Pilfer Academy

by Lauren Magaziner

“Don’t forget the clotted cream!” shouted the woman, Strongarm, from under the truck.

  George rolled his eyes. “No, it means you won’t find the North Star. The sun’s still out.”

  “Oh.” Ballyrag frowned. “Hey, Strongarm! The kid says we won’t find the North Star.”

  “Why not?”

  “The sun’s still out.”

  “So?”

  “So,” said Ballyrag, “it’s hiding the star.”

  “Well, don’t worry!” Strongarm shouted, crawling out from under the car. “I’ll find it, now that I know exactly where to look! If the star is behind the sun, why, then all I have to do is stare directly into the sun with my binoculars, and eventually I’ll see right through it!”

  “What a magniferous idea!” Ballyrag said, clapping his hands and squealing.

  Strongarm held the binoculars up to her eyes and pointed them straight at the sun. Ballyrag hulked over to where George was lying, all tied up.

  “I should make those rumpets, now,” he said, sticking his head back in the ice-cream truck. “You know, in some countries, it’s forbidden to miss teatime.”

  “Like where?”

  “New Hampster,” Ballyrag said authoritatively, twirling the ends of his golden mustache.

  Unbelievable, George thought. I’ve been kidnapped by idiots!

  When Ballyrag left to rejoin Strongarm in her quest to find the North Star, George realized it was the perfect time to make his escape. He wiggled and wriggled and thrashed against the tape that was gluing him to the floor of the ice-cream truck. But it was no use—he was stuck tight.

  He tilted his head to see what Strongarm and Ballyrag were up to. Ballyrag was looking at Strongarm. Strongarm was still peering straight into the sun. Finally, she put down her binoculars. “See? I told you I was right. All I had to do was stare at the sun until it became nighttime. Now, quick! Someone locate the North Star!”

  George tried to exchange a glance with Ballyrag, but Ballyrag was too busy scratching his head.

  “It’s still the middle of the afternoon,” George said. “It’s one of the sunniest days I’ve ever seen.”

  “So?” said Strongarm.

  “So?” repeated Ballyrag.

  “So you’ve gone blind from the sun.”

  “Really?” Ballyrag said. “Strongarm, are you going blinded?”

  “I cannot see!” she announced. “Ballyrag! Help me!”

  He walked over to her and grabbed her arm. “Where should I take you?”

  “To the driver’s seat!”

  George spluttered. “But you can’t drive if you can’t see!”

  “But how can I see if I can’t drive?”

  “Good point, good point,” Ballyrag muttered.

  “That is not a good point!” George shouted. “That doesn’t make sense at all!”

  After a very unsuccessful attempt of begging Ballyrag to drive, George was finally able to bribe him—his left shoe in exchange for Ballyrag in the driver’s seat.

  Though, why Ballyrag wanted George’s left shoe was beyond him. Ballyrag buckled Strongarm in, then hopped in the back of the van to take what was his. He wiggled the shoe off George’s foot and tied the laces around his neck to make what looked like a shoe-necklace.

  Ballyrag took a big whiff and coughed. “You have stinky feet,” he said as he stroked the shoe-necklace fondly. He shut the truck doors again, jumped into the driver’s seat, and away they drove.

  “Do you have sunscreen?” Strongarm asked Ballyrag, after Ballyrag’s third illegal U-turn. “I think my eyeballs are sunburned.”

  Ballyrag dug into the side compartment and found a tube for Strongarm, who globbed it on her hands and delicately swabbed her eyes.

  “OWWWWWWWWW!” she howled.

  George, meanwhile, was still struggling with the tape around his wrists and ankles.

  They must have driven for three or four hours before the truck finally stopped. Strongarm’s eyes had begun to clear up, and Ballyrag had, apparently, driven in the right direction because when Strongarm looked out the window she clapped, giggling madly. George tried to peer out the front windshield, but from where he was tied up, he couldn’t see anything but a winding road that disappeared up a hill.

  “We’re here!” Strongarm said.

  “And where’s that?” George asked. “What do you want with me?”

  Strongarm climbed into the back of the truck and pulled a nail clipper out of her pocket.

  “Hold still,” Strongarm said. “These things are very dangerous.” She proceeded to cut the tape and netting away from him. After fifteen minutes, she succeeded.

  The second his arms were loose, George pushed her—she tumbled back and hit the wall of the truck. He jumped out its open doors, picked a direction, and ran.

  But it didn’t matter because Ballyrag caught up with him in less than three seconds. And no wonder—his legs were as tall as George’s entire body. Ballyrag plucked George off the ground by the scruff of his shirt and dangled him as far away from himself as possible, like he was a stinky diaper. George couldn’t understand this at all. He couldn’t have been any stinkier than the shoe under Ballyrag’s nose.

  “You’re running in the wrong direction,” Ballyrag said. “Here.” He carried George, and when they were right underneath an iron gate, Ballyrag turned him around so that he was staring at a long, twisty path that led up the hill.

  And at the top of the hill was the most amazing thing George had ever seen: a beautiful Gothic manor, with taupe exterior walls and colorful stained-glass windows. The building was so wide that it looked like it had eaten seven normal-sized buildings. And all over, the mansion was adorned with striking archways and ribbed vaults and tall spires and flying buttresses. It was stunning but very out of place in the middle of nowhere, USA.

  “Beautiful!” George gasped.

  “We know! We splanstranted it from Europe. Here, read the graving,” Ballyrag said, lowering him a bit and shoving his face in front of an engraved plaque.

  PILFER ACADEMY OF FILCHING ARTS

  (WE STEAL THINGS)

  FINDERS KEEPERS, LOSERS WEEPERS

  “TA-DA!” Strongarm and Ballyrag shouted. Strongarm even threw in some jazz hands for a TA-DA! effect.

  George’s mouth felt far too dry. “What is this place?” he croaked, even though he somehow knew exactly what they were going to say.

  “Your new school,” Strongarm said with a wicked grin, “and home sweet home.”

  Pilfer Academy of Filching Arts (We Steal Things)

  Ballyrag carried George up the stone steps—all three hundred fifty-two and a half of them—that led into the mansion’s ornate front doors.

  “The entire property is locked from the outside, so no excaping,” Ballyrag explained as Strongarm kneeled over to unlock the door with a key that was hanging around her neck.

  She held the door open for them as they stepped into the foyer—or foy-yay as Strongarm called it. The entrance was chandelier lit, illuminating expensive Oriental rugs that covered the marble floors and ran up the symmetrical master staircases that flanked each side of the room. The two mahogany banisters were just fat enough for sliding down. More than anything, George wanted to slide right down those puppies—but as he looked around, he realized it wouldn’t be possible to do that without breaking something.

  There were ivory statues everywhere—big ones and small ones, portraying Greek gods and naked people and cupid babies. One even squirted yellow liquid out of its mouth, which George thought looked positively disgusting. Old, serious-looking paintings covered every single space on every single wall and every single column.

  But there was even more—and the rest was bizarre. Right in the middle of the room, directly underneath the crystal chandelier, was the enormous skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex riding a World War
II fighter plane. Next to it, a suit of armor was in the driver’s seat of a pioneer wagon. A mummy was taunting a taxidermied bull with a red cloth. A replica caveman was typing Morse code. An astronaut suit was holding a butter churner.

  It was like someone had vomited a museum right into the foyer, but hadn’t bothered to fix the exhibits.

  George stood in silence, utterly overwhelmed. At last, he said, “That’s a very nice imitation David.” He nodded toward a grand, fifteen-foot-tall stone statue somewhere along the left side of the room.

  “Imitation?” Strongarm scoffed. “Imitation! I daresay, that’s the real thing! Italy has the imitation! Everything in this academy is one hundred percent stolen.”

  “WOW!” Ballyrag marveled, as if he were hearing all this for the first time.

  “Even the estate itself is stolen from the Duke of Valois in France—”

  “He and his wife went into town for an expresso!” Ballyrag interrupted.

  “And when he came back a half hour later, his manor was gone.”

  “Even his gardens were flinched, lawn and all!”

  Strongarm gave a rousing round of applause for the ingenious theft.

  George smiled halfheartedly and looked around again. “That fountain isn’t part of the plumbing system, is it?” He warily eyed the ivory man who looked like he was most certainly spitting pee.

  “Absolutely not!” Strongarm said, aghast. “That’s lemonade!”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” George said, even though being kidnapped by fools and trapped in a mansion full of thieves was the absolute opposite of relieving.

  “Let’s go to my office, Ballyrag.” Strongarm scurried across the foyer, and Ballyrag stomped after her. She led them through more rooms of stately statues and stolen museum exhibits, climbing two stairways and crisscrossing the building multiple times.

  “I would have introduced you to Dean Dean Deanbugle, but he’s out,” she said to him over her shoulder as they walked.

  “Dean . . . Deanbugle?”

  “Dean Dean Deanbugle,” Strongarm corrected. “A Dean named Dean Deanbugle! You will meet him soon enough.”

  They finally stopped before a medieval oak door with decorative ironwork.

  Inside, Strongarm’s office was cramped and overflowing. There were cases of fancy goblets, twisty candles, wood-carved puppets, and swanky hats. There were coins of all shapes and sizes from just about every country around the globe. On the wall hung bronze pocket watches, shiny picture frames (which didn’t house pictures, but instead framed smaller golden frames—frame inside frame inside frame), shimmering jewels, sparkly gems, and flashy gold nuggets. Strung around the perimeter of the room were silver chains, hanging like sparkling Christmas tinsel.

  While everything that glistened was not gold, everything that glistened was in Strongarm’s office.

  “It’s very . . . erm . . . shiny in here,” George said.

  Strongarm beamed.

  “You think this is shiny? Just look at my Crowning Jewel!”

  “Your Crowning Jewel?”

  “Yes, the Crowning Jewel of my thieving career—it’s thief talk for my most valuable steal!”

  “So what is your Crowning Jewel?” George asked her.

  “The Crowned Jewels!”

  “Right,” George said. Of course.

  Strongarm walked over to her chest of drawers, opened the top one, and wheedled the bottom of the drawer out. “It has a fake bottom,” she explained in response to George’s bewildered expression. She beckoned George over to the drawer, and he peered in at a dazzling collection of jewels of all colors, shapes, and sizes.

  “Those are taken right from the queen?” he asked.

  “Right from the queen!” Strongarm confirmed.

  “Snatchled from under her nose!” Ballyrag said.

  “What’s your Crowning Jewel?” George asked Ballyrag.

  “Did you see that fancy chandelier when you first walked in?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not that,” said Ballyrag firmly as Strongarm dragged three gem-encrusted chairs into a triangle shape and sat at one corner.

  She motioned for George to sit, and so he did—only to find that it was the lumpiest, most uncomfortable chair he had ever had the misfortune of sitting in.

  “Okaaaaay!” Strongarm said not a moment later, popping out of her chair. “Now that we’ve had a little rest and relaxation, it’s time to take a tour!”

  She yanked George out of his seat, pulled him back out into the hallway, and led him down a forty-foot tall corridor. Twinkling chandeliers dangled from hand-painted ceilings, and the walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with mirrors. It was like walking in his sister Rosie’s ballet studio, only a thousand times grander.

  “You must be blundering what all this is,” Ballyrag said, gesturing widely, “here at Pilfer Academy.”

  George looked around. “And where is Mr. or Mrs. Pilfer?”

  “Who?”

  “Pilfer Academy. Is Pilfer someone’s name?”

  Strongarm snickered. “No, silly! Pilfer isn’t a name—pilfer means to steal. It’s just a fancy word for thievery.” She cleared her throat. “Pilfer Academy of Filching Arts is the finest school for cultivating thieves, robbers, muggers, burglars, crooks, and otherwise intolerable hoodlums.”

  George frowned. He wasn’t a thief, robber, mugger, burglar, crook, or otherwise intolerable hoodlum. Sure, he borrowed Corman’s comics, but he was going to return them . . . maybe. And yes, he pocketed Derek’s money, but it was only ten dollars. He would have paid him back, probably. He hardly thought any of that qualified him to be enrolled in a thieving school.

  He opened his mouth to protest, but Strongarm plowed on. “You should be very proud of yourself,” she said, trudging down a flight of stairs. “You popped up on our radar last year. Our recruitment field scouts thought you had excellent thief potential, and we’ve been dogging you for a while now, watching your every move—”

  “—waiting to see if you’d inhibit thief qualities,” Ballyrag interrupted.

  “And did I?”

  They both stopped walking and nodded vigorously.

  “Multiple counts of thievery, general sneakiness, excellent timing, sharp intuitions, persistence, cunning, and a disregard for universal morality,” Strongarm said, ticking off his offenses with her fingers.

  George furrowed his brow. “So . . . what does that mean?”

  “It means that you are well on your way to becoming one of the top thieves in the country—no, the world.”

  The corridor forked at the end, and Ballyrag pointed to the left. “That’s the way to the lie berry.”

  “The what?” said George.

  “The Bonnie ’N’ Clyde Lie Berry,” Ballyrag said, leading him over to the stained-glass double doors that led inside. “Run by our splunderful liberrian, Bagsnatcher.”

  Strongarm unlocked the door with a small key hanging around her neck, then opened the doors wide. George marveled at the sight. The library was four stories tall with ladders to climb to the next level, and bookshelves that wrapped all the way around the room.

  “Our library only stocks first-edition original copies, stolen directly from each author,” Strongarm said proudly.

  “So when people borrow books—”

  “You want to borrow a book from the library?” Strongarm laughed incredulously. “You can’t do that! We keep all the books chained to the wall to prevent that sort of thing.”

  “The books are chained to the walls? What use is that? The whole point of a library is to let someone take a book with them!”

  Strongarm snorted. “How ridiculous! Why, if we let you borrow the books, you might never return them!”

  And she strode off to show George a room filled with exotic—and mostly rotten—food.

 
George followed Strongarm and Ballyrag around what felt like hundreds of corridors. He had the distinct feeling that they were wandering around in circles, but they never passed the same exhibit twice.

  “So what do you do here?” George asked. “Just train thieves and let them loose on the world?” They had wandered into the Butch Cassidy Wing, through a room that housed a large collection of exotic creepy crawlies. George shuddered as some sort of multicolored millipede flittered down the side of a terrarium.

  Strongarm nodded and smiled widely. “That’s exactly what we do.” Then she led George through an archway into a room full of space rocks. George paused for a moment to read the plaque:

  From the private collection of Neil Armstrong, 1969 moon expedition, stolen by Golddigger, Class of 1972, for his thesis project.

  Everything seemed to have a plaque on it, detailing who stole the object, from where, and when.

  “Where is everyone?” George asked. “All the students, I mean.”

  “In their dorms. It’s past curfew, but you’ll meet them soon,” said Strongarm, now ushering George into a hall of gemstones and gold.

  “How—how many kids have you kidnapped for this?”

  “Currently, we have seventy-four students in the whole school.”

  Ballyrag jeered at George, his face illuminated in the glow of three different gemstones. “We could have more, though. If we wanted. We have a rolling addition policy.”

  “That’s rolling admission, Ballyrag dear,” Strongarm corrected in a sugary voice as they walked into a large and echoing grand ballroom. “It means that students are admitted whenever we want. We bump people up to the next grade whenever we feel like they’re ready . . . which could be anywhere between six months and five years, depending on how they perform.”

  “Five years?”

  “Maybe longer, maybe shorter. Then you’ll become a second year, until we deem you ready to become a third year. And a third year until you are a fourth year. And a fourth year until you graduate and become a professional thief. If you add it all up, you will graduate Pilfer Academy of Filching Arts between three and twenty years from now.”

  “Twenty! Years!” George choked.