“But that’s impossible!” Vince yelled. Not at me, of course, just the situation. “Four grand in a week. I mean, we’ve never even come close to making one thousand in a week. Not even in our best ones! Plus, every kid’s permanent record? I mean, we’ve never been able to crack that even without the Suits on our tails.”

“I know, Vince,” I conceded. “What other options did I have?”

He thought about this and then shrugged and plopped down onto the chair next to the desk in my room. Vince had come over as soon as his mom had gotten home from work and let him leave the house. It had taken me a while to explain my day because Vince kept asking so many questions. And I could hardly blame him. I mean, hearing the story come out of my own mouth made me realize just how surreal my day had been.

“And you’re sure Staples doesn’t know?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It sure didn’t seem like it.”

Vince nodded. “Well, he is basically a professional liar.”

“He can’t know about his sister’s involvement. He would have said something to us. There’d be no benefit to him keeping it a secret.”

“What benefit is there from us keeping it a secret from him?” Vince asked.

I shrugged. “I was afraid he’d kill the messenger. After all, her running a giant crime ring was exactly what he’d said he didn’t want.”

“Shoot the messenger,” Vince said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. So what are we going to do, then?” Vince asked. “I mean, we have only like a little over a thousand dollars of our old Funds left. Assuming we even want to just donate all of our money to this mess, that still leaves us with around three thousand dollars to go!”

“We’ll do the only thing we can do: earn the money and then pay back Kinko,” I said calmly. Even now a plan was brewing.

“But how?” Vince asked, pivoting the chair back and forth so that the sides hit my desk over and over in rhythm. “And what about the permanent records?”

“We’ll call in every outstanding favor owed to us. Round up all of our former employees. We’ll open up business again. Take donations. Put together a network of legitimate lemonade stands while it’s still hot outside, which is a market we should have tapped into years ago. Basically we’ll put together the most massive operation we ever have. It will be a whole empire squeezed into one week. I don’t know yet about the permanent records, but we’ll come up with something, right? We always do.”

Vince nodded slowly. I could see he was catching on to the thought that this just might work. That wasn’t surprising; he was a genius, after all.

“Yeah,” he said, “we could also do bake sales during lunch, sell our old video games, arrange fights between bullies and sell tickets! We can even get our hands on the newest R-rated movies and M-rated video games and sell them at a markup to kids who aren’t allowed to get them.”

“Now you’re talking. That’s genius! We’ll do anything, everything we can. What have we got to lose?” I said.

“There is one major flaw to this plan, though, not to mention the dozens of smaller ones,” Vince said, being his usual logical self.

“What’s that?” I asked, even though I knew what he was going to say.

“The Suits: they’ll sniff us out in no time. We’ve got no chance to avoid detection with such a massive amount of stuff we’ll be in charge of. And as you know, the permanent records are located in the administration offices. So there’s that.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “We don’t need to worry about the Suits for now. For that problem I’ve got a plan. It’s probably the most insane plan I’ve ever had, but I think it just might work.”