Aces Up, Page 7

  The button is this little plastic disk that’s sitting on the table, and I know from watching on TV that it moves from person to person after each hand. So if you’re sitting to the left of the button, you must have to put in the small blind (which in this game is one dollar), and the person to the left of the small blind must have to put in the big blind (which in this game is three dollars).

  Of course, Cole never mentioned anything about buttons or blinds or anything, you know, important like that. Figures. I mean, the guy is a complete jackass. He’s probably lurking around right now, watching me to see how I do, if I’m thrown off by the fact that he neglected to mention two obviously important parts of the game. But I’m not rattled.

  The dealer sets two cards in front of me, and I pick up the edges of them and look, careful not to let anyone see what they are. No way do I want anyone to know what I have; I know some people at this casino are very shady, and will try to get a peek at your cards no matter what. I’ve seen it in action, firsthand.

  Hmmm. A queen and a king. “Pass,” I say brightly when it comes around to me.

  “You mean ‘check’?” the dealer asks. He sighs again and looks up at the ceiling, like he can’t believe I got stuck at his table. Seriously with the customer service in this place. Shouldn’t they be making new players feel welcome?

  “Right,” I say. “Yes, definitely, check.” That’s right. In poker, if you want to pass, you say “check.” The three cards the dealer throws into the middle of the table, the flop, are two, three, seven. All different suits. None of that helps me, so when it’s my turn, I fold.

  Boring.

  The second hand is a little bit better, as I’m dealt two sevens, and the flop is seven, king, queen. All hearts, which means that someone could have a flush (five cards of the same suit, which would beat my three sevens), and I run the percentages in my head, figuring out that there are thirteen hearts in the deck. With three of them on the board, that leaves ten in the deck, and someone would have to have two of those ten to get a flush.

  The turn is a three of diamonds, and at this point, everyone is out of the hand except me and the guy in the flannel shirt. The river is the two of spades. I bet, throwing my chips into the pot. The flannel-shirt guy raises my bet. That jerk! I know you’re not supposed to let your emotions get involved in poker, but still. I mean, how dare he? I call his bet, and when we turn the cards over, he has a pair of kings. I win a pot of almost forty bucks.

  Forty dollars! For ten minutes of work!

  The dealer pushes the pot over to me, and I squeal with delight, “Forty dollars! Yay!” I can’t help it. Can you imagine if I’d been playing the bigger stakes? Like five hundred dollars or something? I would have made thousands! Wow. Poker is fun.

  “Nice pot, sweetheart,” the guy next to me says. He smiles at me, and I smile back. The guy in the flannel shirt gives me a dirty look. Wow. Whatever. I mean, way to be a sore loser.

  An hour and a half later, I’m up two hundred bucks. Two hundred dollars! Playing three-six, which is, like, the lowest stakes you can play. I’m actually starting to get the hang of this, and it is very, very fun. Plus everyone at my table is so friendly!

  So far I’ve made friends with three other players: a nice businessman from New York, a college kid named Stuart, who’s majoring in politics and is very smart (but he’s a little nerdy for my tastes, and he has a girlfriend), and a perfectly nice but possibly shady man who keeps saying, “Booyah!” every time he wins a pot.

  “You’re on a roll, huh, Shannon?” Stuart says as I win twenty more dollars.

  “Must be beginner’s luck,” I say. I mean, they’re supposed to think I’m ditzy and crazy. Actually, I think they do think I’m ditzy and crazy, because a couple of times when I made certain calls or bets, I caught them all glancing at me and at each other with surprise. And the guy in the flannel shirt is definitely annoyed with me every time I take his money. Oh, well. If you can’t take the heat, then don’t sit down at the tables, you know?

  I’m just about to throw in the small blind when I hear someone at the table behind me yell, “This drink is weak sauce!” in a loud, familiar voice. The familiar voice of someone who could get me in a lot of trouble. I swallow hard. Okay, I think, don’t panic, you don’t know for sure that it’s him.

  I take a deep breath, lean in close to Stuart, who’s sitting on my right side, and whisper, “Excuse me, Stuart?”

  “Yeah?” he says. You’re not supposed to whisper with other players during a hand, but since we haven’t looked at our cards yet, I think it’s okay. Plus this is a total emergency.

  “Do you hear that guy, the one behind us, talking about how his drink is really, really weak and he wants to send it back and he doesn’t have to gamble here and maybe he’ll just take his business elsewhere?”

  “The one who just screamed, ‘Aces, baby, yeah!’ like a tool?” Stuart asks happily.

  “Yes,” I say. “Could you … um … could you just … turn around and tell me what he looks like?”

  Stuart, thankfully, doesn’t ask questions. He just turns around and then back to me. “He has a goatee, short brown hair, and he’s wearing a Celtics hat.”

  I close my eyes and sigh. “Thank you, Stuart.”

  “No problem.”

  “Um, one more thing,” I say. “Can you let me know if he’s looking over here?”

  Stuart glances back. “Nope,” he says.

  I crane my neck back slowly and take a look. Yup. There he is, Leonardo, sitting with a big cup of something alcoholic, being loud and crazy and pretty much ruining my whole night with his presence.

  I take a deep breath and start gathering up my chips. “Thanks, guys,” I say. “But I gotta go.”

  No one protests, which kind of hurts my feelings, since I thought we were all friends. I rack up my chips and head over to Flo the cashier to turn them in. She hands me seven hundred-dollar bills, all crisp and perfect. It might be my imagination, or the fact that I’m in a better mood, but she seems a little friendlier this time.

  “Thank you,” I say, holding the bills in my hand and admiring their neatness. I resist the sudden urge to smell them. I’m definitely starting to understand how people can get so crazy about money.

  I turn around and almost bang into Cole.

  “Geez,” I say. “Stop doing that!”

  “What are you doing?” he asks. “Why did you get up?”

  “Because my sister’s boyfriend sat down at the table behind me, and I didn’t want him to see me. It was probably good that I got up, anyway,” I say. I shake the bills at him. “Because I won two hundred dollars.”

  He takes the money out of my hand and studies it. “Yeah, I know,” he says. “I was watching you.”

  “You were?” I ask. “From where?” I look around behind me, wondering where he possibly could have been.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “We have to go, anyway. The Triple A guy called. The truck’s almost here.”

  “Anyway,” I say, following him as he starts to walk out of the poker room, “did you notice that I was a natural? That I knew exactly what was going on, that I picked up on things like that?” I snap my fingers, in case he needs a visual of just how fast I was picking up on things.

  “Yes,” Cole agrees. “You did really well. You have some stuff to learn, but you did really great for your first night.”

  He’s walking fast now, through the casino and toward the exit that leads to the elevator. I race to catch up with him.

  “I know,” I say. “I totally did. I won two hundred dollars! At a three-six table! On my first night, without any help whatsoever.” It really is too bad that it’s never going to happen again. I start to feel a little sad about that. I mean, this is definitely the easiest money I’ve ever made.

  “I’m glad you had fun,” Cole says. We’re in the elevator now, and he pushes the button for the parking garage. The elevator starts to move, and he’s looking up at the numbers, which ar
e lighting up as we make our descent, and he looks almost … bored. My stomach flips.

  Now that I’ve had a taste of this whole gambling thing, I kind of want to do it more. Uh-oh. Should I be worried? Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, I won two hundred dollars. But the fact that I changed my mind so quickly about gambling being shady, that it took only a little more than an hour for me to get high off winning and feel all jittery to do it again—it’s kind of scary. Am I a gambling addict already?

  And what’s up with Cole’s not saying anything about meeting up again? I mean, I know I can’t do it again. Too risky. But you’d think he’d at least ask me if I wanted to. Is Aces Up kind of like a guy? Do I want them only because they don’t want me?

  The elevator doors open, and Cole saunters out ahead of me. Whatever happened to ladies first? My spirit slightly dented, I limp along behind him as he walks to his truck.

  “Perfect timing,” Cole says as the Triple A truck pulls up behind my car. Cole sits with me while the guy jumps my car. Once it’s started, I wait for him to finally say something else about us meeting up again. But he doesn’t. Instead, he just hands me two hundred-dollar bills from the stack I gave him. And then he gets in his truck and drives away.

  The next day is Saturday, and when my alarm goes off at eight a.m., I’m already awake, lying in bed and thinking about the crazy happenings of last night. I slide out of bed, put on a pair of jeans and a soft green sweater, then brush my teeth and scrape my hair back into a ponytail. My plan is to get a super-early start on my homework for the week. And, um, do some catching up for last week. The house is quiet, but when I get downstairs, I find Leonardo sitting in our kitchen, eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and reading a magazine.

  “Oh,” I say. I did not expect to see Leonardo here. Of course, I didn’t expect to see him at the casino last night, either. He’s just popping up all over the place unexpectedly. Ugh. Okay, Shannon, I tell myself. Play it cool. Act natural. Think of what you’d say to him if it was any other morning. Probably something smart, so I force a cockiness into my tone and say, “I didn’t know you could read.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Leonardo says, obviously missing the sarcasm. “I love to read.” He’s wearing cargo pants and a brown T-shirt, and his leg is bouncing away under the table. Leonardo is always very … jittery.

  “What are you doing up so early?” I ask. Especially when you were out so late last night, I want to add, but don’t.

  “Me and Robyn are going on a hike,” he says. “But I’m not up early. I haven’t been to bed yet.” He looks at me expectantly. “I was out late last night, remember?” My heart starts beating super-fast, and I open the refrigerator and pull out the milk. I don’t even want milk. But I need to do something to turn my back on him so that he can’t see how red my face is.

  “Um, no, I don’t remember,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. I put the milk on the counter and then realize that now I actually, you know, have to do something with it, so I pour myself a glass, then grab a Nutri-Grain bar out of the cupboard. Definitely time to take my breakfast to go. But then I realize that it would seem weird if I poured myself a glass of milk and left without drinking it, so I start gulping it down as fast as I can.

  “But I saw you,” Leonardo says. He takes a big slurpy spoon of cereal. “Last night.” Ugh. Stupid dumb Leonardo and his stupid dumb poker playing.

  “Um, no,” I say, laughing. “I was working last night. Did you come into the Rusty Nail?” I arrange my features into what I hope is an innocent look. Nothing to see here, just everything being on the up-and-up, la la la.

  “No,” he says, frowning. “You were at the Collosio, right? I was there, too. At the poker tables.” My heart starts pumping blood faster through my body, and I can hear a whooshing sound in my head. It feels like I’m panicking, so I take a long, deep breath and hope it doesn’t show on my face.

  “No,” I say slowly and carefully. “I was at work. What would I be doing at the casino? I’m not even twenty-one!” I try to keep my voice light, like “Haha, isn’t it funny you thought I was at the casino?” Of course, Leonardo’s not twenty-one, either, but somehow it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine him with a fake ID.

  He frowns. “That’s weird,” he says. “I swear to God, it looked just like you. You were sitting at the poker tables, and it looked like you were having a good night.” He puts his hands a few inches off the table to indicate a stack of chips. “You had a huge stack of chips.”

  “Yeah, well, I have a very common look,” I say. “People are always thinking that they saw me out somewhere when they really didn’t. In fact, just the other day, I was out and this girl on the street totally thought I was her cousin. Came up and hugged me and everything.”

  Leonardo frowns, his eyebrows knitting together. He pours himself some more cereal from the box on the table. “Really?” he asks.

  “Totally.” I take another sip of milk, forcing myself not to pour the rest of the glass down the sink. “And don’t even get me started on the time this guy kept insisting I was the girl from camp he’d hooked up with two summers ago. Apparently she’d given him some kind of disease, it was completely—”

  My dad chooses that moment to walk into the kitchen. He’s whistling, but he stops when he sees Leonardo. “Oh,” he says warily. “It’s you.”

  “Hey, pops,” Leonardo says. He gets up and pats my dad on the back. The weird thing about the whole Leonardo–my dad relationship is that Leonardo looooooves my dad. He thinks he’s the coolest cat around. (His words, obvi, not mine.)

  “How did you get in here?” my dad asks. He shoots me a look, like he thinks I’m the one responsible, but I put my hands up in surrender and shrug as if to say, “Don’t blame me, I would never let him in here.”

  “Robyn let me in,” Leonardo says.

  “And where is Robyn now?” my dad asks.

  “She’s upstairs, getting ready,” Leonardo says. He pulls a mug down from the cupboard and busily pours a cup of coffee for my dad. “You need some coffee, pops.” He says it as a command. Nice. Leonardo never offered me any coffee. All he did was tell me he saw me at the casino and try to ruin my life.

  “Thanks,” my dad says. He sets his laptop down on the table and boots it up. When my dad lost his job, we had to cancel our subscription to the newspaper, so now he gets all his news online.

  There’s a silence, and I panic, thinking maybe Leonardo is going to bring up the casino thing to my dad. “Robyn and Leonardo are going for a hike,” I say quickly.

  “Her idea,” Leonardo says sadly. “Not mine.”

  “Yes, you know Robyn,” I say. “Always trying to get you to go hiking with her!” I’m babbling now, so I pour the rest of the pot of coffee into one of my mom’s Starbucks travel mugs. Definitely time for me to get out of here. And then my phone starts ringing in my pocket.

  Who would be calling me this early?

  I pull my phone out and check the screen. Ohmigod. It’s Max! Max is calling me! The name Max is blinking right on my caller ID screen!

  I don’t know what to do. Answer, not answer. Answer, not answer. My finger flicks over the green button on my phone, back and forth, back and forth. If I answer, I’m going to be subjected to talking to him in front of my dad and Leonardo. If I don’t, I’m going to wonder what he wanted.

  And what if he doesn’t leave a message? Then I won’t know if I’m supposed to call him back. I mean, some people think that if you see a missed call from them, you should know you’re supposed to call them back. But other people figure that if they don’t leave a message, it doesn’t necessitate a return phone call. Why didn’t he just text me, like a normal person? Texting! Maybe I should text him. That would be okay, even if he didn’t leave a message. Just a friendly text, saying—

  “Are you going to answer that?” Leonardo asks. He takes another big spoonful of cereal. “That ringtone is driving me crazy.”

  Ugh. So I do. “Hello?” I say. Hmm. Maybe I should have said,
“Hey, Max.” Obviously he knows I know it’s him because I looked at the caller ID. But maybe now he’ll think I erased his number out of my phone. Do I want him to think that? Should I pretend I don’t know who it is? Because then—

  “Oh, hey,” he says, sounding startled. “It’s Max.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Hey.”

  My sister comes running into the kitchen, wearing khaki shorts and a pink tank top.

  “I’m ready!” she yells. “Ready to get my hike on!”

  “I didn’t think you’d answer,” Max is saying. “I was going to leave a message.”

  “Then why did you call?” I ask, confused. Did he not want to talk to me? Was he hoping that I wouldn’t answer, just so he could leave a message and not be subjected to having to deal with having an actual conversation with me? Are we going to be a tutor couple who does nothing but play phone tag? How. Lame.

  “Uh, I wanted to set up a tutoring time,” he says. I narrow my eyes and start to feel angry.

  “Who are you talking to?” Robyn asks. She reaches past me and pulls a box of granola out of the cupboard. “Ugh,” she says. “Who left the milk out? It’s going to get all gross.”

  “You there?” Max asks. His voice sounds scratchy, like he just woke up. Very sexy. I picture him lying in bed, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt. His face is scruffy, and his hair is all messed up. I imagine his body being all warm, and his shirt rides up a little bit as he reaches over to grab his phone off the nightstand to call me and … I take a deep breath. This is definitely not the way to stay mad at him.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m here.”

  “So can you get together tonight?” he asks.

  “Tonight?” I repeat.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe around seven or so?”

  Dilemma: admit I have no plans for Saturday night and tutor Max, or make something up so that I seem cool and alluring, but in return, give up the chance to hang out with him.