Project Sweet Life (5 page)

I have to tell Curtis and Victor what I know!
I thought. But to tell the truth, I also still desperately had to pee.
Do I have time to use the bathroom first?
I wondered.

No. This was too important to wait.

But just as I turned and started back toward our table, the waitress stepped out of the hallway into the dining room.

She looked over at me, then back at the hallway behind me and at the swinging door. I could see the wheels turning in her head. My only hope was to convince her that I’d been in the bathroom the whole time—that I hadn’t heard anything that she and her coconspirators had been saying. I knew I could do it; I just had to be completely cool, absolutely unruffled. She thought I was only fourteen, so I was sure she wouldn’t expect me to be able to lie convincingly.

“I was in the bathroom!” I said to the waitress, almost a shout. “I’ve been back there the whole time! I couldn’t hear anything back there! Thanks for letting me use your bathroom!”

Okay, so even
I
wasn’t dumb enough to think that she’d believe me.

I didn’t wait for a response. I just stepped around the waitress and hurried back to the table. What was she going to do,
tackle
me?

“We have to go!” I said to Curtis and Victor. “
Now!
”

But I hadn’t counted on the fact that the waitress might follow me. “What’s the rush?” she said behind me, sweetly, her hand on my shoulder. “How about a piece of pie? You guys have been such regular customers, I’ll make it on the house.”

I stiffened. Curtis and Victor stared, bug-eyed, at me and the waitress. They could tell that something was up, but they had no idea what.

“Um, no, thanks,” I said to the waitress. “We have to go to, uh, our jobs.”

“We do?” Victor said. “What jobs?”

“Our
jobs
,” I emphasized. “You know? Our
summer jobs
. My lifeguarding job? Your job at KFC?”

“Ahhh!” Curtis said, clueing in first. “Our
jobs
! Yeah, he’s right. We have to go. We’re already late!”

“Oh, honey, I insist,” the waitress said. Unfortunately, she was holding a whole pie in one hand. She must have
grabbed it from the case on her way to our table.

“Okay!” I said. “We’ll wait here while you go get plates!”

“Just relax, sweetie,” the waitress said, pulling up a chair. “I’ll have Jerome bring us some.” She looked right at me and talked to me like I was a puppy. “Sit.”

I sat.

She began calmly slicing up the pie. “I think we have a problem.”

“You’re right,” I said. “What’s pie without ice cream? We’ll wait while you go get some!”

She smiled—white teeth stark against her unnaturally tan skin. “That’s not the problem. The problem is I think someone heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear.”

“
You!
” Curtis cried. “You’re the bank robbers!”

“Holy Saint Lysol, Our Lady of Kitchen Grease!” Victor said.

I wasn’t thrilled that Curtis and Victor had spilled the beans like that, but at least maybe the little old lady—the only other person in the restaurant—would hear them. She was done with her sandwich now and was standing by the cash register with her check. But she didn’t seem
to have heard my friends’ outbursts. She just kept calmly digging through her carpet bag of a purse for money to pay her bill.

“Not another
word
,” the waitress said to us under her breath. “Jerome, honey?” she called back into the kitchen. “Would you get a check? I also need some pie plates and forks.”

A moment later, the skinny, twitchy guy appeared from the kitchen. There was flour on his apron, and I wondered,
Could it be that the pie is actually homemade?
I thought he might be the waitress’s son; they had the same eyes.

At the cash register, Jerome took the old lady’s money. As she strolled toward the door, I frantically tried to catch her eye, but she ignored me. I wasn’t surprised. We were teenagers. To most adults, we were completely invisible anyway.

“So,” the waitress said when the old lady was gone. “What are we going to do about the three of you?”

“Let us go?” Victor suggested.

The waitress laughed. She’d served us all a slice of pie, but she was the only one who was eating. The
pie was cherry, and the red juice stained her otherwise blinding teeth.

“We won’t tell!” Curtis said. “We won’t say a word to anyone.”

I thought to myself,
If there was ever a time for Curtis to be a good liar, let it be now!

The waitress looked over at Jerome. “What do you think?”

“I think,” Jerome said as he bolted the front doors of the coffee shop and turned the closed sign face out, “that we have a very serious problem.”

He wasn’t twitching anymore.

It was only after they’d led us into the kitchen that I remembered from television how you’re never supposed to go where criminals tell you to go, especially if it’s somewhere hidden from sight.

“Where’s Eddy?” said the waitress to Jerome.

“Gone,” Jerome said. “He went to get us some decent food.”

I looked around the kitchen. Any other time, it would have looked like an ordinary, harmless restaurant kitchen—except for the binoculars. But now, having been
kidnapped by a cabal of bank robbers, I found it had a shockingly sinister appearance. For example, a magnetic bar along the wall held a row of grimy knives, including a thick-handled meat cleaver. Meanwhile, the grill sizzled, and the deep-fat fryer churned and hissed menacingly. And don’t get me started on the
blender
.

Curtis was obviously seeing the same disquieting items that I was. But unlike me, he had a plan. Suddenly he reached forward and snatched something off the metal island in the middle of the kitchen.

“Defend yourself!” he said to Victor and me.

Prodded into action, we reached forward and grabbed the first objects we touched. When I looked down, I saw I was holding a plastic colander.

I looked over at Curtis and Victor; Curtis was wielding a metal flour sifter, and Victor brandished a plastic turkey baster.

Okay, this was too funny; in a kitchen full of knives and forks and mallets, we’d grabbed
these
? Somehow it just figured.

The waitress found this hilarious too. “Oh, no, they’re going to
sift
us!” she said, laughing. “Would you boys
relax
? We’re not going to kill you. Jerome and I
obviously can’t stay here. But we can’t have you calling the cops on us either. So we’ll be taking one of you with us. As long as the other two of you don’t say a word to anyone for, say, four hours, he’ll be just fine.”

I immediately knew what television would say about a situation like this: Whichever one of us went with them was dead. After four hours in the car with them, he’d know too much; they’d have to kill him.

The waitress looked right at us and smiled. She still had cherry pie staining her white teeth.

“Well?” she said. “Which of you is going to come with us?”

How could anyone ask someone to make a decision like that? It was
crazy
, having to decide between your own safety and that of your two best friends.

Which is why I was so touched when all three of us said, at exactly the same time, “Take me.”

Do I have great friends or what? I couldn’t remember ever feeling closer to them. I was also very glad I’d spoken up; I could only imagine how embarrassing it would’ve been if I’d been the only one who hadn’t.

A distant siren cut through the sound of rush-hour traffic outside the restaurant.

“What’s that?” Jerome said.

“Nothing,” the waitress said. “Just a passing police car.”

“But it sounds like it’s getting
closer
!” Jerome said.

It
did
sound like that siren was getting closer. Might I have been wrong about the old lady with the BLT? Could she have called the police after all?

“It’s nothing!” the waitress said. “Let’s just—”

“
Run!
” Curtis said to Victor and me. Taking advantage of the fact that the waitress and Jerome were distracted, he threw the sifter full of flour right at their faces. A huge white cloud exploded around them.

Victor, meanwhile, jabbed the turkey baster into the deep-fat frier, sucked up some of the boiling oil, and squirted it at the two of them.

“
OWWW!
” said Jerome from inside the billowing cloud of flour.

Wow, maybe the things we’d grabbed weren’t completely worthless after all!

I looked down at my plastic colander.

Nope. Still worthless.

But I could still run. I threw the colander at the cook and the waitress, then lunged for the back door with
Curtis and Victor right behind me.

Once outside, Victor said, “Where do we go?”

“This way!” I said, running down the back alley toward a nearby vacant lot.

“Good idea!” Curtis said as we ran. “We can hide in the woods!”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was,
Who cares about hiding in the woods? I just want a place where I can finally pee!

Once we were sure the coast was clear, we returned to the scene of the crime. Police cars jammed the parking lot, their lights throbbing red and blue.

“Look,” Victor said, pointing to the back of one of the police cars. The waitress and Jerome, handcuffed and downcast, slumped against the backseat.

“Ha!” Curtis said. “They caught ’em!”

A cluster of police officers surrounded the old lady from the restaurant.

“It
was
her!” I said. “She was pretending she didn’t hear what was going on, but she really did!”

“This means, of course, that we’ll have to split the
reward money,” Victor said.

“Four ways!” Curtis said. “That’s still seventy-five thousand dollars!”

We practically threw ourselves at the cops and the lady.

“Can I help you boys?” one of the officers said, stopping us.

“It’s okay!” Curtis said. “We’re with her!”

The police all turned to the little old lady.

She took a good long look at us. Then her face wrinkled. “Yes?” she said innocently, a little bit frail.

“It’s us!” Curtis said brightly. “From the restaurant? You overheard us talking to the bank robbers?”

“I did?” she said, sounding confused, with just a touch of sadness. “That’s funny. I thought I was alone in that restaurant.”

Curtis, Victor, and I didn’t quite know what to say to that.

“It’s
us
,” Curtis repeated. “We’re the ones who solved the bank robbery!”

“Oh?” Her eyes dimmed. Now she sounded sad
and
tired. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” She swooned a little, leaning on one of the police officers for support.

“Okay, boys,” the police officer said. “Move along.”

“But—
wait
!” Curtis said. “What about our reward?”

“Reward?” we heard the old woman say, even as the police were leading us away. “I didn’t know anything about a
reward
.”

Seventy-six-year-old woman solves bank robberies over dinner
, read the headline in the newspaper the next day. Victor had brought it with him to the bomb shelter.

“‘Mildred Shelby has never been one to eavesdrop on other people,’” he read in a shell-shocked monotone. “‘But when the University Place resident overheard the proprietors of the Sunset Grill on Bridgeport Avenue talking about their involvement in a series of unsolved robberies of the Capitol American Bank branch just across the street, Shelby felt she had no choice but to go to the police.’”

“I don’t believe it,” Curtis said. “She totally lied!”

“Keep reading,” I said.

“‘It was a good thing she did,’” Victor read on. “‘The proprietors of that coffee shop, Rene Blunt, forty-three,
and her son, Jerome Blunt, twenty-five, were operating the business under aliases, and police say they were running it solely to observe the proceedings at the bank across the street. The pair has now been arrested in connection with Capitol American’s string of unsolved robberies.’”

“Stop!” Curtis said. “I can’t bear it! Just tell me if we’re ever mentioned at all.”

Victor read the rest of the article to himself.

“Not a word,” he said at last.

“I can’t believe it!” Curtis said. “
We
solve the bank robberies, and
she
gets the credit—and the reward! It’s an outright robbery!”

There were two upsides to everything that had happened. First, there was the fact that none of us had been killed by the waitress and the cook. This was kind of a big deal. Second, there was the fact that we had learned just how far we would go for one another—that when given a chance to sacrifice it all, we would do it.

You might think that would have been enough to make us happy, to get us over the sting of losing that hundred-thousand-dollar reward.

You might think that. But it wasn’t.

That thing with the bank never happened.

It was one thing to make almost six thousand dollars by selling your most prized possessions in a garage sale and then lose it all in a fluke accident at the very end of the day. It was something else entirely to earn a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for solving the mystery of a bank robbery, only to then have the money stolen by a conniving old biddy with a complete lack of conscience and a taste for bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.

It was just too horrible to contemplate. So we didn’t
contemplate it. For the rest of the week, not one mention of the bank was made. We all just pretended it had never happened.

But before long, we had other problems. The next Monday, Victor shuffled into the bomb shelter and said, “My family wants to stop by where I work. My mom wants to meet the manager, and my little brother wants to see the refrigerator full of chicken.”

Curtis and I looked up from where we’d been sitting on the bare floor playing Boggle with a cracked board we’d fished out of the neighbors’ trash.

“Piece-o-cake!” Curtis said. “Tell them your boss strongly discourages family visitors. Say that if anyone stops by, you’ll get in big, big trouble.”

“I did!” Victor said. “But my mom at least wants a phone number. She wants to be able to contact me at work.” We’d explained our missing cell phones, gone since our disaster of a garage sale, by telling our parents we’d accidentally dropped them into water. Our parents had all punished our “irresponsibility” by pointedly not replacing them, which was just as well, since we wouldn’t have been able to afford the plans for them
without our allowances, anyway.

“Just tell her you can’t take personal calls at work,” Curtis said.

“I
did
!” Victor said. “She said that was ridiculous—that she needed a phone number in case of emergencies. If I don’t give her one, she’ll just look it up. Saint Verizon, we’re screwed!”

“No, we’re not,” Curtis said. “Just set up one of those cheap voicemail services and give them
that
phone number.”

“With what money?”

“Okay, okay!” Curtis said. “
I’ll
set up a voicemail service. One for each of us. I’ll use my birthday money. I think they’re about ten dollars each.”

“By the way,” Victor said, somewhat mollified, “I also have an idea for Project Sweet Life.”

We looked at him.

“Guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar,” he said.

This was a new one. “Tell me more,” I said.

“I was over at the mall,” Victor went on. “They’re doing this big promotion where you have to guess the number of jelly beans in a big glass jar. Whoever guesses
closest to the actual number wins ten thousand dollars.”

That last part sure got Curtis’s attention. “That’s
it
!” he said, leaping to his feet. “Let’s get to the mall!”

“Hold on, Eager Edgar,” I said. “Every person in town is going to try to guess the beans in that jar. What makes you think we’ll have any shot at the right answer?”

“Well, sure,” Curtis said. “With an attitude like
that
.”

I rolled my eyes. “Attitude doesn’t have anything to do with it. Either you guess right or you don’t. But it’s still just a guess.”

“Not necessarily,” Victor said quietly.

Curtis and I looked at him again.

“What?” I said.

“Ours won’t be a guess,” Victor said. “We’ll
know
the answer.”

But when we asked him to elaborate, he just smiled a mysterious little smile and said he’d tell us more when we got to the mall.

The place was mobbed. It was now the third week in July, and what were people doing with their summer? Gathering together to enjoy the weather and the company of friends and family? Reflecting on the
meaning of the Fourth of July earlier that month?

Nah, they were shopping like rabid zombies at the dawn of the dead. They were fumbling through the clothes racks at Macy’s, slurping down overpriced smoothies from Yogurtland, and lurching off with glassware and towering vases from Planet Warehouse.

We found the jelly-bean display under a big glass cube in the main entryway to the mall. The jar itself was at least four feet tall, corked and completely filled with colored jelly beans. It rested on a small podium, and a collection of decorative moneybags—small white sacks marked with dollar signs—had been piled around the base. To one side was a small treasure chest spilling forth fake gold coins, and on the other side was a stack of fake gold bars. Behind it all was a cardboard rainbow arcing down into a pot of more gold.

As displays go, it was overkill—too much stuff packed too closely together. But it had definitely attracted a crowd. People were staring in at the jar with eyes squinted and fingers pointed, whispering to themselves, trying to count the thousands of jelly beans. Others were busy scratching their guesses on little slips of paper, then stuffing them into the big box covered
with dollar-bill wrapping paper.

Curtis went over to read the contest rules, which were posted on a stand near the display.

“What did you mean when you said that we wouldn’t be guessing?” I asked Victor.

“We won’t be,” he said. “We’ll
know
the right number of jelly beans. I think so, anyway.”

“How?” I said.

“It’s really a very simple math equation.”

Curtis returned. “Bad news,” he said. “Since we’re under eighteen, we’ll need our parents’ permission to collect the money.”

“I bet if we ask Dave’s Uncle Brad, he’ll let us use his name,” Victor said.

“Only one guess per household,” Curtis went on.

“We’ll only
need
one guess,” Victor said.

“They’re accepting entries up until Wednesday night and announcing the winner on Saturday morning,” Curtis said.

“Oh, we’ll definitely know by then,” Victor said. He was growing more confident by the minute.

“How?”
I said. “You say we won’t be guessing, that it’s just a simple math equation. But how exactly are we
going to
know
the right number of jelly beans?”

Victor leaned in close to Curtis and me. “It’s a question of volume. We just calculate the capacity of the jar, then divide it by the space occupied by a single jelly bean.”

“But we
can’t
measure the jar,” I pointed out. “It’s behind glass.”

“Correct,” Victor said. “But we
can
measure a single jelly bean. We can buy some right here at the mall, at the candy shop. With that jelly bean as a reference point, I can then write a simple computer program that will calculate the volume of the entire jar, which I’ll then divide by the size of the jelly bean. That should tell us almost exactly how many jelly beans are inside the jar. We just need to take a picture of the jar.”

“Ah,” I said. “But you sold your digital camera in our garage sale two weeks ago, right?”

“Right,” he said. But then he smiled again. “Which is why I borrowed my mom’s.” He patted a lump in his pocket. “Cover me.”

As we were leaving, we ran into two girls we knew from school, Lani Taito and Haleigh Gilder. Victor has
had a thing for Lani since about the sixth grade; he can barely get a word out whenever she’s around. It’s pretty clear she has a crush on him too, because she whispers around him despite the fact that she’s not a particularly shy person. But even though they are both totally hot for each other, neither one of them has ever done anything about it. They’ll go on like this, I am certain, until their senior year, when they’ll finally get together the night of the graduation party. Then they’ll stay up till morning, talking about how stupid it was that it took them so long to get together.

Curtis, meanwhile, has his own weird relationship with Haleigh. For one thing, he always kicks into slacker mode around her, even though he usually has energy to burn. They tend to insult each other too, in a way that you just know means they like each other. Truthfully, I’m not sure what the exact history is between the two of them—if they’ve ever gotten together—because Curtis is not one to talk about his love life.

“Hey, Victor,” Lani whispered.

Victor made an inaudible gurgle.

“Boy, they’ll let anyone in the mall these days, won’t they?” Curtis said, suddenly slouching.

“So says the himbo in the stained T-shirt,” Haleigh responded. “What’d you do, finger-paint in that thing?”

“Look who’s talking,” Curtis said. “Uh…” But he couldn’t think of another insult. Haleigh is the only person I’ve ever known who can out-talk Curtis.

This was crazy. We didn’t have time for all this romantic subtext—we had jelly beans to count. And let’s face it, there was still the very real danger of running into one of our family members at the mall; Curtis’s older sister practically
lived
there. (It’s also possible I was jealous. Victor had his whole awkward thing with Lani, and Curtis had his thing with Haleigh. But I had nothing.)

Which was why I was more than happy to stop this little lovefest before it even got started.

“Hey, Haleigh. Hey, Lani,” I said, pulling Curtis and Victor away. “Nice to see you, but we were just on our way to do something really important.”

They all looked at me with their mouths wide open, like they’d been just about to say something—all except poor Victor, who still couldn’t get a single word out in front of Lani.

“Thirty-seven thousand, five hundred seventy-two,” Victor announced.

“That’s the number of jelly beans?” I said.

“No,” Victor said. “It’s the number of stars visible from North America with the naked eye. Yes, it’s the number of jelly beans!”

It was the following day, Tuesday, and Victor had finally written and run his computer program. So after checking with my Uncle Brad that we could use his name, we biked our way back to the mall to drop off our answer.

“You really think that’s the
exact
answer?” I said after we’d slipped it into the box.

“Well, maybe not down to the last jelly bean,” Victor said. “But I’m sure we’re within fifty jelly beans. And if we’re that close, I’m sure we’ll win. The odds that anyone would be any closer than that by sheer chance are astronomical.”

“I can’t believe you don’t have a sunburn,” my dad said to me that night over dinner. “All that time you’re spending out in the sun?”

“Sunblock,” I said, digging into my mom’s chicken-Tater Tot casserole. “I’m using it religiously.”

“Thatta boy!” my dad said. “Good for you. Don’t want to take any chances with that.”

Questions from my parents about my “job” were still making me uneasy. But Curtis had been right that fooling our dads hadn’t been that hard after all. So much for my dad’s surveyor’s sense. True, we’d all had to write up regular “schedules” and keep to them more or less, but the truth was that since most people are so busy with their own lives, they don’t really pay much attention to the lives of those around them. And while it had taken some pleading, even Victor had finally gotten his mom to agree not to stop by the KFC. Now if the money from the jelly-bean contest came through on Saturday as expected, all this lying would be totally worth it.

Then my dad said, “I should stop by for a swim.”

I choked on a Tater Tot.

“What?” I said, and took a swig of milk.

“Your pool,” he said. “I should stop by for a swim. I think I will. I want to meet your boss and your coworkers. After all, you are who you surround yourself with.”

You are who you surround yourself with
. If it wasn’t clear by now, my dad took this theory of his very seriously. He once even dumped one of his oldest friends when my dad found out he was having an affair.

“Um, you can’t come to the pool,” I said to my dad. Technically, Fircrest was a municipal pool, not a private club, so there was no reason why he couldn’t come. But I quickly told him what Curtis had told Victor to tell his family, about how our bosses supposedly strongly discouraged family visitors.

My dad dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “All right, I won’t tell anyone who I am. But I still want to
see
them. When is your next evening shift?”

“Uh,” I said, “tomorrow.” I didn’t really work tomorrow night, of course, but according to my fake schedule I did.

“Then I’ll see you then.”

“But—” Was there anything I could possibly say to keep him from coming to the pool? Not if I wanted to keep his surveyor’s sense from tingling.

“What?” my dad said.

“Nothing,” I said, wearing my bravest face. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“This is not a problem,” Curtis said to me later that night. I’d told him and Victor what my dad had said.

“How is this
not
a problem?” I said, outraged. “Tomorrow night my dad is going to go for a swim in order to see me working at my summer job as a lifeguard! Only I’m
not
a lifeguard, so he
won’t
see me! It’ll totally spill the beans!”

“No, it won’t,” Curtis said.

“What?”

“Your dad
will
see you. Working as a lifeguard, I mean.”

“
How?
” I demanded.

“I won’t know that,” Curtis said, “until we go check out the pool where you supposedly work.”

We rode our bikes to the Fircrest Pool, which was still open by the time we got there. When we peeked through the green plastic privacy weave in the chain-link fence, we saw a medium-size pool shaped like an
L
. There were two lifeguards on duty, both wearing red shorts and white T-shirts that read
LIFEGUARD
. One was lounging in the tall lifeguard’s chair at the crook in the
L
, and the other was
slowly walking back and forth along the other side of the pool. The building with the office and the locker rooms was directly opposite us.