Project Sweet Life (18 page)

“Sure,” I said meekly. “What?”

“He said that Dave has been an excellent employee and that he’d definitely be welcome back at the pool next summer.”

Huh
? I thought. Then I realized:
There was someone else named Dave working at the Fircrest Pool!

Which meant I’d just confessed Project Sweet Life to my parents for no reason whatsoever. I’d made it past my dad’s keenly tuned “surveyor’s sense” all summer long—only to get caught by my own mistake. Could I really have been so careless? I wasn’t just a complete disappointment to my parents; I was also a total idiot. And now Curtis, Victor, and I were all going to pay the price.

“It wasn’t fair,” I mumbled.

“What wasn’t fair?” my dad said.

“Your making me get a summer job,” I said, louder.
“I’m only fifteen years old.”
I might as well say what I’m thinking,
I thought.
At this point, how can I make things worse?

“And there’s some kind of unwritten rule that a fifteen-year-old can’t get a summer job?” my dad said.

“He
can
get a summer job,” I said, “but he isn’t
required
to.
That’s
the unwritten rule! Everyone knows that. Your making me get a summer job, that wasn’t fair.”

“So that gives you the right to lie to me?”

“Yes!” I said. But then I said, “No. I mean, okay, it was wrong of me to lie to you. But it was wrong of you too, to make me spend my last summer of freedom doing something I didn’t want to do. You didn’t even listen when I tried to explain!”

My dad looked at my mom. I looked at her too. But she was smart enough not to say anything, to just sit there sipping her cranberry-papaya juice blend.

My dad banged his fist on the table.
“Enough!”
he said to me. “You and your friends have been lying all summer long! And if you think you can somehow blame me for that, you are sadly mistaken. And if you think you’re going to keep spending time with those two juvenile delinquents, you’re mistaken about that too.
You are who
you surround yourself with!
”

So here at last was the anger I’d expected, and the punishment too. Like I said, my dad likes things in black-and-white. But how was I going to live without Curtis and Victor as my friends?

Then I had a realization. Unlike the secret of the Labash coins, it was something so straightforward and obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

“No,” I said to my dad.

“No?”
my dad said, his face reddening again. “No,
what
?”

“No, I’m
not
who I surround myself with,” I said. “I’m not sure that was true even when I was a kid. But I’m not a kid anymore, and it’s definitely not true now. I’m
more
than the people around me. I’m my own person. We all are.”

My dad started to speak, but my mom spoke up at last, cutting him off. “No. Let Dave finish.”

So I finished. “And even if it is true?” I said. “I don’t think I could surround myself with anyone better than Curtis and Victor.”

“Those con artists?” my dad said, his face now valentine
red. “Those
liars
? How could they
possibly
be a good influence?”

So I explained how when we’d been captured by the bank robbers, my two friends had both been so quick to offer their lives for me. I explained how when we’d broken into Mrs. Shelby’s house, it hadn’t been to steal from her but to prove once and for all that we
didn’t
steal. And I explained how once we’d started looking for Lei-Lei Tang’s hidden treasure, we’d all agreed to donate most of it to the Chinese Reconciliation Project. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered a million other examples of how much integrity Victor and, in his own way, even Curtis had: the way Victor had always insisted that everything about Project Sweet Life be perfectly legal or the way Curtis had treated those women at the Evergreen Assisted Living Center.

“You can punish me for what I did this summer,” I said to my dad. “I accept that. But you can’t take away my friendship with Curtis and Victor. Because the person who decides who I surround myself with now is me, not you. And personally, I can’t imagine surrounding myself with anyone better than them.”

When I was finished, my dad just stared at me, eyes bulging. I had struck him speechless again.

Still, I noticed his face wasn’t quite as red as before.

I’d like to say my brilliant speech to my parents meant I didn’t get punished.

I’d like to say that, but it isn’t true. I did get punished. When my dad told Curtis’s and Victor’s dads, they got punished too. Interestingly, we all got the same punishment (clearly, our dads talked).

First, we lost our allowances for good. Given that our net worth now exceeded our parents’, this was only fair.

Next, we all had to put most of our individual shares of the money aside to pay taxes and as investments for college. (But—duh!—we would have done that anyway. We also had to give a pretty big donation to the Reconciliation Project, but again, this was something we were planning on doing anyway.)

Finally, our parents made us agree to do volunteer work every Saturday until Christmas break. We suggested the same organization that Haleigh and Lani had volunteered with, which meant we could go back and see the women at the Evergreen Assisted Living Center.

But my dad never said anything more about my not being friends with Curtis and Victor. And so far, I’ve never again heard him use that expression about how we are who we surround ourselves with.

So did my friends and I find the sweet life? Given the fact that we ended up with more than a million dollars, it’s hard to argue otherwise. But the whole point of Project Sweet Life was to create one last completely work-free
summer
—one last drink at the oasis of freedom before heading off through the harsh desert of a lifetime of employment. In the end, we’d spent the summer working a lot harder than if we’d just gotten jobs to begin with, with a lot more frustration and disappointment too. Just the other day, Curtis, Victor, and I were talking about the irony.

“Think about all we did this summer,” Curtis said. “I mean, it’s kind of incredible.”

It was mid-October, not even two months since Labor Day, and the three of us were sitting in the whirlpool we’d had installed in Curtis’s backyard, right next to the bomb shelter. With some of the money from the coin sale, we’d also replaced most of what we’d sold at
the beginning of the summer. Our new television, for example, was an 82-inch LCD flat-panel television with a high-end audio system. And the same contractor who’d put in the whirlpool had also built us our own bathroom and shower.

“Our summer wasn’t exactly lying around the pool drinking lemonade, that’s for sure,” Victor said.

“Yeah,” Curtis said, “but it was some pretty interesting stuff. In the end, we did all the things we’d planned on doing—scuba diving, bike riding, even spelunking of sorts—plus a whole bunch of other stuff we never would’ve done in a million years.”

Curtis had a point. I hadn’t really thought about the summer quite that way before.

“Sure, we got frustrated or annoyed at times,” he went on. “But didn’t that just push us to be smarter and more creative?”

“I wouldn’t have minded a little less pushing and a little more lemonade,” Victor said.

Curtis and I laughed. But at the same time, I was reminded how the summer had made me feel so much closer to my two friends. In a way, I even felt closer to my parents. Would any of that have happened if we
hadn’t had to work so hard?

The warm water felt good bubbling against my skin. I leaned back in the whirlpool, and I couldn’t help but think more about what Curtis had said. Yes, we’d worked hard over the summer, but we’d had fun, too, and it was all very satisfying in the long run. Why? Well, because we did things entirely on our own terms. And honestly, how could life get any sweeter than that?

Then again, I thought as I soaked in the warm water, there was also definitely something to be said for LCD televisions and backyard whirlpools.

The historical events described in my book concerning the expulsion of the Chinese from the city of Tacoma are fictionalized but are based on historical fact.

In the 1870s, two-thirds of the workers who built the Western Division of America’s Northern Pacific Railroad were Chinese. In the 1880s, after the completion of the rail line, many settled on the West Coast, including in Tacoma, working as waiters, servants, launderers, and garbage collectors. But the economy turned sour. Many people, especially the unions, blamed the Chinese for being willing to work for low wages; in reality, the
Chinese were merely trying to survive, and no American labor union had ever invited them to join their movement and organize for better working conditions.

The anti-Chinese sentiment was particularly nasty in Tacoma, which blamed many of its problems on its Chinese population. Tacoma mayor Jacob Robert Weisbach (himself a recent immigrant, from Germany) referred to the Chinese as a “filthy horde.” Jack Comerford, the editor of the
Tacoma Ledger
, wrote racist diatribes in his newspaper. Local unions held angry meetings. The few dissenters who urged tolerance were ignored.

In 1885, the city gave its Chinese residents a deadline: Leave town by November third. One Chinese man, Goon Gau, wired the territorial governor for help and protection, saying he feared the angry mob. He was ignored.

Some Chinese had left town early, but more than half, about two hundred people, remained behind on November third. A crowd of white people, including the mayor and city officials, descended on the part of town where the Chinese lived. They pulled guns, broke doors and windows, and rounded up all the residents, marching them to the rail station and forcing them on the morning train to Portland, Oregon. Later, the mob
burned the houses and pushed the wreckage into the water of Commencement Bay. Most of the Chinese lost everything and never returned to Tacoma. Some of the perpetrators were indicted, but the judge let them free on bail; Tacoma celebrated with a parade. Later, all charges against them were dropped. The “Tacoma Method” for dealing with immigrants became famous and was even considered by other cities.

To this day, unlike its neighbors to the north and south, Tacoma has no Chinatown.

In 1993, the Tacoma City Council finally passed a resolution apologizing for the actions of the city and its leaders. A citizens’ committee was created, which led to the creation of a Chinese Reconciliation Project. The project includes a commemorative park not far from the site of Tacoma’s original Chinese settlement.

If the sweet life really is, in part, about the people you surround yourself with, my life is sweet indeed. The important people in my life who contributed to this book include Michael Jensen, my partner since 1992; Ruth Katcher, my editor; Jennifer DeChiara, my agent; Elyse Marshall, Dina Sherman, Patty Rosati, Lillie Walsh, and all the other terrific folks at HarperCollins; and Tom Baer, Tim Cathersal, John Dempsey, Steve Gernon, and Scott Jarmon, with whom I shared plenty of teenage adventures of my own, some of which were just as crazy
as the ones described here (and some of which
were
the ones described here!).

Special thanks to Anjali Banerjee for thoughtful feedback; to Dave Meconi and Laura Hanan for generously granting me access to their downtown Tacoma basements; and to Bill Middlebrook, who shared with me the details of his underwater exploration of the wreckage of Tacoma’s original Chinese settlement.

Finally, thanks to the city of Tacoma, my hometown. As a boy, you disappointed me more times than I can count. But I kept believing in you, even before you believed in yourself. And what do you know? After all these years, you’re finally starting to get it right.