The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower (12 page)

R
EVELATION
:
n
: the act of discovering an object or a piece of information previously unknown; often the finale of a trick

It was a good thing Gabe's house was only one story high. That meant Bernetta didn't have to climb any trees in order to pound on his bedroom window first thing Monday morning.

She peered through a gap in the curtain to make sure it was Gabe's room. His bed was right next to the window, and she could see him sleeping peacefully. “Hey!” Bernetta hollered, banging on the glass with her fist. “Hey! Wake up!”

Gabe sat up in bed with a start and looked toward the window, rubbing at his eyes. “Huh? What's going—”

“Wake up!” Bernetta pounded on the glass again.

Gabe looked nervous, but when he pulled back the curtain and saw Bernetta, his face relaxed. “Oh,” he said, “it's you.” He threw back his covers and sat up in bed to open the window. “You kind of freaked me out, Bernetta,” he said with a smile. “What time is it anyway?”

Bernetta glared at him, plaid pajamas and all. Yesterday she might have thought his hair looked sort of cute, all tousled like that, but now she was wiser and completely unfazed by messy-cute boy hair.

She set her palms down flat on the windowsill and leaned in, putting her weight as far forward as possible. She was pretty sure this made her look intimidating. She was going to roast him now.
Mess with Bernetta Wallflower
, she thought,
and you're as good as dead
.

Too bad she didn't
feel
intimidating.

“Bernetta?” Gabe asked. “Something wrong?”

Bernetta sighed a deep sigh and scratched a bug bite on her arm. She couldn't roast him. She just couldn't. She looked at him then, dead in the eye, and she could feel her entire face crumple. Her voice came out tiny and thin.

“Why did you do it?” she asked. “Why did you write her name on my backpack?”

He didn't deny it. And he didn't call Bernetta an idiot either. His face crumpled too, just like a napkin. “I'm so sorry,” he said. And then he sat back on his bed and stared at his hands. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

Bernetta bit her bottom lip. Her eyes were brimming with tears, and she wasn't even sure why. She'd been betrayed before.
That
was nothing new. And it wasn't like she and Gabe were best friends or anything. She'd known him only a month. Still, it hurt. Right in the center of her stomach. It hurt something awful.

“So it's true?” Bernetta asked. Her voice was almost a whisper. “You set me up? I mean, all along, you were—You never even—”

Gabe nodded. “I'm sorry.” It seemed to be all he could say.

“But why? Why would you do that? You didn't even know me.”

Gabe looked up at her then, with the saddest eyes Bernetta had ever seen. “I was friends with her,” he said. “Ashley. Back when she still went to Kingsfield with me.” He shook his head. “We did all kinds of stupid stuff. Shoplifting, stealing kids' lunch money from their backpacks, even the kindergartners. We set up this whole gambling thing too, and we'd rake in money from the middle school soccer games. It was crazy. We thought we were fifth-grade bookies or something. I don't know. It was exciting, I guess. You never knew what was going to happen with Ashley around.”

You never knew, all right
, Bernetta thought. All of a sudden the sight of Gabe in his pajamas was making her sick. How could she ever have
liked
him? When all this time he was
using
her? She was just a part of one of his cons. What was it called, the mark? The victim. Bernetta was the mark for a perfectly choreographed long con, starring Ashley Johansson as the expert con artist. And Gabe had been the roper.

“But,” Gabe continued, “then I found out she was going to a new school, Mount Olive, and I was kind of relieved. Because well, things were getting out of hand. I had to, I don't know, watch my back all the time. I guess I was just getting tired.”

“So?” Bernetta said, drumming her fingers on the windowsill. “Why didn't you just quit? If she left your school, why didn't you just cut things off with her?”

“I did!” Gabe said. “I tried to. But . . .” He heaved another deep sigh, as though just the memory of what he was about to say made the air around him harder to breathe. “Right before Ashley found out her parents were sending her to a new school, we made this bet. Me and Ashley. It was her idea, and it was totally crazy. I never really thought she was
serious
about it.”

Bernetta tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She wished she could just walk away right then and there. Gabe didn't deserve to have anyone listen to his stupid stories. But she was curious despite herself. “What was the bet?” she asked.

“Well, Ashley was always bragging about how great she was at making money. She said she could make five thousand dollars in one year, just pulling stuff on kids at school, and she'd never even get caught. Back then I thought it was ridiculous. Five thousand dollars? I mean, we did pretty good, but we only made a couple hundred bucks the whole year of fifth grade. And I thought we were millionaires, you know? But Ashley was always talking about five thousand dollars. That was her big number. So somehow I got roped into this bet with her. She said if she couldn't make five thousand dollars in one year, then she'd have to give me half of what she
had
made. And if she did make the money—” He stopped talking then and chewed on a fingernail.

Bernetta leaned a fraction of an inch closer into the window. “If she did make the money . . .” she prompted.

Gabe spat out a bit of nail. “Then I'd have to match her,” he finished.

“What do you mean, match her?” Bernetta asked.

“You know, I'd owe her as much money as she made.”

Bernetta raised her eyebrows. “Five thousand dollars? You'd owe her five thousand dollars?” He nodded. “But that's crazy! Why would you ever agree to that?”

“I thought it was impossible! I didn't think there was any way she could do it. I thought I'd be making easy money.”

“You should've known better.”

Gabe groaned. “You're telling me.” He went back to chewing on his thumbnail. “Ever seen
Guys and Dolls
? There's this one line, where Marlon Brando is talking about betting, and he says that if someone ever tries to bet on something ridiculous, like that they can make a jack of spades jump out of a deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear, you shouldn't take it, because no matter what, you're going to end up with an earful of cider.”

Bernetta couldn't help smiling. Only Gabe could think about
movies
at a time like this. But then she frowned again. Gabe wasn't the only one with cider in his ear. She'd fallen for his bets too, hadn't she? With the grandmother and the bookstore gift card and the movie quotes. Gabe wasn't exactly a poor, pitiful victim in all this. Bernetta couldn't believe she'd ever thought he had
chocolate
eyes. They were mud. Mud, plain and simple. She turned around and slid down until she was sitting on the grass, back leaning against the house. She folded her arms across her chest.

“So then what?” she said up toward Gabe. “So Ashley made the five thousand, and you owed her big, and then what happened? How did I get involved?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. Bernetta could just barely see that he'd leaned his head out the window to talk to her, but she didn't look at him. “She went to Mount Olive for sixth grade and made all that money. I couldn't believe she did it, but she showed me the cash herself. And she told me how she did it, with that cheating ring, slipping those notes in everyone's lockers. And she told me about you, too, and how she could never get caught because she'd pinned it all on you, used you as a—as a scapegoat or whatever.”

Bernetta could feel her insides tightening up. “Did she tell you I thought she was my best friend?” she said. She wiped the tears away quick. There was no way she was going to let Gabe know she was
crying
. “Did she tell you that she used to spend the night at my house and bake cookies with me and my little brother? And that she let me tell her all my secrets and pretended like she
cared
?” In all that time, Bernetta realized, she hadn't known Ashley at all. Because in all that time Ashley had never said one word about Gabe.

“No,” Gabe said, and he began to speak more slowly. “I didn't know any of that.” He paused. “I didn't. . . . See, all of a sudden I owed her a ton of money, and I didn't know what to do. I knew that if I didn't give it to her, I'd . . . well, I knew it would be bad. She said I had until the end of the summer. She said I should've been saving up all along, that I should've known I was going to have to pay her. But I didn't think I could do it. And I figured if she'd made all this money by setting you up . . .” He paused again. “Well, I thought I could too.”

“You thought I sounded gullible, right?” she said. “You thought I'd make a good mark.”

“But I didn't even know you then!” Gabe said. “And now that I do, I'm sorry I ever—”

“So is that why you went to my dad's club that night? So you could rope me into something?”

He sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I don't even know what I was thinking. I was desperate. Ashley told me you worked there on Saturdays, so I convinced Patrick to have his birthday party there. I didn't find out until later that you'd just gotten in trouble for Ashley's whole thing at school.”

Bernetta wiped her wet hands on her shorts. “I think I should go,” she said into the air.

“No!” Gabe cried. “Wait. Please.” And before Bernetta knew what was happening, Gabe had crawled out his window and was sitting right beside her on the grass in his blue plaid pajamas. “Look,” he said, and he put a hand on Bernetta's knee. She sucked in a quick gasp of air but turned her head the other way. He kept talking. “Bernetta, I went there, and I met you, and you did that watch trick, you know? And I realized right then that I couldn't do it. You weren't like Ashley, you weren't like anyone I knew at all, and I don't know, I guess I . . . liked you.”

Bernetta didn't know if Gabe meant he liked her or he
liked
her, but she refused to look at him either way.

“I knew I couldn't do it,” Gabe said. “You didn't deserve that. So I decided I'd just leave you alone and find some other way to make the money, but then I ran into you again, and I swear I thought it was
fate
, just like in
Close Encounters
, how I said, with the potatoes. And I needed money, and you needed money, so I thought we should be partners. And we were really good partners. I was right. Bonnie and Clyde.”

Bernetta wiped the last of her tears away and looked down at her knee. Gabe's hand was still there. She looked him in the eyes again and then shook her head, drawing her legs in close and wrapping her arms around them. Gabe took his hand back. He seemed hurt about it. Good.

“That's a nice story and everything,” Bernetta said, sniffling her very last sniffle, “but I know you're still lying.”

“I'm not!” Gabe cried. “I swear!”

“Oh, yeah?” Bernetta was done being upset now. She was
mad
. “Well, if that's true, if you thought we made such great partners, if you
liked
me or whatever, then explain why you set me up. Tell me exactly why you put Ashley's wallet in my backpack, Gabe, and why you wrote her name on there so she could steal everything right out from under me. Hmm? Why'd you do it?”

Gabe closed his eyes and leaned all the way back, resting his head against the side of the house. He pressed his knuckles against his eyes and was quiet for a long while. He seemed to be thinking, but Bernetta couldn't tell if he was angry at himself or busy coming up with new lies.

“I just . . .” he said at last, opening his eyes and staring straight ahead as he spoke. “I guess when I saw all that money you had that day, I just went a little crazy or something. And I thought that if I could get it from you, then I could give it to Ashley along with what I'd made too, and I'd be done. I'd never have to worry about her anymore. So I called her, and I—I told her about the money in your backpack. And she came up with that idea, that I should put her wallet in there and everything. She thought it up, I swear.”

“But you did it.”

Gabe scratched at the side of his face. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

They were quiet for a long time again, both of them staring straight ahead in silence. Bernetta noticed that they were breathing right in time with each other, in and out, and she tried to change the rhythm of her breaths so they wouldn't match Gabe's anymore, but it was a hard thing to do once you started to think about it.