Authors: Andrew Clements
Lunch Money
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Chapter 5: The Girl Across The Street
Chapter 14: Seventy-Five Percent Of Nothing
Chapter 21: The Question Of Money
Chapter 23: The Best Interests Of The School
For my dad, Bill Clements
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Greg Kenton had heaps of talent. He was good at baseball, and even better at soccer. He had a clear singing voice, and he also played the piano. He was a whiz at sketching and drawing, and he did well at schoolâreading, science, music, writing, art, math, gym, social studiesâthe whole deal. But as good as he was at all these things, Greg's greatest talent had always been money.
Greg had never taken money lessons. He hadn't had a money tutor or gone to money camp. His talent with money was natural. He had always understood money. He knew how to save it, how to keep track of it, how to grow it, and most of all, how to make it.
It takes some kids years and years to figure out that everything is worth something. Not Greg. Sitting in a grocery cart by the door of the supermarket, he had watched with sharp
brown eyes as his mom dropped a small metal disk into a red machine. Then she'd turned the crank, and a handful of M&M's had rattled out into her hand. Greg loved the sweet, crunchy taste, but it wasn't the candy that had captured his imagination. It was that shiny silver coin.
While he was still a skinny preschooler with curly brown hair, Greg had learned to keep his eyes and ears open. One day at breakfast his biggest brother, Ross, griped, “How come I have to make my bed? I'm just going to mess it up again tonight.”
His other big brother, Edward, chimed in, “And cleaning up our rooms every single morning? That's not fair. Besides, they're
our
rooms.”
His mom had answered, “Yes, but your rooms are in
my
house, and I like my house tidy. So if you want to keep getting your allowances every Friday, get back upstairs and fix the mess.”
Ross and Edward had grumbled all the way back to their rooms. Their little brother followed them, and two minutes later Greg had started a housekeeping business: making a bed,
ten cents; putting dirty clothes in the laundry, five cents; putting clean clothes away, two cents; and hanging up used towels, three cents each.
If both his big brothers were complete slobs, and they usually were, Greg earned a little more than two dollars a weekâso it was certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme. But that wasn't what Greg was trying to do. He was perfectly happy to get rich slowly, because being patient is a big part of having money talent. Greg understood that a year has fifty-two weeks. So between the ages of four and six Greg transformed rumpled sheets, used underwear, smelly socks, and soggy towels into beautiful, spendable cashâmore than two hundred dollars. Then his mom shut down his
business, insisting that Ross and Edward had to do their own chores.
When he was still in nursery school, Greg had taken charge of recycling the family's trash. He emptied all the waste baskets at least once a week. At the bins out in the garage, he sorted the newspapers and magazines from the cardboard, the aluminum from the steel, and the
plastic from the
plastic. As a reward for this service, which took him only ten minutes a week, Greg was allowed to keep the deposit refunds on all the cans and bottles. This added up to about four dollars a month in the cool seasons and eight dollars a month during the long, thirsty summer.
As a seven and eight-year-old, Greg had found other ways to make money around the house and yard. He shined his dad's and mom's dress shoes for fifty cents a pair. He scrubbed black heel marks and old wax off the floor tiles in the kitchen for ten cents a square. He dug dandelions out of the lawn at the rate of four for a nickel. And he picked Japanese beetles off the shrubs for a penny a bug.
At first Greg enjoyed simply
having
the
money he made. Cash was fun and interesting all by itself. He liked sorting and stacking the billsâsingles, fives, tens, twenties, and even a few fifties he'd gotten from his grandparents for Christmas. He studied the faces of the famous presidents, and Alexander Hamilton, tooâwho he discovered was never president, only the first secretary of the treasury of the United States. He looked at the engraving on the bills with a magnifying glass, studying the tiny face of Lincoln sitting there on his big square chair inside the Lincoln Memorial on the back of every five-dollar bill.
Greg found the coins just as interesting. He loved making rolls of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, stacks and stacks of them. And the golden Sacagawea dollar coins? He didn't put them into rolls. He had collected twenty-seven of them, which he kept hidden in a sock in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Every once in a while he'd spread them out on his bed and count them again.
Greg also became an amateur coin collector.
It was exciting to come up with a Mercury dime now and then, and he'd found a couple dozen of those gray pennies that had been made out of steel instead of copper during the Second World War. He had found pennies that were worth ten dollars or more, and that can get a kid thinking.
As nice as it was to have the money itself, Greg quickly learned it was also fun to spend some now and then. He would spend it for something special, like his own professional-quality soccer ball, or one of those huge aluminum flashlights with six batteries, that could throw a beam of light all the way across the lake at his grampa's cabin. He bought cool stuff that he really wanted, and mostly when it seemed too long a wait until his birthday or Christmas. He bought collectible baseball cards, and he had also bought a few Beanie Babies and then sold them for a nice profit. Sometimes he bought comic books, but only a few, and only ones that looked like they would become more valuable. Greg loved comics, but he got to read all he wanted for free because his dad collected them.
