CHAPTER 12

AN UNFAIR FIGHT

When we got home, I didn’t need to be told to go to my room, and I knew not to go on the computer for any reason, but especially not to play fantasy football. I had a full backpack. Assistant Principal Allegra asked my teachers to put together assignments for the week so I wouldn’t fall behind in any classes. But I didn’t open any of the books. Mostly I just lay on my bed, tossing a tennis ball in the air and thinking.

Around six, I heard a car pull up, which meant Kevin was home from practice. I looked out my window and saw him unfold himself from the backseat of a sports car. He had changed out of his football uniform, but his hair was matted in sweat and he had streaks of black on his face.

He slammed the car door so hard I could practically feel the house shake, and stormed up the driveway, looking like he wanted to tear somebody apart.

Uh-oh. Could somebody have told him what I did? Was that why he was so mad? It didn’t make much sense—but I couldn’t think of any other reason for him to look like King Kong on a bad day.

Mom and Dad intercepted Kevin in the driveway. I’m sure they were going to give him advance warning and tell him about his juvenile delinquent brother, if he didn’t already know. I ducked down where they wouldn’t see me watching them.

Mom and Dad were talking in hushed tones so I couldn’t hear very much. But the expression on Kevin’s face went from furious to surprised. What? Are you kidding? Mitch? My kid brother, the one with the spot in the starting lineup of the Honor Roll? He got suspended?

When Kevin came inside, he walked right to my door and knocked. I opened it up a crack.

“Tough day, huh?” he said.

“You could say that,” I muttered. “You, too?”

“Not so much for me.” He stood there in my doorway. “But it’s true about Coach Williams. He told us today. We’ve got one more game this season, against our biggest rivals, Clarksville. The Corncob Bowl is the most important game of the year. Both teams agreed to push it back a few weeks just to get ready! If we don’t win, he’s out of a job.”

“Oh.” I wandered back over to my bed to flop down on it and stare at the ceiling some more. “That sucks.” I couldn’t exactly work myself up to feeling all upset; I just didn’t have the energy. But I did feel bad for Coach Williams. Even if some of his plays weren’t the best, he didn’t deserve this.

Kevin sighed. “Hey, at least you didn’t get a swirly the way you did in California,” he said, watching me. “Remember when you tricked Carl Lake into helping you win that fifty bucks?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “On the other hand, I only got wet hair and embarrassment for that. For this football gambling thing, I got suspended.”

“ ‘This football gambling thing,’ ” Kevin said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to say I told you so. But I told you so.”

“Yeah, you told me.” I threw the tennis ball hard enough to bounce sharply off the ceiling, making a loud thwack. And I didn’t really care when it left a scuff mark.

“Everybody’s pretty mad, huh?”

Thwack.

“Yeah.”

Thwack.

Kevin shrugged and turned around, headed for the door.

“The thing is, Kevin?” I sat up.

“Yeah?” He turned back around.

“I don’t get it. Why everybody’s so mad.”

“Really?”

I groaned a little. “I’m not trying to be stupid. Okay, I guess I should have checked in about whether gambling at school is against the rules.”

“Yeah, that might have been a good idea.” Kevin laughed.

“And I know it was wrong lying to Mom and Dad. I’m sorry about that. Seriously. But is there really something so terrible about helping people make bets?” I flopped back down on my bed and stared at the ceiling some more. “It’s not like I stole from them or lied to them or something.”

Kevin came and sat on my bed.

“But you made a lot of money, right?”

“Yeah.” Thwack. “That’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s wrong. But the other kids, the ones who were betting? Did they make money?”

“Some of them.”

“A lot of them?”

I thought about Jamie’s chart, and the way she’d figured out that even if you bet right on half of your games, you still wouldn’t break even. “No, probably not.”

“So you made a lot of money. And nobody else did.”

“So what? That happens all the time in business. Somebody makes money, somebody doesn’t. You don’t go to jail if you’re the one who makes money. Do you get in trouble if you score more points in a football game than the other team?” Thwack.

“No. I don’t know, Mitch. But it doesn’t feel the same. I guess—it wasn’t really a fair fight, the way you did it.”

“Not fair?” I felt hot anger bubbling inside of me like lava in a volcano. I threw the ball harder. “I didn’t lie. I didn’t cheat.”

“Yeah, but you kind of—you’re really smart, Mitch.”

Thwack. “So now I’m in trouble for being smart?”

“No. Shut up. Stop giving me such a hard time. I’m trying to figure it out.”

I looked over at Kevin. He really did look like he was thinking hard. So I shut my mouth and let him do it.

Finally he nodded, like something made sense at last. “When I play football, both teams know they’re trying to beat the other team,” he said. “Right?”

“Right.”

“So everybody’s playing as hard as they can. Any little advantage you can get, you take it.”

“Right.”

“But those other kids, the ones who were making the bets? They didn’t know it was like a football game to you. They thought they were just fooling around with some of their friends. That it didn’t matter how smart they were, and that you were smarter. It was like you were in game mode, and they were in friend mode. You were competing, and they weren’t. Maybe that’s why everybody got so mad.”

Wow.

I was used to explaining money stuff to Kevin. I wasn’t used to having him explain something back to me. So I lay there, kind of surprised, thinking about what he’d said. It actually made some sense.

“I don’t know, Mitch. But that’s what I think, anyway. Hang in there. Nobody stays mad forever.” He got up and headed for the door again.

“Kevin?” I said before he got there.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. But the thing is…” I said quietly, still staring up at the ceiling, “most of them weren’t really my friends, even though I wanted them to be.”

He nodded, like he understood what I meant, and then he left.

I lay there, thinking about the one real friend I’d made during this whole year so far, and the look on her face in the assistant principal’s office. If anybody in the world could stay mad forever, it might be Jamie Spielberger.

Back in California, a kid in the grade above me was suspended for getting into a fistfight one time. I remember thinking that suspension sounded more like a vacation than a punishment. You have to stay home from school for a few days? Not much difference between that and a weekend.

Wrong.

Mom and Dad made me swear I wouldn’t watch television, turn on the computer, play video games, or watch a screen of any kind. Instead, I had to work on all the assignments from school that I was missing. On top of that, they gave me extra assignments to keep me busy. Dad printed out a list of world capitals and told me that I was expected to have them memorized by the time he returned home from work. From Afghanistan (Kabul) to Zimbabwe (Harare).

Mom had given me a list of vocabulary words to commit to memory.

• Illicit: illegal
• Clandestine: held in secret
• Deceiving: tricking or giving a false impression

(Jeez, I wondered whether all the words Mom chose were intended to be about my “crime.” I was relieved that the rest weren’t about me. I think.)

• Corpulent: fat
• Xenophobic: fearful of foreigners
• Diffident: shy
• Craven: cowardly
• Interminable: never-ending

They’d also decided that I was going to have to “make amends” to the Jonasburg school community. “People will feel better about you, and you’ll feel better about yourself,” Mom said. They were going to call Mrs. Allegra and talk about some ideas for what I could do.

Oh, and one more thing. They made me get rid of all the money!

By this time, I had a little more than three hundred dollars stashed away. Mom and Dad sat me down for a talk about what to do with my “ill-gotten gains,” as Mom called them.

“We thought about making you give back the money to the kids who paid to bet,” Mom said. “But we decided that it could get too complicated.”

“Plus, those kids made some mistakes, too,” Dad said. “They shouldn’t have been betting in the first place.”

I guess that’s why they were waiting to talk to Mrs. Allegra.

It turned out they decided there was somebody who needed the money more than I did, or the other kids at Jonasburg Middle School did. Dad told me I was going to have to donate everything I’d earned off the gambling ring to a charity. “We have a few suggestions for you,” he said, “if you need some ideas. Or you’re welcome to come up with something on your own. But you’re not going to keep that money.”

You know, I wasn’t too upset about that. Making the money had been fun. Figuring it all out—how to place the bets, how to eliminate the risk, how to make people want to give me two dollars every Monday. Having the money was fun, but it was never really the point.

I’m not sure Mom and Dad would have understood that, though. So I just nodded and agreed.

Thinking about where I’d donate all my cash was actually the only interesting thing that happened that whole week. Otherwise, one of those vocabulary words—“interminable”—basically described my days.

Boy, was it boring. And, worst of all, there was no one else to talk to.

At one point, my mind wandered and I reached for the phone in the living room to call Jamie. Then I remembered:

1) I wasn’t allowed to use the phone.

2) Jamie hated my guts.

Still, I wondered what she was doing. Probably writing in her notebook. A new notebook, anyway. Maybe she was writing down more insults. He’s so dumb, he tried to drown a fish. She’s so dumb, she tried to put M&M’S in alphabetical order. Maybe she was reading her favorite magazine, Sports Illustrated. Maybe she was playing with Pepper. Maybe her parents had given her extra school assignments, too.

On Friday, when Dad asked if I wanted to go to the store with him, I was practically panting with excitement, just like Pepper when she thinks you’re about to throw her ball.

Mom was working on some sort of “big secret project,” and she had to go to Louisville to buy supplies. Dad was vague on the details but said that he had an appointment in the afternoon, and maybe I could “hold down the fort” while he was busy.

When I got to the store, I noticed that something looked different. There was a lot more stuff on display. Vases and paintings and teapots and sculptures and bowls. More of them than ever. One of the things on the walls was that painting I’d bought, the one-hundred-dollar one of the covered bridge. I remembered Mrs. Allegra saying that my parents had found it under my bed.

My dad saw me looking at it and walked over to the cash register. He took out a handful of twenties. “Here,” he said. “The rest of the money—I know we said you had to donate it. But I think this is yours.”

Oh, man. I felt sick.

It was weird. I’d been yelled at by the assistant principal and my best friend. I’d been suspended. I had to give away hundreds of dollars. But the thing that made me feel so bad that my stomach squirmed around inside me was when my dad made me take back that hundred dollars.

“No, Dad,” I begged. “I don’t want it. I don’t. I just—I really wanted you to have it. Dad, please?”

He didn’t budge. But after he pushed the money into my pocket, he leaned back against the counter and looked at me.

“You wanted us to have that money?” he asked softly.

I nodded.

“Why, Mitch?”

I’d told Jamie, but this was a lot tougher. How do you tell your dad that you’re worried he and your mom aren’t making enough money?

“I just—I was getting worried,” I muttered, staring down at the floor. “That things were getting bad. Like back in California.”

“Oh, Mitch.”

Dad sounded so sad. That was really worse than him being mad. I looked quickly up at him and then down at the paint-splattered floor.

“I know it was rough on you, having to move,” he said. “You and Kevin both. But things are okay here, right?”

“Yeah, things are okay,” I agreed. That was sort of the point. “I just—I want them to keep on being okay, right, Dad? I like it here. I really do. I don’t want to have to move again.”

Dad sighed.

“Maybe I should get suspended, too,” he said sadly. “Mitch, really? Running an illegal gambling ring? You were worried about our family’s finances, and that was your solution?”

Well, when he put it like that, it did sound kind of stupid.

“Listen,” my dad said seriously. “You don’t have to keep this family afloat. That’s our job, your mom’s and mine. Maybe we haven’t always done it perfectly, but we’re working on it. And it’ll be okay. You’re a kid. Please just be a kid. All right, Mitch?”

I must have made a face that indicated it wasn’t all right.

“Mitch? Say what you’re thinking, please. When you get that look on your face, I start to get worried you’re about to go sell shares of the Brooklyn Bridge or start a gambling ring or something.” He was smiling. But, I wasn’t.

I took a deep breath.

“So I’m a kid. Right,” I agreed. “But I do know some things, Dad. I do have good ideas.”

“I know you do, Mitch.”

“No, you don’t!” He sort of jumped. I guess my voice was a little loud. “When I try to talk about money, you don’t ever listen. But I understand this stuff, Dad. I’m not trying to tell you about what glaze to put on your pots, or how hot to make the kiln. But I can help you sell stuff. Like—look at the store. Look at all this stuff!”

He looked around blankly. Like, Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff here. So? “We’ve been hard at work making a lot of different things,” he said. “Even if no one is buying them.”

“Maybe that’s not a coincidence.”

Dad’s eyebrows went up.

“Tell me more,” he said. I hesitated. “No, really,” he went on. “Are you saying that you think having more products to offer our customers, that show off more of our artistic talents, might be a bad thing?”

“Well, there is such a thing as too many choices,” I said. “People get overwhelmed. Remember when Mom took me to get a Halloween costume last year and I eventually came home with nothing?”

“Yeah,” said Dad.

“I couldn’t decide because there were too many choices. There were hundreds and hundreds of costumes in the store. I could have been a zombie or an ax murderer or a mummy or a lumberjack or a racecar driver or a pirate or a hippie like you.”

“If you’d chosen to be a hippie,” he responded, “I could have given you your choice of tie-dyed shirts.”

“But I didn’t choose that. I didn’t choose anything. It was way too much to think about. If there had been six costumes, I would have picked one. When there were six hundred, I was, like, frozen.”

“If you were frozen, you should have gone as a yeti. Or the guy who drives the ice cream truck.”

“Very funny,” I said. “Seriously, Dad, sometimes less is more.”

He nodded. He looked like he actually might have heard what I had to say. But right then the bell over the door jangled, and a serious-looking man carrying a binder full of files walked in. He reminded me of the guy the bank had sent to foreclose on our house in California.

“Mr. Collins!” Dad greeted him, shaking his hand. “The office is this way. Mitch, you’re minding the shop. If you need anything, come get me.”