The Seventeenth Swap Read Online Free

it’s so dumb how come you’re always after it?” Eric usually retorted, and that would be the end of it until the next time.
    The fact was, he didn’t have any better answer. He didn’t know what good it was to him, or why he wouldn’t give it even to Willy, who was his best friend. It was just his, that was all—and so few things were. Like the agate, it had come to him by chance—he’d found it wedged in the very back of a drawer the day Dad had brought his desk home from the second-hand shop, four years ago. It had seemed a dazzlingly good omen—not only was he getting a real desk of his own, he was getting a fascinating, mysterious little prize. The stamp had been his treasured possession ever since.
    But now he wondered. It was a little silly to own just one stamp, when you were supposed to have whole books full. He’d never wanted any others; collecting things left him cold. But Willy wanted every triangle stamp he saw—he wanted every one in the world. He especially wanted Eric’s, probably just because it wasright there, under his nose, and yet not his. He was always offering to swap something for it. He’d even offered to buy it.
    All right, Eric thought. I’ll sell it to him.
    But for how much? If it had cost five cents at the Qatar post office (or probably five some kind of Qatarese coins) what would it be worth now, in US money? You heard about people paying thousands of dollars for just one stamp—some rare one. They were nuts, in Eric’s opinion, but live and let live. Anyhow, he doubted that his stamp was rare, or the least bit valuable to anybody but Willy. And while Willy’s folks were comparatively well-off—he not only had a good bike but was campaigning for a twelve-speed to replace it—the price he could actually scrape together would fall a good bit short of even eighteen dollars. He probably had something under fifty cents in mind, judging from the items he’d offered to swap, at one time or another. For instance, his skin-tattooing ink—what was left of it after the two of them had spent a week drawing pictures on each other. His ballpoint pen that said “Souvenir of Indianapolis” and needed a filler. His Corgi auto collection—six trucks and a Jaguar—which he’d abandoned when he began on stamps.
    Too bad Steve Morris didn’t own the Qatar stamp, Eric reflected. Steve would have swapped in a minute for one of Willy’s Corgi cars.
    It was right about then that the light bulb went on in Eric’s brain. It went off again a second later, leaving him with just a glimpse of a great idea. Of something that might be a great idea. It might equally well be a dud. But for that brief instant he’d peered down a long, intriguing vista of swaps and double-swapsand finagling, with a pair of red-and-black boots at the end. He was still staring hard at nothing, trying to make the vision come clearer, when he heard his dad’s key in the lock.
    By the time he’d put his possessions away and got to the entry hall, his dad was hooking his old red windbreak onto its nail and pulling on the even older turtleneck he always wore at home unless it was actually midsummer. He was a thin, middle-aged man and felt the cold.
    â€œHi,” Eric said. “I put the potatoes in at quarter of six.”
    His dad smiled his slow, warm smile, gave him the usual penetrating glance, and nodded. It was at once a greeting, an acknowledgement of the potato report, and a gesture of satisfaction that Eric was there, was safe, that life was normal. He was a man of few words, but Eric was used to it.
    Producing a butcher-wrapped package from the pocket of the red jacket, he held it up, announcing, “Steak!” and started for the kitchen, with Eric trailing him.
    â€œWow! Great!” Eric didn’t have to ask the reason for the treat. His father worked at Mulvaney’s supermarket, and sometimes