The Boyfriend Thief - By Shana Norris Page 0,1

familiar voice asked.

I opened my mouth to say I was fine—foam hot dog was surprisingly good for pillowing a fall—but another, much more familiar voice stopped me.

“I told you to leave the shopping cart alone,” Hannah Cohen snapped.

Her boyfriend, Zac Greeley, knelt in front of me, holding my puffy gloved hands in his as he tried to help me up. A rusty shopping cart lay on its side next to us, one wheel still spinning.

Zac and I only vaguely knew each other from school. I didn’t know what he and Hannah could possibly have in common. While Zac’s wrinkled clothes and eternal cowlick in the back of his hair indicated that he apparently rolled out of bed and threw on the first thing he grabbed from the floor, Hannah always looked neat and put together. She was president of the junior class student council (I was vice president), vice president of math club (I was president), and the girl who was currently tied with me for highest GPA in our class. In other words, Hannah was my official arch nemesis.

She was also once my best friend, a lifetime ago.

They didn’t know it was me inside the giant hot dog. Thankfully, the costume included foam legs and feet in addition to foam arms and gloves, so I was completely covered and they couldn’t see the embarrassed flush creeping up my neck at this fiasco.

“Sorry, sorry!” Zac pulled me to my feet, grabbing hold of my arms when I stumbled a bit as I tried to catch my footing. “Next time I’ll remember to figure out how to steer before I decide to ride a shopping cart down the sidewalk.”

He grinned, looking like an impish little boy. From what I knew of Zac, riding a shopping cart down the street was only one of many things he’d done, or was rumored to have done. I still wasn’t sure I believed the rumor that he’d danced an Irish jig in nothing but green boxers in the cafeteria on St. Patrick’s Day.

Again, what did he and Hannah have in common?

There was no way I would speak and let Hannah hear my voice, so I gave him a thumbs up. Or at least, as close to a thumbs up as was possible with the huge glove engulfing my hand.

Hannah waited by the door, her arms crossed over her chest. “Can we go get your hot dog now, before the weekend is over?” Back when Hannah and I were friends, she was silly and fun. These days, as we got closer and closer to our senior year, all anyone ever saw of her was the stressed out, serious overachiever who was determined to knock me down to salutatorian.

I knew a lot of people probably said the same thing about me. But my case was different. One day I had a mom. The next I didn’t. My mom’s disappearing act when I was twelve changed everything. And from that point on, everything that didn’t put me closer to my goal didn’t matter. I had to succeed, to make things better for my dad and brother and me.

Hannah, really, had no excuse, other than the fact that she was a liar who sneaked around behind her best friend’s back and then abandoned that so-called best friend when things didn’t go her way.

Luckily, she couldn’t see the face I made through my costume as they headed into the restaurant.

Two hours later, I was on a break from mascot duties, seated in the very back corner of the kitchen. The hot dog body laid crumpled on the floor beside me as Elliott Reiser and Tara Watkins worked nearby. They were on hot dog duty today—as in, making them, not wearing them—and they stood awfully close to each other at the counter. Since Elliott had started working at Diggity Dog House three weeks ago, he and Tara had become cozier and cozier with each other.

I absolutely despised Elliott Reiser, but he and my best friend Molly Pinski had this thing going on between them. Not quite dating yet, but definitely headed in that direction.

Elliott had swept Molly off her feet when they both reached for the same computer game at Valu-Mart. Leave it to Elliott to cast his charms on an innocent girl like Molly when I wasn’t around to make her see reality.

And the reality was, Elliott was a jerk. Plain and simple. Maybe once he had been a pretty decent guy, but now he always had some obnoxious comment