CHAPTER 5

KA-CHING!

It was early in the year, but I already had a favorite teacher. If my school hours were one of those stock market charts showing “highs” and “lows” then my day hits its peak when I sit in third-period math with Mr. Rafferty. I wouldn’t exactly call him “cool.” (In fact, he’s definitely not cool.) It looks like his hair is afraid of his forehead and is backing away as fast as it can. When he walks around the classroom, his shoes squeak. His arms are so hairy, it seems like they’re carpeted.

But he’s one of those teachers who make class so fun that you forget you’re learning. Today he taught us about percentages, fractions, and decimal points, and he used baseball as an example. ”When a batter hits .300, it’s not really ‘three hundred’ the way the announcers say,” he said to the class. “It’s .300 or .3 or thirty percent or three out of ten.”

My hand shot up. “The difference is that three-for-ten in baseball is good. But three-for-ten on a test is a big fat F!”

Mr. Rafferty smiled. “Good point, Mitch.” Then he waited for a beat.

“Get it?” he said. “Good point. Decimal point? A joke? Anyone?”

There were a few groans. I’ve always wondered why adults don’t realize that if you have to explain your joke, maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t funny to begin with.

When I got back to my locker, Jamie was waiting for me. She was wearing a backward baseball cap, a Jonasburg sweatshirt, jeans—and a nasty frown.

“Here you go,” she said, throwing a crumpled five-dollar bill at me.

I felt bad. But not bad enough to reject it. As I put the money in my pocket, she kept staring lasers at me.

“What?” I said.

“You know what,” she said. “Three of Baltimore’s best players were hurt and didn’t even play!”

“Maybe,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

“Yeah, right. That’s the last time I make a bet with you.”

“There’s no rule against having more information,” I said.

“Don’t you think you should have told me that Baltimore was going to be fielding a JV team?”

“Then you wouldn’t have taken the bet.”

“But at least then,” she said, arching an eyebrow, “we’d still be friends.”

An awkward silence hung in the air like a bad smell. Uh-oh. I got a little jump in my stomach, like I had ruined a good thing.

Then she smiled. “I’m just playing with you.”

I wonder if she heard me exhale with relief.

“Don’t worry,” she told me. “I’ll get you back.”

She made a fist, and we pounded knuckles.

As usual, I sat by Ben Barnes at lunch. As usual, he was already eating when I got there. And as usual, he was eating the kind of food my parents call “poison,” tearing through a bag of chips and a pack of cookies while draining a can of fruit punch. Plus, he bought a double order of Tater Tots on the hot-lunch line. Ben scrunched up his face as he stabbed at one with his fork.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, but these Tater Tots are awful. I don’t know how you manage to spoil Tater Tots, but they did it.”

“Then why are you eating them?”

“Duh,” he said, shaking his head. “Because I paid for ’em. A dollar fifty.”

“Would you eat them if they were on my tray and I just gave you some for free?”

“No way!”

“That makes no sense, then,” I said. “If you paid for the Tater Tots, the money is gone. Why make it worse by making yourself eat something you don’t want?”

“Maybe you’re right, Mitch.” Of course I was right. But by then he had put the last of the Tater Tots in his mouth.

“Hey,” he said. At least I think it was “hey.” I couldn’t tell for sure, since his mouth was full. “I want to bet on a football game, too.”

“What?” I said.

“Like you did with Jamie,” he mumbled between bites.

“How’d you hear about that?”

“Everyone knows,” he said with a shrug. “You won five bucks from Jamie betting on football.”

Note to self: Rumors and gossip travel the halls here faster than a racecar—a word that spells itself backward, by the way—at the Indianapolis 500.

“So?” said Ben.

“So what?”

“Can I make a bet with you?” he asked.

“No. Well, I guess. Okay. What?”

“I love the Colts. They’re playing Denver this weekend, and I know they’re going to kill them.”

Ka-ching, I thought to myself. He’s betting on the Colts not because he knows anything about the game, but because they’re his favorite team. I smelled opportunity. I smelled money. He would bet with his heart. I would bet with my head.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound reluctant. “I guess I’ll take Denver, but to make it fair, how about the Colts have to win by at least six points?”

“Six points!” said Ben. “Heck, that’s barely a touchdown. They’re going to win by two or three touchdowns! You can make it ten points if you want.”

Even better! Ben thought the Colts were going to crush Denver because the Colts were his favorite team. But I knew the truth. The Colts were at best an even match with Denver, and winning at all, let alone by ten points, would be pretty unlikely. This was an easy bet.

It was right around then that the idea hit me. I could bet my classmates on football and take advantage of (1) their being die-hard fans, which could get in the way of their judgment, and (2) me having more information. But even then, there would be cases when I could lose. A star on my team could get injured unexpectedly. The officials could make a bad call. Someone could have as much information as me. For whatever reason, my team might just stink one Sunday. There could be all sorts of flukes.

But what if I could eliminate the risk? Then I could make money without worrying about losing it!

It was an incredible idea, and now all I needed was a willing partner.

“So here’s how it works,” I said.

Jamie looked hard at me, and I couldn’t tell if she was skeptical—after all, she had just lost five dollars to me—or if she was intrigued.

“You collect the bets for one team. I collect bets for the other team. Ten bucks a bet. Winner gets eighteen. We get two for our services.”

“What service is that?” she asked.

“We’re arranging all the bets,” I explained. “If we didn’t do this, no one would even have a chance to make money.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like a salad bar at a grocery store,” I said. “You could buy the lettuce and the carrots and the cucumber and make your own salad. But that would take a long time. So you go to the salad bar. It’s more expensive, but you’re willing to pay extra because they’ve done the work for you, right? The lettuce is already washed. The carrots are peeled. The cucumber is chopped. And it’s all right there in front of you. So you’re willing to pay more.”

She nodded. “But what if everyone wants to bet on one team and no one wants to bet on the other team?”

“This,” I said, “is where the genius of Mitch kicks in. We only take bets if we know we can line up the same amount of people on each side. The Broncos play the Colts this Sunday. If ten people want to bet on the Broncos, we find ten people to take the Colts.”

“Ten bets on the Broncos. Ten bets on the Colts. And we get two dollars a bet, so we get twenty dollars no matter what happens, no matter who wins.” Jamie’s face suddenly lit with a smile. “Not bad.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling.

“But wait a minute,” she said. “What if we can’t find ten people to bet on the Broncos? This is Colts country, you know.”

“That’s where we set points,” I responded. “Just like our bet last week. You had to beat the Steelers by more than four points, remember?” I can’t help taunting her a little.

“Yeah,” she said a little bitterly.

“We offer points to people to get them to bet on the Broncos. Maybe they think the Colts will win, but not by more than ten points. So, we say Broncos plus ten points. That’s how they do it in Vegas.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s pretty clever,” she said. “But the Colts winning by ten over Denver is crazy. No one is nuts enough to think they’re going to win by that much!”

I smiled, thinking of Ben. “I don’t know. People can get carried away with this stuff.” I was so excited I was having trouble sitting still. “So are you in?”

“Let me think about it.”

“For how long?”

She scowled at me. “For as long as I feel like it, Mitch.”

I didn’t mind waiting. I was psyched. She liked my idea, we were still friends, and we were about to make some money together. “Okay, okay, fine. Hey, can I ask you a question while you think about it?”

“Shoot,” she said.

“How’d you get so into sports, anyway? Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve never met a girl who…”

“Who what? Would rather play football than do her nails?” she said in the girliest voice ever.

“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

“Well, my dad is a big sports fan, and he got me into it. Once, we were watching a football game and he said to me, ‘Having you around is as good as having a son.’ It probably slipped out. But after that, I couldn’t disappoint him by asking to get a manicure or bake muffins or something girly like that.”

“But you do like sports, right?” I said.

“Oh, sure, totally,” she said. “I might not have tried them without my dad, but after a while I realized I loved them. Sports are way more fun that all that girly crap other girls do. Okay, buddy. Your turn.”

“Huh? My turn to do what?”

“Answer a question. What did you mean when you said you got your head dunked in a toilet at your old school? What was that about?”

“Oh. Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about that day so much. But Jamie had just told me the thing with her dad. So I kind of felt like I owed her, and I did feel kind of bad about the bet and all.

“My other school, back in California… I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly popular.” I shrugged.

I could tell she was getting ready to give me some trash talk—

You, not popular? I can’t believe it—but then I think she saw my face. “Go on,” she said, and she even sounded a little sorry.

I didn’t tell her all of it. I’d never really told anybody all of it. Elbows to the ribs. Books knocked out of my hands. Kids scrambling as soon as I was about to open up my locker so they could slam it closed and I couldn’t grab a book or a pen.

“So there was a bunch of eighth graders on the basketball team,” I told Jamie. “And they grabbed me one day and decided to give me a swirly. Stuck my head in the toilet and flushed. You know, so your hair looks like a Dairy Queen cone, all swirly.”

“That sucks,” Jamie said angrily. “Why didn’t you tell a teacher?”

“I did.”

That was the worst part, actually. I’d told Mr. Funkle, our assistant principal. And do you know what he said?

What did you do this time, Mitch?

He’d practically sung it, rolling his eyes and tapping a pen against the coffee mug he always carried around. After I’d explained what happened, he told me he’d take my complaint “under advisement,” whatever that meant. I think it was adultspeak for “I have more important things to do than deal with you and your wet hair, kid.”

“That sucks!” Jamie said again, really mad. I hadn’t wanted to tell her, but I have to admit I kind of liked seeing her get all fired up about something that happened to me six months ago. “I can’t believe that! I can’t—wait a minute. Mitch?”

“What?”

“What did you do?”

“Hey! Nothing!”

She held up her hands. “I’m not saying you deserved it, dude. Seriously, nobody deserves that. They should have expelled all those kids and fired that principal. I’m on your side. But… maybe there was… something? Some reason they were mad at you?”

“Hey, I’m the victim here. I didn’t do anything!”

“Seriously?”

“Well… okay. Fine. I did kind of take some money from Carl Lake.”

Carl was probably the tallest kid at my old school. He was lanky and had this mop of hair that made him look like a toothbrush. He had been taking lunch money from sixth graders the past week, and one day it was my turn.

“Got any lunch money, kid?” he said in the deepest voice he could make.

I could tell he was trying to scare me, and that he thought I was just some little sixth-grade idiot that he could step all over. But I could also tell he wasn’t going to leave empty-handed, not quietly anyway.

“I don’t have any money,” I said. “Because I used it all to buy these candy bars.” I showed him the box of twenty candy bars I had, which I was supposed to sell for my computer club.

“You gonna eat all those?” he sneered. “Maybe I’ll help you!” And he grabbed the box of candy from me.

“No,” I laughed, trying to stay calm, “I was going to sell them.”

“To who?” he asked.

“Yeah, I bought these candy bars because I thought I could sell them during lunch or between classes. Figured I could make about twenty-five cents on every bar.”

He had already opened one of them and was munching away on it, but I could see I had his attention.

“In fact,” I continued, “maybe you’d be interested in helping me sell them. We’d split the profits, of course.”

It was risky. Carl could have easily just taken the candy bars away from me, but given the amount of money I’d seen him collect this week from other kids, I suspected he wanted the money more than the candy.

“Can you get more?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, “and if you want to partner with me, you can cover the seventh and eighth graders. They won’t take the candy from you!”

Carl smiled. I think he liked the thought of other kids not daring to steal from him. “Okay,” he said, grinning, “but I get twenty cents. You can keep five.”

It was a pretty lopsided partnership. But, figuring this might happen, I had a better plan. You see, for the kid in the computer club who sold the most candy bars, there was a fifty-dollar prize. Carl would probably manage to sell at least five boxes or a hundred candy bars, netting him a profit of twenty dollars. I would get five dollars. But, since I would be the one who sold the most, I also got the fifty-dollar prize, which Carl didn’t know about.

Unfortunately, he eventually found out about the prize from his younger brother, who was also in the sixth grade. Carl wasn’t too happy.

I told this to Jamie, and she shook her head.

“What did you do with the money, Mitch?” she asked.

“I gave some of it back to the kids whose lunch money was stolen,” I said, “then kept the rest. But I probably would’ve given it all back to avoid that swirly.”

“I’m going to have to think twice before I go into business with you,” she said.

“What the heck is that?” I asked Ben Barnes. By the time I got to the lunch table the next day, his mouth was already filled with food. Food I had a hard time identifying.

“What? You mean you’ve never seen a tenderloin sandwich before?” he said incredulously.

“Nuh-uh.”

I looked closely at the lunch that he’d spread out on his cafeteria tray. It seemed to be a piece of fried meat, flattened until it was the size of a small pizza, and tucked into a bun. He told me it was some sort of Indiana specialty, like sourdough in San Francisco.

“It’s pretty good,” he said. “Try some if you want.”

He ripped off a corner and handed it me. I looked at it with suspicion but figured if it was poison, well, a lot of other kids were going to be sick besides me.

“Not bad,” I said.

“That’s it?” said Ben.

“Okay, it’s good.” I kept chewing. “Really good. So good, I’ll be right back. I’m going to get one now.”

I came back from the lunch line, and it happened. I’m not sure how. It kinda just did. As I started to unwrap my tenderloin, Ben was slurping the last bit of his milk through his straw—I hate that sound—and was getting ready to leave. Seth Brockman had already left and Trevor Wiseman was out with the stomach flu. At the table behind us, a knot of girls was getting up together, all except Jamie, who was still eating. Two bites into my tenderloin, she and I were the only two people left in our corner of the cafeteria. It was like we broke the tribal rules of the cafeteria but obeyed the rules of gravity. We scooted our chairs over and sat together.

“Hey,” I said.

“You gonna eat that slop?” she said, looking at my sandwich. “I wouldn’t feed that to my dog.”

“It’s really good,” I said, shrugging and continuing to eat.

“Good to see you have the same standards for your food as you have for your football teams.”

“Speaking of football, have you given any thought to my idea?”

Jamie started to smile. “Wellllllllll, Mitchell—”

“Mitch,” I corrected her. I couldn’t let that one slip, even if she was about to deliver good news.

“Sorry.” She paused. “Okay, I admit you’re onto something.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Because I just mentioned, real casually, that if people wanted to bet ten dollars on the Colts beating the Broncos, I might be able to help. Avni Garg was the first. Then Jonah Gideon said he would—”

“How many total?”

“Ten so far!” she said. “And I barely tried.”

“Did you explain to them if they bet ten dollars and won, they would get eighteen back?”

“Yeah, nobody cared,” she said. “They’re so confident their team’s going to win, it doesn’t matter to them.”

“Here’s the crazy thing,” I said. “I already have ten people willing to bet ten dollars on the Broncos. You know what this means?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to make twenty bucks no matter which team wins!”

“And you know what else? This is only one game! Why don’t we do this for the Vikings-Packers, the Dolphins-Jets, the—”

“Slow down, slow down. Don’t get greedy,” she warned.

“It’s not greed. It’s opportunity.”

“Let’s just do one game this week and see how it goes. Make sure we didn’t overlook something.”

She got up to bus her tray, but I wasn’t done with my sandwich.

What should I do now? Shake Jamie’s hand like we were real businesspeople making an agreement? Give her a high five? Bump fists? I panicked and just sort of tapped her elbow.

Awkward.

Of course, that had to be the time Zander McCallum walked by.

“Who’s this,” he said, pointing to Jamie standing next to me, “your girlfriend?”

I wanted to say, Even better—my business partner.

But for some reason it was like the words got stuck at a traffic light that had turned red. The only thing that came into my brain sputtered out.

“Um, uh, nah, no,” I stammered. “We’re just friends.”

“Sure you are,” said Zander. “Suuuuure you are.”