The Fruit of My Lipstick by Shelley Adina Page A

you supposed to know?”
    “I could have asked.”
    With a snort, she said, “Right. That would be number five on the questionnaire you handed him at the beginning of the evening.”
    Carly snickered and kept her eyes on her Chem notes. I was prepping both of them for our second set of thirdterms, which were at the end of February. Yep. Exams every three weeks or so during a ten-week term. It wouldn’t surprise me if we were the smartest student body on the planet, statistically.
    “Lots of people are allergic to angora and fur and stuff,” I went on. “I should have thought of that and gone with natural fibers.”
    “Fur is a natural fiber,” Carly observed, not looking up.
    “You know what I mean.”
    “The point is, you guys just need to communicate,” Lissa said.
    “How can we do that when he isn’t talking to me?” Honestly, sometimes Lissa really is blond. “He hardly said a thing to me at prayer circle this week.”
    “Have you gone up to him and tried to talk? Thanked him for the evening?” she asked. “Or have you been hiding out in here with us, making us do more homework than we need to?”
    “Do you want to pass Bio or not?”
    “Not at the expense of your love life.”
    “You have a better chance of getting an A on that exam than I do of getting another date with Lucas.” Once you nearly send a guy into anaphylactic shock, you may as well cut your losses and move on.
    “You could always buy an A,” Carly said.
    Both of us stared at her.
    “I can buy a pair of shoes. I can’t buy a grade,” Lissa said. “Or did I not hear you properly?”
    “You heard it right. At least, that’s the word around the halls.”
    “Back up,” I said. “What’s this?”
    “Rumor has it that someone’s selling exam answers,” Carly said. “For a thousand bucks, you can get a whole Chemistry exam with the answers all marked.”
    A thousand. The neurons in my brain lined up and fired. “The week before last, I heard Rory Stapleton telling Brett that he got eighty percent on his Trig test.”
    “And if you believe he got that without help, I have a bridge to sell you.” Lissa made a wry mouth.
    “But why would you buy an answer sheet that gave you wrong answers?” I wanted to know. “How stupid.”
    “What would be stupid is any teacher believing Rory could get a perfect score,” Carly said. “That would tip them off right away. With eighty percent, he could say he’s been working with a tutor.”
    “That’s some tutor,” Lissa put in. “He probably doubled his grade.”
    The three of us cracked up. Rory Stapleton’s dad may own some sports team or other, but his son and heir isn’t the brightest bulb in the box.
    “Speaking of smart people, I went and saw that Jodie Foster movie last weekend with one of the girls in Dad’s condo complex,” Carly said. “Have you seen it?”
    “I have.” Lissa grinned. “Didn’t you love the part where she—”
    “Spoiler!” I warned, threatening to clap a hand over her mouth. “Don’t say a word.”
    “But it was so cool when she and the guy who was pretending to be a—”
    “Lissa!”
    “All right, all right,” she grumped. “You’d better go see it soon, then, so we can talk about it.”
    “Ask Lucas if he wants to go with you,” Carly suggested. “You can casually bring it up in conversation and then pop the question.”
    “Ooh, good plan.” Lissa sat back and tossed her pen onto her notebook. “The hook ’em and reel ’em in scenario.”
    “Spare me the marine metaphors,” I groaned. “On top of everything else, that’s all I need.”
    It was still a good plan, though—one that ran through my head the next day as I passed the physics lab and remembered that Lucas’s free period fell on Thursday afternoons. And where would a guy whose life was physics be during his free period?
    Not in the gym or the common room, that’s for sure.
    I found him at the back of the lab, gazing at the high-resolution, widescreen