CHAPTER 9

UNDERWATER

We didn’t just move to Indiana because we wanted to. My folks got in “turbulent financial water,” as I overheard a banker once put it to my dad.

Mom and Dad had never made a lot of money. Some days they would sell a painting or a piece of pottery. But most days they sold nothing at all.

That was okay. We were never rich. Or even close to rich. We were as far from Warren Buffett as Mercury is from Pluto. But we had enough money to live on.

I know, because I used to help keep track of it.

“Mitch, since you like money so much, why don’t you help us make a family budget?” Dad once asked me.

I figured out how much we earned as a family and how much we spent, everything from house payments to car payments to the allowance Kevin and I got. “How come he gets more money than I do?” I asked.

“He’s older,” Mom said.

So unfair.

Anyway, I told Mom and Dad that as long as nothing unexpected happened, we were fine and should even be able to save a few hundred dollars a month.

But last year something unexpected did happen. A lot of people started to struggle with their money. They had less of it. People lost their jobs, or their investments weren’t doing so well. Companies were making less money, too.

When people are worried about their money, they save it for things they really need, like food and gas. They don’t spend it on art. And when people stopped buying art, then it was my parents who started to struggle.

Entire weeks went by without Mom selling a painting or Dad selling any crafts. “Maybe you need to advertise more,” I suggested. But they didn’t.

“Advertising costs money, Mitch.” Dad sighed.

Pretty soon they weren’t able to pay the rent on their shop and started selling their things out of our home. Which was fine when we had a home.

“I don’t think you made the payment on the house this month,” I told Dad. “You owe the bank money.”

“We don’t have it, Mitch,” he said matter-of-factly.

Oh no.

Eventually this guy from the bank came by the house, a short, plump man with a mustache that looked like a caterpillar on his upper lip and a short-sleeve dress shirt with stains under the armpits, just like Coach Williams’s. (Except that Coach Williams was running around on a football field, not sitting in our living room.) The man told us the bank might be “foreclosing” on our house at 353 Del Rio Avenue.

“What’s that mean?” Kevin asked me.

“It means that the bank gave Mom and Dad a loan to pay for the house. And Mom and Dad have to pay back the bank,” I said. “And since they can’t pay back the money, the bank is going to want the house back.”

“What’s a bank want with our house?”

It was a good question. Does a bank really want a three-bedroom home with bike tire tracks on the walls, a gaping hole in the ceiling from where Kevin once swung on a ceiling fan (don’t ask how it happened), and a skateboard ramp in the back?

But I guess, from the bank’s point of view, getting our house was better than not getting anything.

That’s when we ran into another problem.

The price of the house had gone down. Not just our house, actually. House prices all over California—all over the country—were way down. So our house was worth less than it was when Mom and Dad bought it. Even if we sold the house, we wouldn’t have enough money to pay the bank back (and we wouldn’t have a place to live).

So they did what a lot of people did. They decided to hand the house over to the bank and start fresh somewhere else. It was sort of like a do-over in a game of kickball.

As always, I tried to explain it to Kevin in a way he could understand. “Let’s say you wanted to buy a vintage baseball card of Willie Mays, the all-time greatest San Francisco Giant—”

“I could never afford that,” he interrupted. “That would cost, like, thousands of dollars!”

“That’s okay,” I said. “A bank would buy it for you. You just have to promise to pay them back the money—plus a little more in interest.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “How could I pay it back? I can’t even save my allowance each week.”

“But the bank thinks you can pay them back eventually. And maybe even by the time you want to sell the card, it could be worth at least the same amount as what you bought it for, maybe even more, and you would have already paid them most of the money.”

Kevin started smiling. I’m sure he was picturing himself showing the card off to his friends and framing it for his wall. I had to cut off his daydreaming.

“There’s only one problem,” I said. “What if the value of the card went down? Let’s say you paid three thousand dollars for the card, and then suddenly you owed the bank three thousand dollars plus interest for a baseball card that at the most you could only sell for, like, one thousand dollars? Even if you sold the card, you’d still owe the bank more than two grand, and they want it back!”

His smile went to half-mast. Then it collapsed entirely.

“I’d be in trouble,” he said. “I’d probably just have to give the card back to the bank or whatever.”

“Exactly.”

So that’s what my mom and dad did. Ditched the house. Gave it back to the bank. Moved out here to Indiana to start over.

And it wasn’t so bad. I sure didn’t miss school back in California. Kevin was playing football (and losing, but at least he had fun being good at it). I was making friends, and maybe even a best friend.

So I told all this to Jamie, and she listened, petting Pepper, looking serious and thinking.

“Okay, I get it,” she said. “That sounds rough. I’m sorry, Mitch. But what does it have to do with the betting at school?”

I sighed. “They’re not selling a lot of art here either,” I told her. “I didn’t mind it, moving once. But I really don’t want to have to do it again. I like it here. People like me here.”

“So you want to keep making money at school? Just in case?”

I nodded.

“Okay, then. We will.”

Suddenly Jamie was all business. “I know what to do about the change thing, Mitch. This’ll work.”

And she told me her plan. We’d give the kids who placed their bets using one-dollar bills first choice of the games. Kids who wanted to pay with tens and twenties could bet, too—but only after the ones who paid with singles.

Genius.

And Jamie had another great idea. Right after we’d paid off the winners, we’d show them the schedule of the next weekend’s games and give them the chance to put down their bets. It worked great. As long as they had the money handy—and were feeling good about how talented they were at predicting football games—why not let them make more bets?

They did, too. They were glad to do it.

The money kept piling up in my dresser drawer.

And Jamie didn’t talk about quitting anymore.

Remember how I said that my day would usually peak with math? Well, that wasn’t the case lately.

It seemed like Mr. Rafferty was starting to… well… I don’t want to say he had it in for me, but I could tell that he didn’t like me as much as he used to. He didn’t call on me a lot—sometimes even when I was the only one with a hand in the air. He never laughed at the jokes I made.

And please don’t bother trying to suggest that it was “in my head” or that I was “imagining it.” That’s the kind of thing grown-ups say. And I know it’s not true.

Mr. R. was teaching us about integers—positive and negative numbers. And as usual, he had come up with a fun way to do it: a fake game show. He called it Mathletes in Action.

When it was my turn to be the featured contestant, Mr. R. stared me right in the eye and spoke extra slowly. “Okay, sir,” he said in a fake game-show-host voice. “For the benefit of the folks watching at home all around this great nation, please state your name and your affiliation.”

“Mitch Sloan. Jonasburg Middle School.”

“Very good. With everyone at Jonasburg Middle School cheering you on, Mitch Sloan, are you ready for your first question?”

I don’t know how Mr. Rafferty always had the energy to be so lively and funny. Especially compared to Mrs. Connor, my social studies teacher, who once showed us a movie and fell asleep in the middle of it. Or Mrs. Shelby, my fifth-grade teacher, who would sometimes try to sneak out her phone, place it in her lap, and send text messages to her friends while we were filling out the worksheets she assigned. But Mr. R.? He’s like those athletes who “always bring their A game,” like the announcers say.

Listening to his introduction, I almost started to crack up, but I held it together. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m ready.”

“Okay,” he said, staying in character. “Everyone at your school is suddenly interested in gambling on professional football games.”

Did I hear that right? Did he really just—

“This is cleeeeearly against school rules. Kids? Gambling on football? That’s not right. But your usual good judgment eluuuuudes you, Mitch. And you do it anyway.”

I did hear it right.

My classmates were starting to laugh.

“Here’s the question, Mitch Sloan: You bet ten dollars one week and win eighteen when your team proves victorrrrious.”

Wait, he even knows the amounts? How is that possible?

“The second week, you waaaaager ten dollars and lose the bet. The question: What integer represents your total winnings?”

I stood frozen like one of those lawn gnomes. Except that lawn gnomes don’t blush from a combination of shame and embarrassment.

“I’ll repeat the question: What integer represents your winnings from gaaaambling?”

Oh, that word again. I may as well give him the right answer.

“Minus two,” I finally whispered, my heart beating faster than ever.

“Yes! You wagered twenty dollars and made eighteen. So your winnings come to an integer of minus two! Which means you actually lost two dollars. Thanks for playing, Mitch. You have made your classmates—and yourself—so, so proud.”

For the first time in Mr. R.’s math class, the bell couldn’t ring soon enough.

From there, my day somehow got worse. Of course it did. It’s like a rule of middle school. If something goes wrong in the morning, you can bet that something else will go wrong in the afternoon. Every now and then, you get a day when you should have stayed in bed. And this was one of those days.

I walked into fifth-period science class, where Mrs. Wolff always collects the homework right after the bell rings. I reached into my folder to pull out a worksheet she’d assigned about continental drift. I always keep my homework in the pocket on the left side. But when I looked, it was empty. Hmmm. That’s strange.

I opened my science textbook, thinking maybe I had folded the worksheet in half and left it in the book. But when I fanned out the pages, nothing fell out. Maybe it was in my locker. But I couldn’t go back to check without a hall pass. And Mrs. Wolff wasn’t going to give me one of those—at least not until after the homework was collected.

I got that awful panicky feeling. You know, when your mouth goes dry, like all the saliva has been drained. When your stomach feels like it’s doing a gymnastics routine. And then your palms get all the moisture that’s missing from your mouth.

As I started flipping through my science folder one last, desperate time, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and it was Clint Grayson, flashing a smile that revealed teeth the color of creamed corn. When his lips turned up, I could see the beginning of the mustache he was growing.

“Looking for this?” he said in his goofy voice, holding up my homework.

“Give it to me!” I said, feeling the anger start to flare up.

“I would,” he said, “except for one little thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t really want to,” he snarled.

“Give. Me. My. Homework,” I said again. Panic was totally giving way to rage.

“Do you want to try and make me?” he asked.

This felt like a dance I hadn’t done in a while. The Bully Dance. And the step-by-step choreography was coming back to me.

You know what I hate the most about bullies? It’s not just that they humiliate you. It’s that they turn everyone else against you, too. As Clint teased me, I looked back and saw that Mark Sterner was laughing, along with a lot of other kids. Rudy Matthews was grinning and Rachel Miller was snickering with a hand over her mouth.

I didn’t even care about the homework. This is going to sound arrogant, and probably annoying, too, but I knew I was going to get a good final grade in science, even if I got a zero on this particular assignment.

I cared more that Clint was embarrassing me in front of other kids. Mark and Rudy and Rachel? All of them were part of the betting pool. Mark was in my fantasy football league. Rudy and I had played H-O-R-S-E during recess just last week. Why were they siding with Clint? It’s like they wanted to be on the side of the person with more power, even if he was mean and wrong and acting like a jerk.

I wasn’t going to overpower Clint and get my homework back. I knew that, and so did he. So I tried to act like a businessman and treat this as a negotiation.

“Okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. “What do I have to do to get my homework back?”

He had his answer ready. “Give me one of them football bets for free.”

No way. That was a deal breaker, as they say in business.

1) Jamie and I had agreed that we wouldn’t make any decisions without first talking to each other.

2) If I did that for Clint, every kid who wanted a free bet would just steal my homework and hold it for ransom. I’d be vulnerable. And Jamie might be, too.

3) It was just flat-out wrong. I wasn’t going to let this jerk get what he wanted, just because he was bigger than I was, and a star on the football team, and he had my homework assignment in his disgusting hands.

4) A basic business rule: If you give something away for free, it’s not worth as much anymore.

“No deal,” I said.

“Okay, then. Have it your way.” He tossed the paper back at me. Of course it drifted to the floor and I had to lean down to grab it.

I couldn’t believe Clint Grayson had given my homework back so easily. I’d said no to him, and he hadn’t even cared? What was up with that? Bullies never let you get away with “no.” They always find a way to make you pay.

Clint saw that I was confused.

“Don’t need one little piece of homework,” he said, grinning. “I’ve got something a lot better. Should have given me my free bet, little Mitch. You’re gonna be sorry about that.”

I turned my back on him and sat down, like I didn’t care. But it was an act. If he was trying to make me nervous, it was working.