CHAPTER 11

THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

Then, on Monday, like someone flipped a switch, everything came to an end. My smooth adjustment to a new town and a new school. My booming business. Pretty much my life as I knew it.

I was sitting in math class, learning about irrational numbers, when static crackled over the loudspeaker. The voice of Ms. Minton, the office administrator, blasted through the air. “Mitch Sloan, please report to the assistant principal’s office. I repeat: Would Mitch Sloan please report to Assistant Principal Allegra’s office?” She phrased it like a question, but it was really a command.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. If you’re worried about getting sent to the principal’s office, well, forget it. The person you really have to fear is the assistant principal. Principals are like CEOs of big companies, captains of big ships, generals of big armies. They’re in charge of the whole enterprise, and they spend most of their time in boring meetings, dealing with Big Issues. They deal with parents, with the superintendent, with the newspapers, and so on. They don’t usually deal with the students.

The assistant principals? They’re the eyes and ears of their schools, the ones who really know what’s going on. They’re the ones you have to watch out for.

Without saying a word—in fact, without even looking me in the eye—Mr. Rafferty scribbled out a hall pass and put it in my hand. He looked disappointed. Like he had asked me for a favor that I forgot to do. I made the long walk down to the office. My guess was that Mrs. Allegra was not calling me because she wanted to offer a belated welcome to the new kid, or to tell me that I had won Student-of-the-Week honors. I had a sinking feeling this was about one thing and one thing only.

I tried to put the negative thoughts out of my head, and I walked into the office wearing my brightest, blue-ribbon smile, a trick I learned from one of those business books. People don’t want to make deals with somebody who looks miserable or angry. Looking cheerful and confident is the way to go.

The smile quickly melted away when I saw Mrs. Allegra. She was sitting behind her desk, glasses riding low on her nose. She was peering down at some sort of report, looking as though she had just smelled an overflowing toilet.

I could see a framed picture next to her computer. She was posed with two boys who looked about Kevin’s age—her sons, I guessed—in front of the Saint Louis Arch. Everyone was wearing shorts and sunglasses. It was probably a family trip over the summer. Mrs. Allegra looked a lot happier in that photo than she did now.

“Hi, I’m Mitch!” I said as cheerfully as I could, extending my arm for a handshake. She didn’t look up. This. Was. About. To. Get. Ugly.

Mrs. Allegra didn’t waste time. “Do you know why you’re here, Mitchell?”

Mitchell? The only person who calls me Mitchell is my grandmother. Not that this was the right time to discuss my preferred name.

“Not really,” I lied. I noticed that I had been doing that an awful lot lately.

“Well, it’s about the little gambling ring you’ve been running. Actually, I shouldn’t say little. A concerned student handed this notebook in to me yesterday. And if the information on this piece of paper is correct, you took in a thousand dollars in bets for this week alone. One. Thousand. Dollars.”

Gambling ring? That made it sound so bad. Like it was illegal or something.

When she pulled out the notebook, I recognized it immediately. It was Jamie’s. The one she had lost yesterday. Whoever found it must have been surprised to see that, among the poems and stories and journal entries, there were betting records for over thirty football games.

“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Allegra spit out. “I’ve already spoken with your co-conspirator.”

Co-conspirator? That made it sound even more serious, like illegal drugs or something. And what was Jamie thinking right now? What had she said already? I could feel the panic rising up in my throat. I tried to remain calm.

“Well, it wasn’t like we were going to keep the thousand dollars,” I explained very reasonably. “We only take a percentage of the—”

“I’m not finished. Do you have any idea how serious this is?”

“I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. I just assumed—”

“Never assume,” she snapped, cutting me off again. “This has been a mystery for weeks, and we’d found a lot of clues. Now you’re going to help us solve it.”

“Clues?” I thought I said this to myself but apparently not.

“Yes, Mitchell. Clues,” Mrs. Allegra said, slowing her voice down. “It started a few weeks ago, when a teacher wondered why on Monday mornings there was always a gathering of students in front of your locker. And why they were all wearing guilty looks when he walked by. I believe ‘masks of shame’ was his exact phrase.”

“Well, I can—”

“Does it sound like I’m through? Next, Irma the cafeteria cashier reported that, several weeks ago, you had nervously asked her to make eighty dollars’ worth of change in one-dollar bills. We also found this notebook belonging to your friend Jamie Spielberger. In addition to some rather sarcastic comments about the intelligence level of some classmates and the physical appearance of teachers, there was this.”

Here, Mrs. Allegra opened Jamie’s notebook and flipped through pages and pages filled with notes and charts about football games and money owed and paid.

“And when I called your parents this morning to ask for their help in solving this conundrum, they said that you had paid for a painting of a covered bridge with one hundred dollars in cash. You said it was for a classmate, but then they found the painting under your bed. I think you know you’ve been up to no good.”

I really didn’t see what she was getting so upset about. Okay, maybe there was some school rule against gambling I hadn’t known about. (That you didn’t want to know about, my brain whispered. Never even tried to find out about.) But really, what was so wrong with helping people out? All the old arguments, the ones I’d used with Jamie, popped back up in my mind. I hadn’t lied, hadn’t cheated, hadn’t stolen anything.

People had wanted to place bets. I’d just helped. I’d helped my parents, too, by buying that painting. What was so wrong?

But then I thought about how angry Mrs. Allegra was, how worried Jamie had been weeks ago, how Mr. Rafferty had looked so disappointed in me. How I had lied to my parents.

“Now, Mitchell, why don’t you connect the dots and explain this whole scheme?”

A scheme? A co-conspirator? Evidence? Witnesses? A gambling ring? Mrs. Allegra was making this sound like a real criminal investigation. It occurred to me that, before I said anything else, I should talk with Jamie and make sure we had our stories straight.

As if she had been reading my mind, Mrs. Allegra cut in again with her stern voice. “And don’t bother trying to check in with your friend. We’ve had enough of your machinations.”

I had never even heard that word before. But it didn’t sound good.

“I don’t know who’s responsible for what, who’s the ringleader, and who was just going along with a bad idea, Mitchell,” she said. “But I called Jamie Spielberger down fifteen minutes ago. She’s in the office annex and I gave her the same options that I’m about to give you.”

Mrs. Allegra then explained my choices. If Jamie and I both kept quiet and didn’t reveal exactly what was going on, we would each get a one-day suspension from school, mostly for all the suspicious behavior.

But here was the catch: If one of us confessed the whole plan and the other kept quiet, the person who kept quiet would get six days of suspension and the confessor would get off free for coming clean.

On the other hand, if we both confessed, we would each get four days of suspension. Mrs. Allegra sent me to a small empty conference room across from her office and told me I had a few minutes to think about it. When she came back, I would have to give her my answer.

It was kind of confusing, so I sketched out a little chart with boxes of the possibilities, and it looked something like this:

		JAMIE	JAMIE
		CONFESS	KEEP QUIET
MITCH	CONFESS	BOTH GET FOUR DAYS’ SUSPENSION.	JAMIE GETS SIX DAYS’ SUSPENSION. MITCH GETS NO SUSPENSION.
MITCH	KEEP QUIET	MITCH GETS SIX DAYS’ SUSPENSION. JAMIE GETS NO SUSPENSION.	BOTH GET ONE-DAY SUSPENSION.

I thought about what Jamie might do. Would she keep quiet? Or would she tell Mrs. Allegra what had been going on? Jamie wouldn’t really rat me out, would she?

Maybe I was thinking about it the wrong way. Looking at my chart, I realized something: It really didn’t matter what Jamie did. Whatever she chose, I was better off confessing.

If I thought that Jamie was going to confess, I was better off confessing, too. In that situation, we would each have to do four days of suspension—but that was better than the six days of suspension I would face if I stayed quiet and she didn’t.

If she were quiet, I was better off confessing, too. I would be in trouble for zero days—which was better than the one-day suspension if we both kept quiet.

It was pretty tricky of Mrs. Allegra to set us up like that, and I was sure Jamie would figure out that the best thing for both of us to do would be to own up. So I decided to confess everything:

About how I first won a football bet with Jamie. About how that got me thinking and I came up with the idea to run the football pool and talked Jamie into helping me. About how we eliminated all the risk by matching up the ten-dollar bets and not taking one side unless someone else took the other side. About how we collected two bucks on every twenty put into action.

Apparently Jamie confessed, too, because as I told Mrs. Allegra everything I had done wrong, she just looked down at me. Her glasses still riding low on her nose, she looked more bored than surprised. When I finally finished, she shook her head and sighed.

“Well,” she said, “you and your pal broke about a dozen school rules—from soliciting on school property to organizing a game of chance. But I will say this: At least you told the truth today. Your story matched with the story of your co-conspirator.”

Mrs. Allegra almost sounded nice there for one second. But that quickly changed, and she started in again. “Still, there’s no excuse for what you did. No excuse whatsoever. I called your parents to come pick you up. You’re welcome to return to school on Monday after spending four days thinking about what I will charitably call an extreme lapse in good judgment.”

It was around then that a tall woman wearing black boots and a fur coat stomped into the principal’s office area. Jamie’s mom.

She looked about the same as she had that time I’d met her at Jamie’s house—perfect clothes, perfect hair—except that this time she didn’t look at all happy to see me.

When Jamie walked out of the annex, her hair covered most of her face, but I could see that her eyes were rimmed in red. I was surprised that she had been crying. She could skin her arm playing football and not want to leave the game. But I guess everyone has their breaking point.

“Mom,” she said.

Mrs. Spielberger was having none of it. “Young lady,” she huffed, “I can’t even talk to you right now.”

“Young lady”? It sounded funny to hear Jamie—a girl who talks more trash than any boy, whose hands are caked in dirt, who chews her fingernails, who burps at volumes that could shatter your eardrums, who can name every quarterback in the league—get called “young lady.”

“Hey, Jamie,” I said, getting up from my seat and moving toward the doorway of Mrs. Allegra’s office.

She turned around and glared at me.

Actually, it was worse than a glare. It was like there were little knives in her eyes and she was trying to stab me. “I wish you had never moved here from California,” she said. “You and your stupid get-rich ideas.”

Jamie stormed out right after her mother. I felt sick.

Because there was still time for things to get worse, a few minutes later my mom walked in. And where Mrs. Spielberger had looked furious, my mom looked even worse.

Furious I could deal with. My mom looked disappointed, and miserable, and about to cry. I felt awful.

She signed me out of school, and then thanked—thanked—Mrs. Allegra.

As we walked out of the office, some of the kids who had bet in our pool, including Ben and Avni, were waiting outside. Were they in trouble, too? How did Mrs. Allegra know?

Jamie’s notebook! We had gotten everyone in trouble. As I brushed past them, I saw them staring intently at me. Not quite as bad as Jamie’s glare, but they were mad. Really mad. Then one of the eighth graders shoved me and said, “Heard you made like a thousand dollars off of us. Nice way to treat your friends!”

Except that they weren’t really my friends. They had been nice to me because I’d placed bets for them. And now they all hated me because I’d placed bets for them. I was less popular than I had ever been in California.

When we finally got outside and into the car, I tried to talk to my mom. I needed someone to understand. “Mom, listen,” I started.

“Not now, Mitch,” she said quietly. “Really. Not now.”

Mom didn’t say anything to me on the drive home, which was actually worse than having her yell at me. The expression on her face was more confusion than anything else. Like: Who are you? This smallish kid wearing the blue hoodie and jeans, with short brown hair and a few freckles on his nose? He looks like my younger son, Mitch. But this kid got suspended for running an illegal gambling ring. That’s not the kid we raised. Must be somebody else’s. Nope, don’t recognize him at all.

Finally, as we drove past an orchard, Mom ended the patch of silence.

“This is some pretty heavy stuff for a seventh grader,” she said with a sigh. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Then it was my turn to sigh. I figured that I may as well tell her the truth, even if it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “In a weird way, I feel kind of relieved. I still don’t get why everybody is so mad, though. It wasn’t that bad.”

“You really don’t get it, Mitch?” My mom looked so upset. “You lied, for a start. You lied to your teachers and you lied to us. About the bets. About that painting. Couldn’t you tell that if you were doing something you had to tell so many lies about, it must be wrong?”

Oh.

Jamie had been worried. Mr. Rafferty had been suspicious. But all along, I’d never felt bad about what I was doing.

I did then, though. Sitting in the car, looking at my mom’s face.

“Dad and I really are just so… disappointed, Mitch. You let us down.”

And it wasn’t just them. I had let Jamie down, too.