Stealing the Game

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

“Too late,” I said. “I saw it. It’s an Archie.”

  She sighed. “Not just any Archie, moron. A speculative Archie.” She pulled it out of the bag. It was oversize and thick. “It’s a what-if issue with two stories. What if Archie marries Betty, and what if he marries Veronica. And it deals with important grown-up issues, like divorce and betrayal and losing one’s job.…” She stopped talking, as if afraid that anything else she said would make things worse. But actually, I found that particular selection somehow touching. I didn’t know why, but it made me like her even more.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said suddenly, and started shoveling her comics back into the bag.

  I didn’t want her to go. For one thing, I didn’t want to go home and face my lying brother. I still hadn’t figured out what to say to him or whether I should tell my parents what Theo had discovered. I also didn’t want to face my parents’ sickeningly enthusiastic campaign to make me Stanford material. Would there now be a Stanford pennant on the wall above my bed?

  And I certainly didn’t want to explain what had happened to my face.

  “I draw comics,” I blurted out. She was the first person—other than Jax—I’d told that to, and she didn’t even like me.

  “Oh?” she said. She laid her hands on top of her bag and waited for me to continue.

  So I told her about Master Thief and how I couldn’t figure out what powers to give him and that I sucked at drawing, so all my characters looked like something you’d find scribbled in crayon on a kid’s mat in a restaurant.

  “Master Thief, huh?” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or really interested.

  I just nodded.

  “Ever steal anything?” she asked, a strange smile creeping across her face.

  “No.”

  “How are you going to understand the mind of a thief if you’ve never experienced the thrill and danger of actually doing it yourself?”

  “I’m pretty sure Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster never flew or had bullets bounce off their chests, but they still did a good job.”

  “The original Superman didn’t fly,” she said. “He leaped over buildings. It wasn’t until 1941, two years after his first appearance, that he could fly.”

  Remind me what I liked about her again? Man, she was frustrating.

  “My point is,” I said slowly, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice, “a good writer imagines things without having to do them.”

  “I don’t think Ernest Hemingway would agree.”

  All I knew about Hemingway was that he did a lot of things he wrote about: hunted for lions, fished for marlin, fought bulls. I couldn’t chance a literary debate. She’d easily win. I changed the subject. “Did you ever steal?”

  “As a kid, I shoplifted some candy from a 7-Eleven. And a scrunchie from Nordstrom. No major felonies.”

  “Did you get caught?”

  “Nope.” She grinned wickedly. “So which one of us is the real Master Thief?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She frowned at me. “So, how does this whole silence-is-golden thing work with you? Anytime you get outthought or outwitted you just clam up?”

  I clammed up.

  “And then what? People get bored and move on?”

  Pretty much, I thought, but didn’t say anything. Bored yet?

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said excitedly, like she’d just invented peanut butter. “Let’s go to a store and you can shoplift something. That will help you get into your character better.”

  I laughed, because I thought she was kidding. Then I realized she wasn’t.

  “I don’t want to steal,” I said.

  “It doesn’t have to be anything expensive. It can be anything, even a candy bar. Then once you’ve made it outside the store you can give it back. Just tell them you forgot you had it.”

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that this is a really bad idea. If it were a movie, everyone in the audience would be saying, “Don’t do it, Chris!” because this is the part of the story where the good guy (me!) gets caught and his life is forever ruined.

  On the other hand (just hear me out), she had a point. Maybe I was stuck with my comic because I didn’t really know what it felt like. I mean, I could plan the perfect heist, but that was all on paper. I didn’t know firsthand the kind of adrenaline-pumping, heart-stopping, am-I-going-to-prison feeling.

  And, like she said, I’d give it right back afterward. Technically, that wasn’t even stealing. More like borrowing.

  “I just thought of something else,” she said. “We can go to the Accessory Depot over at the Tustin Marketplace.”

  “Accessory Depot?”

  “They sell accessories like earrings, bracelets, smartphone covers, barrettes, stuff like that. My dad is a part owner, so if you get caught, I can explain it to the manager. No harm, no foul. Sound good?”

  I looked at her bright smile and said, “Sure, okay.”

  And off we went to my first heist.

  MY LIFE OF CRIME BEGINS

  EVEN though no one in the store was looking directly at me, it felt as if they were all secretly watching me. Like teachers at their desks during a test, pretending to read a magazine or grade essays but out of the corners of their eyes always scanning the room for cheaters. That hopeful drool forming on their lips at the thought of catching one.

  I was as out of place as a quarterback suddenly pushed onstage in the middle of a ballet. Earrings, bracelets, and necklaces glittered and gleamed and sparkled on the walls like tiny fireworks. Spinner racks of flavored lip gloss, bedazzled phone cases, and a bunch of stuff I couldn’t even identify crowded the small store so that you had to squeeze around them just to move through the place.

  I studied each customer with the fevered panic of a prisoner in the exercise yard who’d just been told that one of the inmates was coming for him with a sharpened toothbrush. Who would it be?

  Was that woman in the yoga outfit, who was holding up earrings to her ear and checking herself out in the mirror, actually watching my every move in the reflection?

  Was the six-year-old boy fidgeting so much because he was bored waiting for his mom to select a bedazzled iPhone case, or because he was impatient to rat me out to the store manager?

  Were the cute teenage girls with sparkling braces giggling over the enormous selection of mustache necklaces, or were they actually giggling over me and what I was trying to do?

  Was everyone in the store today an undercover cop? FBI? CIA? Homeland Security?

  So this is what being a criminal felt like: Extreme paranoia. Cold sweat. Thumping heartbeat. The strong need to pee.

  I swallowed hard and wiped the sweat from my eyes. I also wiped the sweat from my hands on the back of my pants. I was sweating so badly that anything I picked up was likely to slip right out. Would that cause me to be discovered and arrested? Would I end up in jail? Would the other inmates nickname me Sweaty the Shoplifter? What if my cell mates were Steve the Stabber or Carl the Cannibal? How would Sweaty the Shoplifter survive against them? Not to mention Dave the Disembowler or Ben the Beheader.

  Whewwwwwwww!

  I took a deep breath, like I did before a basketball game. Calmed myself.

  Brooke wandered around the store pretending to browse. Occasionally, she would lift her dark eyes and glare at me expectantly. Once she widened her eyes as if to say, Do it already!

  So I finally picked up something, a round copper bracelet with hearts engraved all around it, and examined it closely, like I was thinking how this would look on my imaginary girlfriend. All the while I was wondering if I could get away with stuffing it down my pants and marching out the door.

  Brooke nodded encouragement at this new step. Like a cheerleader at tip-off.

  When we’d first walked into Accessory Depot half an hour ago, the tall man behind the counter had said, “Hi, Brooke. Your dad send you here to check up on me?” They’d both laughed. Brooke had gone over
to the counter to chat with the man. With his light blue shirt, dark blue tie, and shiny black shoes, he was clearly the manager. He looked about thirty and in good shape. His bulging biceps pushed tight against his blue shirt. I might be able to outrun him in a flat race on the street, but if he ever caught me, he’d be able to snap me in two like a wooden match.

  I was pretty much against being snapped in two like a wooden match.

  They’d talked in low voices while Brooke had signaled me with her hand behind her back to get to work. She’d even blocked his sight so he couldn’t see me. I’d appreciated her distracting him for me and was about to jam a pair of sterling-silver mermaid earrings down my shirt when a girl I recognized as a senior at the high school came out of the back room carrying a box full of jewelry. Her name was Janet Slovski, but everyone called her Goody.

  I’d heard two versions of how she got her name. The first was that she’d once gotten an A on a history essay, then turned herself in for cheating because she felt she’d gotten too much help on it from her mom, who was a history professor. The teacher had made her stay after school and write a new essay right there in class. She’d gotten an A on that, too. The second version was that she’d gone to a beach party with Cameron Littlefield, a popular senior who thought he was cool because he interned at an alt-rock radio station. When she didn’t want to kiss him after s’mores, even though everyone else was making out like their lips were on fire and the flames needed to be smothered, he started calling her Goody Two-Shoes.

  It didn’t really matter which version was true. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Thing is, when did it become a bad thing to be good? I get that when somebody is really good it makes the rest of us feel bad, like we’re not trying hard enough, and so instead of becoming good ourselves, it’s easier to pull the good person down. Like with Lex Luthor and Superman. In Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, the thing that drives Luthor so crazy about Superman is that he’s an alien with enormous powers setting this example for the rest of us to live up to. Luthor thinks it sets an impossible standard that just makes us all miserable. That we’d be better off looking to regular humans for models of goodness, like Martin Luther King Jr., and former president Jimmy Carter, who builds homes for poor people. Maybe Lex has a point. On the other hand, maybe it’s better to see that even superheroes have flaws. Like my brother, Jax.

  I wanted to say something nice to Goody, to let her know I was on her side. But once again, words seem to tumble around in my mouth like bingo balls rattling around in a cage, until finally it spit out only one ball.

  “Hi,” I said to Goody.

  She looked up from her cardboard box, gave me a be-polite-to-all-customers-even-middle-school-boys-on-a-limited-budget smile, and said, “Hi.”

  And that was it. Nothing had changed. I hadn’t improved her life.

  So I went back to trying to steal and she went back to stocking shelves.

  And now I had two sets of eyes to worry about, not to mention all the customers who were pretending to ignore me.

  Which is why, after almost thirty minutes, I was still skulking around and Brooke was glaring at me to Get it done already, moron! Her glares were very articulate.

  She was right. In terms of sweat alone, I was losing more moisture than my body could bear. I felt like I’d been playing full-court basketball for three hours instead of walking around an accessory store for thirty minutes. I was probably two pounds lighter than when I’d arrived.

  That’s when it occurred to me.

  WWMTD?

  What Would Master Thief Do?

  I was pretty good at planning crimes. In my comics I’m always figuring every larcenous move, down to the last detail. Actually, planning a heist isn’t much different from coming up with a game plan to beat an opposing basketball team. Just look at their strengths and weaknesses and act accordingly. For years, I’d been walking into stores and banks, figuring out their security, imagining various ways to rob the places so I could write about it for Master Thief. Once I’d confessed my love of comics to Jax and shown him my stories, he’d started driving me to various locations. Afterward, he’d take me out for ice cream sundaes and play cop to my robber, trying to poke holes in my plans. He made a pretty good cop, too, finding every weakness and forcing me to come up with something even better. I missed those times more than I wanted him to know.

  So why had I walked in here without thinking things through, mapping the place out first, observing every tiny detail, and then coming up with a plan? Instead, I’d allowed Brooke to pressure me into doing the heist (okay, it’s shoplifting trinkets, but I’m calling it a heist anyway). She’d picked the time and place and was even acting as my accomplice.

  WWMTD?

  Take control of the situation.

  I looked around the store. It didn’t take long to spot the security cameras in the corners. That’s because they wanted you to see those. They were meant to discourage the amateur thief short on allowance or looking for a thrill. The real danger was the hidden security cameras in the ceilings. (Part of my research for my Master Thief comic was reading about security systems. A lot.) There would be one above the cashier island in the middle of the store, in order to keep an eye on the cash register, making sure the employees weren’t pocketing any cash. And there would be two fisheye lenses—one at the front of the store above the entrance door, and one at the back above the rear exit. That covered almost all the store.

  Almost.

  I put the copper bracelet back and waited. I couldn’t wait much longer or I would be suspicious just for being in here so long. Most guys didn’t tend to dawdle in accessories stores.

  Brooke looked up from the display of colorful earbuds and screwed up her face into a combination glare and frown that meant, Are you the lamest boy in the world? Or something like that.

  I ignored her and inspected some earrings that had both peace symbols and tiny silver guns. I guess it was meant to be ironic or something.

  It was weird, but I no longer felt shaky or had to pee. I’d stopped sweating. I was still scared, but in a different way. In a way that was exciting. Like when I’m dribbling down the court and the double team is clamping on me, and my teammates are all being swarmed, and suddenly I see just the tiniest possible opening. Maybe, just maybe, if I juke to the right and spin to the left and duck under and pivot twice…In real life, that almost never works, but that tingly feeling you have when you see it all, know it’s probably going to fail, but decide to try it anyway…that’s how I felt.

  That’s how Master Thief would feel.

  And we both liked it.

  Then what I’d been waiting for happened. The manager and Goody were both ringing up sales for customers at the same time. Yoga Lady had decided earrings that looked like gold suns were right for her. And the two Giggly Girls each bought matching mustache necklaces that made them BFFs. Then they saw a fishbowl filled with various-flavored lip gloss and couldn’t decide which flavors would be best. Goody cheerfully explained the flavors to them. “The Dreamsicle tastes like a fifty-fifty ice cream bar,” Goody said.

  That’s when I walked over to the one-foot strip on the wall that was a blind spot from the security cameras and from the manager and Goody. I lifted both hands as if trying to grab the stuffed blue monkey from the top shelf. As I reached high, I used my right hand to brush three pairs of earrings into my left arm sleeve. The small squares of plastic they were attached to slid down the sleeve of my hoodie, feeling like hard-shelled insects skittering against my skin. When they reached my armpit, I clamped down, pinning all three pairs under my arm. Then I stuck my hand in my pocket, twisted slightly, and let them slide back down my arm and into the pocket of my hoodie.

  Master Thief had scored!

  Brooke was trying on a barrette with a big yellow flower attached. It was way too cheerful for her taste, yet it looked good on her. I quickly grabbed her comic book bag from the counter and said, “Time to go.”

  “You done shopping?” she asked in way th
at let me know what she really meant: had I chickened out?

  “Done,” I said.

  She smiled, took her bag of comics from me, and I picked up my backpack from the front of the store, where there was a sign ordering customers to leave them. Together we nonchalantly walked out of the store and into the bustling noise of the mall.

  It could have been a cool slow-motion movie moment, like in Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13, when they bust the casinos.

  Except…

  Except the manager followed us out the door and grabbed my arm.

  He was just as strong as I’d thought he’d be. There would be no pulling free from that grip and making a run for it.

  CAUGHT?

  “EXCUSE me, sir,” the manager said firmly. I could smell his peppermint breath mint and tangy Axe body spray. He had a three-day stubble. He seemed like the kind of guy who always had a three-day stubble, like he imagined himself living in a cologne ad.

  “Yes?” I said innocently. “Did I drop something?”

  His answer was to tighten his grip on my arm until the bones shifted.

  Touché.

  “I’m going to have to search you, sir,” he said. His grip was making my arm go numb.

  My mind suddenly started wondering: what would I call him if he were a supervillain?

  Miami Vice Grip?

  Edward Pliershands?

  The Crushinator?

  Rumple-stubble-skin?

  “Sir, please turn out your pockets,” he insisted.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, furrowing my brow to show confusion.

  “You were observed shoplifting.”

  I gasped, just like on TV, when joggers discover a body in the brush. It’s not that hard to do and does add nice dramatic flair. Being a successful Master Thief requires some basic acting skills.

  “There must be some mistake,” I said. Cue the angry scowl.

  “No, sir,” he said, his voice getting lower and more menacing. The polite veneer was starting to shed like a collie in July. Even his stubble looked threatening.

  “That’s impossible,” I said, raising my voice. My heart seemed to have migrated from my chest to right behind my eyes. Each rapid heartbeat felt like it was kicking against my eyes, making them bulge like a squeeze doll’s.