Pilfer Academy

by Lauren Magaziner

“And you didn’t even say thank you! You are well on your way to becoming a hardened criminal, I see! I am very proud. Very proud, indeed!” Dean Dean Deanbugle rocked back in his chair, looking rather triumphant.

  George wasn’t really sure what had just happened. One minute he was about to get in trouble, and the next minute he was being patted on the back. It was all very confusing. He nodded and tried his best to look like the hoodlum Dean Dean Deanbugle wanted him to be.

  “Well, you’d best be on your way to class,” Dean Dean Deanbugle said. “I don’t want you to be too late for . . .” he swiped the schedule out of George’s hands. “Ah, yes—Thieving Theory. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve got my eye on you, boy. Yes, I expect great things from you.”

  The Key

  George arrived five minutes late to his first class, which was pretty good considering he got lost in the mansion about fifteen times.

  His schedule read that his class was in the Blackbeard Wing, but he couldn’t remember where that was. George finally asked a third-year teenager for help. The older boy led him to an unmarked door and directed George right into—SPLASH—a soapy mop bucket.

  “This is just a janitor’s closet!” George said.

  “Welcome to Pilfer, kid!” the third-year called out as he fled.

  So George wandered around the halls, squishing every time he took a step. After trudging across two rooms, George ran into an angry custodian who yelled at him for dripping brown water all over the nice floor—and wouldn’t stop yelling until he shed his left shoe and sock. It was the second time he was forced to walk around Pilfer Academy of Filching Arts without a left shoe, since Ballyrag had stolen his other one, and he wondered how many days in a row he would go half shoeless.

  He wandered around aimlessly, but the hallways were quite empty. It seemed as though everyone in the mansion had found their classes except him. George passed through an open, lofted hallway of grandfather clocks when the clocks struck 8:30 a.m., echoing so madly that George heard chimes for a solid minute after they had stopped ringing. He was officially late, and more lost than he had ever been.

  But at the precise moment he was ready to give up, skip class, and wait in his room for someone to tell him what he missed, an adult wandered in.

  “Oh, hello!” said a round man, nodding at George. The man was very short and very wide, with a face that was made up of just a bunch of chins and glasses that were far too big for him. He looked like a big-bellied bug.

  “Excuse me!” George called, relieved to find someone who—he assumed—wouldn’t direct him into a closet. “I’m looking for the Blackbeard Wing.”

  “The new student, I presume? George Beckett?”

  George nodded.

  “First-years . . . criminally hopeless,” the man said, shaking his head. “Just round the corner there’s a spiral staircase, go up two flights, walk straight about fifteen paces, and the Blackbeard Wing will be on your left-hand side.”

  “Thanks!” George said breathlessly, dashing toward the spiral staircase.

  “Wait!” the man called.

  George paused and turned around.

  “You’re missing a shoe.”

  “I know.”

  The man chuckled. “You’re pretty strange, aren’t you, kid?”

  George ran around the corner, up the stairs, paced down the hall, and burst through the door of Blackbeard 204.

  Ballyrag stood at the front of the class, but when he turned to George, his expression became panicked. “HELP!” Ballyrag shouted. “A THIEF IS BREAKING INTO MY CLASS! HIDE ALL THE VOLUBLES!”

  “I’m not breaking in! I’m supposed to be here,” George explained. “Remember? You kidnapped me?”

  “Oh yes,” Ballyrag said, then he fondly patted George’s shoe, which he was still wearing around his neck. “Right. Well then . . . you’re late! One bajillion demerits for you! You can take a seat, Mr. Bucket.”

  “It’s Beckett.”

  Ballyrag scratched his head.

  George took a seat at the only empty desk, next to Tabitha, who leaned over and whispered faster than he had ever heard anyone speak, “There are no demerits, here. Just so you know. Only detentions and the whirlyblerg. You’re lucky it’s your first day because—believe me—you don’t want either of those.”

  “Why not?” he hissed.

  The corner of her mouth twitched as she looked up at the chalkboard, now covered with notes. “Quiet, or I’ll lose my key!” she hissed.

  “Lose your what?” George whispered, but Tabitha kicked him under the seat.

  “—never do well if you don’t think inside the box. But you all should feel very honored to be secluded among our ranks! As I was esplaining,” Ballyrag said, “right now, we’re going to be learning about basic grieving theory.”

  Tabitha raised her hand. “You mean Thieving Theory, right?” she called out.

  Ballyrag grunted.

  “So . . . let’s start with kidnapping. What’s the number one thing you have to remember about that?” The class was silent, hanging on Ballyrag’s answer. He sighed as though the answer was obvious. “You gotta remember to hold them for handsome.”

  Tabitha’s hand shot up. “You mean ransom, right?” she shouted out.

  Ballyrag grumbled.

  She vigorously scribbled in her notebook.

  “So when you’re holding someone for handsome, you need to send them a list of reprimands—”

  Once again, Tabitha’s hand flew up, and she interrupted, “You mean demands, right?”

  Ballyrag was starting to look annoyed—his nostrils flared out, and his eyes flashed angrily. He nodded brusquely before moving on with the lecture. “And you got to make sure your ransom note sounds very minister.”

  “You mean sinister, right?” she called out.

  Ballyrag growled.

  George leaned over to Tabitha. “Why do you keep correcting him?” he whispered.

  “Why do you keep bothering me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell everyone I put the toast on Milo’s chair?”

  “I would never do anything that might even remotely help Milo,” she said. “We are not friends.”

  “Why not?”

  “Shhhhhhh!” she snapped.

  “—a threat, a bequest, and constructions are the last things you need to remember to make a good letter.” Ballyrag finished grandly, raising his hands in the air. He skulked to a cabinet on the other side of the classroom and retrieved supplies—scissors, construction paper, stacks of magazines, and rubber gloves. “We’re going to make our own handsome notes, now, so get your magazines.”

  Milo rushed to the front of the room and accidentally-on-purpose knocked into George as he cut in front of him. At last, the line cleared out ahead, and George swiped a few magazines, a pair of scissors, a glue stick, construction paper, and rubber gloves. He returned to his desk and started on his project. He glanced over at Becca, who was the only one from his breakfast table that was sitting near him. She looked like she was having a grand old time poking holes through the magazine models’ eyes.

  George began to line up a few choice letters—mostly vowels—on his piece of orange construction paper. Then he found some threatening-looking consonants and began to form words. After ten minutes, he had pasted a short letter, and he was pretty satisfied with it.

  He looked over at Tabitha, and she had already written what looked like a whole essay out of magazine snippets. He tried to see what she was gluing, but as soon as she caught on, she shot him a scandalized look, then hunched over her project and shielded her ransom note with her arm.

  “I’m not copying!” George explained. “I’m done . . . and I’m bored.”

  Tabitha ignored him.

  When Ballyrag finally called for an end to the project, Tabitha was still gluing. In fact, she glued and
glued and glued while Ballyrag had the whole first row read their ransom notes aloud. Then it was the second row, and George was first.

  “Mr. Bennett, your turn.”

  “Beckett,” Tabitha corrected mindlessly, still gluing letters down.

  George stood up with his paper, cleared his throat, and read:

  I AM HOLDING YOUR KID HOSTAGE.

  GIVE ME A MILLION DOLLARS OR ELSE.

  “Sweet and short!” Ballyrag said, nodding. “But next time, you may want to give better defections.” He threw a bit of dust on George’s paper and wiped it with a brush. It looked like the makeup brush his mom used to apply powder to her face.

  George raised his hand. “What is that?”

  “Fingerprinting powder and applercation brush. From my crime kit.” Ballyrag finished blowing the dust off George’s note, and not a fingerprint in sight. “All clear! Next!”

  “Hold on, I’m not done gluing,” Tabitha said. George thought that was bold of her, but everyone in the class let out a collective sigh.

  Ballyrag cocked his head to the side in confusion, his mouth agape. George thought that if Ballyrag were a cartoon character, he would most certainly have a question mark hovering over his head at that moment.

  “Okaaaaaayyyyy,” Tabitha said, pressing down her last letter. “Ready!”

  Tabitha read in a loud and dramatic voice:

  I HAVE THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON EVER

  YES I HAVE STOLEN HIM MUAHAHAHAHA.

  IF YOU EVER WANT HIM BACK

  LEAVE A BILLION DOLLARS

  ON THE CORNER WHERE CLINTON STREET

  MEETS KINCAID AVENUE.

  IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS

  YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR PRECIOUS SON AGAIN.

  MUAHAHAHAHAHA.

  “Very good, Miss Crawfish!”

  “That’s Crawford,” Tabitha said.

  Ballyrag coughed. “Good. Very pacific and clear. Nice villainous flair with the evil laughter.”

  After a while of listening to ransom notes, they all began to sound the same. And just as his last classmate had finished reading her note, the bell rang. George gathered up his books and followed Tabitha out of the classroom.

  Their next class, Stealth 101, was on the other side of the mansion. No one waited for George—not even the kids he had breakfast with this morning—and so he walked alone.

  At last, he arrived at the classroom, and George took the only available seat. Five minutes after class was supposed to begin, the teacher still hadn’t arrived.

  George glanced at his schedule again—someone named Browbeat was supposed to be teaching this class. If he or she ever showed up. George leaned over to his neighbor. “Is Browbeat usually late like this?”

  The girl, who looked about as old as his sister Colby, rolled her eyes and ignored him.

  “Boo!” said a voice, and George whipped around. There was a man standing against the wall—well, actually, more like blending into the wall. George hadn’t even noticed him! The man wore a suit that matched the beige color of the classroom, and his face was painted to look like the art he stood in front of. As he walked to the front of the classroom, he took off his towering wig and wiped the makeup off with a handkerchief. George recognized him immediately. It was the round man with the many chins and enormous glasses that had given him directions to Ballyrag’s class.

  “I do this every time we have a new student,” Browbeat said. “I was, indeed, here the whole time. I just want you to realize how unobservant you truly are.”

  George nodded.

  “Though,” Browbeat said, “I just talked to Dean Dean Deanbugle, who seems to think you are not lacking in areas of stealth and cunning. In fact, he says we should all expect great things from you. I think his exact word was: exceptional.”

  George sunk down in his seat. He could feel people glaring at him, but he didn’t dare look.

  The class itself was rather dull. Browbeat lectured for an hour and fifteen minutes on the basic principles of stealthiness, which he called the P-I-S-S method: Patience, Imperturbability, Silence, and Surprise. Of course, this resulted mostly in Milo and his two friends—Adam and Carrie, as George discovered from Browbeat’s roll call—making pssssssss noises throughout the entire class underneath their breath.

  At lunch, George ate with Robin, Neal, Beth, and Becca again. They kept talking about some funny thing that happened during one of their exams two months ago, and Neal was desperately trying to catch George up.

  “So then the mice were loose and running all over the place, and the cats were going nuts in their cages—”

  “Oh my goodness,” Becca interrupted. “Remember that fat orange cat?”

  Robin shuddered. “How could I—”

  “Wait!” Neal said. “I’m explaining to George. So then, Strongarm released the cats from their cages, and they were running toward the mice. And some of the mice were getting eaten. It was pretty bloody, actually. Anyway, so I shouted, ‘RUN, MICE! HIDE AND GO SQUEAK!’”

  Robin burst into giggles and Beth snorted.

  George smiled weakly.

  “I . . . uh . . . guess you had to be there,” Neal said, and then he turned back to Beth who was launching into the memory of what happened once during a detention they’d all shared.

  George sighed and looked around the dining hall. Tabitha was sitting alone, and he thought about joining her, but when he caught her eye, she pointedly looked away.

  George stood up, and a balding waiter took his plate.

  “Thank you,” George said.

  The man looked entirely taken aback. He frowned like he was about to say something, but then he seemed to think better of it and scampered off to the kitchen, gripping George’s dirty dish.

  That afternoon, George arrived early to Practical Applications of Breaking and Entering. Strongarm was standing in the front of the blackboard.

  Once everyone arrived, Strongarm broke the class up into two teams—everyone with an A–M name on one team, and everyone with an N–Z name on the other team. George was stuck with Milo, unfortunately, who began the session by puffing out his chest and boasting that he could handle every practical situation this class threw at him because he was top of the class.

  “Not the top,” a teenager named Jacob said. Jacob looked significantly older than everyone else—he had the beginnings of a stubbly mustache on his upper lip. “Tabitha’s top. Then Sunny, then Tiago, then Robin, then you.”

  Milo crossed his arms and scowled.

  Strongarm retreated into a small door next to the blackboard—which seemed to lead into a storage closet—and rolled out two stage-prop doors in front of each team. One was a miniature door, made for a mouse, which George luckily got. The other team’s door was the biggest door George had ever seen. It was at least twelve feet tall and ten feet wide and five feet thick.

  “Whichever team can get through, over, or under this locked door first gets an A for the day!” Strongarm said.

  Everyone groaned.

  “An A?” Milo griped.

  “An A and ice cream?” Strongarm suggested. “Studies have shown that children love ice cream.”

  “Keep talking,” a small, blond boy shouted out.

  “Oh . . . AHA!” Strongarm said, clearly coming to some sort of realization. “The winning team gets Triple-dipple Ultra-deluxe Melty Creamy Creamer Rainbow Swizzle Milk Munch ice cream. A whole tub of Triple-dipple Ultra-deluxe Melty Creamy Creamer Rainbow Swizzle Milk Munch ice cream for each and every person on the winning team!”

  The class hooted and hollered with excitement, George included. He still had no idea what a rainbow swizzle ice cream was, but after hearing Strongarm talk about it so often, he now had extremely high expectations.

  The assignment was rather easy for George’s team, who only had to step over the mouse
-sized door to complete the task. But there was no way over, around, under, or through for the team that got the door built for a giant. The other team fiddled with the locks, but by the time they got a bobby pin ready, George’s team had already won.

  His entire team applauded, and even though he had been feeling down today, he couldn’t help but cheer, too. Strongarm began to look around the classroom with shifty, darting eyes. “Uh . . . excuse me . . . gotta go get that . . . prize . . . ?” she squeaked before turning on her heels and bolting out of the classroom. She didn’t return by the time the bell rang, which made George think that she was probably bluffing about that big stock of triple-dipple-whatever ice cream.

  His last class of the day was Gadgetry with Pickapocket. Pickapocket was a wiry woman with bulging eyes and a creepy, unsettling smile. Her short, spiky hair was mussed in a hundred different directions, making her head look a bit like a pincushion. Her clothes were far too baggy, her pants far too short, and her glasses didn’t even have lenses in them. George thought she looked a bit unhinged, and his suspicion was only confirmed when she started the class by throwing dental floss at them.

  “ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING,” she squawked, “IS A GADGET.”

  They spent the whole class examining normal objects—dental floss, T-shirts, blankets, toothbrushes, candles, books, umbrellas, galoshes, stuffed animals, toilet paper—and talking about how these objects could help a thief. Eventually, Pickapocket promised as the class ended, they would get to some real high-level, intricate, state-of-the-art gizmo technology—but that wouldn’t be until their second year.

  “You’ve got to master the basics!” she cawed as everyone filed out of her class.

  George had more homework than he had ever had in his entire life—an essay on the P-I-S-S method of stealth, a list on all the things he could do with a tissue box, and ten practice ransom notes all due the next day. Plus, he had a pop quiz in Practical Applications tomorrow, which Strongarm had told them was coming.

  He spent a few hours at the library, finishing up his homework and trying not to get distracted by the second-years and third-years studying in groups. There was a lot more laughing than studying. George’s heart felt a bit hollow watching them.