The Fourth Stall (18 page)

We started digging. On his desk were a few notebooks containing lists of kids who owed him money. As much as I was curious to see who was in there, that wasn’t something that could help me much at that moment. There were also a lot of old sports newspapers and magazines lying around.

Staples had a ridiculous bobblehead collection lining some shelves behind his desk. They were mostly baseball players. He practically had the whole Yankees lineup and half the Hall of Fame. I was a little jealous of the collection, to be honest. And I was surprised that such a psycho could appreciate the finer things in life, such as baseball.

There was some other stuff scattered about that didn’t look related to his business, like a few baseball gloves and an old TV with an ancient-looking, gray video game system I didn’t recognize hooked up to it. On his desk was a picture of a really little girl and Staples standing next to the same shed we were in. The picture was old—Staples looked maybe close to my age in it—but it was definitely him. Only in the picture, the lawn around the shed was green and freshly cut and the shed was newly painted and Staples actually looked nice. And happy. I could only guess that the girl in the picture might be a little sister. I wondered where she was now. I certainly hoped she didn’t still live there. That house was no place for anybody to live in, let alone a little girl. The photo was just another item that left me suddenly feeling a little uncertain as to just who Staples really is, and what his intentions were.

That’s when it all finally clicked. I suddenly knew why he’d looked so familiar to me. Barry Larsen was an older kid who used to live in our trailer park. We used to play football with him. We had done so on the very day I’d met Vince for the first time. Staples had actually invited me to play football with him when we were kids. In fact, I even caught a pass from him that day, and I remember he said, “Hey, nice catch, kid.” I’d almost passed out, I was so proud that an older kid complimented me. Barry Larsen had never seemed like such a bad guy. I marveled at the discovery, but pressed on with the search.

Tyrell moved on to the file cabinets, and I started rummaging through his desk. If you want the truth, I honestly expected to find my stolen Funds right then and there that day. Where else would he have them hidden? But we didn’t find my money. We didn’t find
any
money, actually. But just because we didn’t find my money doesn’t mean we didn’t find anything useful. In fact, we found plenty. What we saw in Staples’s shed that day changed everything.

Chapter 24

M
onday passed quickly. Too quickly. For once I wanted the hours in class to drag, to last forever. And for once, class time flew by. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

For the most part Fred and I didn’t talk during any of the recess or lunch breaks. He played DS while I sat in my office, going over my final Books, trying to predict whether or not Staples would actually show up after school. Right at the end of afternoon recess, I called Fred into my office.

“Yeah?” he asked as he stepped into the fourth stall from the high window.

“Fred, do you think you could meet me here after school today?” I asked.

“Sure, I guess. My mom said she’d be home late today anyways.”

“Thanks. Just meet me here at three twenty-five. The door will be open.”

“Okay,” he said, standing up. “I guess I’ll see you then.” He opened the stall’s door.

“And Fred, one last thing,” I said, prompting him to stop before leaving the stall. “Don’t be late.”

“Okay,” he said.

The bell rang a short time later. I had just a few hours left until my meeting with Staples. Maybe only had a few hours left to live, depending on how it would all go down.

After class I packed my stuff into my backpack and trudged across the school to my office. My stomach ached like it knew something I didn’t, which was a strange feeling for me. I wasn’t used to being so nervous and jittery all the time. Just a few weeks ago I had been in total control of this school. Or I thought I had been. Now I had been reduced to nothing but some friendless, penniless kid with a key to an abandoned bathroom in the boonies of the school’s East Wing.

The halls were crowded that day, but the kids didn’t shout greetings like they normally did. I had been pretty popular around here simply because of what I could do for people. But lately kids seemed to care less. I think they knew my business was all but finished. Too many kids had witnessed my surrender plea to Justin Friday night at the football game, and my office had hardly been open at all in the past two weeks.

I got to the East Wing entrance and waited there for the janitor. He locked the door every day at 3:20. Only two of the school’s eight entrances remained unlocked after 3:30. And those only stayed open until four o’clock.

“Hey, Mac, how are you?” he said as he reached for his keys.

“I’m okay. Say, a friend is coming to visit me, so do you think you could leave this one open until 4:00 today?” I asked.

“Sure, no problem,” he said, and walked back down the hallway. He whistled some catchy tune that I recognized from somewhere.

Just like that. No questions asked. You don’t ask questions that don’t need to be answered. That’s rule number one when dealing with a business like mine. And the janitor seemed to understand that. He was by far the coolest adult I had ever met. Kids in most schools make fun of their janitors because it’s usually some creepy guy with gross hair, a funny smell, and a collection of bent spoons in his work closet. But our janitor is downright awesome.

I went inside the bathroom and sat in my office. Fred entered a few moments later. I heard him sit in one of the chairs across from the sink. It was three minutes until three thirty. I wasn’t sure if Staples would show. And if he did, could I go through with it?

The first question was answered just a minute later, when the door to the bathroom swung open. I heard heavy footsteps scuff across the dirty tile floor. Then I heard Fred’s voice.

“Staples? What are you doing here?”

Fred didn’t sound all that shocked to see Staples, though. You’d have thought he would sound terrified. But he didn’t. There was a silence and then Fred spoke again.

“Uh, Mac, Staples is here! Why is Staples here?”

I got up and stepped out of my office. Fred was still seated in his plastic chair and Staples stood by the sink a few feet away. They were both looking at me.

“Oh, Fred, I think you know why Staples is here,” I said.

Fred shook his head, “I don’t. I don’t know what—”

But Staples cut him off. “So I heard you finally want to accept my offer? Having problems with your business, are you?”

I looked at Staples with a blank face. I didn’t really feel all that afraid of him anymore. Because this time, for once, I actually did have the drop on him. This time I had the element of surprise.

“I guess you could say that,” I said, trying to sound calm, bored. “But I most definitely do
not
want to accept your offer.”

His eyes narrowed. “Then why am I here? I don’t like being jerked around, Christian.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like being jerked around either,
Barry
.”

He shook his head and took a step back. He looked so shocked that I knew his real name that I thought he might have a heart attack right there in my office.

“How? How do you know my name?” he demanded.

“All in due time,” I said. “First, I have an offer to make you. Well, it’s more of a demand than an offer. One: I want you out of my school forever. I don’t want to hear about any of my classmates placing a bet with one of your bookies again. Two: I don’t ever want to see you or any of your high school cronies near my friends ever again.”

Staples laughed. He had gone from scowling and confused to laughing in just a second’s time.

“So . . . so  . . . .” He tried to talk but was too busy laughing.

I waited while he calmed down.

Eventually he composed himself enough to say, “So what exactly are you going to do if I refuse your offer?” When he said the word “offer,” he made bunny ears with two fingers from each of his hands and then curled his fingertips downward.

“Well, right now, as we speak, a few friends of mine are currently raiding the shed in your backyard. They’re going to kidnap your dog, search the place, and take any money or information that they find. They’re going to call me in the next few minutes to confirm all of this, and if I don’t answer, they’ll know something is wrong, and they’ll take your dog out to a field and leave him there, call the cops and give them all the stuff they found, and keep all of your cash. Which, to answer your question, is also basically what will happen if you refuse our offer.” I made the same bunny-ears-curl-downward gesture, then pulled my phone from my pocket so Staples could see it.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, but he was no longer smiling.

“No? Your address is 1808 Academy Road South. Your dog is a pit bull with a pink camouflage collar. Your office is in a shed in your backyard, and you have a pretty remarkable bobblehead doll collection. My friends will use a bolt cutter to break into your shack. They’ll use sleeping pills to disarm your dog. Oh, and they better find my Emergency and Game Funds, too, because I want those back.”

Staples shook his head. He looked a little shocked and maybe a little scared, but also very, very angry. He rubbed his left eye and then balled his hand into a fist. His knuckles turned white as snow.

“But I don’t have your stupid little Funds. How could I have stolen them? I don’t even know where they are,” he snarled.

“I know, but your snitch does.” I turned to Fred. His eyes went wide.

I continued. “Fred knew where I hid my Funds and he told you where they were. Then breaking into my room Thursday afternoon probably wasn’t all that hard, was it, Barry? Considering that you found my window open? I still can’t believe that Fred has been working for you all this time.” I looked down at him in the chair.

Fred looked away quickly.

“I know it was you, Fred. You broke my heart.”

He looked at his feet. I could tell he was ashamed of himself. He shook his head and whined, “He made me do it, Mac!”

“Whatever, Fred. It doesn’t matter now.” I looked back at Staples. “You see, I found a Nintendo DS inside your desk, Staples, when I broke into your shed on Saturday. It struck me as odd that you would be into the DS, being that most of its games are for little kids. So I powered it up and found something pretty shocking: messages from Fred in the in-box. All the time I’d thought Fred had been playing games on his DS, he was really taking notes with the stylus and sending them to you.

“I also found a few records in the file cabinets detailing who is still on your payroll, and sure enough Fred is listed. And Vince isn’t. Up to that point I really had thought that Vince was the snitch and had stolen the Funds. I really had believed that Fred was innocent and had been telling the truth about everything and that I was ruined. It had all added up. It had all made such perfect sense. And that’s because that’s what you had wanted me to think all along, isn’t it, Staples? You’re clever, I have to admit that. You staged everything to make me think Vince stole the Funds and was the snitch.”

Staples just stared at me and didn’t say anything.

Sure, I was happy when I found out I was wrong, that my best friend hadn’t stabbed me in the back. But the news had also hit me like a three-ton semitruck going one hundred miles per hour. Because it meant I had questioned my best friend’s loyalty in the worst way imaginable. And thinking back to everything I’d said to him, no wonder he was so angry he could barely even talk or deny my accusations. I’d acted like a true jerk not to trust him or even give him the chance to explain.

Which made it extra hard to go visit him on Sunday morning to try and apologize. When I got to his trailer and his mom answered the door, the first things I saw on her face were relief and then a smile.

“Christian, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I don’t know what happened between you guys on Thursday, and it’s none of my business, but he’s barely even left his room since then. He hasn’t changed, showered, anything. I can barely even get him to eat.”

I hadn’t thought I could feel much worse up to that point but I had been wrong. I wanted to compost myself and let some crazy lady use me as fertilizer for her tomato plants. I wanted to cover myself in honey and then get lowered slowly into a huge vat of fire ants. I wanted to strip the skin off my arms with a cheese grater and then take a lemon juice bath. I wanted to poke a sleeping lion in the ribs with a short stick. I wanted . . . Okay, you probably get the idea.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” I said, walking past Vince’s mom.

I went to his room and saw that the sign I’d given him for his birthday was no longer hanging on his door. Really, would there ever be an end to just how low I could feel?

I knocked. Nothing.

I knocked again. Again, nothing.

I slowly opened the door and poked my head inside. What I saw, I will never forget, though I wish I could. Vince was lying on his bed wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing on Thursday when we had our fight. His face was the color of cigarette smoke or one of George Romero’s zombies. His eyes were vacant and he lay motionless, and for just a second I thought I
was
looking at an actual zombie. Which was fine, because you can add getting my brains eaten to the list of things I deserved right then.

But then he saw me and spoke.

“What are you doing here?” he said so quietly it was nearly a whisper. “Get out. Don’t ever come back.”

“I know. I am the worst friend you could have. I should have at least talked to you before jumping to conclusions. All I want is fifteen minutes to try and make things better. After that I’ll leave, I’ll give you my three Ryne Sandberg rookie cards, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll even finally try eating waffles with hand lotion for syrup like your grandma sometimes tries to feed us.”

He glanced at me and looked away. But he did sit up and I thought that a little color might have returned to his face. He nodded at me to continue. Like a true friend would.

“First, Vince, I’m sorry I believed that you could have done that to me. It was ridiculous of me to think that, and you have a right to be mad. But just at least try to imagine how it looked from my standpoint. Please. Before this you’d never lied to me before. And then within days of each other I find out that you lied to me about your grandma’s birthday, you’ve been stealing money from our business, and you accepted a payment from Staples. Then my Funds go missing on the one day you happen to miss school for the first time in years?”

“Our Funds.”

“What?”

“You said ‘my Funds,’ but they were
our
Funds,” Vince said, still not looking at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were.”

“You’re right. I can see how that probably looked bad,” Vince said. “But still . . .”

“I know, Vince. I should have trusted you above all else. That’s why our business succeeded in the first place. I remembered that when I was thinking about how it was your idea for me to first hire Tyrell back during the Graffiti Ninja debacle. I remembered that it was all you who got this business started in the first place. It was your idea from the start because you recognized what we could do together even as kindergartners. And I should have remembered those things when it mattered most, but I didn’t. And I can’t really forgive myself for that.

“This whole thing had me feeling paranoid. I just didn’t trust anybody anymore, not even myself. And I guess sometimes I lost sight of the fact that this business has always been about you and me, not the money at all. It has never mattered how much money we made, not even for a Cubs World Series game. But I’m not going to make those mistakes again. You’re probably the funniest, most trustworthy kid I’ve ever met. I can’t believe I ignored that fact even for a day, or an hour, or a second.”