Scam (4 page)

I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t help thinking about where I was and what came next. How was I going to make it through the summer? What would it be like to go back to school? How long might I have to stay here in this group home? Even worse, where would I would go after that? I felt like I simply wasn’t ready to deal with anything.

So I tried to stop thinking about it all. And then an image of Lindsey floated into my head. The old me would have been scared of a girl like that. A bad girl. A tease. A liar and a scammer. Who knew what else? But I had to admit I looked forward to seeing her the next day. Saturday. And she’d asked me to dress up. What was that about? Was this some kind of real date?

Noah slept quietly for the rest of the night. In the morning, Darren walked the halls and announced, “Rise and shine, campers. You don’t want to miss this one. This is the first day of the rest of your life.” I could see that Mr. Sunshine could get on your nerves after a while. But as I stumbled into the kitchen and saw him scrambling eggs and frying bacon, I decided I could forgive him for his annoying cheerfulness, and apparently the others did too. We all ate like we hadn’t seen any food in a month. Even Noah, who seemed to have survived his nightmares.

Darren had a little garden in the backyard, but he was the only one who worked on it that morning. I wasn’t in the mood for any more of his advice, so I stayed clear of him. When the afternoon rolled around, I tried on Noah’s pants and shirt and shoes. The shoes were a bit tight, but the rest
seemed to fit. I looked in the mirror and Noah watched as I tried to tie the tie but failed miserably. I didn’t think I had ever worn a tie. Finally, Noah helped me out. “Where are you going, anyway?”

“I don’t really know.”

“But there’s a girl involved, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky you,” he said, offering me some kind of gel to put in my hair.

“Yeah, lucky me.”

I met up with Lindsey as planned, in the coffee shop of the new downtown library. She saw me walking toward her and stood up. She had on a dress and makeup and carried a large, expensive-looking handbag. She looked beautiful. I suddenly felt nervous and not at all like myself in my new look.

“You clean up real nice,” she said in a fake Southern accent.

“So do you,” I said. As we stood there sizing each other up, I noticed that some adults were looking at us and smiling. The perfect young couple. Ha.

“Now what?” I asked.

Lindsey checked her watch. “At two o’clock we’re going to go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“To a wedding,” she said, giving me a mysterious smile. “Well, we’ll go to the wedding at the church, and then we won’t look out of place when we get to the wedding party.”

“Friends of yours?”

“Not really.”

“What’s this all about?”

“What, you don’t like weddings?”

“I’ve never been to one.”

“You have a long list of things you’ve never done?” she asked and gave me a funny look.

That was just like Lindsey, to put it that way. It made me feel even more embarrassed.

So for the second time in less than a week, the second time in my life, I found myself sitting in a church. With a pretty girl. The service was like something out of a movie. People smiling, crying, a young couple walking down an aisle strewn with rose petals. The whole thing had nothing to do with the world I had come from. It was like I had landed on another planet.

When it was over, we followed the other people outside. “And now for the good part,” Lindsey said. As the couple was being photographed, we walked with the others to a nearby church hall. Inside, people milled around and chatted with each other. Lindsey held my arm and walked me into the center of the room. Three separate bars were set up, and people were getting drinks.
Lindsey walked over to the closest one and asked for two glasses of wine. The man behind the bar didn’t question her, but he did give me a wink as he handed her the glasses.

“Isn’t this great?” she said, giving me one of the glasses and taking a sip.

“Another first,” I said as I sipped the wine. I’d had beer before and even sneaked some whiskey once, but I’d never had wine. Lindsey drained her glass quickly, and, like a fool, I did the same. She went back for seconds.

Lindsey led me on a tour around the hall and stopped in front of a table piled with gifts and envelopes for the newlyweds. “Must be nice,” she said, pointing at the wedding booty.

Suddenly it struck me as very odd that we were part of this scene. “What are we doing here anyway?” I asked.

She didn’t answer my question. “Aren’t you having fun?”

I could feel the wine doing funny things to my head. “I guess so.”

“Just relax and enjoy the party.”

We wandered around the room some more. I followed Lindsey’s lead, nodding and smiling at the people we encountered. No one asked us who we were or why we were here.

And then the bride and groom entered the hall. All eyes were on them. That’s when Lindsey grabbed me by my sleeve and led me back toward that table with the gifts. As everyone oohed and aahed at the wedding couple, Lindsey began picking up envelopes from the gift table and stashing them in her oversized purse.

I couldn’t believe it. “What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Be quiet,” she hissed as she grabbed another handful of envelopes and started walking casually to the door. Everyone was still making a fuss over the newly
married couple, who looked like they had just stepped out of a magazine.

As I followed Lindsey out into the sunlight, I was both shocked and angry. “That was a truly rotten thing to do.”

“Just shut up and keep walking.”

I thought about getting the hell away from her. I felt like I had been tricked into being part of this, her worst scam yet. “You’ve done this before?” I asked, the anger rising further in me.

“No. First time,” she said nonchalantly.

“Why?”

She stopped in her tracks. “Get over it,” she said. “This is what I do. It’s my life, so don’t go judging me. It’s who I am. Take it or leave it.”

We walked for ten minutes in complete silence. Lindsey stopped and sat down on a park bench by a wire trashcan. I sat down beside her. At first I just looked away. But then I turned toward her. I watched as she
opened the first envelope, found a check inside and threw it and the card in the trashcan. The same thing happened with two more envelopes. Then she opened the next envelope and found two fifty-dollar bills. “Bingo,” she said. “At least some people still give cash. Here. Open a couple of these.”

She tossed three envelopes in my lap, but I just stared at them.

“Go on. Do it.”

It’s hard to explain why I didn’t bail on her right then. I was really pissed off. I didn’t want any part of this. But then I remembered that this was the girl who had sat beside me through my mother’s funeral. I opened my first envelope and read the inscription inside:

May your lives be filled with love and happiness.

Love,

Brett and Sybil

And there was a hundred-dollar bill. Lindsey looked over, gave me a big goofy smile, took the hundred and stashed it in my shirt pocket and then threw the card into the trashcan. I handed the other envelopes back to her, tilted my head back and closed my eyes.

Lindsey continued on like a kid on Christmas morning. When she had opened all the stolen envelopes, she announced, “Five hundred dollars. Not bad. Too bad we can’t use those checks.” “Now what?” I asked, feeling totally defeated.

Lindsey tucked another $150 in my shirt pocket. “Even split,” she said. “Enough fun for today. This week we go on a spending spree though. I gotta go now.” She stood up, leaned over me and kissed me full on the lips. “Thanks for being such a good sidekick.” And she walked away.

Chapter Ten

I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t believe what I had allowed Lindsey to get me into. I’d never stolen anything in my life. Even my mother, hooked on drugs, hadn’t stolen. She’d sometimes spent welfare money on street drugs and we didn’t have enough to eat, but she hadn’t stolen.

Noah couldn’t sleep either. I could tell by his breathing. So there we were, lying on beds on either side of the room, wide awake.

“Noah,” I asked. “Can I run something past you?”

“Sure.” He sat up and turned on a lamp.

So I told him about my day.

“Man,” he said. “You didn’t strike me as the criminal type.”

“That’s just it. I’m not. It was her idea.”

“But you went along.”

“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

“But if you got caught…”

“I know. So what do you think?”

“You want my opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he began slowly. “Is she cute? The girl?”

“Yeah. She’s hot.”

“How come she chose you?”

I explained how we met.

“That is one crazy chick,” Noah said. “She sounds really…interesting.”

“Interesting but dangerous.”

His eyes were wide now. “What was it you wanted my advice about?”

“I’m not sure I want any more grief in my life than I already have. Should I see her again or just walk away from it?”

Noah looked at me like I had two heads. “Josh, are you out of your mind? If I had a girl like that, I’d rob a bank if she asked me to. What is there to think about?”

I nodded. “Okay. Thanks. Would you mind not mentioning this to anyone else?”

“Secret’s safe with me. But I want to hear what happens in the next chapter.”

And that was pretty much the end of the conversation. He turned off the light. I eventually drifted off to sleep.

The next day Darren drove us out of town to a trail in a forest. We hiked for two hours. It had been a long, long time since I’d been in the woods, and it felt good. Kyle complained a lot until Connor told him to shut up and threatened to hit him.

“Back off, Connor,” Darren said.

“Fat kids don’t belong on hikes,” Connor said. “Fat kids don’t belong anywhere.”

Kyle looked humiliated, but Brian came to his defense. “Connor, you have your head so far up your ass, how do you know anything about who belongs where?”

Strangely, Darren didn’t say anything, and that seemed to be the end of it. The trail was steep, and I was feeling it in the backs of my calves. The pain felt good. Really good. Noah was right beside me, and we were breathing hard. But not as hard as Kyle. When Connor, Brian and
Darren rounded a big rock and were out of sight, we both gave Kyle a hand, helping him up the incline. We were all sweating at that point. That felt good too.

When we stopped for a break on a high ledge overlooking a valley with a lake at the bottom, Darren handed around sandwiches. I was hungry, and they tasted great. I had a flashback to when I was little, and how my mom used to make me liverwurst sandwiches. It was weird, because in the flashback my mom was a good mom. She would wake me up, make me breakfast and help me get ready for school. It was a long time ago, though, and I couldn’t tell if it was a real memory or just something I imagined.

When I finished my sandwich, I walked away from the others to take a pee over the ledge. I took out my cell phone and thought about calling Lindsey but discovered there was no signal.

The hike back down was almost as difficult as going up the hill had been. Noah and I hung back and kept an eye on Kyle. Darren knew what we were doing and gave us a thumbs-up but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t giving any lectures today, but he knew what he was doing. The hike, I think, was good for all of us. It was a challenge, and we did it as a group. As a family, Darren might have said. A weird little family.

That night the house was quiet. I had plugged my cell phone in and left it on. It rang at about two in the morning. It was Lindsey.

“Where were you today?” she asked.

“We went for a hike. In the woods. Sorry I didn’t call.”

“Are you mad at me?”

I didn’t quite know what I was feeling about her, but I remembered
what Noah had said. “No,” I said. “How can I be mad at you?”

“Can we do something tomorrow?”

“I guess. What did you have in mind?” I was worried about what she might have in mind. What kind of scam would she come up with next?

“Nothing, really. Let’s just hang out together. Do something…normal. Maybe go to the park.”

“The park sounds good.”

“When I see you, I’m going to give you a really big hug.”

I fell back asleep, dreaming of Lindsey. Dreaming of Lindsey and me, hand in hand like some kind of dream couple.

Lindsey’s idea of normal was finding a quiet spot near the duck pond at Sullivan’s Cove and smoking some weed. I didn’t want to, so I pretended to smoke but didn’t inhale (as the politicians say). Lindsey got kind of
dreamy-eyed and laughed a lot and kept commenting on how cute the ducks were.

I asked her about her family and growing up, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Then I asked her how she’d gotten into this scamming thing, and she grew much more animated.

“Well, I always liked to pretend things. Just kid stuff. But when I was about twelve, I was really bored. I was walking home from school one day. I stopped this lady and asked if I could use her cell phone to call home. She said yes. I made a fake call home and pretended I only got message.
Mom
, I said,
it’s me. I lost my wallet and my phone and don’t have any money to catch the bus home. I don’t know what to do
. And then I hung up. The lady looked at me and asked how much I needed. I told her that five dollars should do it. She handed me the five, and I started to
shake and look worried. She asked me what was wrong. I said I wasn’t sure I’d make my bus connection on time and that I might get stuck downtown. I said I was scared to be there on my own. She ended up giving me twenty dollars and told me to take a taxi. She tried to stop one for me, but I said I’d be okay.”

“That was the beginning?”

“Yep. I started coming up with inventive strategies after that.”

“Like what?”

“Boy, you want to know all the tricks of the trade.”