Stealing the Game (17 page)

I wasn’t sure why Dad had insisted we go to the movies on a school night. He’d just walked into Jax’s room, interrupted our discussion of committing a felony, and said,
“Who wants to go see
Dark Evil 2
?”

Jax had declined, of course, but I could tell by Dad’s look that this was something he wanted to do with me, so I said yes. This was
our
thing anyway. Dad had been taking me to
scary films ever since I was ten. I never got nightmares, so we just kept going. Mom hated them (“I don’t see what’s so entertaining about horrible girls with stringy hair
crawling out of your TV screen”), so it was just Dad and me. We always tanked up at the concession counter with popcorn, candy, and giant sodas. Then, once the movie started, we flipped on
our hoods, tightened them around our faces like masks, and hunched down in our seats, giving in to the fear. Dad had spilled more than one popcorn by jumping in his seat when something suddenly
lunged out on the screen.

On the ride home after the movie, Dad was quiet. Usually we dissected the film, reliving all the best scenes and recalling how stupid the characters were to wind up alone with a homicidal demon.
Not tonight. Something was on his mind. I eventually realized that the whole point of our going out to the movies on a school night was so we could have this time alone.

I waited. I could outwait anyone in the silent game.

Finally, he said, “Are you okay, Chris?”

This took me by surprise, though you’d think that after Jax asked me to help him rob a store, nothing would surprise me.

“I’m fine, Dad,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “It’s just that there have been a lot of changes in the last couple days. Jax coming home…”

He let that hang, as if waiting for me to add something. I let it hang, too.

“I know his dropping out of Stanford must have come as a shock to you.”

“He’s on a leave of absence,” I said. I don’t know why I said that, why I was defending Jax’s lies.

Dad shrugged. “Now Mom and I are dumping Stanford catalogs on you, hiring tutors, enrolling you in PSAT classes—”

“In what?” I snapped.

“Sorry, we forgot to tell you. It’s just once a month for now. Later, when you get closer to taking them for real, we’ll do it every Saturday.”

I didn’t say anything. What was the point? Apparently, he and Mom had my life all figured out.

“We’ve also been looking into club teams for basketball.”

This time I spoke up. “I told you, I don’t want to join a club team. I’m happy playing for the school.”

“Like we said before, Chris, playing club will—”

“Get me noticed more. I know. But I don’t want to be noticed more. I just want to play ball with my friends, mind my own business, and
have you and Mom mind your own
business
!”

Uh-oh.

My heart beat a drum solo against my chest. I wished I could pull my hoodie over my face, cinch it up, and scrunch down in my seat. I’d never yelled at him like that, so I wasn’t
sure what reaction to expect.

“Son,” he said quietly, “I love you.”

Okay, I hadn’t expected that.

“And I know you think Mom and I are suddenly interfering in your life because of Jax’s screwing up. That’s partially true. But that’s not all of it.”

He was silent a minute, like he wasn’t sure what to say, or maybe how much he wanted to tell me.

“When Jax was about, I don’t know, ten or eleven, Mom and I were watching this old movie on TV called
And Justice for All
.”

“I’ve heard Jax quote it before. ‘You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!’ He loves that part.”

Dad chuckled. “Yeah, he does. Thing is, the movie was too mature for him at that age, but we didn’t think he was watching it. He was over at the dining room table, reading some Harry
Potter novel. Anyway, the movie is about this crusading young lawyer fighting a corrupt legal system. Mom and I had both seen it in college and it had influenced us to become lawyers.” He
paused again, scrunching his face as if remembering something bad. “In the movie, the lawyer has a young client who’s innocent but gets sent to jail because of some misfiled paperwork.
The innocent kid hangs himself in prison.”

“Why did he do that if he was innocent?”

Dad sighed. “Bad things can happen to you in prison. Doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty.”

I thought about Jax. About the robbery he wanted me to help him with. Would the same bad things happen to us?

“The thing is, when the movie was over, your mom and I looked over at Jax and saw that he was crying. He was being quiet about it, but his shoulders were shaking, and when he looked up,
his face was wet with tears. We asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!’” Dad looked over at me. “He was so outraged by the
injustice that he couldn’t stand it. After that, he went through our DVD collection and started watching movies on his own. Not the Harry Potter or Adam Sandler films like before, but
To
Kill a Mockingbird
and
Twelve Angry Men
. Movies about justice and the law. All he talked about was how one day he would become a lawyer and stop the injustice. That’s why we did
everything we could to help him get into Stanford Law School. Because that was
his
dream. Not ours.”

I hadn’t known all that about Jax. I wondered why he’d never told me.

“See,” Dad continued, “with Jax it was easy for us, because he always knew what he wanted. He had a passion. But with you, Chris…you’ve never shown passion for
anything. Not that you have to yet—heck, you’re only thirteen. But we want to at least lay out some sort of path for you. Right now it’s law. But that’s only a suggestion.
If you choose another path, that’s fine with us. You want to be a teacher or a trapeze artist, it doesn’t matter. But Mom and I want you to be able to have choices. So, if we’re
acting a little crazy right now, it’s because seeing Jax crash and burn like this has made us worry even more for you. I mean, if someone like Jax, who knew exactly what he wanted from the
age of ten, could fail…”

He left the rest unspoken. But I filled in the words for myself:
Then what chance does someone as unfocused as you have?

Did it really matter? After all, I had only been conceived to be some sort of life-support system for Jax. My path was to give him a future. Now his future was flat-lining.

During the whole ride I’d been debating with myself about whether or not to tell Dad the truth about Jax. I had hoped he might be able to help. But now I thought it would only make Mom and
Dad feel like bigger failures.

I swallowed something thick in my throat. I’d rather get another elbow to my nose than feel this bad.

“My point is, son, that I’m sorry if Mom and I are acting like helicopter parents, or whatever the term is now. But we’re trying to make sure you succeed where Jax
didn’t.”

I could have told him that I did have a passion: comic books. But compared to ridding the world of injustice, that would seem so lame. I still hadn’t even figured out everything about
Master Thief yet. Plus, having a secret is like having a hidden treasure to use in an emergency. Like Hot Pockets.

“You understand, Chris?” Dad asked.

“Yeah,” I said. And we were silent the rest of the drive home.

“
SO
,
are you going to help me, or what?” Jax asked.

I looked at him, sitting on the edge of my bed, holding a fresh bag of ice to his ribs. Was this the same guy who’d cried at injustice? The same guy who’d vowed to end it, like Bruce
Wayne after his parents were murdered, or the Punisher after his family was mowed down by gangsters, or Hit Girl after Big Daddy was killed? The same guy who’d taken me along on his dates, to
beach parties, to Lakers games when he didn’t have to?

I didn’t know the answer. In the end, all I knew was that this guy asking me to help him rob a store wasn’t the real Jax, and it was my job as his brother—his spare
parts—to help him get back to himself. He’d promised me that he would make everything right, even with the place he robbed. Given all that had happened in the past few days, I had no
reason to believe him. But I chose to believe him anyway. I guess, after all we’d been through together, I didn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t believe him.

I also figured that I might be able to control the situation, to keep it from getting any worse.

“Yes, I’ll help you,” I said.

He sighed with relief. “Thanks, bro. I owe you big-time.”

“Don’t you ever get sick of saying that? Isn’t it about time you pay me back?”

“I will, after this,” Jax said. “All my debts will be settled after this.”

Yeah, sure, I thought to myself. Out loud I said, “How much money do you need?”

“I need goods worth ten thousand dollars.”

I gagged. “
Ten grand?!
I thought we were talking about a couple hundred or something. That’s insane, not to mention impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible. Haven’t you seen the inspirational posters in Ms. Truman’s office?” He curled his fingers and held them in front of him in imitation of the
cat in the poster dangling by his front paws from a bar. “Hang in there, baby!”

“Where would you even get that kind of stuff?” I said, my stomach turning over.

“Angelo’s—you know, the pawnshop. There’s bound to be some jewelry there.”

He scooched closer to the desk where I was sitting. “Let’s get cracking on the plans. I’ve got to do it tonight.”

“Tonight?!”
He was getting crazier with each passing second. I had to stop this, or at least slow him down. “No way, dude. I have to think things through, look at
every angle, double-check the store.”

Jax scoffed. “Come on, Chris. You’ve been doing all that for the past couple years for your comics. You know the layout of most of the local stores, their alarm systems, and a dozen
different ways that Master Thief could break in.”

“That’s for my comics,” I said. “If something goes wrong in my comics I can make up crap so it works out. Give the cops a flat tire. Create a jamming device that
doesn’t really exist. If something goes wrong tonight, you’ll end up in prison.”

“I’ll be fine. Just give me the plan.”

I leaned back in the desk chair and closed my eyes. This was too real. The thing with my comics is that I’d never actually finished one. I had lots of half-written stories and drawings,
but because I hadn’t fully thought through Master Thief, I couldn’t figure out how to end anything. The comics always stopped after a successful heist. But then what happened?

I tried to picture what would happen tonight. Even if Jax broke into Angelo’s and stole whatever he needed to pay off Fauxhawk, how would he make everything better with everyone else? With
Mom and Dad? With the store’s owners? With the police?

With me?

What if the story ended with Jax getting caught? Wouldn’t it be my fault?

Then I started to think of something else. Where had Jax been when he was supposed to be at Stanford? What had he been doing all that time? Was it illegal—is that why he didn’t want
to tell us? Why wait this long to come home and tell us? Why did he bet so much money on my team when he knew we didn’t have much of a chance to win? Was he that far gone as a gambling
addict? Or was he hiding some other secret?

Either way, he needed to succeed tonight. And he couldn’t do that alone.

“I’m going with you,” I said.

He sat up so quickly that the pain in his ribs contorted his face. “No! That’s out of the question!”

“You’re injured.”

“You’re not going, bro. That’s final. I’m still your older brother, and what I say goes.”

LOCK-PICKING
is not easy, even with the help of YouTube. You need to practice with a tension wrench and a hook pick until you get just the right
feel to manipulate the tumblers, like I sometimes did on our front door lock when Mom and Dad weren’t home. It’s not as easy as it looks on cop shows when someone uses a bent fork to
enter the Pentagon. It took four months before I was finally able to open the door without using my key. For me, it was just research for Master Thief. I never thought I’d do it for real. Yet
here I was, in the dark, smelly, wet alley behind a strip mall, at three in the morning, scratching at the door to the Carpet and Flooring Emporium (“The Karpet Kings of OC!”).

I had my hood up and cinched around my face, the same way I’d worn it a couple hours ago at the horror film. When I was sitting with Dad in the theater, my hood had been like Linus’s
security blanket. It represented my bond with my father and everything he’d ever taught me. Now, kneeling in front of this door, my hood was a disguise against security cameras, which went
against everything Dad had ever taught me. I had felt like a fraud when I was with Dad, and now I felt like a fraud with Jax. It was like I had a secret identity. But which was was the real me?

“Hurry up, SP,” Jax said. He was keeping watch on the alley. One hand gripped a sledgehammer, and the other held a rusty crowbar, which we’d taken from the garage. Not that Dad
ever used those tools. In fact, I think he’d borrowed the sledgehammer from neighbors that had moved away a couple years ago. The hard part was hiding them under our hoodies and lugging them
from the car, which we’d parked several blocks away to avoid suspicion.

I kept working the lock, a task that was made harder by the thick orange rubber gloves I was wearing. They were all I could find around the house on short notice. The good news was that the
package had never been opened, and I knew Mom wouldn’t miss them. (One Sunday, she’d stared at the toilet with the gloves in one hand and a scrub brush in the other and said, “I
don’t think so.” The next day she’d hired a weekly cleaning service.)

“Maybe we should try a window,” Jax suggested impatiently.

“The windows are wired.”

He sighed and bounced on his toes, nervously looking up and down the alley. Sometimes he looked overhead, as if expecting to see helicopters.