“It’s gross.”
I moaned even louder.
“Oh, stop it,” Drea snapped. “Troy is not worth it.”
“We went out for two years!”
“So?”
“How would you know if he’s worth it? You’ve never dated anyone for more than two months!”
Drea’s eyes turned to slits.
I almost felt bad about saying it. I mean, I wasn’t coming straight out and calling her slutty, but that was the implication. If she smacked me in the back of the head, I couldn’t say I hadn’t sort of deserved it.
But Drea took the high, nonviolent road.
“You’re right. I’ve never dated anyone for more than a month or two.” She cocked her hip defiantly. “But I’ve never sobbed on a filthy floor over anyone either.”
“And neither have I,” I replied. “Until now.”
Drea opened her purse and removed a pack of Wrigley’s spearmint gum.
“Want a piece?”
It wasn’t sugar-free. To my parents, she might as well have offered me drugs, but I accepted anyway.
“The way I see it”—she folded the stick of gum into an accordion and popped it into her mouth—“the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”
Of course Drea saw it that way. What her relationships lacked in longevity, they more than made up for in variety. But I was the one on the floor, not her. Who was I to say her choices were worse than mine?
“The thing is.” I sniffled. “Um. This is so embarrassing. But…”
“But what?” Drea pressed. “What could possibly be more embarrassing than wearing an American flag abomination of a uniform?”
I laughed. The ABC apron was almost impossibly unflattering.
“I’ve never been. Um. Under anyone,” I admitted. “Not even Troy.”
Troy and I had decided to hold off on sex until I could get a prescription for cheap birth control through the university health care center without parental knowledge or permission. The Pill was part of the plan.
I braced myself for another one of Drea’s honking fits of hilarity. For someone as experienced as everyone knew Drea was, I assumed she’d mock my babyishness just like when we used to be friends.
But she did the opposite.
“Virginity is nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said. “Especially when your top prospect was someone who’d need a compass to navigate your nethers. Know what I mean?”
I knew exactly what she meant. Troy actually consulted his older brother’s Human Anatomy textbook for pointers.
“If you want to forget that loser, I can help you with that,” she said. “Just like you can help me with the treasure.”
“The treasure?” What was Drea even talking about?
“There’s a fortune hidden somewhere in the mall,” Drea said, “and I’m determined to find it.”
“Excuse me, but I’m totally confused.”
Drea brushed dust off a cardboard shipping carton and sat.
“Tommy and Vince D’Abruzzi were cousins,” Drea began. “Tommy was assistant manager at Kay-Bee Toys. Vince worked the night shift at the Coleco factory…”
“This sounds like a Bon Jovi song,” I quipped.
Drea sighed.
“Keep your comments to yourself until I’m done.”
Rightfully reprimanded, I shut up for the rest of the story. It went something like this:
In late summer of 1983, Vince canceled a fishing trip with Tommy because he had to work overtime on the production line at the factory. He told his cousin how Coleco was going all in on these butt-ugly dolls; the market research predicted they would be the craze of the Christmas season. Tommy was a veteran of the toy biz. He survived the infamous Star Wars action figure shortage of 1978, and so he persuaded Vince to smuggle the dolls across state lines. They stockpiled hundreds of them in a secret storage room in the second basement level of the mall, biding their time until the demand far exceeded supply.
“So that’s how the Cabbage Patch came to be,” I said.
“Right,” Drea replied. “But that’s not the good part.”
As legend had it, in the weeks and days leading up to Christmas, when the dolls were impossible to find at Kay-Bee or anywhere else, Tommy sold them for two, five, ten times the retail price. Together, Tommy and Vince made tens of thousands of dollars. Vince used his share to buy a Camaro. Tommy invested his in a cocaine habit. The coke made Tommy paranoid of “the Feds,” so he stashed his illegal earnings all around the mall until he figured out how to safely launder the cash later on.
At this point in the story, Drea got as deadly serious as anyone could possibly be in an outfit that was 50 percent leather, 50 percent lace, and 100 percent bimbette.
“Tommy died of a massive heart attack before he got the money out,” she said. “The treasure is still somewhere in the mall. And you’re going to help me find it.”
I wanted to laugh right in her heavily made-up face. Hidden treasure? A black market for Cabbage Patch Kids? I mean, come on.
However.
Here were hundreds of Cabbage Patch Kids on shelves, the unlucky ones that had gotten left behind. And in between sobs, I had noticed something interesting. And once I noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it. But this detail only gained significance after I heard Drea’s story. What harm would it do to share this information with her?
“About the treasure.” I hesitated. “It’s probably nothing.”
“What’s ‘probably nothing’?”
From the bottom shelf, I pulled out the Cabbage Patch Kid that had caught my attention. A boy with brown hair, brown eyes, and a single dimple in his left cheek smiled at us from behind the plastic.
“His birth certificate isn’t authentic.”
Drea eyed me skeptically. “What do you mean?”
“I adopted three Cabbage Patch Kids…”
Drea snorted at the word “adopted.” Genius toy company marketing ploys die hard.
“I never played with those things,” Drea said. “I was way more into designing outfits for my Barbies.”
“I remember.”
Even at ten years old, Drea was far too fabulous for changing pretend diapers.
“When you compare this one’s documentation to all the others on the shelves, you can see the ink isn’t the same shade of green…”
Drea took a closer look at this boy’s certificate.
“And the decorative border is only one line, not two…”
Drea chomped harder on her gum.
“But it’s his name that really makes him interesting,” I said. “Rey Ajedrez.”
Between junior high and high school, I’d taken six years of foreign language classes. I was confident in my pronunciation.
And translation.
“In Spanish, Rey Ajedrez means…”
I paused to enjoy this moment. I had Drea’s undivided attention for the first time since fifth grade.
“Chess King.”
Drea stopped chewing.
“That’s either one hell of a coincidence,” I said. “Or a clue.”
Drea’s face shined brighter than all the sequins in Bellarosa Boutique.