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and calling the police, with a full description of this suspicious-looking kid they’d seen earlier.
    If I’d been able to come up with some kind of story to cover for the missing money, I’d have turned around and walked right back out of the store then and there. But I couldn’t. So, I fought back my fear and wandered around the place trying to look normal.
    I’ve seen people shoplifting since then and I can tell you that the biggest giveaway is the way they’re working at looking casual, just as I was doing that day. It’s a hard act to pull off.
    Luckily for me, no one seemed to be paying much attention to the skinny kid with the sweaty palms and the too -innocent face. I ended up with a sports watch for Lynn and a package of fancy stick-on fingernails for Mom. She was always saying how she’d love to have long nails.
    Once I’d stuffed these two things inside my jacket, I had to fight to keep from bolting out the entrance and running. Walking toward the door was unbelievably hard, and when the alarm sounded I nearly passed out.
    It was pure luck that a woman carrying a couple of shopping bags was going through the security machine at the same time. She stopped and looked expectantly at the cashier, who said, “The machine must not have scanned something right.”
    Amazingly, no one seemed to have even noticed me, although my legs had gone liquid and barely held me up as I shoved open the door and hit the pavement. I realized I was holding my breath.
    I pushed my shaking hands into my jeans’ pockets and swallowed a lungful of air. I moved along the sidewalk, unable to resist quickening my pace. Halfway along the length of what seemed the longest building in the world, I broke into a trot and then sped up, feeling the air rush cold against the sweat on my face.
    I nearly puked when I got home. Even there, I didn’t feel safe. It was hours before I stopped waiting for a knock on the door. I was dead sure I’d never steal anything again.
    Through it all, the single thing that really seemed to matter was that I got that bong.
    I stared at it, remembering how important it had seemed at that time, and now there it was, wrapped in a towel and tucked out of sight, totally useless to me.
    Sure, I’d made lots of use of it back when I got it, and probably wouldn’t have retired it at all if it wasn’t for the scrape Tack and I had gotten into, and what had happened afterward.
    I remembered how I’d used the bong a few times the weekend before court. It got rid of the worry and uneasiness — mellowed me out and turned my anxiety into a mix of indifference and amusement. I saw it as a problem solver, and I managed to believe it was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t like I was cranking or anything.
    Funny, looking at the bong that day, I could almost bring back that feeling of floating calm. The uneasy thought popped into my head that maybe I’d kept it “just in case.”
    I decided I’d spent enough time thinking about that, rewrapped it in the towel and shoved it into the back corner of the closet. I actually had to stop and think for a few seconds before I remembered what I was doing in there.
    The shoes. Where were they anyway? I didn’t remember throwing them out but then it had been a while. Maybe Mom had given them to someone — but she wouldn’t have gone into my closet and I couldn’t remember her asking for them.
    I looked again and discovered that I’d missed an old gym bag, tucked off to the side and blending into the dark of the corner. When I pulled it out and managed to force the zipper open, I found the shoes in there, along with a few other things — none of which looked too attractive. The shoes had been keeping company with some crumpled old socks (apparently, they were ready for the washer when they were abandoned), a dried out stick of deodorant, a couple of empty Pepsi cans and a fuzzy green lump