Simple.

My new favorite word. I never knew life for a kid could be so simple. Seventh grade had started just a month ago, and that’s probably the one word that could best describe how my school year had gone so far: simple. Even the word itself had a kind of easiness to it, like it wanted you to say it over and over again.

Life was simple. And I liked it. I mean, I still couldn’t figure out why other kids were always complaining all the time. School was a piece of cake when that was all that was on your plate and you didn’t also run a huge business operation with multiple employees and a healthy cash flow.

This was my first school year since kindergarten that had started without my business up and running. I used to run my business with my business partner and best friend, Vince, in the East Wing boys’ bathroom. Basically, if any kid in school had a problem, they knew they could come to me and I’d solve it for them. For a fee, of course. By the time sixth grade rolled around, we pretty much owned the school.

But at the end of last year, we had to end our business after coming clean and sacrificing its secrecy in order to save our school from this sadistic vice principal named Dr. George. At first, Vince and I had planned to shut our business down temporarily while the heat subsided.

But then near the end of summer, we both decided it was kind of nice to not have to worry about it for once. We could just focus on playing baseball, watching the Cubs, playing video games, going to movies, blowing up stuff with fireworks, etc. You know, doing normal kid stuff.

It was so nice that we decided just to shut the doors for good. Or, well, maybe not for good as in “forever,” but at least for all of our seventh-grade year, and probably even longer. I mean, eventually our saved-up money, our Fund, would run dry and we’d maybe need to get some sort of business going again. And eventually kids would get tired of having to solve their own problems and they’d come begging for us to open up shop once again in the East Wing boys’ bathroom, fourth stall from the high window.

One thing you can always count on: kids are going to find ways to get into trouble and are going to need someone to get them out of it.

Actually, several kids had come to me already to ask when we were reopening the business or to ask for help or advice. But I had turned them down each time. I was pretty determined to stay retired for now. The business used to be a lot simpler. It used to be just me and Vince and the problems kids brought to us. But last school year had been a nightmare. First we’d gotten involved in that mess with legendary crime boss Staples, and then a few months later a new principal had tried to take down the whole school. And our business had buried Vince and me alive right in the middle of both of those messes.

So, as much as it disappointed the kids who had come asking for help, and as much as I kind of did still want to help them out, I couldn’t. I’d turned down every one of them. And they understood, for the most part, why I had to. They knew I couldn’t open up business right away given all the attention we’d gotten saving our school last year.

Here’s the thing, though: if you asked me, I might have said, even then, that I know deep down that it just wasn’t going to be that easy to get out. There’s this old trilogy of movies called The Godfather. They are some of my favorite movies because they kind of remind me of Vince and me. In fact, the first time I saw them, I had to double-check what year they had come out because I could have sworn the guys who wrote that movie had stolen some of my business tricks. Anyways, in the third movie, the main character says, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

I just hoped it wasn’t the same deal for me. Where the only way out was either in handcuffs or a body bag. Well, okay, my business probably wouldn’t ever lead to anyone ending up in a body bag, but detention, suspension, or juvenile prison were all bad enough; and those were all definitely possible. Maybe worse than that if some of the juvie horror stories I’d heard were true.

Take this one kid Jack Knife who’d served a four-month stint upstate at the Estevan Juvenile Detention Center last summer. He was a changed kid when he got out but not in a good way. Kids hadn’t always called him Jack Knife. No, back before he’d served his time, they used to just call him by his real name, Greg. Well, one day Greg accidentally blew up his friend’s dad’s car while trying to prove that Twinkies are completely fireproof. Anyways, the string of events that led to the car exploding are so crazy, you’d never believe me, but I was there and I saw it with my own two eyes. And by explode, I mean literally the car burst into a huge ball of fire. One of the tires got lodged right inside the middle of this old oak tree in his front yard. The fire chief had said it was a miracle that nobody got hurt. That kind of thing pretty much automatically earns you an extended stay at one of our state’s fine juvenile correctional institutions.

Anyways, the point I’m trying to make is that Greg was a pretty good kid; he wasn’t juvie type material. It was really just bad luck that he had happened to be experimenting with Twinkies, lighter fluid, and a blowtorch in the wrong place at the wrong time and caused an explosion so huge that to this day some kids say you can still feel the ground vibrating slightly where the car had been parked. But when Greg got back from juvie, he was a different person. He told me stories that I can’t even bring myself to repeat. He said the only reason he’d survived was because he developed a signature move called the Jack Knife. It’s pretty complicated and I’m not even too sure how it works, but let’s just say at the end of it, the other kid looks like he just got run through a pasta maker, complete with ricotta cheese filling.

So that’s what I was worried about. Becoming a human ravioli someday and getting sucked back into my business made it likely that this was going to be one of those things where the only way out was to go to juvie. And as much as having a cool nickname like Flint Cracker and a killer reputation to match sounded awesome, I didn’t really want to go through what Jack Knife had told me he’d had to in order to earn them.

If only it could have been that simple.

It all started one day when I was walking home from school. I was walking because I was still grounded from using my bike due to the exposure of my business last year. I mean, I had helped take down an evil psychopath, so I had gotten off fairly easy, but that still didn’t mean I escaped punishment altogether. Anyways, that’s beside the point. The point is I was walking home one day and got a surprise visit from someone I’d thought I’d never see again. . . .