Flat Broke (7 page)

7

The Successful Person Knows When to Revise and Expand His Plans Quickly

L
ater on Saturday, after I’d scrubbed my filthy skin raw to remove the grit of a thousand cumulative years of dust and crud, we had a family dinner.

Luckily, my parents had both been working really hard and it was a fast dinner of turkey tetrazzini from the freezer. Afterwards they went to “read.” That means doze on the couch. I waited until Mom’s head fell back and Dad started snoring before I ran over to the college campus to make sure the game at the dorm was going well and collect my fee. Then I ran to the store and then to Auntie Buzz’s office to take Daniel’s hockey team grape soda and tortilla chips and collect my fee. “Don’t make crumbs or spill,” I told them. But I still made a mental note to come by early the next morning to clean up after them.

I worked fast and was home in time to meet JonPaul on the driveway; he was coming over to watch movies, like he does every Saturday night. I peeked into the living room on our way to the kitchen. My mother was actually reading and my father was thumb-typing on his phone, but neither had noticed I was gone during their little catnaps. I was hardworking
and
stealthy. Awesome.

I whipped up a batch of that dry breakfast cereal/melted chocolate/melted peanut butter/melted butter/dash of vanilla/tons of powdered sugar stuff we like so well.

“Man,” JonPaul said, “there is nothing as wonderful in the world as late-night munchies.”

That reminded me of the lame lemonade stand idea that I’d set aside. As JonPaul snarfed, I thought back to Goober’s dorm room earlier that evening when I’d dropped off the tortilla chips and soda and gone over the rules
again.
Then I remembered watching my mother and father drink coffee and come to life every morning of my life before they leave for work. I also took note of the fact that I’m something of a night owl and can get by on less sleep than the average fourteen-year-old.

“I’ve got it!” I jumped up and started pacing. The best ideas come when you pace. I don’t know why. I guess people with brains like mine need activity to jump-start creativity. Or else I was on a sugar high.

“Got what?” JonPaul looked at me warily.

“Our new venture. You, me and Sam. Catering.”

“Huh?”

“College students are pretty much fried and dragging at around ten-thirty, eleven at night after a full day of classes and then studying all evening. Right?”

He nodded.

“Okay, so we rig up a coffeepot and throw together a few batches of cookies and brownies. We borrow Markie’s wagon and drag it around campus at night selling munchies.”

“You think that’ll work?”

“Why wouldn’t it? They’re hungry, craving sugar, but too lazy or busy to go get stuff. We bring the supply to the demand and
bingo!
We’ll clean up.”

“You’re amazing, Kev. The way you …”

“Thanks, JonPaul, it’s a gift.”

“How are we going to pay for the cookie and coffee stuff?”

“I made money today cleaning garages. Spending my own money worked for the poker game; I made back my investment the first night.”

We figured that Sunday, tomorrow, would be the ideal day to start. The students would have had Friday and Saturday nights to cut loose but would be facing Monday morning and the start of a new class week. We guessed that Sundays were prime cram nights on campus.

First thing in the morning, I bribed Sarah to take me to the huge warehouse store, where I bought fifty-pound bags of flour and of sugar, small-car-sized boxes of chocolate chips, and plastic bins for the cookies. I made careful note of the ten dollars I paid her. The cost of doing business. I’d have to set up a bookkeeping program on the computer.

JonPaul and Sam were waiting in the kitchen when we got home. Not only did Sam arrive wearing an apron, but she went right to work setting up stations of ingredients to form an assembly line and speed up the process.

My dad, getting coffee on the way to the living room to read the Sunday papers with my mom, raised an eyebrow.

“I’m starting a business!” I gestured to all the stuff on the counters. “All by myself. Well, except for JonPaul and Sam.” Dad had probably noticed them standing next to the oven.

“Looks like a lot of work,” Dad said.

“Nah. I’ve got everything covered. Nothing to worry about,” I told him.

He looked doubtful but finally nodded. “I’m going to take your mother a cup of coffee and tell her there’s a perfect example of capitalism in action in her kitchen.”

“She’ll be pretty happy about that, I bet,” I told him.

“She’ll be happy if you clean up when you’re done.”

I waved off his concerns. But JonPaul looked worried.

“How are we going to do this in one day, just the three of us?” he asked.

“Time-management skills, JonPaul, multitasking. Doing one thing at a time is for losers. Professionals know how to maximize their time. We can even do our homework while the cookies and brownies bake. I stayed up late last night thinking this through—I’ve got everything covered.”

“We don’t have any eggs,” Sam piped up just then, “and the recipe you got off the Internet for these cookies says we need eggs.”

Eggs. I’d forgotten eggs. And butter.

I made my second trip to the store. Sarah sighed a lot in the car like I’d taken her away from something more important than long conversations on the phone with her new boyfriend, Doug. After we picked up the butter and eggs and dropped them off with Sam and JonPaul, I had her drive me to church, where I borrowed a coffee urn from the basement social hall. The last time our family had helped with a church party, I’d noticed that one of the urns was in a back closet because it had a crack near the spigot.

But that’s what duct tape is for.

When I returned home, Sam and JonPaul had made up a bunch of batches of cookie dough and had them ready to be dumped in spoon-sized blobs on cookie sheets and put in the oven. Except that we didn’t have nearly enough baking sheets.

Good thing I’d gotten the coffeepot when I did, because it reminded me that we couldn’t sell piping-hot coffee to bare, cupped hands—we needed actual cups. Ooh, and napkins. Rats, this was turning out to be complicated.

JonPaul and Sam measured coffee while I headed out again, on my third trip to the wholesale store for cookie sheets, paper napkins and coffee cups. And milk. Sarah rolled her eyes at me, but I don’t know why she was annoyed. She could talk to Doug just as easily waiting for me in the parking lot as lying in her bedroom, and at least this way, she was helping me start an empire. Some people only think of themselves.

The guard checking membership cards at the warehouse store’s door did a double take when he saw me arrive for the third time in a day. Then he followed me around the store.

As if I’m gonna shove a 250-pack of triple-A batteries down my shorts or stick the 7,000-piece-of-gum box under my shirt. Unless you’re a kangaroo or a minivan, shoplifting isn’t really an option at the wholesale store.

Finally, we had all the supplies and the house was filling with the smell of melting chocolate. JonPaul and Sam sat at the counter doing homework while I created a master list of supplies so that the next baking day would go more smoothly. Then I set up accounting systems for the poker games, Sarah’s beauty salon, my cleaning service and the munchies runs. Wow. I wondered what people did when they had more money than they knew what to do with. I couldn’t wait to find out.

“You know,” JonPaul said, looking at my outfit as we were getting ready to leave the house that night, “blue and orange aren’t really your colors.”

“I know that. Who in their right mind would wear an orange stocking cap and a shiny blue—what is this material, anyway?—warm-up jacket? But these are the college colors and we’re going to show school spirit. And I really do appreciate your efforts on behalf of this marketing and promotion idea.”

“I had to think long and hard before I painted ‘Go Huskies’ on my face! This stuff will come off, right? It’s not toxic, is it? Because lead can cause liver failure and kidney disease and brain damage in young people, you know, and I could develop respiratory distress. If I do, you know, start to gasp and turn blue, well,
more
blue, I guess, underneath the face paint, can I count on you to revive me with assisted breathing until the paramedics arrive?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t sound committed.”

“Believe me, JonPaul, I’m committed to the idea of not having you keel over dead in the middle of a transaction. Bad for business.”

Sam had to go home for dinner, so it was just me and JonPaul hitting the bricks with Markie’s wagon and a dream. Mom and Auntie Buzz were going to a book club meeting, so they’d given Sam a ride home. I’d handed them each a cookie as thanks.

“Next time, save me a blob of the raw dough,” Auntie Buzz said. “The baked stuff isn’t half as good.”

I nodded, but my mother shook her head. “Salmonella, Buzz.”

I was glad she hadn’t seen how many fingerfuls of dough I’d eaten all day. You know, to keep my energy up. Nothing like melted butter and two kinds of sugar, plus chocolate chips, to give a guy a boost. Plus, I’m sure salmawhatsit only affects older people.

The hope was that JonPaul and I would do modest sales the first time out, spread the word and build a client base over time.

We were swarmed from the start. Hands were grabbing for coffee and cookies and thrusting crumpled bills and fistfuls of change at us.

We only managed to get to one dorm before we ran out of everything. And the college had four dorms on the side of campus closest to my house.

Hmm. I was going to have to think bigger. Nightly campus runs. Skip Fridays and Saturdays, though.

I was sitting in the kitchen the next day after school while that night’s brownies baked, realizing that Markie’s wagon had already become obsolete. I needed more efficient transportation.

I was thinking about my options when my dad came home from a business game at the golf course midfume.

My dad has a habit of starting in talking to people like they’ve heard the first part of a conversation that actually happened somewhere else, so I didn’t understand what he was going on about. I just nodded along until I finally figured out that he was furious about the defective golf cart he’d rented.

“It doesn’t go over three-point-eight miles an hour, I couldn’t put it in reverse and the steering wheel stuck if I tried to turn left. I could only make right-hand turns! We abandoned it on the sixth hole and called the clubhouse to complain.”

A golf cart. Really nothing more than a minicar.

And a minicar is really nothing more than a microvan.

Perfect.

“What happened to the cart then, Dad?” I asked, very calm even though I was so excited I could have hovercrafted myself over to the golf course.

“They towed that fragmented pile of motorized rubble to the maintenance shed for repairs. They should shoot it between the eyes, that’s what they should do.”

Dad’s phone rang. He ruffled my hair on his way to his home office.

I dug through his golf bag and found the map to the course that was printed on the back of the scorecard. One reason we live where we do is that we can walk to the course.

I studied the map and found the garage. Then I traced a route of right-hand turns (and, of course, forward gear) only, back to my house. I’d go for the cart as soon as darkness fell. When I got back, JonPaul and Sam would be waiting to load it with our baked goods.

I took four of the most perfect-looking cookies and two corner pieces of the brownies and wrapped them carefully in plastic wrap. I’d offer them to Tina the next day at lunch and casually mention my new business. Girls like guys who can cook and bake. I’d read that it makes us seem sensitive and thoughtful or something. Finally! I’d come up with a way to make her aware of how hard I was working to be the ultimate boyfriend. There’s no way a girl is going to pass up the chance to date a guy who bakes from scratch. If I was a girl, I’d date a guy like me, and I have very high standards.

8

The Successful Person Knows He Is a Force for Good in the Universe

I
nodded off in homeroom Tuesday morning. There’s something about daily announcements that puts me to sleep. Plus, I’d worked really hard the past two nights. The income stream was good, I thought, but the output of effort was bad. I was going to need another variable to even things out in my getting-rich plan.

I was going to need another business partner. Preferably one who already had a blossoming sideline and could benefit from my skills to make it into something much more impressive, like I’d done with Sarah.

I glanced around homeroom. Any likely candidates?

Sometimes the last thing you’d ever think of is the first thing you should consider. The difference between being smart and being really smart is looking at things in a way no one would ever expect.

“I need Katie Knowles,” I told JonPaul in the hallway on the way to first period. “She’s the next piece of the puzzle.”

“She’s still not speaking to you after the way you lied to her about the social studies project a couple weeks ago,” he said, looking at me like I was crazy. “She doesn’t like you.”

“No, that’s not it. She loathes and despises me.”

“Yeah, well, then, how do you figure she’s going to work for you?”

“While it’s true that she looks at me like she’s wishing my internal organs would fall out of my body and land with a wet
thwack
on the ground, I think she’s just waiting for me to make the first move.”

“And what move would that be?”

“A job offer.”

“You’re going to offer a job to a girl who pretends you don’t exist and believes you’re not worth talking to?”

“I don’t need her to talk to me. We can communicate through notes—I told you about those abstract thingies she wrote for the social studies project, right? She’ll probably appreciate correspondence rather than conversation.”

“Why would she bother?”

“Simple. I can give her what she wants most in the world: malleable minds to sculpt.”

“How does that work?”

“You know she tutors, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude. She’s doing that for
free.
”

His silence proved that he was as horrified by that as I was.

“I know. Wrong, so wrong, so very wrong, isn’t it? Giving away a valuable service like that for nothing. It’s unnatural.”

“How do you fit in?”

“As the, uh, purveyor of, um, managerial services.”

“Huh?”

“I am exactly the right person to help her make more of her little tutoring gig by giving it some professional flair.”

“I’m pretty sure she won’t see it like that.”

“I’m going to talk to her about it today.”

“I thought you were going to write.”

“I can’t propose a partnership other than face to face.”

“I hope she doesn’t laugh in your face. Or slap it. Or—”

“Yeah, I get the picture. But I’m not worried. I’m a very persuasive guy, and I only need to say a few words to convince her.”

“If you say so.” JonPaul was doubtful. A lesser guy than me would have held his lack of faith in me against him, but I just felt sorry that he didn’t believe in me as much as I did. Because believing in someone like me is a great thing. He’ll see. He just needs time.

At lunch, I went right over to Katie’s table. She looked up.

“Kevin.”

Funny how one girl saying one word can make your blood run cold.

I flashed what I hoped was a dazzling smile at her. “Katie. Good to see you. You look great. How’re you doing these days?”

“What do you want?”

“I like a person who cuts to the chase. Clearly, small talk is wasted on someone of your intelligence. I’ll get right to the point: I have a business proposition for you.”

“What? I do the work and you get the credit? Like the last time?”

“I see you’re still upset about our … misunderstanding. I’d hoped you’d put that behind you.”

“People don’t so much put that kind of thing behind them as learn from their mistakes. And what I learned is to stay far away from you.”

“Point taken. But hear me out, because I have an idea that is going to appeal to you both academically and financially.”

She didn’t laugh or hit me or run away or lean over and puke on my shoes, so I quickly explained.

“For a small fee, a teeny, tiny percentage of your earnings, I will help you transform your informal tutoring situation into a structured educational enrichment provider.”

I was using my best and most impressive vocab; I thought I sounded pretty good—I just hoped I was making sense. So much of this business jargon sounds stupid to me.

“You think I’m going to pay you to come in and meddle with my tutoring? That I don’t even charge for in the first place because that would be shallow and unfair and then I couldn’t use the sessions as my service hour requirements anymore?”

“At the current time, you have no profits, but I could change that. And there’s nothing wrong with being compensated for your services. Besides, people value what they pay for. You’ll be making yourself look more professional and worthwhile if you start charging. And you’ll get more work out of your students.”

She didn’t say anything for a second, but I knew she was tempted.

“What do you have in mind? Precisely?”

“We sit down with the yearbook and figure out which kids are vulnerable in a GPA kind of way and then we send letters to their parents offering your services and spelling out what you charge. Given your reputation as a brainiac, we sit back and wait for the flood of job offers.”

“It’s that easy?”

“Sure. Doesn’t it
sound
easy?”

“It sounds smart. That’s not like you.”

Ouch.

“Look, I’ve got this computer system that I set up to keep track of your appointments. I’ll do all the scheduling for you. You won’t have to do a thing but teach. Which you’re doing anyway. And collect the money. Which you’re not doing.”

She looked torn.

“Are you in?”

She bit her lip.

“This will look
ah-may-zing
on your college applications.”

“I’m in.”

“Good. Meet me here after school and we’ll walk back to my house together and get started on the letters.”

She laughed. Snorted, really.

“Right. Like I’m not going to have finished and polished final drafts by the end of the school day.”

I may not like Katie Knowles. But I absolutely love Katie Knowles. I wish I could bottle her crazed perfectionism. She’s got all the right stuff for a corporate whiz kid.

I noticed that Tina was sitting a table over and had probably noticed me talking to Katie. Perfect! Guys always look more attractive to girls when they’re talking to other girls. I heard Sarah say that once. I am a genius even when I’m not working at it.