Stealing the Game Page 4

  I laughed. “That’s Mine?”

  “Okay, man, you’re the artist. I don’t want to interfere with creative genius.” He flopped back on my bed and let out a long sigh. “Man, I am beat. Getting yelled at is exhausting. Nice to know Dad hasn’t lost any volume in his old age.”

  I didn’t say anything. Something didn’t feel right about this whole situation. Not about him dropping out. Or coming home. Or that guy he was with in the park who threw his Icee on him.

  “What really happened, Jax?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why’d you drop out of law school?”

  “I told you, Chris, I didn’t drop out. I just took a leave of absence. That’s a real thing. I’ve got official paperwork to prove it.”

  I made a face. “You’ve never failed at anything before. Not even close. I can’t believe this was too hard for you.”

  He closed his eyes and crossed his hands over his chest so that he looked like a corpse. “Here lies the body of Jackson Peter Richards. He finally failed at something and it killed him.”

  “Stop acting like a jerk,” I said, feeling the anger boiling up in me. “I’m not Mom or Dad.”

  He opened his eyes and sat up. He looked at me for a minute, then smiled sadly. “It’s not easy being the Golden Boy, Chris. Everybody expects you to win. Always.” He shook his head, as if trying to shake the memory out of his mind. “This time I didn’t win. I don’t know why. The courses were hard, but not that hard. The students were competitive, but basically nice. The teachers were helpful. I wasn’t distracted with sports or girls or drugs or any of the usual excuses. And yet…” He shrugged. “And yet, I didn’t seem to care.”

  “There’s got to be a reason why,” I insisted. “There’s a reason for everything.”

  “You sound like Mom and Dad.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  He laughed. “There’s no mystery to solve, Chris. Big brother screwed up, and now I’m going to crash at home for a couple months while I figure things out. If I were you, I’d quit worrying about me and start preparing yourself.”

  “Preparing myself for what?”

  “Now that I’m the Bad Son, you’ve been promoted to the Good Son. Which means Mom and Dad will be pushing you even harder.”

  I knew he was probably right. Which meant my only hope was to return him to the status of the Good Son, the Golden Boy.

  “You going back to Stanford?” I asked hopefully.

  He shrugged again. “It’s an option. Among others.”

  “What other options? What else can you do if you don’t finish law school?”

  “Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.” He flexed his huge bicep. “Enforcer for the Mob.”

  “I’m serious, dude.”

  He nudged my leg with his foot and sang in a Jamaican accent, “‘Don’t worry, be happy.’”

  I knew he was just trying to end the conversation. “I’m not the same kid I was when you left for law school, Jax. You can tell me things.”

  Jax’s face turned serious and sad. “I know, bro. I know. It’s just that there’s really nothing to tell. No sob story. No excuse. I just failed.”

  I knew he was lying. I always knew with him. Not that he couldn’t tell whopping lies and get people to believe him. If I overheard him lying to someone else, I’d believe him, too. But he could never lie directly to me without me knowing. That didn’t stop him from trying, though.

  “Who was that guy in the park? The one who threw the Icee on you?”

  “Just a guy I know. No one important.” He looked away, avoiding my eyes.

  I decided not to push him. He wasn’t going to tell me anyway. Not yet. But there definitely was something mysterious going on with him, and I was going to find out what it was.

  But I would need help. And I knew just where to find it.

  THREE DAYS EARLIER…

  RIDDLE ME THIS

  “OKAY, students, here is today’s brain-busting riddle.” The class quieted as Mr. Laubaugh sat on the edge of his desk and faced them. He liked to begin each English class with a riddle to, as he put it, “kick-start our brains.”

  “What’s the prize?” Clancy Timmons asked from the back row, where such questions always seemed to come from.

  “Prize?” Mr. Laubaugh said, pretending to be shocked by the question. “Why do you need a prize? Isn’t knowledge enough of a prize? Or the respect of your peers for having solved a tough puzzle?”

  The entire class shouted, “No!”

  He laughed and said, “Message received.” He picked up a DVD from his desk and held it up for all of us to see. “The prize is this copy of the beloved classic John Hughes film Pretty in Pink, starring the incomparably quirky Molly Ringwald.”

  “Molly Ringworm?” Clancy said and snickered.

  “Ah, Mr. Timmons,” Mr. Laubaugh said, “I can always count on you to find the humor in everyone’s name. We all fondly remember how you were able to turn substitute teacher Mr. Farley into Mr. Fartlips.”

  “One of my better ones,” Clancy agreed.

  “A rare talent indeed,” Mr. Laubaugh said.

  If it were any other teacher, I’d think that he was making fun of Clancy. But Mr. Laubaugh didn’t make fun of students, no matter what stupid thing they did or how much they deserved it. He treated everyone with cheerful respect and the students liked him for that.

  “What’s the riddle?” Brooke Hill said impatiently. She was the richest girl in school—and the prettiest. But she was also the most competitive person I had ever known, and I’ve played every kind of sport since I was five. As another student once said of her, “She’d rather gnaw off your leg than let you beat her in a race.”

  “Let’s hear it, Mr. Laubaugh,” Theo said. Theo, one of the few African-American students in the school, was six-foot-four after a six-inch growth spurt last summer. That made him taller than his dad, Officer Rollins, who’d been to our house the night before to warn us about the garage burglaries. Right after his growth spurt, Coach Mandrake had talked Theo into joining the basketball team, even though he’d never played. He was skinny and awkward and clumsy. After a rough start, he was finally starting to fit in with the rest of the team. Not that he needed to. He was also one of the smartest kids in the school, once on the Brain Train team of eggheads that challenged other schools to see who was the brainiest.

  He was the person I really needed to talk to today.

  Mr. Laubaugh cleared his throat dramatically. “Okay, here we go. What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?”

  While I was still repeating the riddle in my head, two people called out.

  “A towel,” Theo and Brooke said at the same time.

  “You’ve heard it before?” Mr. Laubaugh asked.

  “No,” they both said, again at the same time.

  Brooke glared at Theo with a leg-gnawing expression.

  Someone in the back fake-coughed. “Nerds.”

  “Let’s try a harder one,” Mr. Laubaugh said. “The man who invented it doesn’t want it. The man who bought it doesn’t need it. The man who needs it doesn’t know it. What is it?”

  Silence.

  Brooke closed her eyes and scrunched up her nose. I knew she was a handful, but I couldn’t help thinking how cute she looked like that. She reminded me of Lucy in the Peanuts comics.

  “Give us a hint,” Dave Jaspers said.

  “No hints,” Mr. Laubaugh said. “Just keep your eyes on the prize. This special edition DVD from my home collection. Played on the very night I asked Mrs. Laubaugh to marry me, so we know it has magical powers.” The prize was always a DVD from his home collection, because he was downloading all his movies onto a hard drive and getting rid of his DVDs, which numbered in the thousands.

  “What did she say?” Clancy asked.

  “He called her Mrs. Laubaugh, doofus,” Brooke said. “That should be a clue.”

  Clancy whispered something to Jeremy in the desk next to him. T
hey both chuckled.

  “Give up?” Mr. Laubaugh asked the class.

  “Yes,” most of the class chorused.

  “No!” Brooke snapped.

  “Can you repeat it?” Dave Jaspers said.

  Everyone groaned.

  Brooke glared at Dave and repeated the riddle word for word: “The man who invented it doesn’t want it. The man who bought it doesn’t need it. The man who needs it doesn’t know it. What is it?”

  I had no clue what the answer was. I never did with these riddles. But I still liked them and admired people who could figure them out, which was almost always Theo or Brooke.

  “Bzzzzzz!” Mr. Laubaugh said. “Time’s up.”

  “Wait—” Brooke protested.

  “It’s a coffin,” Mr. Laubaugh said. “The man who invented it doesn’t want it, because that would mean he’d be dead. The man who bought it doesn’t need it, because he’s not dead yet. The man who needs it doesn’t know it, because he’s already dead.”

  Brooke snorted. “You have to give us enough time.”

  Clancy said from the back, “That’s pretty dark, Mr. L. Are you sure you’re allowed to talk to us about death and such?”

  Mr. Laubaugh smiled as he walked over to the whiteboard. He wore baggy pants and a maroon sweatshirt with some sort of stain near the collar. Egg, I thought. He wore baggy pants and sweatshirts every day, and every day there was some sort of food stain somewhere.

  “We talk about everything in this class,” he said. “Especially while we’re reading The Catcher in the Rye.” He then wrote on the board: Who is good? Who is bad? Why?

  During class discussions I didn’t raise my hand unless a lot of other kids did, to decrease the chances of my being called on. That strategy usually worked. It’s not that I didn’t know the answers. I did in this case, and I was actually excited to hear the discussion, because I loved the book. But whenever I did get called on, what I said never seemed to be what I meant to say. It was like one of those voice changers you can use to make yourself sound like a robot or Darth Vader, only this changed my actual words, so I sounded like Lame-o McLameson.

  My motto was something that, according to Mr. Laubaugh, Mark Twain had said: “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

  When the class was over and we were all funneling out the door, I grabbed Theo by the elbow, pulled him to the lockers, and said quietly, “I need your help.”

  He looked startled, like I’d said, “I just ate your dog.” Probably because I’d never asked anyone for help before.

  “You mind?” Brooke said, shoving past us. “If you boys want to discuss the best place to inject steroids, please do it elsewhere. Some of us have to get to class.”

  Theo frowned at her, but I grinned. I might have been the only student in the school who thought she was funny. But then, my brother was the only person in the world who thought I was funny. So we had something in common.

  “What’s up, Chris?” Theo asked as we walked through the crowded hallway.

  “I need a detective,” I said. “And you’re the closest thing to it that I know.”

  A smile stretched across his face. “I’m in!”

  THE BULLDOG MYSTERY

  “BRICK is innocent!” Sharon Currie yelled so loudly that I covered my ears.

  “Brick is guilty!” Damon Currie yelled right back at her. “And you’re gonna pay for a new iPhone.”

  “I’m not paying for anything!” Sharon yelled again. “Because Brick didn’t do it. What about Hobbit? Hobbit could’ve done it.”

  “Hobbit would never break anything of mine. Never has, never will.”

  Sharon and Damon were twins in the eighth grade. They both had red hair and braces, but other than that they didn’t look anything alike. But they did both like to yell.

  Theo and I were sitting at their kitchen table with Damon’s broken iPhone lying there between us like roadkill. The glass plate was cracked around two puncture holes very clearly made by teeth.

  Earlier that day, I’d seen Theo at lunch. I was sitting with a couple of guys from the basketball team. Theo had been sitting with his pals from the Brain Train. He’d recently gotten a reputation as a middle school Sherlock Holmes after solving a mystery involving his cousin’s stolen song. After a famous band turned it into a hit on YouTube, Theo found out who leaked it. Today, at the table next to us, Damon and Sharon were arguing loudly about whose dog had destroyed Damon’s phone. Theo walked up to them and said he might be able to figure out who was right.

  “How much?” Damon had asked Theo.

  “What?”

  “How much will you charge us to figure it out?”

  Theo’s blank expression showed he hadn’t even thought about money, but now that Damon had mentioned it, he warmed to the idea. “If I solve the mystery, you pay me twenty bucks. If I don’t, you pay me nothing. Fair?”

  Damon frowned, not liking the price, but Sharon immediately said, “Deal!”

  After school, we’d ridden our bikes to the twins’ house. On the way, I filled Theo in on what I wanted. I didn’t want to explain it all at school, because someone might have overheard. Sharing secrets at school almost guarantees that everyone will find out. I didn’t have to go with him, but I wanted to see him at work, maybe to make me feel more confident that I was doing the right thing in asking for his help.

  “You want me to dig up dirt on your brother?” Theo asked as we pedaled through Palisades Park. It was a shortcut to the Currie home.

  “No, not dirt. I just want to find out what’s going on with him. He’s lying about something.”

  “Sorry, Chris, I guess I’m still not clear about what you want me to do.”

  “I’m not sure either. I thought you could help me figure out what the next step should be.”

  Theo didn’t say anything.

  “Look,” I said, “I feel bad asking you. Like I’m betraying him or something. But I’m worried about him. Like maybe he’s in some kind of trouble. He’s just not being himself.”

  Theo didn’t say anything for a while, then, “Let me think about it.” He looked over at me and must have noticed the worried expression on my face. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “We didn’t talk about price,” I said. “How much?”

  Theo laughed. “Well, if I don’t find out anything, then no charge. But if I do find out something, then…no charge.” He laughed again. “We’re teammates, dude. We gotta stick together.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, man.”

  We pedaled on in silence.

  The more I pedaled, the more this seemed like a dumb idea. Because the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if maybe I didn’t really want to know why Jax was lying.

  As we flew through the park, we both looked over at the basketball courts. Kids were stopping for a quick game or two on their way home from school. Brightly colored backpacks lined the sidewalk next to the court.

  I noticed the gleam in Theo’s eyes. Probably the same one in my eyes. We both wanted to stop and play. When a real basketball player sees a court and kids gathering for a game, everything else fades into the background as unimportant.

  But Theo wasn’t the kind of kid who’d break a promise. That’s one of the reasons I’d gone to him.

  “So?” Sharon said now, her eyes focused on Theo. “How’re you going to prove that Brick didn’t chew Damon’s stupid phone?”

  Theo picked up the phone, tilted it in the light, looked at it from all angles. “First of all, I didn’t promise I’d figure this out. I just said it was a possibility. Second, I’m not here to prove Brick is innocent.”

  “But he is innocent,” Sharon insisted. She looked outside the sliding glass door. Brick and Hobbit, brindle-colored bulldogs, were playing together in the yard. They fought over a long rubber bone. As their heads shook back and forth, slimy webs of drool flung from their jowls.

  “Are they related?” I asked.


  “Brothers,” Damon said. “But not from the same litter. Brick is a year older.”

  “Lucky them,” Sharon added. “It sucks being a twin.”

  They stopped talking, and the three of us just stared at Theo, who was now puffing hot breath on the broken glass of the phone.

  “What are you doing?” Damon asked.

  Theo stared at the glass and smiled. “Catching a canine criminal.”

  THE NOSE KNOWS

  THEO counted off on his fingers as he spoke: “I need a pencil, a knife, clear tape, and a sheet of unlined paper. Note cards would be better.”

  “What for?” Sharon asked.

  Theo ignored her and turned to Damon. “And I need you to hold the dogs.”

  “What do you mean, hold them?” Sharon asked, alarmed.

  “Just their heads,” Theo explained.

  “Their heads! What for?” Damon asked.

  “I’ll explain later,” Theo said. He looked at me and grinned. That grin told me that he could have explained to them right then what he was doing, but Theo liked a little drama when he performed his magic. I’d learned that last time.

  I had no idea what he was doing, but I helped Sharon gather the materials from various drawers and cupboards. I held a Swiss Army knife in one hand and a couple pencils and a tape dispenser in the other.

  “I have note cards up in my room,” Sharon said as she climbed the stairs. “You’ll have to wait here. Boys aren’t allowed upstairs.” She turned and smiled at me. “But then again, my parents won’t be home from work for a couple hours.” She waited for my response.

  I waited for my response, too. I didn’t know what to say. I never did when it came to girls. I was interested in girls (really interested, if you want to know the truth), and some were interested in me. Some, like Sharon, let me know they were interested. Others just told friends who told friends who told friends until someone told me. But all I ever did was smile and nod and pretend I didn’t notice anything. The rumor around school was that I had a secret girlfriend who attended another school and that was why I didn’t flirt with any of the girls at our school. It wasn’t true, of course, but I never tried to correct it. To be honest, it kind of took the pressure off me.