it had violence and language. But if it was R because of sexual content or nudity, she didn’t want me to go. Naked people, no. Hacked-up
people, okay.
“Anyway,” Officer Rollins said with a tired sigh, “the department’s been going door-to-door to warn people about the rash of burglaries we’ve had around here
lately.”
“Right,” Mom said. “We got an automated phone call.”
“Apparently, that wasn’t effective enough. We’ve had three more since the calls.”
I’d heard something about it at school. The crooks were breaking into garages and taking all they could carry.
“How are they getting into the garages?” Dad asked. “They’re all on coded remotes.”
“We don’t know yet,” Theo’s dad said. “They’ve hit a dozen homes in the area in the last three months.”
“By ‘area’ do you mean
this
neighborhood?” Mom asked.
“Not yet. But the last house was only a few blocks away, on Champion.”
Mom looked at Dad. “That’s pretty close.”
“Who do they think it is?” Dad asked. “Kids, or professionals?”
Officer Rollins shrugged. “It’s a pretty smooth operation for kids. They’ve made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of property. Somebody’s going to
do some serious jail time, kid or not.”
Why was he looking at me?
He continued, “So, just be on the lookout for anything suspicious. People you don’t know driving around. You see anything, give us a call and we’ll check it out.”
Mom and Dad walked Officer Rollins to the front door.
When they were out of the room, Jax said, “Man, I go away and the place turns into a crime zone. Pretty soon we’ll have gangbangers spray-painting the mailboxes and Mafia hit men
patrolling in Best Buy.”
I smiled. I missed his sarcasm.
Then Mom and Dad reappeared and Dad said, “Let’s get back to why you dropped out of Stanford after everything your mom and I did to get you there.”
Jax took a deep breath, like he was about to dive to recover something from the bottom of the ocean. “I didn’t exactly drop out,” he said quietly. “I’m on academic
leave. It was either that or flunk out.”
“Flunk out?!”
Dad wailed. “Flunk out!” He was moving again, hands chopping the air like he was fighting off a gang of attacking ninjas.
I’ll save you from the rest of the argument. I tiptoed up the stairs while Dad continued to rant and Mom cross-examined. Then Jax got mad and
he
started to rant. Then even Mom was
ranting at both of them to stop ranting.
Rant. Rinse. Repeat.
I closed the door to my room and flopped onto my bed. My backpack was still where I’d tossed it earlier, before I had taken off to play some basketball. It held the homework I had to
finish. Algebra, Spanish, and social science.
But instead of hitting the books, I hopped off my bed, opened my bottom desk drawer, and removed the false bottom I’d made last summer, when my parents were busy moving their law office to
a bigger location. I pulled out the papers I kept hidden there and put them on my desk.
Like I said, home is where the secrets are kept. And this was my big secret.
One of them, anyway.
MY 3 DARK SECRETS
HERE ’ S Dark Secret No. 1: I like to steal.
Yeah, I know it’s wrong, so don’t give me The Lecture about how stealing is a crime and morally wrong and would I want someone to steal my computer and blah, blah, blah.
When the guidance counselor at school asks me what I want to be when I grow up, I always say something like
lawyer
or
businessman
or something else she wants to hear. But in my
head I’m thinking
master criminal
.
Before you pull out your cell phone and 911 on me, here’s Dark Secret No. 2: I’ve never stolen anything. Not a pack of gum, a pencil, not even the dollar bill I found in Spanish
class last week. I gave it to the teacher, who asked the class if anyone had dropped it. Five hands shot up.
Anyway, I don’t want to be a petty thief. I see myself all dressed in