Project Sweet Life (11 page)

He looked familiar.

The third bank robber!

How could I have forgotten? There were
three
thieves who had been involved in those robberies at Capitol American: the waitress, her son the cook, and an older guy in a leather jacket. He was probably the waitress’s husband or boyfriend. I’d overheard them all talking back in the kitchen. But that third guy—“Eddy”—had gone out for food, and I’d forgotten all about him. I’d just assumed that the police had caught him too—even though the
newspaper had specifically said they’d only caught
two
thieves. But how
could
the police have caught him? The newspaper said they’d rented the restaurant under aliases, and the waitress and her son sure weren’t going to turn in their accomplice. And the informant, Mrs. Shelby, had never even known he existed in the first place!

I quickly whispered all this to Curtis and Victor.

“Eddy must have read about Mrs. Shelby and the reward money in the same newspaper article we saw,” Victor said. “He probably figured he could make a fast score
and
get revenge for what she did to his girlfriend and son.”

Out in the house, floorboards squeaked—first in the foyer and front hall, then up the steps and into the upstairs bedrooms.

“Let’s go,” Victor said. He nodded to the door in the pantry. “If we leave through here, it’ll even set off the burglar alarm.”

“Yeah,” Curtis said, “but if the burglar alarm goes off, we might get caught too.”

“What are you saying?” I said. “That we wait here until the burglar leaves and then go out the way we came in?”

“Why not?” Curtis said.

I looked down at my watch. It was 4:56—twenty-nine minutes since Mrs. Shelby had left and one minute until the time we’d intended to be gone. We’d been hiding in the pantry too long. Mrs. Shelby would be home for sure in just sixteen minutes. Inside the garden gloves, my hands sweated like crazy.

“I still say we go,” Victor said. “The police won’t be here right away, and we’re fast runners. Let’s risk it.” He turned for Mrs. Shelby’s back door.

“Hold on!” Curtis whispered. “He’s leaving.”

At first I didn’t believe it. But as I listened, it
did
sound like the thief was working his way back to the bathroom, and back out the bathroom window. The toilet tank even gurgled again.

Once we were sure he was gone, we hurried out into the entry hall. I looked around. Some of the stuff was definitely gone—mostly the small items from the dining room table. I was certain the jewels from upstairs were missing too. Eddy had been shockingly efficient.

I glanced down at my watch. It was now 5:02.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Now, before Mrs. Shelby comes home.”

And of course that was the exact moment that we heard a key being inserted into the front door lock.

Mrs. Shelby!

She’d come home from dinner early! We’d been so distracted by the thief that we hadn’t been listening for her car.

The door opened, and her burglar alarm started beeping—a warning that gave her a minute or so to turn the device off before it activated.

On the other side of that doorway, Mrs. Shelby looked right in at us.

It took a second for her to register what she was seeing. Then she said,
“You!”
An instant later, she glanced over at her piles of stuff and at the small but obvious gaps where expensive things used to be.

“No!” I shouted. “It wasn’t us!”

“Don’t bother,” Curtis said to me. “Let’s just get out of here.”

Curtis was right: There was no way Mrs. Shelby wasn’t going to blame us for stealing from her.

We turned and ran for the kitchen door.

And somehow we managed to get away.

We didn’t bother calling the police. We knew there was no way they’d believe us, especially not after Mrs. Shelby had seen us inside her house. Fortunately she didn’t know our names or anything else about us, so there wasn’t much chance that the police would be able to track us down.

Still, something told me that the story about Mrs. Shelby and the Capitol American bank robbers wasn’t quite finished yet.

“Fried chicken!”
Victor said, bursting into the bomb shelter. “I need a bucket of fried chicken
now
!” Even without the crazed expression on his face, he would have struck both Curtis and me speechless.

“Wow,” Curtis said at last. “That’s a serious food craving.” We’d gotten rid of the flea-infested couch, but that meant we were back to sitting on folding chairs.

“Not for
me
!” Victor said. “Someone told my mom that at the end of the day, the workers at KFC get to keep the leftover chicken for free. So she keeps asking me to bring home the chicken. I keep telling her that
there aren’t any leftovers, but now she’s starting to grow suspicious!”

I saw now why Victor was panicking; we were still totally broke, and fried chicken wasn’t cheap. But this was just the latest of our problems. We were already seven weeks into summer, and the sweet life wasn’t anywhere in sight. Plus, I was getting really, really tired of lying to my parents all the time.

“Okay,” Curtis said to Victor, “we need some fast cash. How ’bout a car wash?”

Victor rolled his eyes. “We can’t do a car wash. We can’t do
anything
in public. Not only do we have to worry about our families seeing us, now we have to worry about Mrs. Shelby too! And if Mrs. Shelby sees us, we don’t just get punished, we go to prison.”

“Okay, okay!” Curtis said. “But we’ll figure this out somehow. Trust me! Piece-o-cake.”

So it all boiled down, once again, to trusting Curtis. What other choice did we have?

I looked over at Mr. Moneybags, who was still almost the only thing in the bomb shelter. With his outstretched arms, he made being a millionaire look so easy.

The truth was, it wasn’t easy at all.

We got the money for Victor’s fried chicken by fishing the change out of two bank fountains and a park wishing well. Needless to say, it was beyond humiliating. But Victor needed that fried chicken, and he needed it now.

That night over a dinner of fish-stick stew, my own situation became much more dire.

“So,” my dad said to me. “Your bank statement came today.”

“Wait,” I said. “You opened my mail?”

“I opened it by accident. But I couldn’t help but notice…”

I had a very bad feeling about this. “What?”

“Your balance is three dollars.”

Whoops,
I thought.

“So?” I said.

“So where’s the money from your summer job? Dave, don’t tell me you’ve spent it already!”

My life flashed before my eyes—including the time I saw college students skinny-dipping at Lake Chelan, which was a pleasant surprise both then and now.

Then, since my life really wasn’t all that long yet, I tried to figure out how to deal with this new wrinkle.
I obviously couldn’t tell my dad I was really unemployed. But if I lied and told him that I’d spent all the money I’d made, that would be almost as bad as if I admitted I didn’t have a job at all. And it would just make him insist that I give
him
my next paycheck, only compounding the problem.

So I said, “No, I haven’t spent it. I just haven’t deposited any of my paychecks yet.”

My dad stared at me, eyes narrowing; I think the surveyor in him was once again sensing that something wasn’t right.

Finally, he just sighed and said, “Dave, Dave, Dave. That’s not very responsible. Deposit them tomorrow. I want to see the deposit slip tomorrow night.”

“Absolutely,” I said, which meant I officially had twenty-four hours to live.

At that, my dad turned to my mom. “Did you hear they finally caught the kids who broke open the chimpanzee cage at the Woodland Park Zoo? Do you know what I’d do if one of them was
my
kid?”

When my dad isn’t speaking directly to me, he has a habit of talking as if I’m not even in the room. In this case, however, it was a good thing, because he couldn’t
see how I was totally freaking out.

“What would you do?” my mom said to my dad, sipping on her glass of mandarin-kiwi juice blend.

“I’d split ’em up!” he said. “I’d make sure he never saw any of his hoodlum friends ever again.”

My dad may not have been talking to me, but I was hearing him loud and clear.

“You said
what
to your dad?” Curtis said to me in the bomb shelter later that evening. I’d told him and Victor about how I’d promised my dad I’d have a deposit slip for him the following day.

“I didn’t have any choice,” I said. “It was either that or say I’d
spent
the money.” I’d been in a bad mood since dinner.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Victor said to Curtis. “Our dads must be talking again. My dad said he wanted to see my bank statement too. I told him I’d lost it, but he said I needed to get a new copy.”

Curtis threw his hands up. “So we need to come up with—what? Fifteen hundred dollars for each of you? Three thousand dollars before dinner tomorrow night?”

“Better make it forty-five hundred,” Victor said. “If
our dads are talking, it’s a good bet that
your
dad is going to want to see evidence of money, too.”

“There’s more,” I said.

“What ‘more’?” Curtis said.

I told them my dad’s theory about who you are being who you surround yourself with. I also repeated what he’d said over dinner about the boys who’d freed the chimpanzees.

“Oh, that’s just talk,” Curtis said. “He’d never really make you stop seeing your friends.”

“He already did,” I said. “Back when I was eight years old.”

“What?” Victor said.

So I told Curtis and Victor something I’d never told anyone before, about a friend I’d once had named Shawn Kelsey-Emmerling. We met at soccer, and we didn’t go to the same school, so we had to go to each other’s houses to play. One afternoon, I’d gone to play at his house. He lived near a big train tunnel, and we decided to go inside even though we’d been told not to. His mom caught us and she told my dad, who was so mad that he said I could never go over to Shawn’s again, that he didn’t even want me to be friends with him anymore. My mom had
tried to talk him out of it, but he’d just said, “You are who you surround yourself with, Colleen!
Our son
will be whomever he surrounds himself with!” Which just made me feel even worse about the whole thing because it had been more my idea than Shawn’s to go into the train tunnel.

But my dad got his way. Sure, I still saw Shawn at soccer practice, but by then his parents were mad at my parents for blaming the whole thing on their son. Shawn and I were caught in the middle, and every time we spoke to each other, we had our parents glaring at us. So the friendship—my best friend at the time—just drifted away.

Even now, it made me really sad to think about Shawn Kelsey-Emmerling. It was the real reason I’d been in such a bad mood since dinner.

“Your dad wouldn’t do something like that
now
,” Curtis insisted. “You’re fifteen years old! Besides, how could he break us up? We’d still see each other at school.”

“Yes, he would,” Victor said quietly. “And I think mine would too.”

“What?” Curtis said. “No, he wouldn’t—”

“I’ve heard the way my dad talks about your dad,”
Victor said to me. “He really looks up to him. He likes how uncompromising he is. And if your dad said we couldn’t be friends anymore, I think my dad would back him up.” Victor looked at Curtis. “And for the record, being best friends is about a lot more than just seeing each other at school.”

Hearing Victor say this broke my heart. Curtis and Victor were really important to me, but I think Curtis and I might have been even more important to Victor. He wasn’t the most popular kid at school. He’d never really fit in, even in his own family. They were loud and friendly and sort of simple, and he was quiet and bookish and complicated.

Curtis looked like he wanted to speak, but nothing came out. I think he was realizing that Victor and I were right about our dads splitting us up if they found out about Project Sweet Life—and maybe also that his dad would go along with them. It was funny how, even though I hadn’t been nearly as certain as Curtis that the project would succeed, I’d never really thought about what would happen if we failed. Part of it was that at the beginning of summer, the end of summer had seemed a million years away.

Curtis sat upright. “Well,” he said, “then we’ll just need to make sure that our dads don’t find out. How are we going to get the money we need by tomorrow?”

“Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny?” Victor said. He looked at me. “You could ask them for a loan.”

I shook my head. “It was one thing to use their front porch for the sale or to have them loan us that two hundred dollars for the car repair. But this would mean asking them to outright lie to my parents. I can’t put them in that position.”

“Then who?” Victor said. “We don’t know anyone else with that kind of money.”

Suddenly Curtis’s eyes lit up. “Wait!” he said. “Yes, we do!”

We met Lani Taito and Haleigh Gilder at the bottom of an abandoned gravel pit in a wooded area near our houses. Waterfalls of sand spilled down from crumbling walls. It smelled like pollen from the scotch broom above the rim. The tiniest sound echoed back and forth between the sides of this artificial canyon, making it seem like exactly the kind of place where spies would rendezvous. It was also a place where we didn’t have to worry about being
spotted by our parents. We’d called Lani and Haleigh and told them that we had something important we needed to discuss.

“What is it?” Haleigh said, getting right to the point. She looked even more self-satisfied than the cat that ate the canary; she looked like a canary that had eaten a cat. I wasn’t surprised. She and Lani had to know we wanted something from them.

Victor made a soft gurgling sound. In the presence of Lani, he’d been struck speechless once again.

And to Haleigh, Curtis said, “Sorry we had to meet here, but we didn’t want to be seen with you in public.” Naturally, he’d kicked into slacker mode.

Good plan!
I wanted to say to him.
When you’re trying to get someone to do you a big favor, it’s always best to start off with an insult.

Being around Lani and Haleigh, my best friends had once again turned into complete imbeciles. It was up to me to handle this.

“Just ignore them,” I said to Haleigh and Lani. “Remember when you guys won that ten thousand dollars from the jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest? Do you still have it?”

“Most of it,” Haleigh said. “Why?”

“We were hoping we could borrow a little.”

“A little?” she said suspiciously. “How little? And for how long?”

“Four thousand, five hundred dollars,” I said. I figured there was no point in beating around the bush.

“
What?
” Haleigh said. “Are you out of your
minds
? We’re not going to give you four thousand, five hundred dollars!”

“Not give!” I said. “Lend!” Now I wished I’d beaten around the bush.

“We’re also not going to
lend
you four thousand, five hundred dollars,” she said. “Do you think we’re stupid?”

Curtis started to answer, but I interrupted. “This isn’t how it sounds,” I said to the girls. “We just need the money for twenty-four hours. Not even that long, really. We just all need bank statements to show our dads so it
looks
like we each have fifteen hundred dollars in our accounts. We could use the same fifteen hundred dollars three times. You can even come with us to the bank. We’ll deposit the money, have statements printed, then withdraw the money and give it right back to you.”

“Why do you need statements showing that you have fifteen hundred dollars in your bank accounts?” Lani said.
Being around Victor, she was whispering.

I looked at Curtis and Victor. I think we all knew that there was no way they were going to loan us the money without knowing about Project Sweet Life.

Curtis nodded, and Victor gurgled a little, as if to tell me,
Go ahead.

I turned to the girls and told them everything.

“No
way
!” Haleigh said, laughing out loud.

Even Lani snorted.

I wasn’t sure if they were laughing at us and the fact that we hadn’t been able to earn the money or just laughing at the whole
idea
of Project Sweet Life.

“And here it is, the second week of August, and you
still
haven’t earned anything?” Haleigh said. “Oh my God, that is so pathetic!”

Okay, so now I knew: The girls were laughing
at
us.

“Look!” Curtis said at last. “Are you going to help us or not?”

The girls stopped laughing, but they didn’t stop smiling. They walked away and conferred quietly.

Finally, Haleigh turned and peered right at Curtis. “What’s in it for
us
?” she said.

“Why should
anything
be in it for you?” Curtis said.
“Can’t you just do someone a favor?”

“Oh, like if the situation were reversed, you guys would just do
us
a favor, right?” Haleigh said.

Even Curtis had to admit that she had a point.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I’m just saying,” Haleigh said, “if we do something for you, you should do something for us.”

“Yes!” I said, feeling desperate. “Anything!”

That sure got Haleigh’s attention. “Anything?”

“Well, not necessarily
anything
,” Curtis said. He threw me a look that said,
Thanks a lot!
“What do you
want
from us?”

The girls eyed each other again. There was something about their little smiles that made me nervous.