Adults, I’ve noticed, are usually terrible with money. I thought about the sock full of cash I have hidden in my pajama drawer. I’m an excellent saver.
“How much do you owe?”
“I’m not going to open the bills until I have the money to pay everything.” She looked more jittery than normal.
“Do you want me to find out for you?”
“You’re only fourteen years old—exposure to that kind of stress might kill you or make you sterile, and I don’t want to be responsible for you not being able to have children someday.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen if I read a few—twenty-seven—letters.” I hunched down and thumbed through the stack of envelopes.
“Can you put them in chronological order for me? I’ll find an accountant to deal with everything first thing on Monday.”
Monday is always Auntie Buzz’s favorite time to handle a problem.
“Do you have any plans for, uh, solving your financial … situation other than getting your own television show?”
“Why should I? I’d be a natural on TV, and the network—or the cable companies—would be crazy not to hire me.”
Buzz and I were more alike than I’d suspected; that was exactly the way I think. Self-confidence is everything for military geniuses, liars like me, and decorators in trouble with the government. All of a sudden, I felt warmly toward my aunt—a little parental, even.
When Sarah and Daniel and I run through our allowances and ask to borrow money from our folks, we get a huge lecture, and then they make it a teachable moment. No one ever gets punished in this house, because Mom says we should “experience the consequences” of our actions so that we can “benefit from the learning opportunity.”
I thought Buzz could get a lot out of a teachable moment. And I was just the person to teach her. I was the answer to her prayers—she just didn’t know it yet.
She was in a lot more trouble than Sarah or Daniel or I ever were, so she’d need more help and a bigger moment of teachabilityness, and if that isn’t a word, it should be.
She didn’t even notice when I took the bag to my room. I sat on the floor and separated the invoices from the checks. Then I went downstairs to the family computer in the basement and sorted through the boxes of software until I found the bookkeeping program Mom uses for her store. On the way back to my room, while Buzz was still on her laptop, I quietly rooted though her purse and grabbed her checkbook. I could have shaved her head for all she would have noticed. She was typing away, and her fingers must have been breaking land-speed records. I saw an empty coffeepot on the table next to her.
I took the disk to my room, installed the program on my laptop and whizzed through the tutorial, and in no time flat, I was entering debits and listing credits. I was so glad we’d done an accounting section in math a couple of weeks ago or none of this would have made any sense to me.
About an hour later, I’d balanced Buzz’s checkbook and discovered that she had a ton of money. She just never recorded the deposits. By the time I’d set up a bill-paying system and gotten everything entered and paid, Auntie Buzz had turned a nice profit in the past quarter.
I felt a little drunk with success, so I read the letters from the tax folks. I didn’t know what she was so freaked out about. The letters told her to call the 800 number and set up a payment schedule. I grabbed the phone and called the number and, deepening my voice a little, had a friendly conversation with a lady named Ms. Young who was completely understanding about Buzz’s dilemma in these tough economic times and suggested a monthly repayment plan. I read the number of Auntie Buzz’s checking account to Ms. Young, who said she would send Buzz the paperwork right away.
I could have told Auntie Buzz that her problems had been solved, but what kind of lesson would that have taught her?
I heard Auntie Buzz make a fresh pot of coffee and introduce herself for about the twelfth time to the webcam on her computer so that the network—or the cable companies—could see what a great personality she had on camera.
I had second thoughts about asking her for advice on Tina when I heard her pretend to banter with her imaginary cohost (“Well, Chuck, you would say that, hahaha”). One. Crazy. Broad.
I went downstairs to check my email. I sent a long note to Connie that I cut and pasted from the town council’s monthly minutes, throwing in a lot of heretofores and therewiths. Then I emailed Katie that I’d just gotten back from a lab draw and—good news!—my white blood cell count was down. I said yes to a request from Markie’s parents to babysit the next day, and I IM’d JonPaul to see how he was feeling. My buddies had sent me homework from the classes I’d missed, so I started to tackle that pile of mindlessness.
Truth be told, as much as I liked looking at Tina and devoting all my time and energy during all my free hours to thinking about making her crazy about me, it was already Wednesday and I still hadn’t come up with any brainstorms to get her to like me.
A few more pointless days like this and I was just going to lie to her. This truthfulness thing was a whole lot harder than my spur-of-the-moment inventions.
8. A GOOD LIE TAKES ON A LIFE OF ITS OWN
I took a break from homework to check my phone for new texts later that evening and nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Mom!” I leapt up from the computer desk in the basement and raced upstairs to the kitchen to find her. I’d heard her come in, and had heard Buzz leave, a while ago. “JonPaul and his cousin, you know, the one in college they call Goober? Well, they have tickets for the Blind Rage concert festival at the Kane County Fairgrounds this weekend and they want to sell me one and take me with. The greatest part is that Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot is headlining.”
“Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot? Can’t say I’m familiar with their body of work.”
“You’ve heard them, you just don’t know it. ‘I Could Kill and Eat You,’ ‘You Suck, but Let’s Hook Up Anyway,’ ‘Anarchy Rules,’ ‘Dissension Is the Answer,’ ‘Loving You Is a Pit of Death.’ ”
She shuddered and shook her head. “Poetic though they sound, and I appreciate that you’ve just described both tender ballads of love and socially prescient commentary, I still don’t believe this rings any bells.”
“Dude and the Jailbaits are playing too, and Skullkraker.”
“Delightful bill. How much is this … ode to dark despair going to run you?”
“Tickets are two fifty.”
“Two hundred and fifty? Dollars?”
“I have money from working for Auntie Buzz, and I’ll pay.”
“Yeah, you will.”
“The thing is, we gotta camp out the night before because it’s open seating so we need to get there early to get good spots near the stage. And it’s a two-day festival with a whole bunch of up-and-coming bands in addition to the headliners, so we’ll leave on Friday and then come home Sunday, late, when it’s all wrapped up. Better make that early Monday morning.”
“Kevin. Son. Are you crazy? You think your father and I are going to sign off on allowing you, a fourteen-year-old boy, to go off with some … Goober creature for two days and nights of antisocial music—and I use that term lightly and with apologies to musicians and composers everywhere—without parental or even coherent adult supervision?”
“What’s your point?”
“No. N. O. That’s my point.”
“Can we discuss this?”