The Boy Who Knew Too Much
Page 1
Copyright © 2016 by Commander S. T. Bolivar III
Cover illustration and design by Phil Caminiti
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4847-5407-8
Visit www.DisneyBooks.com
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Munchem Academy Rule 1: Do Not Steal
Munchem Academy Rule 2: Prepare for the Worst
Munchem Academy Rule 3: Be Honest
Munchem Academy Rule 4: Respect Your Elders
Munchem Academy Rule 5: Never Judge a Book by Its Cover or a Classmate by His Grades; They’re Probably Much Worse Than They Seem
Munchem Academy Rule 6: Meet All Situations with Optimism
Munchem Academy Rule 7: Don’t Put Things Where They Don’t Belong
Munchem Academy Rule 8: Employ Good Manners at All Times
Munchem Academy Rule 9: Pay Attention
Munchem Academy Rule 10: No Pets Allowed
Munchem Academy Rule 11: Never Go Out of Bounds
Munchem Academy Rule 12: Never Touch Anything without Permission
Munchem Academy Rule 13: Be Good
Munchem Academy Rule 14: No, Really, Be Good or Else
Munchem Academy Rule 15: Be Aware of Your Surroundings
Munchem Academy Rule 16: Take Your Responsibilities Seriously
Munchem Academy Rule 17: You Break It, You Replace It
Munchem Academy Rule 18: Never Think Outside the Box
Munchem Academy Rule 19: Play Well with Others
Munchem Academy Rule 20: Take Care of Your Fellow Classmates
Munchem Academy Rule 21: Watch Your Back
Munchem Academy Rule 22: Live Up to Your Potential
Munchem Academy Rule 23: Set a Good Example for Other Students
Munchem Academy Rule 24: Always Go the Extra Mile
Munchem Academy Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 15: Sometimes a Wrong Can Make a Right
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 14: Always Have a Plan
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 13: When Cleaning Something Gross, Use Someone Else’s Toothbrush
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 12: Know the Value of a Good Opportunity
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 11: Never Get Trapped in a Dead End
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 10: Be Careful Where You Hide
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 9: Never Leave Someone Behind
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 8: Remember Your Goal
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 7: Recognize Your Team is Your Best Asset
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 6: Always Have a Backup Plan
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 5: And Then Have a Backup Plan for Your Backup Plan
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 4: Never Let the Bad Guys Get Away–Unless You’re the Bad Guy, in Which Case: Run for It!
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 3: Be Careful You Don’t Overdo It
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 2: Always Live Happily Ever After…or Happily Until the Next Job
Mattie Larimore’s Big Book of Bad 1: Always Listen to That Voice Inside Your Head
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOR THE COMMANDER’S MOTHER, WHO KNEW MATTIE WAS CORRUPT FROM THE BEGINNING.
THE FOLLOWING STORY IS THE ONLY true account of how Mathias Littleton Larimore became the world’s greatest thief. Other books may claim to know the truth behind the man who stole the Queen’s jewels and then mailed them back to her. They may even claim to know the real story about the man who stole all the toilet paper from the White House bathrooms.
Those books lie.
They don’t know anything about how a rather-small-for-his-age Good Boy began his life of crime. They don’t know anything about how the youngest member of the Larimore family became the world’s greatest thief.
They do know how everything started, though. Everyone does. You see, there was a subway train, and several bad decisions that resulted in Mattie Larimore being arrested for the first (and only) time.
Later, when he was asked why he would steal a subway train, Mattie said it was because of the following:
Reason #1: His parents were fighting. Again.
Reason #2: His brother kept calling him girls’ names. Again.
Reason #3: The door to the control room was wide open.
His parents’ lawyer said these were “extenuating circumstances,” which seemed to mean “Why, everyone should go home and forget this ever happened.” Only nobody did. They stayed to yell at Mattie.
Then Mattie’s father arrived at the police station, and he yelled at everyone else.
“You are so dead, Matilda,” Mattie’s brother, Carter, said as they watched Mr. Larimore bellow at two police officers. Both boys were sitting against a butter yellow wall, on a bench worn smooth by hundreds—if not thousands—of butts before theirs. “You think they’ll just bury your lifeless body in the back garden?”
Mattie gaped. He had no idea. He had never been in trouble before.
“What were you thinking, anyway?” Carter asked.
“I was trying to…” Mattie trailed off. He couldn’t bring himself to say he was trying to impress Carter. He couldn’t bring himself to say he regretted stealing the train the moment it passed the first stop. He definitely couldn’t bring himself to say he was so worried his parents were going to bury him in the back garden that he had now sweated through his underwear.
“I just wanted you to stop calling me girls’ names,” Mattie said at last.
“Listen up, Melissa.” Carter did not look at his brother. He was too busy using his cell phone to type out all the new swear words he was learning from Mr. Larimore. “That’s a stupid reason to steal a train.”
Sadly, Mattie had to admit this was true. He knew being called Madeline was not a good enough reason to steal a subway train that smelled like vomit and hair spray. It was not a good enough reason to take all of the passengers trying to go to the south side of the city to the north side of the city. But in the moment before he locked himself in the train’s control room, all he could think about was:
Reason #4: If he stole the train, his big brother would stop treating him like a little kid.
Even if he was a kid—and, let’s face it, little—Mattie was small for his age. His size didn’t seem to matter except for when it came to dealing with brothers and going to gym class. And buying clothes that didn’t have baby ducks on them. Sometimes that was a problem too. Mattie could never figure out why adults seemed to think that if you were a little kid you wanted baby animals on your T-shirts. It was like they thought he was stupid.
Mattie wasn’t stupid. Although one of the police officers was currently asking his parents if he might be.
“Of course he’s not stupid!” Mattie’s mother cried, wobbling on her pink high heels. Mrs. Larimore always wore high heels. She wasn’t very good at it, but she said it was part of her job as an actress. Mattie’s mother was once the star of the telenovela series Como Pasa El Tiempo (As Time Goes On). She played a beautiful farmer’s daughter who was always looking for love.
Mattie knew this because he had just spent the entire summer watching and rewatching the series with her. Sometimes it was the only thin
g Mattie could do to make his mother smile.
She certainly wasn’t smiling now. Mrs. Larimore jammed one finger in her son’s direction. “My son is not stupid! He’s eleven!”
The first police officer exchanged a look with the second. It was a silent look, but Mattie could tell what it meant. It said, But eleven-year-olds are stupid.
“And you, sir, smell like cough syrup,” Mattie whispered.
“What’s that, Beverly?” Carter asked. He had stopped typing swearwords into his phone because their mother was now crying and their father was trying to get her to stop. “Talk louder. I can’t hear you when you whisper.”
Mattie glanced at his parents and then at the police officers. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be talking to Carter about the officers. Actually, he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be talking, period.
“I said that police officer smells like cough syrup,” Mattie said at last.
“So does Dad’s accountant,” Carter said.
“Ugh,” both boys said. Mattie and Carter spent a lot of time with the accountant because Mr. Larimore wanted his sons to know all about the Larimore Corporation. Unfortunately, the accountant never taught Mattie anything he wanted to know, and if Mattie asked his dad questions he did want the answers to, the vein on Mr. Larimore’s forehead would stand up…kind of like it was now.
“Why, if I ran my company the way you run this horrible excuse for a police station, I’d be out of business!” Mr. Larimore yelled. He took a white handkerchief from his suit pocket and dabbed his shiny, bald head. “I’m not even sure you can prove my son took that train! What proof do you have?”
The first police officer shook his fist. “He admitted it himself!”
“He’s eleven!” Mrs. Larimore shrieked.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Larimore. “And he’s our good son. Now if you had been talking about my other son, Carter, that would be different.”
Everyone looked at Carter. Carter waved. This was what Mr. Larimore meant when he said Mattie was “the good son.” Mattie made good grades (mostly). He was polite (almost always). He never stole stuff (until today). Meanwhile, Carter had terrible grades, was never polite, and once peed off their third-floor balcony. He had wanted to hit the pigeons below. He missed. Or scored, depending on whether you would give Carter points for missing the pigeons, but hitting old Mrs. Kirby-Clegg as she walked home from seniors’ yoga.
Carter was the Bad Brother. He even went to a special school with other bad kids. It was called Munchem Academy, and it was way out in the countryside so that none of the students could escape.
“And so no one can hear us scream,” Carter would always add.
Mattie hated when his brother said that. It always made his skin prickle. Bottom line: everyone knew Carter was a bad kid. Everyone said Carter was a bad kid. Carter was even sort of proud of being a bad kid. Or at least he seemed proud, especially now when all the police officers were glaring at him and Carter was waving and grinning.
“That’s enough, Carter,” Mr. Larimore said, eyes narrowing.
Carter stopped waving, the adults started talking, and Mattie slumped down on the bench. If his shoulders touched the bottom of the backrest, his sneakers could almost hit the dirty yellow floor. If his parents and the officers argued much longer, he would have to make a game out of seeing how far he had to slump before his feet completely reached the floor.
“We’re going to let Mattie off with a warning,” the first police officer said to Mr. Larimore. “But we better never see him doing anything like that ever again.”
“Of course you won’t see him doing anything like that again!” Mrs. Larimore was wobbling again and Mattie couldn’t tell why. It was either her high heels or her crying. His mom kept making hiccuping noises like she was crying, but her makeup never smeared. It was a trick she had learned on the set of Como Pasa El Tiempo. “What kind of parents do you think we are?” Mrs. Larimore demanded.
The police officers exchanged another look. Mattie understood this one too. It said, We don’t like these people. Mattie’s parents got that look a lot, but they never seemed to notice. Only Mattie did. Sometimes noticing how other people looked at his parents made Mattie cringe. Mostly, it made him try to be even nicer.
“Let’s go,” Mr. Larimore said, grabbing both boys by their shirt collars. He steered them down the butter yellow hallway and past the chipped reception desk. But when Mr. Larimore pushed through the wooden double doors, the whole family was greeted with pops of light.
Cameras, Mattie thought as he shielded his eyes. No, worse, he realized. They were reporters with cameras. His father hated reporters with cameras.
His mother loved them. Mrs. Larimore stopped on the police station steps and began to pose. She turned right and then left and then blew them a kiss.
Mr. Larimore shook his fist. “Out of my way!”
“Mr. Larimore!” one of them yelled. The man wore a red vest with pockets and shouldered past the others to shove a tape recorder in Mr. Larimore’s face. “What can you tell us about your son’s recent lawbreaking?”
Mr. Larimore’s face went purple again. “No comment!” he roared and hauled both his boys toward the parking lot. The reporters followed, but there wasn’t much to see. Mr. Larimore was stomping like he usually did. Mrs. Larimore was teetering like she usually did. And the boys were eyeing each other like they usually did.
But something felt very off to Mattie, like something really bad was about to happen to him, and in a way Mattie was right, because Mr. Larimore was coming up with a plan.
MR. LARIMORE LIKED BIG THINGS: big meals, big houses, bigger office buildings. But most of all, he liked the Larimore family’s big SUV. It towered over the other cars on the road and made him feel like he was sitting on an enormous leather couch as they flew down the interstate.
It made Mattie feel like he might hurl as Mr. Larimore jerked the SUV around another reporter’s van. Someone honked behind them and Mr. Larimore stepped on the gas. The SUV swerved into the next lane.
“You know what your problem is, Mattie?” his father asked.
Mattie thought about it. There were plenty of problems to choose from. Mattie had some problems in math, a few problems reaching top shelves, and a few more problems making friends. In short, Mattie didn’t know which problem his father meant, but he was pretty sure his dad was going to tell him.
“Your problem is you’re turning into Carter,” Mr. Larimore said.
Next to Mattie, Carter blew out an enormous sigh and became very interested in his cell phone. Mattie’s stomach gave a little twist. He thought about patting Carter’s knee…or shoulder…or something, but Carter wasn’t big on Mattie patting him. To be honest, Carter wasn’t big on anything to do with Mattie.
“Both of you boys think that life is just this big game,” Mr. Larimore said. He had craned his head around to look at his sons, causing the SUV to drift into the next lane. Mr. Larimore corrected it with a jerk. “And life isn’t a game, is it, Maria?”
Mrs. Larimore agreed that life was indeed not a game.
“See?” Mr. Larimore pounded one fist on the leather steering wheel and changed lanes. “Even your mother knows I’m right.”
The boys’ father braked for a red light. Once the SUV stopped, he turned in his seat to better glare at his sons. “You’re going to inherit the company one day, Mattie! You better shape up!”
Mattie nodded. “Sorry, Dad.”
“Is that all you have to say?” Mr. Larimore demanded in a tone that sounded very much like that of a father who would bury his bad son in the back garden.
Mattie swallowed. If he were Carter, he would suck in his mouth and round his eyes until they were huge. The move always worked on their mother. It sometimes worked on their father. Mattie was pretty sure it wouldn’t work for him because at the moment all Mattie could do was sweat.
“I won’t ever, ever, ever do it again,” he said at last.
“You’re darn right
you won’t,” Mr. Larimore said and smacked his lips. “I can’t have this sort of behavior. It’s going to put us in all the newspapers. Again!”
The light turned green and Mr. Larimore floored the gas pedal. The SUV lurched forward. Mattie slumped in his seat. Just when he thought disappointing his parents couldn’t get any worse, the newspapers got involved.
“Both of you are turning into hoodlums,” their father continued. “I have to do something or people will think I’m a terrible father and then they’ll think I have a terrible company and then sales will go down!”
Everyone in the SUV gasped. Well, everyone except for Carter, who might have laughed.
But he did it very, very quietly.
“We have to do something, Michael!” Mrs. Larimore was back to wailing.
“Of course we will,” Mr. Larimore reassured her. “I’ll show those reporters how serious we are. We’ll send Mattie to reform school. That’ll shut them up.”
Mattie sat up straight. “But Dad, that’s for kids like Carter!”
Next to him, Carter made a little coughing noise and Mattie winced. He winced because it wasn’t a nice thing to say, and he winced because he knew his brother would make him pay for it. A small voice in Mattie’s head wondered if Carter would make him pay with a wedgie? A swirly? Mattie didn’t know, and he’d finally found something that scared him even more than being half-drowned in Carter’s toilet. He couldn’t go to Munchem. Being buried in the back garden would be a better fate.
“I’m not like those kids!” Mattie’s voice swung so high that, for a second, he really did sound like a Matilda. “I’ve never done anything like this before!”
“And you won’t do it again,” Mr. Larimore said. “I can’t have this kind of behavior. I won’t have this kind of behavior. You boys need discipline!”
“Dad,” Mattie pleaded. He was thinking fast. He was thinking hard. It was important to use words like adults did. Mostly that was all they understood. “Please don’t do this. It was a thoughtless mistake, and I’ve learned from it. I’m a better person now.”