Romancing the Stones

Story Sent in by Kyle:

Denise wore a pair of earrings to our dinner date, each with a dangling, flashy blue stone. They were simple and pretty and I told her so.

"You think?" she asked, "They're real sapphires. They were my grandmother's."

"Well, they're beautiful. You have good taste."

She gave me a smirk, then said, "They're not really sapphires, and they weren't my grandmother's. You really thought they were?"

I replied, "I had no reason to doubt you."

She went on, "I made them myself at a bead store. If you really thought they were real, though… hmmm, want to do an experiment with me?"

She explained a plan in which after dinner, we would go to a jewelry store and attempt to pass off her fake earrings as real, to see how much she could make from them. I said, "A jeweler will be able to tell the difference, I think."

"You couldn't tell."

"I'm not a jeweler."

"Hmm."

After dinner, I followed her to a nearby jewelry store, where she asked the jeweler behind the counter for an appraisal. He took one look at them and handed them back to her. "They're costume jewelry," he said.

She silently took them back and hurried out of the store. I followed after her and asked, "What do you want to do now?"

She replied, "Find another jeweler. A stupider jeweler. I feel like being rich tonight."

I said, "I don't think they're going to fool any jeweler."

She said, "They fooled you."

"I'm not a jeweler," I said again.

"But you didn't look closely at them. I just have to find a stupid, old one and he'll pay me top dollar for them. I can bring him all the blue stones from the bead store and he'll pay me huge for all of them. You coming with?"

"I don't think so."

"Goodbye, then."

She half-jogged away from me. I didn't contact her again.