The Rookie Bookie

by L. Jon Wertheim

  After the Jonasburg defense did its part, the offense got the ball back again with two minutes to play and a chance to score one more touchdown and win the game. Following a couple of running plays, Coach Williams called his favorite: “Hoosier 23.”

  Neil Butwipe would take two steps back, pretend to hand the ball off to A.J. Kumar, and hide the ball behind his hip. As the defense tried to tackle A.J., Neil would throw the ball across the field to Kevin.

  It worked perfectly. The Gas City players ganged up on A.J.—only to realize that he didn’t have the ball. Meanwhile, Neil threw a perfect pass to Kevin, who caught the ball as if it were drawn magnetically to his hands. He did a fancy dance step to free himself from the defender covering him and then started outrunning the Gas City players toward the end zone, widening his lead every ten yards. In the bleachers, the Gas City fans were all booing and yelling something about a penalty and were the refs blind? But the Jonasburg fans and parents were cheering louder than they had cheered all year. “Forty, thirty, twenty, ten, TOUCHDOWN!”

  A few weeks before, when we played a touch football game in the street after school, I scored a touchdown and did a funny dance. (I thought it was funny, anyway.) Kevin got upset and told me not to be a show-off.

  “Act like you’ve been there, Mitch,” he said. “Act like you’ve been there before.”

  “Been where?” I said.

  “The end zone,” he snapped.

  I knew what he meant. But Kevin didn’t realize that, for some of us, scoring a touchdown isn’t something that happens every day. “What if I haven’t been there before?” I asked him.

  “Act like it anyway,” he said.

  But now, as he scored and his teammates followed him down the field to congratulate him, Kevin forgot all about his modesty. He put the ball on his waist and rotated his hips, like he was hula-hooping or something.

  On the sidelines, the coaches were high-fiving each other. Cheerleaders were hugging, and, I could swear, one was wiping tears that were racing down her cheek. Parents behind my parents were hugging. The curse? It was over. Everyone had just gotten immunized from the losing sickness, as Kevin called it.

  Except that when I looked at the field, I noticed that the Gas City section was cheering, too. And their coaches were also high-fiving. And their cheerleaders were hugging, too.

  Uh-oh.

  And then I saw something else. A yellow eyesore. It was like a huge zit on your face. Like an ugly stain on a beautiful painting. It was a penalty flag that one of the officials had thrown down on the grass.

  Pretty soon, everyone else on the Jonasburg side noticed it, too. Three officials came together in the middle of the field, looking like grazing zebras standing in the grass with all their black-and-white stripes. They had a short conversation, and one guy broke away from the others. Facing the Gas City side of the field, he pointed to Jonasburg and gave the signal for holding. Kevin’s touchdown wouldn’t count.

  The Gas City side cheered and whooped. So did their players. Our players slammed their helmets to the ground in frustration. In our bleachers, people said things I can’t repeat.

  “Boooooo! Hissssssss!” someone nearby yelled angrily. I looked over and it was… Dad?

  On the one hand, I should have known. No one else would say “hiss.” On the other hand, Dad was the guy who got called a hippie by a bunch of bullies earlier in the evening and let it glide off his back. Now he was red-faced with anger over a referee’s call? He caught my eye and knew what I was thinking.

  “What?” he said. “Those refs are a bunch of cheaters!”

  In my new, non-annoying state, I knew that it wasn’t the right time to mention this. But the officials probably weren’t cheating. They were just acting like… well, like normal people act.

  Like I said before, we all want to be part of a group. Let’s say you take a test and one of the questions is “What is the capital of Michigan?” You write “Lansing,” and you’re pretty sure you’re right. But after the test, the first eight people you talk to all wrote “Detroit.” So now you’re probably second-guessing yourself, right?

  Now imagine you have to yell out the answer, quick, instead of writing it down. Eight people are yelling “Detroit!” right in your ear. Even if you think they have it wrong, you might go with their answer.

  Now pretend you’re that referee in the football game at Gas City. You have to make a split-second decision. The home crowd is screaming at you to make that decision one way. (Hardly anyone on the opposing side is screaming at you to make it the other way.) It’s easy to see how you could listen to the crowd and do what they want. And, don’t forget, these refs probably live in Gas City and have to deal with the people in the crowd the next day after the game.

  This is why home teams get a lot more favorable calls—whether it’s pitches in baseball, fouls in basketball, or penalties in football.

  Not that this was the time to explain this to Dad.

  “I didn’t know you cared about sports so much,” I said.

  “We don’t, Mitch,” Mom said. “But we care about justice and treating people fairly.”

  And she patted my dad on the arm and got him to sit down and look a little less crazy.

  That Sunday, Jamie didn’t just want to check in over the phone. She wanted me to come over. So we sat in her backyard, throwing a slobbery tennis ball for her golden retriever, Pepper.

  “Mitch,” she said quietly, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing the betting thing anymore.”

  “What?”

  I turned to stare at her. “Why? It’s going great. How much money have you made?”

  “You know how much, Mitch.”

  “About two hundred and fifty dollars,” I said proudly.

  Pepper came galloping back with the drooly ball in her mouth. Jamie continued, “I don’t know. I think we’re going to get into trouble if we keep it up.”

  “It’s not against the rules.”

  “Come on, Mitch. If it’s not against the rules, why didn’t you go to Mr. Pearlman on Monday when Josh walked off with our two dollars?”

  “Okay, then.” I wrestled the ball out of Pepper’s mouth. “So maybe Mr. Pearlman wouldn’t like it that much if he found out. But it’s not like we’re doing something wrong. Are we?”

  She shrugged.

  “We’re not making anybody bet. We’re not cheating. We’re not stealing money like Josh Burke!”

  “Yeah, Mitch, I know. But even so. It’s almost not fair. Look.”

  She took out her notebook, folded back a few pages, and showed me a chart that she had made.

  Week $Bet $Won

  1 $10 $18

  2 $10 -

  3 $10 $18

  4 $10 -

  5 $10 $18

  6 $10 -

  7 $10 $18

  8 $10 -

  9 $10 $18

  Total $90 $90

  “What are you showing me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to notice?”

  “Look at it closely,” she said. “You’re always so impatient!”

  I looked again. She must have seen that I still didn’t get the point that she was trying to make.

  “So this person bets ten dollars for nine weeks. They won five times in nine weeks. And they only broke even. Look here, they put in ninety dollars and they got back ninety dollars.”

  “So what?” I asked.

  “So, they won five out of the nine games—that’s more than fifty-five percent, more than half. That’s pretty good. And they only broke even.”

  “So?”

  “So…” Now she was the one getting impatient. “Let’s say we each put in five bucks and flip a coin nine times, splitting the total ten dollars based on how many times each of us wins. You win five times, more than half of the flips. I only win four. But you still only get your five dollars back.”

  Ah-ha. Now I got her point.

  And I had a comeback.

  “But that’s the thing!” I said. “Fl
ipping a coin is random. It’s a fifty-fifty chance, heads versus tails. So I would insist on fifty-fifty odds. This is different. I probably think I know more about football than you do, that I have a special skill, that I’m going to be right. So I’ll settle for less than fifty-fifty odds.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but imagine you took a test and got more than half of it right and still ended up with no credit. You might as well not have taken the test at all!”

  “Okay,” I said, “but they have fun betting on their teams. Much more fun than taking a test, right? It isn’t just about winning.”

  “It just doesn’t feel right, Mitch.” She sighed and flipped the notebook shut, then turned to her dog. “Look, Pepper, you have to drop the ball if you want me to throw it again.” The big shaggy dog loved fetching that slimy ball, but she hated giving it away.

  “Listen, Jamie.” I was starting to feel weird about this. Panicky, even. I didn’t want to quit running the business. And I didn’t want Jamie to quit either. “Anybody could figure that out, right? What you just did with your notebook?”

  “Sure, but I don’t think anybody has.”

  “That’s not our fault, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  I didn’t let her finish. “And we don’t know it’s against the rules. Right? Nobody ever said. So you can’t quit now! Please. We have to keep it going.”

  “Why, Mitch?” She turned to me, looking a little worried. “What’s the big deal? Why can’t we stop now, before anything goes wrong?”

  It was a good question. What was the big deal? Why couldn’t we just quit?

  I looked away from her, across her yard. It was a nice yard. A big deck. Chrysanthemums in pots. Maple trees starting to turn yellow and orange.

  Pepper whined eagerly around the tennis ball in her mouth.

  “I never told you why we really left California,” I said.

  CHAPTER 9

  UNDERWATER

  We didn’t just move to Indiana because we wanted to. My folks got in “turbulent financial water,” as I overheard a banker once put it to my dad.

  Mom and Dad had never made a lot of money. Some days they would sell a painting or a piece of pottery. But most days they sold nothing at all.

  That was okay. We were never rich. Or even close to rich. We were as far from Warren Buffett as Mercury is from Pluto. But we had enough money to live on.

  I know, because I used to help keep track of it.

  “Mitch, since you like money so much, why don’t you help us make a family budget?” Dad once asked me.

  I figured out how much we earned as a family and how much we spent, everything from house payments to car payments to the allowance Kevin and I got. “How come he gets more money than I do?” I asked.

  “He’s older,” Mom said.

  So unfair.

  Anyway, I told Mom and Dad that as long as nothing unexpected happened, we were fine and should even be able to save a few hundred dollars a month.

  But last year something unexpected did happen. A lot of people started to struggle with their money. They had less of it. People lost their jobs, or their investments weren’t doing so well. Companies were making less money, too.

  When people are worried about their money, they save it for things they really need, like food and gas. They don’t spend it on art. And when people stopped buying art, then it was my parents who started to struggle.

  Entire weeks went by without Mom selling a painting or Dad selling any crafts. “Maybe you need to advertise more,” I suggested. But they didn’t.

  “Advertising costs money, Mitch.” Dad sighed.

  Pretty soon they weren’t able to pay the rent on their shop and started selling their things out of our home. Which was fine when we had a home.

  “I don’t think you made the payment on the house this month,” I told Dad. “You owe the bank money.”

  “We don’t have it, Mitch,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Oh no.

  Eventually this guy from the bank came by the house, a short, plump man with a mustache that looked like a caterpillar on his upper lip and a short-sleeve dress shirt with stains under the armpits, just like Coach Williams’s. (Except that Coach Williams was running around on a football field, not sitting in our living room.) The man told us the bank might be “foreclosing” on our house at 353 Del Rio Avenue.

  “What’s that mean?” Kevin asked me.

  “It means that the bank gave Mom and Dad a loan to pay for the house. And Mom and Dad have to pay back the bank,” I said. “And since they can’t pay back the money, the bank is going to want the house back.”

  “What’s a bank want with our house?”

  It was a good question. Does a bank really want a three-bedroom home with bike tire tracks on the walls, a gaping hole in the ceiling from where Kevin once swung on a ceiling fan (don’t ask how it happened), and a skateboard ramp in the back?

  But I guess, from the bank’s point of view, getting our house was better than not getting anything.

  That’s when we ran into another problem.

  The price of the house had gone down. Not just our house, actually. House prices all over California—all over the country—were way down. So our house was worth less than it was when Mom and Dad bought it. Even if we sold the house, we wouldn’t have enough money to pay the bank back (and we wouldn’t have a place to live).

  So they did what a lot of people did. They decided to hand the house over to the bank and start fresh somewhere else. It was sort of like a do-over in a game of kickball.

  As always, I tried to explain it to Kevin in a way he could understand. “Let’s say you wanted to buy a vintage baseball card of Willie Mays, the all-time greatest San Francisco Giant—”

  “I could never afford that,” he interrupted. “That would cost, like, thousands of dollars!”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “A bank would buy it for you. You just have to promise to pay them back the money—plus a little more in interest.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “How could I pay it back? I can’t even save my allowance each week.”

  “But the bank thinks you can pay them back eventually. And maybe even by the time you want to sell the card, it could be worth at least the same amount as what you bought it for, maybe even more, and you would have already paid them most of the money.”

  Kevin started smiling. I’m sure he was picturing himself showing the card off to his friends and framing it for his wall. I had to cut off his daydreaming.

  “There’s only one problem,” I said. “What if the value of the card went down? Let’s say you paid three thousand dollars for the card, and then suddenly you owed the bank three thousand dollars plus interest for a baseball card that at the most you could only sell for, like, one thousand dollars? Even if you sold the card, you’d still owe the bank more than two grand, and they want it back!”

  His smile went to half-mast. Then it collapsed entirely.

  “I’d be in trouble,” he said. “I’d probably just have to give the card back to the bank or whatever.”

  “Exactly.”

  So that’s what my mom and dad did. Ditched the house. Gave it back to the bank. Moved out here to Indiana to start over.

  And it wasn’t so bad. I sure didn’t miss school back in California. Kevin was playing football (and losing, but at least he had fun being good at it). I was making friends, and maybe even a best friend.

  So I told all this to Jamie, and she listened, petting Pepper, looking serious and thinking.

  “Okay, I get it,” she said. “That sounds rough. I’m sorry, Mitch. But what does it have to do with the betting at school?”

  I sighed. “They’re not selling a lot of art here either,” I told her. “I didn’t mind it, moving once. But I really don’t want to have to do it again. I like it here. People like me here.”

  “So you want to keep making money at school? Just in case?”

  I nodded.

 
; “Okay, then. We will.”

  Suddenly Jamie was all business. “I know what to do about the change thing, Mitch. This’ll work.”

  And she told me her plan. We’d give the kids who placed their bets using one-dollar bills first choice of the games. Kids who wanted to pay with tens and twenties could bet, too—but only after the ones who paid with singles.

  Genius.

  And Jamie had another great idea. Right after we’d paid off the winners, we’d show them the schedule of the next weekend’s games and give them the chance to put down their bets. It worked great. As long as they had the money handy—and were feeling good about how talented they were at predicting football games—why not let them make more bets?

  They did, too. They were glad to do it.

  The money kept piling up in my dresser drawer.

  And Jamie didn’t talk about quitting anymore.

  Remember how I said that my day would usually peak with math? Well, that wasn’t the case lately.

  It seemed like Mr. Rafferty was starting to… well… I don’t want to say he had it in for me, but I could tell that he didn’t like me as much as he used to. He didn’t call on me a lot—sometimes even when I was the only one with a hand in the air. He never laughed at the jokes I made.

  And please don’t bother trying to suggest that it was “in my head” or that I was “imagining it.” That’s the kind of thing grown-ups say. And I know it’s not true.

  Mr. R. was teaching us about integers—positive and negative numbers. And as usual, he had come up with a fun way to do it: a fake game show. He called it Mathletes in Action.

  When it was my turn to be the featured contestant, Mr. R. stared me right in the eye and spoke extra slowly. “Okay, sir,” he said in a fake game-show-host voice. “For the benefit of the folks watching at home all around this great nation, please state your name and your affiliation.”

  “Mitch Sloan. Jonasburg Middle School.”

  “Very good. With everyone at Jonasburg Middle School cheering you on, Mitch Sloan, are you ready for your first question?”

  I don’t know how Mr. Rafferty always had the energy to be so lively and funny. Especially compared to Mrs. Connor, my social studies teacher, who once showed us a movie and fell asleep in the middle of it. Or Mrs. Shelby, my fifth-grade teacher, who would sometimes try to sneak out her phone, place it in her lap, and send text messages to her friends while we were filling out the worksheets she assigned. But Mr. R.? He’s like those athletes who “always bring their A game,” like the announcers say.