
    Like the murder I was suspected of.
    Really, what else could I do?
    I Googled my way to my high school’s Web site. I didn’t even know they had one, but there it was. Good ol’ Monroe High, private school to the rich and affluent—and those who could convincingly fake it.
    Seeing the photo of the school with its ivy-covered walls, swaying palms, and manicured lawns reminded me of how glad I was to be done with all of that. I’d almost rather face the Iraqi secret police than go back to high school.
    My older brother and younger sister and I had all attended Monroe. It was near our house, so most of the students were from our neighborhood.
    I didn’t know exactly how our family ended up living in the upscale area. Mom’s grandmother left the house to her, along with a trust fund. Nobody seemed to know—or was willing to tell—what my great-grandmother had done to get all that money in the first place.
    Scholarship kids from other areas of L.A. attended Monroe, too, lest our school might have been considered stuck up and snooty, which, of course, it was. With tuition and fees topping fifteen grand per academic year, what else could you expect?
    Attending Monroe High was a lot like surviving in the business world. Networking, who you knew, and who you could meet were important. At private schools, though, most of this was used for evil.
    Making connections was often about pretending to be friends with someone just because their family had access to something you wanted—a sky box at Dodger Stadium, an “in” with the casting director at Dreamworks. Social ranking among students was big, based on wearing the latest designer accessories—whether or not they complemented our uniforms. If a student didn’t come from a