The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower Page 6

  “Well,” she said, “I was just talking to Danielle”—Here it comes, Bernetta thought, biting her bottom lip—“and she was telling me that one of her mom’s friends just moved to the area, and they need a babysitter for the summer.”

  Bernetta took a spoonful of green ice cream. So far so good. This was the story she and Elsa had worked out just fifteen minutes ago. Elsa had been so excited when Bernetta told her she’d actually found a job that would earn her enough for tuition—“NEEDED. SUMMER BABYSITTER. 2 KIDS. GOOD PAY”—that she’d agreed to fib to their parents to help convince them that Bernetta should take it. It was a big fib, the one they’d cooked up, and Bernetta didn’t know if it would work. She wasn’t even positive she wanted it to work. If it did, if her parents said okay, she could babysit for the summer, then she’d be off to the mall the very next day to meet up with Gabe and start being Bonnie. If it didn’t work—if her parents didn’t buy Elsa’s story or flat out said no—Bernetta would be stuck at home all summer, getting mentally prepared for public school, her Mount Olive dreams over for good. She wasn’t quite sure which was worse.

  “Oh?” Bernetta’s mom said. “So she wanted you to sit for them then?”

  “Well,” Elsa replied, “not quite. I mean, I can’t sit, because I’m leaving for volleyball camp, and I’ll be gone half the summer practically. And Danielle can’t do it because she’s working at the grocery store. They really want someone reliable, though, who’s not a total stranger. They don’t want to hire just anyone, but they’re new to the area and everything. So anyway, Danielle was wondering if maybe Bernetta wanted the job.”

  Bernetta’s mother set her spoon back in her bowl with a full scoop of ice cream on it. “Bernetta?” she said. “But Bernetta’s grounded for the summer.”

  “I know,” Elsa said, and Bernetta’s head snapped back in her direction. She felt like she was watching a play, not a serious conversation that concerned her future. “But they’re really strapped for someone, and Netta’s got the whole summer free.”

  Their mother cleared her throat. “Elsabelle, I know you’re just trying to help out here, but even if Bernetta weren’t grounded, she’s only twelve after all, and that’s a lot of responsibility, to be in charge of children for an entire summer. How old are these kids?”

  “They’re about Colin’s age, I think,” Elsa responded without a beat. “Danielle said they’re really great. And anyway, it wouldn’t be so terrible. The parents both work at home, so they’re just looking for someone to keep the kids out of their hair all day so they can get stuff done. You know, make them sandwiches for lunch, maybe take them to the park or have them run through the sprinklers, that sort of thing. But they’d be there if anything came up.”

  “I don’t know . . .” Bernetta’s mom said with a sigh. She stirred her ice cream for a moment. “Herbert, what do you think about all this?”

  Bernetta’s dad was still puzzling over his tiles. “I think,” he began, without looking up, “I think”—he picked up four tiles and placed them on the board—“I think I just earned thirty-eight points for ‘kazoo.’ Bernetta, write that down. Not too shabby, right? Oh, and yes,” he said when he noticed his wife’s scowl, “I think Bernetta would make an excellent summer babysitter. Running the sandwiches through the sprinklers. She’ll be great.”

  Under the table, Bernetta’s left leg stopped shaking. But the right one was still twitchy.

  “So, Mom?” Elsa asked. “What do you think? They really need someone.”

  “I just don’t know about this, Elsabelle. I haven’t had any time to think about it, and Bernetta is technically grounded, and—”

  Her father broke in then. “We also don’t even know if she wants the job,” he said. “Bernetta, you’re awfully quiet over there. What do you think? Also, it’s your turn, and thirty-eight is the current score to beat.”

  “Um,” Bernetta said. She glanced at her tiles. She could spell scam or sham or scum. She picked up the s and took two points for “is.” “I think it sounds good,” she said.

  “It would be a good way for her to spend the summer, I think,” Elsa said as Bernetta wrote down her points. “And it’s not like she’d be going out with her friends or anything. She’d be working. Doing something responsible.”

  Their mother still didn’t seem won over. “I know, but—”

  “Do you think,” Bernetta asked as Elsa spelled out “radios,” “do you think maybe if I earned some money babysitting this summer, I could use it to pay for my tuition next year? Then I could go back to Mount Olive.”

  “That’s actually not such a bad idea,” Bernetta’s father said. “Earning your own tuition.” He tapped his spoon on the edge of his bowl. “Not a bad idea at all.”

  “True,” her mom agreed. “But how much money can you really make babysitting, sweetie?” She laid down the word “measly” for twelve points. “I doubt you can make even close to enough to pay for school.”

  Elsa swallowed a spoonful of strawberry ice cream. “They’ll pay sixteen fifty an hour,” she said.

  Bernetta’s father whistled. “Sixteen fifty, huh? I should quit my job and take up day care.”

  “Still, though,” their mother said, “in one summer, that can’t be nearly enough to—”

  “What are the hours?” Bernetta asked innocently.

  “Nine to six, I think,” Elsa told her, as though Bernetta hadn’t told her that herself just a few minutes ago. “Nine to six, Monday through Friday. While the parents are working.”

  “So,” Bernetta said, drawing a line in her ice-cream mountain with her spoon, “if I worked nine hours a day, five days a week, for twelve weeks—” She stopped herself, realizing Elsa hadn’t told them that part yet. “It’s for the whole summer, right?” she asked. Elsa nodded. “At sixteen dollars and fifty cents an hour, I’d make . . .” Bernetta had already done the calculations several times, but she paused anyway, to complete her fake mental math. “That’d be eight thousand, nine hundred, and ten dollars.”

  Her father cleared his throat. “That’s a lot of money, all right.”

  Bernetta nodded.

  “Almost exactly what you need to pay your tuition,” he said, picking a pistachio piece out of his ice cream.

  “Almost exactly,” Bernetta agreed.

  “Well,” her mother said slowly, “I suppose if you’re really that committed to going back to Mount Olive, and if you can show us that you can truly be responsible and work very hard all summer . . .” She took a long, deep breath, and Bernetta’s leg shook harder than ever. “I guess in that case it’s all right with me if you want to take the job. If you can really make that kind of money babysitting, I think it would be an excellent idea to put it toward your education.”

  Bernetta clapped her hands. “Oh, Mom! Thank you so much! It’s okay with you too, right, Dad?”

  But her father didn’t seem to be paying any attention. He was leaning across the table, studying Bernetta’s scoring.

  “Dad?” Bernetta tried again.

  Elsa set down her ice-cream spoon. “Something wrong, Dad?” she asked.

  He pushed his glasses up on his nose with his index finger. “I’m just wondering where my points went, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean?” Bernetta asked. “Your points are right here. Thirty-eight—I wrote it down.”

  “No, not those,” he said. “My other points. For my second move.”

  “Um, Dad?” Elsa said. “You’ve only gone once.”

  “No,” he said, looking genuinely puzzled. “No, I could have sworn I went again. I even got the fifty-point bonus for using all my letters. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Bernetta’s mother shook her head, but she was smiling just the same. “There are no new words on the board, dear. I think you’re losing your senses a little early.”

  “Or trying to cheat,” Elsa said
with a snort.

  “Well, if I didn’t play a word,” their father replied, “then where did all my letters go?” He pointed to his tray, where not one tile remained. “See?” he told them. “Not crazy. My letters must have vanished.”

  Elsa laughed. “Right,” she said. “They just flew off the table.”

  “Nah,” he said, rubbing his chin. “I bet Bernetta stole them. To make up for her lousy two points. I bet she’s hiding them. Lift up your ice-cream bowl, please, missy. I bet you’ve stowed them under there.”

  “Dad,” Bernetta said with a laugh, “I did not—”

  “Up, please!”

  Bernetta lifted her ice-cream bowl. No letters.

  “Hmm,” her father said. “Well, that’s funny, I could have sworn . . .” He searched the table, looking under the box top, under his wife’s elbow, inside Elsa’s dictionary.

  “What’s the missing word, dear?” her mother asked. “Maybe that would help.”

  “It was . . .” He reached across the table and swooped up Bernetta’s crumpled napkin. “Well, there it is, right there.”

  And sure enough, underneath the napkin, spelled out crookedly across the table, lay the word “cunning.”

  “I’d like my eighty-nine points, please,” Bernetta’s father said with the slightest of smiles. And as he set his tiles carefully on the board, turning “love” into “clove,” he added, “And, Bernie, of course you can take that job. I think it’s a wonderful idea.”

  She grinned and wrote down his score, secretly adding an extra five points for a trick well done.

  9

  PATTERn: the continuous talking of a magician during the performance of an illusion; a popular form of misdirection

  The next morning Bernetta gulped down her cereal as quickly as possible. She wanted to be out the door and on her way to the mall before her parents came back into the kitchen and decided to ask her more questions about babysitting. After she’d inhaled the last spoonful, she lurched her chair back across the tiled floor with a screech and dumped her bowl in the sink. “ ’Bye, everyone!” she called into the living room, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. “I’m off to babysit!”

  Her mother hurried into the kitchen before Bernetta made it out the door. “Are you positive you don’t want a ride over there?” she asked for the fifteenth time.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” Bernetta told her. “I’ll just take my bike. It’s not that far. Besides, I don’t want to make Colin late for his swim lesson.”

  “All right, then,” her mom replied. She gave Bernetta a kiss on the forehead. “Have a good time with the kids. And call me if you need anything. Or if the parents get sick, or if you’ll be home late.”

  “Or if there’s a fire. Okay, Mom.”

  “ ’Bye, sweetie. I love you!”

  She gave her mother a quick hug. “Love you too,” she said, and hustled out the door.

  Bernetta worked up quite a sweat pedaling her way to the mall, but she arrived at the food court at precisely nine o’clock. Gabe was waiting by the pretzel stand, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Today his T-shirt was red, and scrolled across it were the words YOUR CAR’S UGLIER THAN I AM. He saw her coming and waved her over.

  “Hey!” he greeted her, his eyes sparkling. “You came!”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ready for your first lesson?”

  “Um, lesson?”

  “Yeah. I thought I could teach you some moves, and then we’ll get started right away. Don’t worry, you’ll be a natural. Oh, and before we start, I think we should agree to a fifty-fifty split of all profits. Deal?”

  Bernetta raised an eyebrow as Gabe led her over to a table with two chairs. “Are you some kind of professional thief or something?” They sat.

  “Nah.” Gabe grinned. “I guess I’ve just done a lot of research.”

  “What do you mean, research?” Bernetta cocked her head to the side and studied him. “You mean watching movies, don’t you? Con artist ones, like what you were talking about the other day. Is that how you researched everything, watching movies?”

  Gabe shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

  “You some kind of film buff or something?”

  He placed his hands flat on the table. “Name a movie, one you think I’ve never seen. I’ll bet you five bucks I can say at least one line from it.”

  Bernetta wrinkled her nose. Granted, back at Mount Olive, she hadn’t talked to a whole lot of boys, but she’d never had any idea they were this weird. “Um . . .” She named the first movie that popped into her head. “Apollo 13?” Her parents had rented that one last week.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Gabe asked, eyebrows raised high.

  “Look, if you don’t know it, it’s fine, we can just—”

  “‘Houston, we have a problem.’ That’ll be five bucks, please.”

  Gabe held out his hand, but Bernetta just rolled her eyes at him. “I don’t have five bucks,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “All right, you can owe me,” Gabe said. He shook his head and laughed. “Man, I can’t believe you picked Apollo 13! Anyway, you ready to learn the shortchange?”

  “Shortchange?”

  “Yeah. It’s probably the most basic con there is. But you still have to be a pretty good talker to make it work. Otherwise people start to get suspicious. Here.” He took his wallet out of the front pocket of his jeans and began riffling through the bills inside. There were a lot of bills. He pulled out a couple. “Say you’re the cashier and I’m the customer, and—”

  “Wait,” Bernetta said. This was all going so fast. “Just hold on a second.”

  “What?” Gabe asked. “What is it?”

  “It’s just . . .” Bernetta traced her finger over a crack in the table. “I mean, okay, I get it, you’ve seen a lot of movies. But have you ever actually”—she lowered her voice—“stolen anything before? Because it’s probably a lot different from in the movies.”

  Gabe leaned forward. “I already told you,” he said. “We’re not gonna be stealing. It’s conning. And anyway, yes, I have stolen stuff before.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bernetta gulped.

  Gabe set the bills from his wallet carefully on the table. “Okay, so with the shortchange,” he said, “what happens is you pay for something with a ten-dollar bill and get a twenty back as change.”

  Bernetta tried to wrap her head around that. “Wait. You mean, I can buy something and get more money back than I paid in the first place?”

  “Sure. You have to know how to read people, though. The best way is to try it on someone who’s new at their job or really busy or something.”

  Bernetta nodded slowly. It was a lot like working at the magic club. You wanted to catch people off guard. Make them check up your sleeves for the ace when really you had three hidden in your coat pocket. “Got it,” she said. And then she paused. “Wait.”

  Gabe frowned. “Yeah?”

  “What’s your deal anyway?”

  “My deal?” Gabe asked.

  “Yeah. I mean, I’m here because I lost my scholarship, but what about you? Why do you want to be a con artist so bad?”

  “Okay,” Gabe said. “I guess that’s a good question.” He shuffled the bills around on the table as he spoke. “See, my family’s rich. Completely loaded. I’m like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But well, when I was little, I hardly ever got to see my parents. I just had to hang out with the nanny all the time. So now”—he looked up at her—“now I steal stuff because no one ever loved me.”

  Bernetta took a good look into his chocolate brown eyes. “Is that true?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Maybe.”

  “All right, fine,” Bernetta said with a laugh. “Show me this shortchange thing. I’m the cas
hier and you’re—”

  “Wait,” Gabe said. “I have to ask you a question now.”

  Bernetta was pretty sure a smile was creeping its way onto her face. There was nothing she could do about it, really. “You do?”

  “Yes, I do. Two of them actually.”

  “Well,” Bernetta said, folding her arms in front of her in mock annoyance, “what are they then?”

  “One. What’s your name?”

  “My name?”

  “Yeah, you never told me.”

  “Bernetta.”

  “Ber what?”

  “Bernetta. That’s my name.”

  Gabe stared at her for a moment, and Bernetta couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Bernetta?” he repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” Gabe said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, but then he laughed, a quick chortle that started in his throat and came out his nose.

  “What?”

  Gabe shook his head. “It’s just the most terrible name I’ve ever heard, that’s all. Bernetta? Man, that’s rough.”

  Bernetta probably should have been offended by that. But she wasn’t. She’d hated her name her whole life. Most people tried to tell Bernetta her name was “unusual” or “dignified,” but that didn’t fool her. At least Gabe was honest.

  “My great-uncle Bernard died three weeks before I was born,” she explained.

  “Good thing his name wasn’t Mortimer,” Gabe replied.

  Bernetta thought about that. “Or Wally. That would’ve been awful.”

  “I don’t know,” Gabe said. “I think you’d make a really nice Wallamina.”

  Bernetta laughed again. “All right, all right,” she said. “What was your second question?”

  “Want to bet me double or nothing I can’t guess another movie quote?”

  Bernetta thought about it. “That’s your question?” He nodded. “All right, fine.” She tried to come up with one he probably hadn’t seen. “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” she said at last. She and Elsa used to watch that movie all the time when they were little. It had been their favorite for years. It was probably too goofy for some sophisticated film addict like Gabe.