Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online Page B

whole time! I couldn’t hear anything back there! Thanks for letting me use your bathroom!”
    Okay, so even I wasn’t dumb enough to think that she’d believe me.
    I didn’t wait for a response. I just stepped around the waitress and hurried back to the table. What was she going to do, tackle me?
    “We have to go!” I said to Curtis and Victor. “ Now! ”
    But I hadn’t counted on the fact that the waitress might follow me. “What’s the rush?” she said behind me, sweetly, her hand on my shoulder. “How about a piece of pie? You guys have been such regular customers, I’ll make it on the house.”
    I stiffened. Curtis and Victor stared, bug-eyed, at me and the waitress. They could tell that something was up, but they had no idea what.
    “Um, no, thanks,” I said to the waitress. “We have to go to, uh, our jobs.”
    “We do?” Victor said. “What jobs?”
    “Our jobs ,” I emphasized. “You know? Our summer jobs . My lifeguarding job? Your job at KFC?”
    “Ahhh!” Curtis said, clueing in first. “Our jobs ! Yeah, he’s right. We have to go. We’re already late!”
    “Oh, honey, I insist,” the waitress said. Unfortunately, she was holding a whole pie in one hand. She must havegrabbed it from the case on her way to our table.
    “Okay!” I said. “We’ll wait here while you go get plates!”
    “Just relax, sweetie,” the waitress said, pulling up a chair. “I’ll have Jerome bring us some.” She looked right at me and talked to me like I was a puppy. “Sit.”
    I sat.
    She began calmly slicing up the pie. “I think we have a problem.”
    “You’re right,” I said. “What’s pie without ice cream? We’ll wait while you go get some!”
    She smiled—white teeth stark against her unnaturally tan skin. “That’s not the problem. The problem is I think someone heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear.”
    “ You! ” Curtis cried. “You’re the bank robbers!”
    “Holy Saint Lysol, Our Lady of Kitchen Grease!” Victor said.
    I wasn’t thrilled that Curtis and Victor had spilled the beans like that, but at least maybe the little old lady—the only other person in the restaurant—would hear them. She was done with her sandwich now and was standing by the cash register with her check. But she didn’t seemto have heard my friends’ outbursts. She just kept calmly digging through her carpet bag of a purse for money to pay her bill.
    “Not another word ,” the waitress said to us under her breath. “Jerome, honey?” she called back into the kitchen. “Would you get a check? I also need some pie plates and forks.”
    A moment later, the skinny, twitchy guy appeared from the kitchen. There was flour on his apron, and I wondered, Could it be that the pie is actually homemade? I thought he might be the waitress’s son; they had the same eyes.
    At the cash register, Jerome took the old lady’s money. As she strolled toward the door, I frantically tried to catch her eye, but she ignored me. I wasn’t surprised. We were teenagers. To most adults, we were completely invisible anyway.
     
     
    “So,” the waitress said when the old lady was gone. “What are we going to do about the three of you?”
    “Let us go?” Victor suggested.
    The waitress laughed. She’d served us all a slice of pie, but she was the only one who was eating. Thepie was cherry, and the red juice stained her otherwise blinding teeth.
    “We won’t tell!” Curtis said. “We won’t say a word to anyone.”
    I thought to myself, If there was ever a time for Curtis to be a good liar, let it be now!
    The waitress looked over at Jerome. “What do you think?”
    “I think,” Jerome said as he bolted the front doors of the coffee shop and turned the closed sign face out, “that we have a very serious problem.”
    He wasn’t twitching anymore.
     
     
    It was only after they’d led us into the kitchen that I remembered from television how you’re never supposed to go where criminals tell you to