The Rookie Bookie

by L. Jon Wertheim

  It was risky. Carl could have easily just taken the candy bars away from me, but given the amount of money I’d seen him collect this week from other kids, I suspected he wanted the money more than the candy.

  “Can you get more?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, “and if you want to partner with me, you can cover the seventh and eighth graders. They won’t take the candy from you!”

  Carl smiled. I think he liked the thought of other kids not daring to steal from him. “Okay,” he said, grinning, “but I get twenty cents. You can keep five.”

  It was a pretty lopsided partnership. But, figuring this might happen, I had a better plan. You see, for the kid in the computer club who sold the most candy bars, there was a fifty-dollar prize. Carl would probably manage to sell at least five boxes or a hundred candy bars, netting him a profit of twenty dollars. I would get five dollars. But, since I would be the one who sold the most, I also got the fifty-dollar prize, which Carl didn’t know about.

  Unfortunately, he eventually found out about the prize from his younger brother, who was also in the sixth grade. Carl wasn’t too happy.

  I told this to Jamie, and she shook her head.

  “What did you do with the money, Mitch?” she asked.

  “I gave some of it back to the kids whose lunch money was stolen,” I said, “then kept the rest. But I probably would’ve given it all back to avoid that swirly.”

  “I’m going to have to think twice before I go into business with you,” she said.

  “What the heck is that?” I asked Ben Barnes. By the time I got to the lunch table the next day, his mouth was already filled with food. Food I had a hard time identifying.

  “What? You mean you’ve never seen a tenderloin sandwich before?” he said incredulously.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  I looked closely at the lunch that he’d spread out on his cafeteria tray. It seemed to be a piece of fried meat, flattened until it was the size of a small pizza, and tucked into a bun. He told me it was some sort of Indiana specialty, like sourdough in San Francisco.

  “It’s pretty good,” he said. “Try some if you want.”

  He ripped off a corner and handed it me. I looked at it with suspicion but figured if it was poison, well, a lot of other kids were going to be sick besides me.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “That’s it?” said Ben.

  “Okay, it’s good.” I kept chewing. “Really good. So good, I’ll be right back. I’m going to get one now.”

  I came back from the lunch line, and it happened. I’m not sure how. It kinda just did. As I started to unwrap my tenderloin, Ben was slurping the last bit of his milk through his straw—I hate that sound—and was getting ready to leave. Seth Brockman had already left and Trevor Wiseman was out with the stomach flu. At the table behind us, a knot of girls was getting up together, all except Jamie, who was still eating. Two bites into my tenderloin, she and I were the only two people left in our corner of the cafeteria. It was like we broke the tribal rules of the cafeteria but obeyed the rules of gravity. We scooted our chairs over and sat together.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You gonna eat that slop?” she said, looking at my sandwich. “I wouldn’t feed that to my dog.”

  “It’s really good,” I said, shrugging and continuing to eat.

  “Good to see you have the same standards for your food as you have for your football teams.”

  “Speaking of football, have you given any thought to my idea?”

  Jamie started to smile. “Wellllllllll, Mitchell—”

  “Mitch,” I corrected her. I couldn’t let that one slip, even if she was about to deliver good news.

  “Sorry.” She paused. “Okay, I admit you’re onto something.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Because I just mentioned, real casually, that if people wanted to bet ten dollars on the Colts beating the Broncos, I might be able to help. Avni Garg was the first. Then Jonah Gideon said he would—”

  “How many total?”

  “Ten so far!” she said. “And I barely tried.”

  “Did you explain to them if they bet ten dollars and won, they would get eighteen back?”

  “Yeah, nobody cared,” she said. “They’re so confident their team’s going to win, it doesn’t matter to them.”

  “Here’s the crazy thing,” I said. “I already have ten people willing to bet ten dollars on the Broncos. You know what this means?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to make twenty bucks no matter which team wins!”

  “And you know what else? This is only one game! Why don’t we do this for the Vikings-Packers, the Dolphins-Jets, the—”

  “Slow down, slow down. Don’t get greedy,” she warned.

  “It’s not greed. It’s opportunity.”

  “Let’s just do one game this week and see how it goes. Make sure we didn’t overlook something.”

  She got up to bus her tray, but I wasn’t done with my sandwich.

  What should I do now? Shake Jamie’s hand like we were real businesspeople making an agreement? Give her a high five? Bump fists? I panicked and just sort of tapped her elbow.

  Awkward.

  Of course, that had to be the time Zander McCallum walked by.

  “Who’s this,” he said, pointing to Jamie standing next to me, “your girlfriend?”

  I wanted to say, Even better—my business partner.

  But for some reason it was like the words got stuck at a traffic light that had turned red. The only thing that came into my brain sputtered out.

  “Um, uh, nah, no,” I stammered. “We’re just friends.”

  “Sure you are,” said Zander. “Suuuuure you are.”

  CHAPTER 6

  RISKY BUSINESS

  When Sunday rolled around and it was time to watch football, Kevin was in a foul mood. He had twisted his ankle in the football game on Friday and spent the weekend limping around and popping Tylenol like they were candy. If I had a dollar for every time Mom said, “Keep that foot elevated, Kevin,” I would be rich. Adding insult to injury—literally—Kevin’s team was still lousy. Their record was 0–2, and no one could figure out why they weren’t better. Jonasburg had some good players, including Kevin. There were a lot of seniors who had played as juniors last season, so they couldn’t blame inexperience. Everyone liked Coach Williams, even if some of his decisions didn’t make much sense.

  “I don’t get it. We should be so much better than we are,” Kevin complained over dinner. “We’re never going to beat Clarksville in the Corncob Bowl.”

  “Who’s that?” Dad asked.

  “Duh,” Kevin shot back. “Only our biggest rivals.”

  “And beat them in the what?” Dad said. “The Corn something?”

  “It’s the Corncob Bowl, Dad,” Kevin said in his you’re driving me crazy voice. “Only the most important game we play every year. It’s always the last game of the season and it’s a huge deal.”

  “Sorry,” Dad said. “I’m new in town. Unlike you, old-timer.” That was Dad’s way of scolding Kevin without really scolding him. Dad was smart like that. “Hey,” he went on. “I have an idea: Maybe you could have Mitch study statistics or something and use that to help the team.”

  Kevin started laughing, shooting me a look that said can you believe how clueless our dad is? “It’s not like we’re losing because we don’t have a ninety-pound middle-school dweeb to help us,” he chortled.

  “Kevin,” Mom started in, but he quickly interrupted.

  “I know, I know, but really, come on!” He laughed again.

  I didn’t even mind Kevin calling me a dweeb. But I did mind when he said this: “I wish we had Clint Grayson on our team to kick and punt. Do you know him, Mitch?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” I said. “He treats me like a piece of dirt. Why do you even have to mention his name?”

  “Because with that bionic leg of his, he might help us win a game.”

&nbs
p; So maybe I was a ninety-pound middle-school dweeb. But I was on my way to being a rich ninety-pound middle-school dweeb. I had a wad of twenty ten-dollar bills—two hundred dollars!—in my sock drawer. And no matter what happened in the Colts-Broncos game, I only had to give one hundred and eighty of it back (and ten to Jamie).

  “Let me guess,” Kevin said as we were settling in to watch the game together. “You have a bet on this game, too.”

  “Yup.”

  “Who do you want to win?” he said. “Or lose, so long as it’s not by too many points?”

  “Don’t care.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like the Colts better,” I explained, slowing down for effect.

  “But…”

  “But I win either way. I got rid of all the risk. Eliminated it.” I smirked.

  “You did what?”

  “I found ten kids who wanted to bet ten dollars to take the Colts. And ten who bet ten dollars to take the Broncos. The winners get eighteen dollars, and I get two dollars for each bet,” I said all this in my best do I have to explain everything? tone.

  He paused, and I could tell he was thinking it through.

  “So you get two dollars just for being, like, the middleman. No matter what happens.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Pretty smart, Mitch,” he said. “Pretty smart.”

  We sat in silence, watching the game for a few minutes before Kevin spoke up again. “If you can make money without any risk, how come you’re just doing it for one game? Why not do it for all the games?”

  I slapped my magazine on the coffee table. “Exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly what I said to Jamie!”

  “Who’s that?” Kevin asked.

  Darn! I let it slip out. “Just a kid at school,” I said quietly. I had to change the subject before he could ask another question about Jamie. I was just thankful she had a name that worked for boys as well as girls. “Hey, is your foot elevated?”

  “Shut up.”

  The Colts beat the Broncos, 34–28. Not that I really cared. I had made the easiest twenty dollars of my life. And more was coming. Ben owed me five dollars, too, since the Colts only won by six, not the ten points he’d bet.

  There was one small hitch. I had to give eighteen dollars to the ten classmates who had won. That meant that I needed a lot of one-dollar and five-dollar bills. If I tried to get them from Mom and Dad, they might ask too many questions. I didn’t have a bank account, so I couldn’t just run to the local credit union, which was next to my parents’ store.

  Then I got an idea. I would go to Irma, the cafeteria cashier. It might be kind of weird. I mean, why would a seventh grader need to make so much change? But I trusted myself to smooth-talk her.

  When Dad dropped me off at school, I went to the cafeteria to buy a cinnamon roll. I approached Irma with the biggest smile I could make.

  “Hi, Irma,” I said, remembering that I once read that successful people in business always try to address others by their name. “How was your weekend, Irma?”

  “Great. I took my grandkids to the mall in Louisville, and we went to the zoo.”

  “I haven’t been to that one, since we just moved here and all. But the zoo where I used to live in San Francisco had an amazing penguin-feeding area. Do they have that over in Louisville?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Irma. “A great gorilla exhibit and giraffe feeding, too.”

  This was another trick I learned from one of those business shows. Small talk = big talk. Just having a normal, simple conversation can help put people at ease before you ask for what you really want.

  “Here’s eighty cents for the world’s best cinnamon roll,” I said.

  When she handed me back two dimes, I had a response ready. “Keep the change!”

  “Oh, I can’t do that, Mitch.”

  “But your service is the best!” I said, still trying to turn on the charm.

  “Thanks, hon,” she said. “But I can’t.”

  “Oh, one more thing, Irma,” I said casually. “I almost forgot: Do you think that if I gave you eighty dollars in tens, you could change it for me and I could get ten fives, and thirty ones?”

  “Um…”

  “It’s for a class project,” I explained, quickly convincing myself that I was not technically lying. (What? It was for people in my class. And it was for a project. A business project I was doing with Jamie. Who’s also in my class. See? Class project.)

  “Well, this one time, I guess,” she said, clearly uneasy, but not so uneasy that she didn’t do it. She fumbled in a drawer of the cash register and counted the money, looking over her shoulder. As she handed me the bills, the mood had changed. It was like the warmth was gone and suddenly there was a frost. But I got what I wanted. I felt like a real businessman, closing a deal.

  When I walked down the hall to go to my locker, I was hoping Jamie would already be there and we could—quietly—celebrate our success. But I couldn’t see her because my view was blocked by a pack of kids. At first I thought it was a fight and everyone had formed a circle to watch. Then I realized they were there for me. It was the ten winners who had come to collect their money. Good thing I got those singles from Irma.

  “Yeah, Colts!” an eighth grader I’d never seen before yelped, slapping five with everyone standing around. “Now where’s the rookie bookie with my money?”

  The Rookie Bookie? Did I (finally) have a nickname that wasn’t making fun of me? So awesome!

  I got out the sheet of paper Jamie had copied for me with all the names and the bets. One by one, I started to pay the winners. As I crossed off their names, I reminded them that they had a chance to double their money the following Sunday. Midway through, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Rafferty watching our group.

  I didn’t know of any specific rule against organizing some bets. I mean, it’s not like it had come up at assembly or something. Say no to drugs. Stay in school. And don’t start a career as a bookie between classes.

  And what was wrong with it, really? I wasn’t making anybody do anything they didn’t want to do. I wasn’t lying, or stealing money like Carl Lake had at my old school. And everybody was lining up at my locker. Everybody wanted to talk to me! Me, the kid who’d had his head in a toilet six months ago.

  But I still didn’t want Mr. Rafferty to see what was going on. As he started walking toward my locker, I rotated my body so my back was to him and tucked all the football sheets into the folder I was holding.

  “Mitch,” he said firmly. “I can only assume you’re talking to everyone about the excitement of fractions.” Luckily, he kept walking.

  When the crowd finally thinned out, I saw Jamie. “Here’s your share for all that hard work,” I said, handing her a ten-dollar bill.

  “You’re right,” she said, staring at a piece of paper.

  “Right about what?”

  “This coming Sunday, why limit ourselves to one game?”

  Yes! She had warmed up to the idea.

  “I circled five games for us to target, ten bets on each side,” she said, sounding very businesslike. “I like making ten bucks without taking any risks. But I like making fifty bucks even more.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Here’s the game schedule I printed out,” she said, adjusting the black baseball cap she was wearing. “You find ten people who want to bet on each team playing at home. I find ten people who want to bet on each team playing on the road. That way we won’t get confused.”

  I liked the way this girl thought.

  “You know, Avni Garg loves the Dolphins,” I said. “Target kids like that first, offering them their favorite team. They use their feelings—not common sense—when it comes to their team. Classic mistake. Doesn’t matter how bad the Dolphins are. Avni will always bet on them. Same for Drew Scott and Ben with the Colts, Raffi Cody with the Patriots—”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “Plan?” I said.

  “Plan.�
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  Nothing like a strategy meeting with your business partner to start the day. We knocked knuckles and went to class.

  CHAPTER 7

  WORD OF MOUTH

  People in business are always talking about “word of mouth.” When someone talks about your store or your restaurant or your amusement park or whatever, that’s the best kind of advertising. And there’s no better place for “word of mouth” than the halls of a middle school. All these people under one roof? Gossip and rumors travel at Mach 3.

  So I shouldn’t have been surprised when a line had formed near my locker and there was a mob of kids surrounding it waiting for the “Rookie Bookie” and “Mitch the new kid” to take their football bets. It had taken precisely two class periods for “word of mouth” to spread throughout the entire school.

  I took everyone’s ten dollars and made a mark next to what team they wanted. At one point I looked over my shoulder and saw Jamie at her locker. Our eyes met. She winked at me. I guess this is what it feels like to be popular.

  “Why don’t you just pay me now?” Noah Raymond said, smiling.

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “Because it’s beyond obvious that Chicago is going to beat Atlanta.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, taking his money and checking his name. “Actually, you’re probably right,” I added. I wanted him to keep betting after all.

  “Hey, I know you’re Mitch, but I don’t think we’ve really met,” said a seventh grader with a buzz cut, his hair standing straight up like freshly mowed grass. “I’m Max. You sure’ve brought, like, an exciting vibe with you. Is that how they would say it in California?”

  “Yeah, sure. I guess. Thanks,” I said, trying quickly to think of what a cool California kid might say. “Thanks, dude… man.” Ugh. Awkward.

  “Okay. Go, Dolphins!” said Max. “Catch you later, dude-man.”

  Maybe not so awkward?

  It went on like that until I took the last bet. By the time the bell sounded, I had five hundred dollars bulging in my pocket. Assuming Jamie did her job and found people to make bets on the other side, we were in business. Serious business.