The Rookie Bookie

by L. Jon Wertheim

  On Sunday, I did my homework in the morning so I could be sure to watch the Baltimore-Pittsburgh game in the afternoon. Ordinarily, I would have just enjoyed the game. But I got an extra surge of excitement knowing that I had bragging rights with Jamie—and five bucks—resting on the outcome. For most of the game, Pittsburgh was leading. My grin must have been pretty obvious.

  “What are you so happy about?” said Kevin. “I thought you didn’t like Pittsburgh.”

  “I like them today,” I said.

  “Let me guess,” said Kevin. “You have a bunch of their players on your fantasy league team.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not a single one.”

  “Then you bet money on them with another boy.”

  Was it that obvious?

  “Something like that,” I said, deciding not to tell Kevin that he was right about the betting, but that the “boy” was Jamie.

  “And you took Pittsburgh?”

  “How could I not? I saw online that both of Baltimore’s best wide receivers and their starting linebacker wouldn’t be playing. And that when they play road games against passing teams, they usually lose. Especially when the field is natural grass and not turf.”

  “Isn’t that kinda cheating?” asked Kevin.

  “It’s not cheating,” I said, staring at him. “It’s called having more information. That’s all.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair. You’re kind of taking advantage. And isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that got you in trouble in California?” Kevin asked.

  “Whatever,” I shot back. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m just saying,” said Kevin in a see what I care? voice. “I wouldn’t be happy if a friend did that to me.”

  We watched the rest of the game. Baltimore made a comeback and tied it up in the fourth quarter. On the next kickoff, the return man for Pittsburgh fumbled. Suddenly, with less than two minutes left to play, Baltimore had a chance to win. After a few running plays, they let the game clock bleed down, and then the field-goal kicker came on with just a few seconds left.

  As if he were guiding the ball with a remote control, he drilled a perfect kick between the two uprights. Baltimore won, 30–27, and their fans in the stadium went nuts. The announcers called it “arguably the best game of the season so far.” Kevin was standing up and pumping his fist. Then he looked over at me, confused. “How come you’re still smiling?” he asked. “In case you didn’t notice, your team just lost.”

  “True,” I said. “But for me to lose my bet, Baltimore had to win by at least four points.”

  Kevin shook his head. “You’re sneaky,” he said, “but you’re good. There should be a word for that.”

  Hopefully it’s not “annoying,” I thought to myself.

  As the television coverage went back to the studio, Kevin flopped down on the couch. “I don’t get it, Mitch. I never have any allowance left at the end of the week, but you have money just lying around to bet on football.”

  “You look at your allowance the wrong way,” I said. “You think of it as money you found. Like, ‘Hey, here’s thirty-five dollars Mom and Dad gave me! Sweet. I’m going to buy a video game, go to the movies, and spend the rest on iTunes.’ But it’s not money they gave you. It’s money you earned. You got it for doing your chores.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s payment you got for doing work. You took out the trash. You mowed the yard. You’re going to rake the leaves this fall. Remember that and you’re going to spend it more carefully than if you think of it as lucky money you stumble on every week.”

  Kevin thought about it. “It’s like I’m a worker getting paid thirty-five dollars, not a guy who won thirty-five dollars in one of those scratch-off games they always advertise on TV?”

  “Exactly!” I said. “Lottery winners use their money to go on cruises and buy new golf clubs and fur coats and stuff they don’t need. Workers use their money to buy groceries and things they need. And hopefully they save some, too, for when other stuff comes up.”

  “Maybe in a few days you can help me make some picks for next Sunday’s game. I want to do some gambling, too.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “One more thing,” he said. “How many enemies have you made since we’ve moved here?”

  “None,” I shot back. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Just be careful, little brother,” he said. “It’s only stupid money, you know?”

  Only stupid money? Sometimes I can’t believe Kevin and I came from the same set of parents.

  CHAPTER 5

  KA-CHING!

  It was early in the year, but I already had a favorite teacher. If my school hours were one of those stock market charts showing “highs” and “lows” then my day hits its peak when I sit in third-period math with Mr. Rafferty. I wouldn’t exactly call him “cool.” (In fact, he’s definitely not cool.) It looks like his hair is afraid of his forehead and is backing away as fast as it can. When he walks around the classroom, his shoes squeak. His arms are so hairy, it seems like they’re carpeted.

  But he’s one of those teachers who make class so fun that you forget you’re learning. Today he taught us about percentages, fractions, and decimal points, and he used baseball as an example. ”When a batter hits .300, it’s not really ‘three hundred’ the way the announcers say,” he said to the class. “It’s .300 or .3 or thirty percent or three out of ten.”

  My hand shot up. “The difference is that three-for-ten in baseball is good. But three-for-ten on a test is a big fat F!”

  Mr. Rafferty smiled. “Good point, Mitch.” Then he waited for a beat.

  “Get it?” he said. “Good point. Decimal point? A joke? Anyone?”

  There were a few groans. I’ve always wondered why adults don’t realize that if you have to explain your joke, maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t funny to begin with.

  When I got back to my locker, Jamie was waiting for me. She was wearing a backward baseball cap, a Jonasburg sweatshirt, jeans—and a nasty frown.

  “Here you go,” she said, throwing a crumpled five-dollar bill at me.

  I felt bad. But not bad enough to reject it. As I put the money in my pocket, she kept staring lasers at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know what,” she said. “Three of Baltimore’s best players were hurt and didn’t even play!”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

  “Yeah, right. That’s the last time I make a bet with you.”

  “There’s no rule against having more information,” I said.

  “Don’t you think you should have told me that Baltimore was going to be fielding a JV team?”

  “Then you wouldn’t have taken the bet.”

  “But at least then,” she said, arching an eyebrow, “we’d still be friends.”

  An awkward silence hung in the air like a bad smell. Uh-oh. I got a little jump in my stomach, like I had ruined a good thing.

  Then she smiled. “I’m just playing with you.”

  I wonder if she heard me exhale with relief.

  “Don’t worry,” she told me. “I’ll get you back.”

  She made a fist, and we pounded knuckles.

  As usual, I sat by Ben Barnes at lunch. As usual, he was already eating when I got there. And as usual, he was eating the kind of food my parents call “poison,” tearing through a bag of chips and a pack of cookies while draining a can of fruit punch. Plus, he bought a double order of Tater Tots on the hot-lunch line. Ben scrunched up his face as he stabbed at one with his fork.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but these Tater Tots are awful. I don’t know how you manage to spoil Tater Tots, but they did it.”

  “Then why are you eating them?”

  “Duh,” he said, shaking his head. “Because I paid for ’em. A dollar fifty.”

  “Would you eat them if they were on my tray and I just gave you some for free?”

  “No way!”


  “That makes no sense, then,” I said. “If you paid for the Tater Tots, the money is gone. Why make it worse by making yourself eat something you don’t want?”

  “Maybe you’re right, Mitch.” Of course I was right. But by then he had put the last of the Tater Tots in his mouth.

  “Hey,” he said. At least I think it was “hey.” I couldn’t tell for sure, since his mouth was full. “I want to bet on a football game, too.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Like you did with Jamie,” he mumbled between bites.

  “How’d you hear about that?”

  “Everyone knows,” he said with a shrug. “You won five bucks from Jamie betting on football.”

  Note to self: Rumors and gossip travel the halls here faster than a racecar—a word that spells itself backward, by the way—at the Indianapolis 500.

  “So?” said Ben.

  “So what?”

  “Can I make a bet with you?” he asked.

  “No. Well, I guess. Okay. What?”

  “I love the Colts. They’re playing Denver this weekend, and I know they’re going to kill them.”

  Ka-ching, I thought to myself. He’s betting on the Colts not because he knows anything about the game, but because they’re his favorite team. I smelled opportunity. I smelled money. He would bet with his heart. I would bet with my head.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound reluctant. “I guess I’ll take Denver, but to make it fair, how about the Colts have to win by at least six points?”

  “Six points!” said Ben. “Heck, that’s barely a touchdown. They’re going to win by two or three touchdowns! You can make it ten points if you want.”

  Even better! Ben thought the Colts were going to crush Denver because the Colts were his favorite team. But I knew the truth. The Colts were at best an even match with Denver, and winning at all, let alone by ten points, would be pretty unlikely. This was an easy bet.

  It was right around then that the idea hit me. I could bet my classmates on football and take advantage of (1) their being die-hard fans, which could get in the way of their judgment, and (2) me having more information. But even then, there would be cases when I could lose. A star on my team could get injured unexpectedly. The officials could make a bad call. Someone could have as much information as me. For whatever reason, my team might just stink one Sunday. There could be all sorts of flukes.

  But what if I could eliminate the risk? Then I could make money without worrying about losing it!

  It was an incredible idea, and now all I needed was a willing partner.

  “So here’s how it works,” I said.

  Jamie looked hard at me, and I couldn’t tell if she was skeptical—after all, she had just lost five dollars to me—or if she was intrigued.

  “You collect the bets for one team. I collect bets for the other team. Ten bucks a bet. Winner gets eighteen. We get two for our services.”

  “What service is that?” she asked.

  “We’re arranging all the bets,” I explained. “If we didn’t do this, no one would even have a chance to make money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like a salad bar at a grocery store,” I said. “You could buy the lettuce and the carrots and the cucumber and make your own salad. But that would take a long time. So you go to the salad bar. It’s more expensive, but you’re willing to pay extra because they’ve done the work for you, right? The lettuce is already washed. The carrots are peeled. The cucumber is chopped. And it’s all right there in front of you. So you’re willing to pay more.”

  She nodded. “But what if everyone wants to bet on one team and no one wants to bet on the other team?”

  “This,” I said, “is where the genius of Mitch kicks in. We only take bets if we know we can line up the same amount of people on each side. The Broncos play the Colts this Sunday. If ten people want to bet on the Broncos, we find ten people to take the Colts.”

  “Ten bets on the Broncos. Ten bets on the Colts. And we get two dollars a bet, so we get twenty dollars no matter what happens, no matter who wins.” Jamie’s face suddenly lit with a smile. “Not bad.”

  “Thanks,” I said, smiling.

  “But wait a minute,” she said. “What if we can’t find ten people to bet on the Broncos? This is Colts country, you know.”

  “That’s where we set points,” I responded. “Just like our bet last week. You had to beat the Steelers by more than four points, remember?” I can’t help taunting her a little.

  “Yeah,” she said a little bitterly.

  “We offer points to people to get them to bet on the Broncos. Maybe they think the Colts will win, but not by more than ten points. So, we say Broncos plus ten points. That’s how they do it in Vegas.”

  “Yeah, okay, that’s pretty clever,” she said. “But the Colts winning by ten over Denver is crazy. No one is nuts enough to think they’re going to win by that much!”

  I smiled, thinking of Ben. “I don’t know. People can get carried away with this stuff.” I was so excited I was having trouble sitting still. “So are you in?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “For how long?”

  She scowled at me. “For as long as I feel like it, Mitch.”

  I didn’t mind waiting. I was psyched. She liked my idea, we were still friends, and we were about to make some money together. “Okay, okay, fine. Hey, can I ask you a question while you think about it?”

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “How’d you get so into sports, anyway? Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve never met a girl who…”

  “Who what? Would rather play football than do her nails?” she said in the girliest voice ever.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

  “Well, my dad is a big sports fan, and he got me into it. Once, we were watching a football game and he said to me, ‘Having you around is as good as having a son.’ It probably slipped out. But after that, I couldn’t disappoint him by asking to get a manicure or bake muffins or something girly like that.”

  “But you do like sports, right?” I said.

  “Oh, sure, totally,” she said. “I might not have tried them without my dad, but after a while I realized I loved them. Sports are way more fun that all that girly crap other girls do. Okay, buddy. Your turn.”

  “Huh? My turn to do what?”

  “Answer a question. What did you mean when you said you got your head dunked in a toilet at your old school? What was that about?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about that day so much. But Jamie had just told me the thing with her dad. So I kind of felt like I owed her, and I did feel kind of bad about the bet and all.

  “My other school, back in California… I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly popular.” I shrugged.

  I could tell she was getting ready to give me some trash talk—

  You, not popular? I can’t believe it—but then I think she saw my face. “Go on,” she said, and she even sounded a little sorry.

  I didn’t tell her all of it. I’d never really told anybody all of it. Elbows to the ribs. Books knocked out of my hands. Kids scrambling as soon as I was about to open up my locker so they could slam it closed and I couldn’t grab a book or a pen.

  “So there was a bunch of eighth graders on the basketball team,” I told Jamie. “And they grabbed me one day and decided to give me a swirly. Stuck my head in the toilet and flushed. You know, so your hair looks like a Dairy Queen cone, all swirly.”

  “That sucks,” Jamie said angrily. “Why didn’t you tell a teacher?”

  “I did.”

  That was the worst part, actually. I’d told Mr. Funkle, our assistant principal. And do you know what he said?

  What did you do this time, Mitch?

  He’d practically sung it, rolling his eyes and tapping a pen against the coffee mug he always carried around. After I’d explained what happened, he told me he’d take my complaint “under advis
ement,” whatever that meant. I think it was adultspeak for “I have more important things to do than deal with you and your wet hair, kid.”

  “That sucks!” Jamie said again, really mad. I hadn’t wanted to tell her, but I have to admit I kind of liked seeing her get all fired up about something that happened to me six months ago. “I can’t believe that! I can’t—wait a minute. Mitch?”

  “What?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Hey! Nothing!”

  She held up her hands. “I’m not saying you deserved it, dude. Seriously, nobody deserves that. They should have expelled all those kids and fired that principal. I’m on your side. But… maybe there was… something? Some reason they were mad at you?”

  “Hey, I’m the victim here. I didn’t do anything!”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well… okay. Fine. I did kind of take some money from Carl Lake.”

  Carl was probably the tallest kid at my old school. He was lanky and had this mop of hair that made him look like a toothbrush. He had been taking lunch money from sixth graders the past week, and one day it was my turn.

  “Got any lunch money, kid?” he said in the deepest voice he could make.

  I could tell he was trying to scare me, and that he thought I was just some little sixth-grade idiot that he could step all over. But I could also tell he wasn’t going to leave empty-handed, not quietly anyway.

  “I don’t have any money,” I said. “Because I used it all to buy these candy bars.” I showed him the box of twenty candy bars I had, which I was supposed to sell for my computer club.

  “You gonna eat all those?” he sneered. “Maybe I’ll help you!” And he grabbed the box of candy from me.

  “No,” I laughed, trying to stay calm, “I was going to sell them.”

  “To who?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I bought these candy bars because I thought I could sell them during lunch or between classes. Figured I could make about twenty-five cents on every bar.”

  He had already opened one of them and was munching away on it, but I could see I had his attention.

  “In fact,” I continued, “maybe you’d be interested in helping me sell them. We’d split the profits, of course.”