Vivian knew Archie was in agony at the very idea of teaching her all his tricks. But she could ruin everything for him if she wanted. She’d overheard more than enough.
A guy like that was smart enough to realize when he’d been had. And she’d definitely won this round, she could tell. She was a city kid, after all. She could handle a wannabe from New Jersey. Especially one who claimed to be an expert con artist but couldn’t even tell she was lying through her teeth when she said she was leaving Camp Shady Brook in a week. He had no idea she was there for the whole summer. Convincing him of that—you might even call it her first successful con. The thought made her smile more than she had since she’d stepped onto the camp bus. Especially because the girls in her cabin already thought she was the cool New York chick. That was something she could definitely work with.
Archie might think he was so smart, but she was even smarter. And she wasn’t going to let some junior level con artist ruin her entire summer.
Finally she was beginning to feel like she was getting her mojo back, after so many months of doubts. All that trouble at school—well, it had been almost more than she could handle, though she would never admit that to anyone, not to her parents and especially not to her so-called best friend, Margot. Even though most of it had been Margot’s idea in the first place, changing grades on the school computer. Vivian never would have done any of that, if she hadn’t been so desperate for Margot’s approval. But at least she’d learned that caring what other kids thought of her only led to heartbreak.
Anyway, that whole mess was behind her now. And this Archie character? Vivian was more than prepared to handle him. She just needed to learn his secrets first. And then it would be time to turn the tables.
And Archie, the fake millionaire and self-proclaimed camp con-artist extraordinaire, did not disappoint.
• • •
The very next day at breakfast he waited until she was in line in the cafeteria, then came up behind her and began talking just over her shoulder, slowly and quietly, so she could barely hear his voice over the early-morning clamor of the campers.
“So, Viv—can I call you Viv?”
“Absolutely not. Nobody calls me Viv,” she said without turning around.
That technically wasn’t true—Margot used to sometimes, and Vivian hadn’t ever objected—but she wasn’t going to begin to allow this little character to start getting personal. Hanging out with him was a business transaction, pure and simple. She was there to learn, not to make friends. If sixth grade had taught her anything, it was that she was finished with friends.
“Okay, fine, VIVIAN,” he said with too much emphasis. “The first and most important thing in this game is your attitude.”
“My attitude is fine, thanks,” she said with a toss of her hair and an eye-roll. She shuffled up the slow-moving line and craned her neck to try to see what the surly CITs were dishing out this morning. She hoped they had something for breakfast other than eggs. She hated eggs. And now that she knew the big CIT was Archie’s friend, she was even more skeptical about what he might dish out.
“I don’t mean that kind of attitude,” he said, though there was no way he could have seen her roll her eyes. “I mean your attitude toward people you want to work on—marks, we call them, in the business.”
Vivian snorted, but Archie ignored her. “The point is,” he continued, “you need to be friendly, but not too friendly. You have to act like you have plenty of other stuff going on. And more than anything else, you can’t care whether or not they believe you when you lie.”
“What?” Vivian said loudly, half turning around, until Archie made a strange noise in his throat and she remembered where she was and turned back. Nobody was paying attention to them anyway—most of the kids were busy watching the front door of the mess hall, where Miss Hiss had reduced a nine-year-old girl to tears for attempting to leave the building carrying a piece of toast.
Vivian took a deep breath and tried to look bored, and peered again down toward where the CITs were dishing out the breakfast. Ugh, it was eggs. Scrambled eggs, probably poured out of a carton that had sat in some barely-above-room-temperature cooler for six months. She’d resigned herself to eating toast for now and just hoped there was something, anything, she liked for lunch. “Hoped” being the most important word in that sentence.
“I mean it,” Archie said. “I saw how pushy you were with those cupcakes yesterday. It was too much, over the top.”
“I do what it takes to get what I want,” Vivian shot back.
“But that’s the whole problem,” Archie said. “If you act like you’re trying to convince them of something, you’ll never convince them of anything.”
“You sound like my grandmother,” she complained. It was true. Ama was always coming out with these little phrases that sounded like something she’d found on a plaque in a tourist-trap gift shop. “A friend to everybody is a friend to nobody,” and “one man’s disaster is another man’s delight.”
But he didn’t hear her comment, because he’d already disappeared. Even when she glanced around—as casually as possible, of course—she couldn’t see where he’d gone. Apparently he fancied himself some kind of Mr. Mysterious type.
Oh well, two could play at that game.
• • •
Still, over the next two days, Archie taught Vivian many of the little details of how he operated. His approach was even more complicated and well-thought-out than she expected. Though she wouldn’t have admitted that, especially not to him.
“Just remember, I’m in charge,” he kept saying.
“Fine, fine, I get it, you’re in charge,” she said, rolling her eyes the tenth time he reminded her. But that didn’t seem to stop him from saying it.
Their first lesson was on “the put up,” which was Archie’s fancy way of saying finding the right person to target. Vivian hadn’t really thought about that idea all that much—the times she’d run little schemes at school, or around the city, she mainly took opportunities when they came up. Just her and Margot, telling stories and getting people to do stuff for them, mostly for fun. It’s not like they had a real system. Well, Vivian didn’t. Margot was the one who had been using her all along, a fact she preferred not to dwell on.
But that was one more reason to make sure Archie didn’t use her either.
But Archie had read books about con artists and how they operated, or so he said. Vivian didn’t even know there were books like that. It wasn’t the sort of topic she would have researched in the school library.
He had all sorts of interesting ideas on how to get people to trust you. How to be convincing but not too convincing. How to lie like you were telling the truth. And most important, how to persuade people that doing what you wanted them to do was their own idea, which was the heart of any good con.
And, of course, how to choose a target. Archie fervently believed in choosing a specific person for each particular kind of scam.
“The first rule is, know your mark,” he confided in Vivian as they waited for a canoe lesson on the third day of camp. Vivian was already dreading falling into the lake, which was brown and gloppy like old pictures she’d seen of the Hudson River from when her mom was growing up in New York. The depressing puddle of water had some French name, but most of the kids called it Lake Joyless. There was a tiny dirt area they called “the beach,” but it was not like any beach Vivian had ever seen. Just a patch of bare ground, next to the edge of the reeds choking the edge of the lake. She wondered how they even held swimming lessons in this place. One mouthful of water looked like it would be enough to send the average suburban kid to the ER with extreme intestinal distress. But at least she wasn’t standing there alone, even if her only “friend” right now was, well, Archie.
In the distance she could make out something that looked like an abandoned shopping cart, sticking up, rusted and covered in green goo. She shuddered to think what else was hiding beneath the dark surface of the water. “I thought the first rule was about my attitude?”
“That’s not a rule, more like a general guideline.”
Vivian gave him a wry smile. “I’m not even going to give you the satisfaction of arguing that point. Fine. I need to know my mark. Whatever that means.”
“It means you need to be able to size people up. Figure out who you can pull something over on, and who you can’t, and choose wisely. For example, I never con the scholarship kids—they don’t have anything I want, for one, and they’re usually more suspicious. Besides, they’re not the ones who deserve it. I try to pick people who I think will believe what I say without a lot of questions.”
Vivian considered this. It did make sense. Honestly, it was basically what she’d been thinking about on the bus, though she hadn’t really put it in Archie’s specific terms. But yeah, she already had a good idea of how to tell who would listen to her tall tales, and who wouldn’t. So that wasn’t anything earth-shattering. But she did feel a pang of guilt at his refusing to con the scholarship kids. It hadn’t occurred to her that he thought of himself as a Robin Hood type character—only hurting the rich, not the poor. That knowledge made her plan to take him down a little bit more complicated.
But only a little.
“What you really want to find is someone who wants something,” he continued. “If you can give them what they want—maybe it’s friendship, maybe it’s gossip, maybe it’s the chance to help someone, or to avoid trouble, anything, really—then you can get them to give you what you want, too. The human mind loves transactions.”
Vivian nodded, though she wasn’t completely sure she understood.
“And that means listening more than talking. Let them tell you what it will take to get them on your side. And why they deserve whatever they get from you. Find out what makes them tick before you ask them for anything,” he said. “And then, only then, you can make your play.”
Archie cocked his head in the direction of the lake just as a kid from the eleven-year-old boys’ cabin (better known as the Bluegills) attempted to get out of a canoe that looked at least fifty years old, with a scuffed wooden hull and the vague imprint of gold painted letters on the side spelling something unreadable.
The boy almost, but not quite, made it onto the decrepit dock, which was the only point that led in and out of anything resembling open water. But as he tried to edge his way past the other boy in the boat, he tripped over one of the wood crossbars and ended up head over heels right in the lake. The canoeing instructor fished him out while the rest of the Bluegills, Chain Pickerels, Rainbow Smelts, and Walleyes stood around doubled over with laughter.
“This is why you need to follow directions, Julian! Go get changed into dry clothes back at your cabin,” the instructor said. “And the rest of you, quiet down!”
The boy, soaking wet and with some sort of disturbingly bright green vegetation attached to his hair and his sopping sneakers, grimaced at the other kids and began to squish his way up the slope that led back to the cabins. Archie stepped away from Vivian and stopped right in the boy’s path.
“Hey,” he said, smiling.
“What do you want?” the boy asked savagely.
“Nothing,” Archie said quickly. “Just that, well, I saw the other kid—the one in the canoe? He pushed you when he was getting out of the boat.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to cause any trouble,” Archie hurried on. “I just thought you should know. Maybe it was an accident and he didn’t do it on purpose? But . . . it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t fall. You were pushed.”
Vivian tried not to look like she was staring. She had no idea where Archie was going with this, but at least for now, she was genuinely curious.
The soaked boy glanced back at the kids on the dock, some of them still hiding chuckles behind their hands, then looked at Archie again, this time with a very different expression than before. “Thanks,” he said. “Good to know.”
“No problem,” Archie said, and turned back to Vivian as the boy made his sodden way up the hill toward the cabins. “See? He wanted someone to blame. I gave him that guy over there. Now he feels better about himself, and gets to be angry instead of embarrassed. And he owes me something now, whether he realizes it or not.”
Vivian watched the boy’s retreating back. There was something about the way his tone had changed once Archie told him he hadn’t fallen, that he’d been pushed, that jumped out at her. Maybe Archie was onto something here.
But she didn’t have time to think too long about that, because Archie was still talking.
If she was learning anything about Archie, it was that he was always talking.
“The next part of our lesson will be the play . . . and then we have the rope,” he continued in a tone that Vivian was finding more and more annoying the longer she was forced to listen to it. “But to learn about those I think we need to make a visit to the camp store. So, we’ll continue this tomorrow?”
“Right,” Vivian said, still watching the wet boy make his way up the hill into the gloom under the trees. As Archie followed, she thought for a minute how weird it was that they had plans tomorrow. Almost like something you might do with . . . a friend.
But of course, Archie wasn’t her friend, not at all.
He was a rival.
• • •
That night, back at the cabin, Vivian was lost in thought when Sasha-from-the-Bus leaned down from her top bunk. “Are you awake?” she whispered.
“No,” Vivian said.
“Ha-ha!” Sasha laughed that self-conscious little laugh Vivian found so irritating. “I know you’re joking; your eyes are open! Anyway, I wanted to ask you a question?”
“Um, okay.”
“We have to pick partners for the races on Friday?”
Vivian looked up at her, confused.
“It’s a Shady Brook tradition! Field Day! Potato sack races? Egg drop?”
Vivian squinted at her. She wasn’t any closer to having a clue what Sasha was talking about than she had been before. And she was mystified that anyone could get that enthusiastic about anything at Camp Shady Brook. Most of the kids were already depressed, if not by the bug bites or the startling lack of anything resembling fun activities, then by the food, which only got progressively worse with each passing day.
“You have to know! Everybody’s talking about it!” Sasha laughed again, though more naturally this time. “Anyway, I was wondering if you wanted to be my partner? I mean, I’m not the best at sports and stuff?” She sounded briefly worried. “I wish they had an art contest, or something like that! I’m really good at painting! At least I think I am? But anyway, Field Day’s on Friday, and it’s supposed to be fun!”
A vague memory of Boring Counselor Janet talking about some kind of game day swam into Vivian’s memory. Along with something about picking partners for the various dull-as-dirt activities. Vivian had been so caught up in learning her new con-artist skills from Archie she hadn’t paid much attention to anything else. But all she said was “I thought you’d want be partners with someone like Lily, from your school.”
Sasha let out a breath. “Well, Lily is busy? With other people?”
For a brief moment Vivian felt a little sorry for Sasha. It was true that after the first morning, Lily had seemed more interested in hanging out with everyone else but Sasha. And Sasha seemed like a nice enough girl, after all, even if her friend Lily deserved to be pushed into the lake more than that kid Julian. Lily had a litany of annoying habits, not the least of which was her method of draping the entire toilet in toilet paper before she would even sit down on it, then leaving the whole mess behind for the next person to clean up. Janet had called a cabin meeting about “sanitary habits,” but all Lily had done was smirk and act like she had no idea who was the culprit. Vivian hated her with every fiber of her being.
“Well, okay, I guess,” Vivian said. And when Sasha didn’t say anything, she remembered all the things Archie had said and added, “And thanks for asking me! It’ll be fun.”
“I know! I can’t wait!” Sasha said, and flopped back on her bunk with a giggle, sending the whole contraption into a dangerous series of shakes. Vivian gripped the wood frame of the bunk and hoped it didn’t all come crashing onto her head. The bunk beds at Camp Shady Brook were held together—barely—with exposed nails and ragged twine, and they dipped and sagged with even the slightest movement.
As Vivian turned over to go to sleep, she realized that was the first conversation she’d had since arriving at camp with someone who seemed to simply want to be her friend. It was almost as if she’d forgotten what that was like.