Project Sweet Life (3 page)

“Everything?” Curtis asked, and I suddenly knew
exactly what he was picturing in his head: his
Star Wars
Bounty Hunter Action Figure set, still in its original box and signed by the actor who had played Boba Fett.

“Everything,” I said.

“
Everything?
” Victor said. I was certain he was thinking of his Meade Deep Space Telescope.

“Well,” I said, losing my nerve. “Maybe not
everything
.” Maybe if he got to keep his telescope, I’d get to keep my purple plasma lamp.

“No,” Curtis said. “Are we committed to Project Sweet Life or not? Do we want freedom or not? Because a lot of people
say
they want freedom, but they don’t really mean it. They’d rather have things.”

We all thought about this for a moment.

Then I said, “Curtis is right.”

Victor didn’t answer.

“Victor?” I asked him.

“Okay, okay, I’m in,” he mumbled. “But holy Parsimonious, patron saint of tightwads, this garage sale better work.”

So began our preparation for the Project Sweet Life Junk-Free No-Garage Garage Sale.

We. Were. Ruthless.

After all, Curtis was right: How did you put a price on freedom?

We started with everything in the bomb shelter: the television, the game system, the popcorn popper, the Sno-Kone maker, the soft-serve and gum-ball machines, the posters on the walls, the watercooler, the refrigerator, and the couch. We also stripped the bomb shelter itself of anything we thought might have nostalgic appeal: the dilapidated power generator, an ancient air filter, some old bottles and canned food with the labels more or less intact, a cistern, metal shelves, and the kitschy 1960s bomb shelter signs. We didn’t tell Curtis’s parents about this, but they hadn’t seen the inside of the shelter in about ten years, so we knew they didn’t care. When we were done we no longer had a hideout; we had a concrete pillbox.

After that, we turned our attention to our individual bedrooms and our own personal worldly possessions. I knew that in their bedrooms, Curtis and Victor were packing up telescopes and
Star Wars
Bounty Hunter Action Figure boxed sets.

In my own bedroom, I picked up my four-foot anatomically correct plastic ant. I put it in the “to sell” box.

I lovingly caressed the fog machine that had enabled me to make some of the best haunted houses this side of Disney World. Then I boxed it up.

Finally, I came to my purple plasma lamp. I boxed that up, too.

By the time I was done packing my possessions, my shelves and closet were almost completely bare. Knowing this would have made our parents suspicious, we’d gone to Goodwill and collected stuff from the “free” bins—mostly coverless paperbacks and broken knickknacks. So now I replaced my good stuff with the free stuff, knowing my clueless parents would never suspect a thing.

It wasn’t easy sneaking everything out of my house without my parents knowing, especially since, unlike Curtis’s mom, my mom is home all day. It was even worse for Victor, who had the dreaded nosy little siblings. But we managed, and by Friday night, we had everything stored over in the basement at Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny’s. Then we posted flyers everywhere within a ten-block radius of their house.

Curtis’s garage sale idea wasn’t a bad one, even if he had pulled it out of thin air. We had Good Stuff. If I’d come to our garage sale, I would have wanted to buy
absolutely everything there. But that made sense, since it was
my
stuff and that of my friends. The question was, would anyone else agree?

Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, like a sunrise in one of those calendars full of cheesy inspirational phrases. I told my parents I was off to work.

“Thatta boy,” my dad said.

My mom smiled. “Watch out for sharks.”

It still felt weird to lie to them so brazenly, and I did feel bad about it. But I reminded myself that this was all my dad’s fault to begin with, that he was basically
forcing
me to lie with his totally unfair insistence that I get a summer job. Even so, what would happen if they happened to drive by Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny’s place and saw me there? Or what if someone from Curtis’s or Victor’s family drove by? How would we ever explain it? That said, we only needed to get through this one day, then we could spend the rest of the summer doing whatever we wanted. It’s not like we were going to run into any of our family members at most of our usual haunts.

It was still early by the time Curtis, Victor, and I arrived at Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny’s. We had time to
set up big wooden sandwich boards on the surrounding streets, directing people to our sale.

By now, anyone even remotely interested in garage sales had to know about ours. But just to make sure, I took all of our leftover cardboard boxes and made a huge, eye-catching tower out of them in front of Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny’s garage.

“Wait!” Curtis said. He grabbed the statue of Mr. Moneybags that he’d bought the weekend before.

“Shouldn’t we sell that too?” Victor asked.

“Bite your tongue depressor!” Curtis said. “We can’t sell our mascot. Besides, it cost two whole bucks.”

He climbed up on a chair to place it on top of the tower of cardboard like a Christmas star. “There,” he said.

Well before we officially opened at ten, the bargain vultures were already circling. Somehow they had sensed that this garage sale was different. We were ready for them, with a wide selection of carefully chosen, genuinely valuable stuff, reasonably priced with just enough leeway to allow for some haggling.

At ten on the dot, the bartering began. It felt weird watching our most prized possessions being lugged away
from the porch. I got the impression that the lumpy housewife who bought my copy of Pauline Baynes’s original 1972 map of Narnia just wanted it for the frame. And what the heck was a nine-year-old girl going to do with a six-channel Raptor G-2 remote-controlled helicopter? But the blow of losing all that stuff was definitely softened by the wad of cash that kept growing in our strongbox.

Unlike most garage sales, which start strong and peter out as the day wears on and the worthwhile merchandise gets carted away, our crowd actually began to grow, especially among the under-twenty set. Word had apparently gotten out that we’d lost our marbles. Before we knew it, the front porch was thronged, and Curtis, Victor, and I were doing a land-office business.

Mr. Moneybags was definitely watching over us from the top of that cardboard tower. By the afternoon, Curtis, Victor, and I all had little dollar signs in place of our eyes.

“Count it!” Curtis said once almost everything had been sold (even the antique generator, and for a surprisingly generous amount).

“I’m counting,” Victor said.

Curtis and I watched silently until he finally announced, “Five thousand, eight hundred.”

“Dollars?” Curtis asked.

“No, Italian lira!” Victor said. “Yes, dollars—what’d you think I meant?”

I could hardly believe my ears. We didn’t have the full seven thousand dollars, but we had most of it! We could earn the rest of what we needed washing windows over a long weekend.

“We did it,” I said, finding my tongue at last. “Curtis, you were right! It was so easy! And we now have almost six thousand dollars!”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Curtis said. “Piece-o-cake!”

At that moment, Uncle Brad’s garage began to squeak from the inside, like someone had activated the remote control on the door. Sure enough, the garage door rumbled open to reveal the back of a sleek red Ferrari. Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny’s neighbor, a red-faced man with pasty white legs, sauntered toward his car, keys jingling in his hand.

“What the—?” He’d noticed our tower of cardboard boxes right in front of his car.

“Sorry,” said Curtis from the front porch. “We’ll
get that out of your way.”

Victor was the first one to reach the tower. He went to push it to one side. But I hadn’t built it as solidly as I’d thought, and it was only cardboard boxes to begin with.

It teetered.

“Whoa!” Victor said, even as he tried valiantly to keep it from toppling over. But it was too late. It started to fall backward toward the open garage.

I remembered the ceramic statue of Mr. Moneybags that Curtis had placed at the top.

A ceramic statue that was heading right for the back of that red Ferrari.

I held my breath. Time seemed to stop.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stay stopped.

The Mr. Moneybags statue crashed down against the Ferrari, denting the trunk and cracking the back window.

Six thousand dollars. Since it was a luxury car (and since the owner was preoccupied with his insurance rates), that’s what we learned it would cost us to repair. But that pretty much figured, didn’t it?

Uncle Brad offered to pay for the damage, but the
most we would take from him was the two-hundred-dollar difference between what we’d earned and what we owed—and only as a loan. After all, he and Uncle Danny had been doing us a favor by letting us use their porch—and they’d only done it because we’d insisted that we be treated as adults. Curtis, Victor, and I had all been equally involved in the mishap with the statue: I’d built the cardboard tower, Curtis had put the statue on top, and Victor had knocked it over. So it was only fair that we all paid for the damage.

But none of that made it any easier to accept. Project Sweet Life, our simple, brilliant plan to get out of working over the summer, had only been in operation for a week. And we were already two hundred dollars in the hole.

The next day, Tuesday, I told my parents I’d be at work and headed over to the bomb shelter for a post-garage-sale conference. The shelter itself had been stripped completely bare. The only things left were that statue of Mr. Moneybags, which we had decided to keep as our mascot despite the bad luck it had already brought us, and
Trains and Totem Poles
, the book on the history of Tacoma that Curtis had also bought at the estate sale. I’d known the bomb shelter was made of concrete, but I’d never realized that it was
just
concrete, not until we’d sold all our stuff. It had never smelled dusty and
dirty before either, but it did now.

Victor was sulking.

“Oh, come
on
,” Curtis said. “So we didn’t make seven thousand dollars the first time out. We
almost
did! It just goes to show that Project Sweet Life is going to be even easier than we thought.”

“I’m not mad because we didn’t make seven thousand dollars the first time out,” Victor said. “I’m mad because we didn’t make seven thousand dollars
and
I no longer have all my favorite stuff that you made me sell.”

This made me feel guilty. I was the one, not Curtis, who had first suggested that we sell all of our personal belongings.

“Well,” Curtis said, “ignore all that.”

“How can we ignore it?” Victor said. “Our
couch
is gone. We don’t even have a place to
sit
.”

“Just listen, okay?” Curtis said. “I have a new plan. And this one is guaranteed to succeed!”

“That’s what you said about the
last
plan,” Victor mumbled.

Curtis ignored him. “Where do most people go when
they want a lot of money? To the bank.”

“Wait,” I said. “You want to rob a bank? I was kidding about that.”

“I don’t want to
rob
a bank,” Curtis said. “I want to keep a bank from
being
robbed.”

Curtis’s words echoed inside the empty bomb shelter. I sat up, intrigued, even though the hard floor hurt the bones in my rear end.

“Tell me more,” I said.

“I did a little research on Capitol American Bank, which has a branch just down the street,” Curtis said. “It turns out they pay a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information that leads to the capture and arrest of any bank robber.”

“What are you saying? That one of us robs the bank so the other two can turn him in?” I slumped back down.

“Not us,” Curtis said. “An actual bank robber! We catch him or provide information that leads to his arrest, and we make ourselves a fast hundred thousand dollars.”

“Curtis,” Victor said. “You’re not making sense. What makes you think anyone’s going to rob that bank?”

“Because that particular branch has already been robbed twice in the last six months!”

Victor and I looked at each other.

“How?” I said. “No one robs banks anymore. They have Plexiglas and hidden cameras. And if the bank has been robbed twice in six months, wouldn’t they have a security guard?”

“All true,” Curtis said. “That’s why it’s not the bank itself that’s being robbed. It’s people who come to pick up money. The first time, it was this man who withdrew cash for some business deal. The thief followed him home and robbed him there. The second time it was a woman who’d taken some diamonds from her safe-deposit box. The thief followed her home too. Anyway, that’s why I think this was an
inside job
.”

“An inside job?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. Both robberies were perfectly timed. Whoever robbed that man and woman knew exactly what they’d taken from the bank. In other words, it had to be someone inside the bank working with someone on the outside!”

What Curtis said did make sense. I stared at the statue of Mr. Moneybags on the floor next to me. For the
record, Mr. Moneybags hadn’t even been chipped in the fall against that Ferrari.

“How do you know all this?” I asked Curtis.

“My mom knows someone who knows someone who works at the bank,” Curtis said.

It wasn’t exactly the most impressive source.

“Do those even count as bank ‘robberies’ as far as the reward is concerned?” Victor said. “They sound more like people who just happened to get ripped off.”

“My mom says the bank is treating them like bank robberies because they took place so soon after their customers went to the bank,” Curtis said. “They want to catch the thief more than anyone. They don’t want people to pull their money out of that branch.”

“Even if this is all true,” I said, “how would
we
catch the bank robber?”

“We do a stakeout,” Curtis said. “Somewhere in front of the bank.”

“Yeah, we could take a video of the robbery,” Victor said. “Oh, wait, no, we can’t! I don’t have a camcorder anymore—I sold it at our pointless garage sale!”

“I don’t know
exactly
how we’ll catch the robber,” Curtis said. “Just that we
will
.”

“
Eventually
, you mean?” Victor said. “If that bank is only robbed once every three months, doesn’t that mean we might have to watch it all summer long? I thought the whole point of Project Sweet Life was that we end up with a sweet life. How is this better than an actual summer job?”

“It pays a hundred thousand dollars, for one thing,” Curtis said. “Look, can we just go check it out?”

We rode our bikes over to Capitol American Bank. It happened to be the branch where I had my own bank account (currently nearly empty, alas). It was located in the newer suburbs, on a busy street—the kind with five fat, SUV-friendly lanes, but no sidewalks. The bank itself was small with big glass windows along the street. There was a small parking lot to one side.

We locked up our bikes and went inside. The front part of the bank had a small waiting area and some desks separated by low-rise cubicle walls; the tellers worked in the back behind a row of Plexiglas windows. The vault with the safe-deposit boxes was behind a railing to the left of the teller windows. We saw seven employees—three managers, three tellers, and a flabby security guard.
But there is only so long that three teenagers can linger in a bank without people getting suspicious, so we left. Plus, this was my parents’ branch, and I didn’t want to accidentally run into them.

Outside, Curtis nodded at the coffee shop across the street. “Let’s go sit,” he said.

The coffee shop was one of those old-fashioned diners with a counter and stools and metal napkin dispensers, where every surface feels vaguely sticky. I found myself wondering who still ate in greasy spoons like this. We took a booth by the window. I could tell that Curtis had something to say, but before he could speak, a waitress handed us menus.

“Get you boys somethin’ to drink?” she said. Her skin was deeply tanned, and her teeth were unnaturally white. If you squinted, she might not have looked too old. But we weren’t squinting.

“Just water,” Curtis said, declining the menu.

“Me too,” Victor said, scrutinizing the grease on the vinyl seat.

The fact was, money was tight for the three of us. We’d given all the money from the garage sale to the guy with the Ferrari. And even though we’d started out the
summer with a little over fifty-five dollars between us, Curtis had bought that book and statue at the estate sale, and Victor had had to drop ten bucks on a KFC T-shirt, leaving us with a grand total of $41.50—money that had to last until we made the seven thousand dollars we needed for Project Sweet Life.

Still, I said to the waitress, “I’ll have a small Coke.” If we were going to sit in this coffee shop, it seemed like we should order
something
.

The waitress just smiled gamely.

When she was gone, Curtis said, “It’s Gladys Kravitz! I bet she’s the bank robber!”

“Who?” I said, confused.

“That bank manager who looks like the nosy neighbor on
Bewitched
?”

We all looked back over at the bank. From the window of the coffee shop, we had a good view inside.

I’d never really watched
Bewitched
, but I could tell by the name that Gladys Kravitz was frumpy, and one of the bank managers fit the bill. You could almost see the curlers in her hair.

“What makes you think it’s her?” I asked.

“Something about her eyes,” he said. “Shifty.”

I laughed, but Victor said, “I think we need a little more to go on than that.”

“This is
amazing
,” Curtis said, still staring over at the bank. “You can see everything from here.”

He wasn’t kidding. Thanks to the glass windows of the bank, this coffee shop was the perfect spot to observe what was going on across the street. It was like looking into an ant farm, except with lazier workers.

“That’s it!” Curtis said.

“What’s it?” I said.

“This coffee shop is where we can do our stakeout! We can sit right at this table until we know for sure that Gladys Kravitz is the bank robber. We could even take shifts.”

“Yeah, and we could call each other on our walkie-talkies,” Victor said bitterly. “Except—oh wait! We sold those at our pointless garage sale.”

“How would that work?” I said to Curtis. “Even if Gladys Kravitz
is
the bank robber, Victor was right when he said it might be weeks or months before she strikes again.”

But Curtis’s eyes were still locked on the bank. “Guys?” he said. “There’s something going on over there.”

Victor and I both turned to look, but I didn’t see anything strange.

“What?” Victor said.

“That woman!” Curtis said. “Not Gladys Kravitz. The one with the orange pants and the big butt.”

I zeroed in on the woman with the orange pants (she really did have an enormous rear end). She stood in a tiny cubicle on the far right side of the bank, behind the loan officers’ desks. It was a little office area with a copy machine and fax. Like all the work spaces, it had cubicle walls, but they were higher than the others. The only way we were able to see her was because we were on the outside looking in through the window.

Even so, I didn’t see what the big deal was. She was talking on her cell phone.

“What about her?” I asked.

“It looks like she’s
whispering
,” Curtis said.

Needless to say, Curtis has a tendency to jump to conclusions. Still, it did look like the woman in the orange pants was whispering. It was something about how she was hunched over.

“And why is Happy Pants talking on a cell phone
anyway?” Curtis went on. “There’s a phone on the desk right next to her.”

This was also true.

“Maybe they don’t allow personal calls on company phones,” Victor said.

“It looks like she’s
hiding
,” Curtis said.

Curtis was right about this too. She was crouched down behind the office divider, but she kept glancing back toward the main office area.

“Maybe they don’t allow personal calls on company time,” Victor amended.

Suddenly Gladys Kravitz stood up from her desk and walked toward the copy machine.

Happy Pants spotted her coming and punched off her phone, sliding it into her purse. When Gladys Kravitz entered the copy area, Happy Pants fumbled for the stapler. You could almost hear the stilted small talk as she did her best to act casual.

I was wondering where this stapler was!
she seemed to be saying.
I’ve been looking all over for it because, you know, I really need to staple something!

She was
nervous
. But why?

Curtis looked at us as if to say,
Well?

It seemed an impossible coincidence that we’d see something even vaguely suspicious after staking out the bank for ten minutes. I mean, what were the odds?

Still, we spent the rest of the afternoon watching the bank. We didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary, but our attention had been piqued, so I knew we’d be back.

“Dave,” my mom said that night as I passed by the kitchen where she was making a pot of her trademark pizza soup. “I’m really proud of you.”

“Proud?” I said. “For what?”

“For getting that lifeguarding job.” She dropped sliced pepperoni into the tomato sauce.

“Oh,” I said. Suddenly it was all I could do to get out of that kitchen. I mean, my dad had been completely wrong to force me to get a job at age fifteen. But when someone compliments you for something you didn’t do, for something that you have, in fact, totally lied about—well, you can’t help feeling guilty.

“I know you didn’t want a job,” she said. “I know all the plans you and your friends had this summer. But you
did it anyway, and you didn’t even complain.”

“Well,” I said. “What can you do?”

I started to leave again, but my mom stopped me. “It really proves how mature you’ve become.”

Okay
, I thought,
enough already!
Was this really how she had thought of me? Not mature?

“Oh, as long as you’re here,” she said, starting to grate mozzarella cheese for us to sprinkle on top of the soup, “would you mind taking the garbage out?”

This reminded me that even though my parents had stopped my allowance, I was still expected to do all my chores. For free, apparently.

I grabbed the garbage from under the sink. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so guilty about lying anymore.

Curtis, Victor, and I met late the next morning at the coffee shop across from the bank.

“I’m sure what we saw yesterday was nothing,” I said as we locked up our bikes. “We probably shouldn’t get our hopes up.”

“Says you,” Curtis said. “It’s a robbery. A robbery in plain sight.”

We sat at the same table as before. The same waitress took our order.