Coin Heist (2 page)

As we crossed to a quieter area of the floor, I heard the rumbling buzz of another phone in another pocket. Then, closer by, someone else's Droid sounded, a tone like a whirring spaceship. A third phone rang out with a few bars of a Rihanna song. Strange.

A thought distantly registered:
It's Friday. Everyone must be making plans.
My plan was already made. The usual: after Math Team practice, we usually played D&D.

“I thought we asked you not to leave your phones on,” Rankin interjected. “Come on, people. How hard is it to part with your precious devices for an hour or two?”

Garcia was unfazed as he continued with the tour. We were strictly Rankin's problem, even if we broke the rules at the Mint. “Later, the coins are drawn here through the washing machine, which removes any tarnish or contamination, and then the upsetting mill, which raises their edges.”

What was upsetting was the fact that my phone was buzzing in my pocket again.

Can you wait a minute, Greg? Ravenloft is a pocket dimension. It's not going anywhere.

Cupping the phone closely, lest Jason bear witness to my lameness, I saw that it was in fact a text from Greg, but it wasn't what I was expecting.

Did you hear? About Hodges?

Huh? I guess I had Jason on the brain, because at first that's who I thought he meant. Then I heard Dakota's husky gasp. “No way,” she said. “Not Mr. Hodges.”

“What?” Dylan asked.

Dakota held up her phone. “Cops came in today and took Mr. Hodges away in handcuffs!” Her voice held a hint of delight at the edges, the news entirely too juicy for her to suppress it. Then, realizing that Jason was among our group, her face fell back into its usual nice-girl mask and she gave him a sympathetic, closed-lip smile.

“What?” Jason said, butting his face over Dakota's arm. “Let me see that. Who said?”

“Junibel Simmons just texted me,” Dakota said. “They let school out early. She said it's utter chaos.”

Jason's dad, led away in handcuffs? Mr. Hodges was as uptight as they came, the kind of guy whose bowtie held up his pants.

What the what?

Jason was still looking at Dakota's phone, his face slack. It was the first time I'd ever seen him without a joke or a goofy expression. Whatever had happened was a surprise to him too.

It kind of reminded me of the day I'd caught that email from Sheryl on my dad's computer. It blew me away. I mean, my dad and I had our problems, but he discovered cancer treatments for a living. He and my mom had been together forever. The information just wouldn't register.

So I could imagine what Jason must have been feeling. More than anything, I wanted to reach out and give him a hug. But he would've thought I was a weirdo. He probably already did think I was a weirdo.

There was no time for hugging or anything else though, because Rankin was trying to regroup us. “People. I need you to focus.” He clapped. “Hello? We still have more stuff to see.”

“Did you know about this, Mr. Rankin?” Dakota asked.

“No,” he said, his eyebrows knitting together. “But let's not allow locker room conjecture to ruin our visit . . .”

“Junibel is a very reliable source,” Dakota insisted. “It's not just rumors.”

“Fine, Dakota, but Mr. Garcia here has other things he needs to tell us.”

Not like it mattered, though. Our “exclusive” tour was nowhere near as interesting as the scandalous gossip hovering around us. Nobody was going to pay attention for the rest of the trip. Design might have been a lot of things, but it couldn't compete with real life.

Figures. The first time a guy I find cute actually talks to me is the day his dad gets arrested.
Maybe I'd even jinxed him. Maybe some people, like art, were better appreciated at a distance.

Two

JASON

As I crossed
over the icy path from our backyard to the official school campus on Monday morning, I felt it—all the eyes on me. Like I was walking into some sort of surprise party. A surprise party of doom.

Everyone had already heard the story, and school hadn't even started yet.

If you want to get your secret shared with a thousand people in five minutes, tell a Friendian. The kid will tell their mom, who will tell all the people at her golf club, and then it will trickle down through the parents' association, the alumni network, the board, and finally back down to the rest of the kids. And don't even mention the staff. The janitors and cafeteria workers know
everything
about
everything.

So yeah. Grab a megaphone. Text everyone you know. My dad was arrested. For embezzling the school's endowment.

It was so weird. My dad? The guy who did warrior poses before he took his blood pressure meds with grapefruit juice every morning? The guy who'd instituted a stricter dress code (no cleavage, despite my complaints) and tougher rules about parking on HF's campus? The guy who, my whole life, had told me that anything could be achieved with discipline?

I still couldn't really wrap my brain around it, other than the fact that he'd been in jail all weekend, and my mom had spent most of that time in her bedroom. There is seriously nothing worse than hearing your mom cry.

I just felt . . . shocked. Sure, I'd seen my dad at the computer, moping around and whatnot when some stock went down. But I always thought he was day-trading with our family's money.

I thought he had it under control.

“I told him it was glorified gambling,” my mom said on Friday night after it all went down, as we sat staring at his empty kitchen chair. “I told him we had your college to pay for. I had no idea it had gone this far, that the debts were so big.”

Now she was stuck on two-hour phone calls with his lawyer, trying to figure out how we'd post the $1 million bail. Think that sounds like a lot? My dad pissed away $50 mil, apparently. Of the school's money.

Looking back, maybe I should have questioned it when he bought me stuff like a bike, a brand-new Jetta, and a sick amp for my guitar, with me barely asking. I guess I was so excited, I just didn't think twice. We'd never had a lot of money before. I thought headmaster was just a cushy job.

Which was the only good thing about it, really. I mean, I realized early on that I could never live up to Jim Hodges' insane expectations. So I became the anti-Jim: class skipper, homework ignorer, and assembly sleeper, not to mention dress code violator (jeans were only comfortable with holes!). It was easier to not do anything than to constantly field his critiques of what I could be doing
better.

He thought it was my own little phase I'd grow out of, that it had nothing to do with him, of course. The morning he was caught, he'd said, “You're in your own world, Jason. But some day you're going to have to grow up and join the rest of us. And maybe then you'll stop embarrassing me.”

Who knows? Maybe the great Jim Hodges had seen the end coming. Because right now it seemed like my own world was officially done with. This was purgatory. Hell was next.

They were
staring.

Everyone knew. I caught sight of Chloe Benezet whispering to Dylan Sanders. Chloe used to be cool, shaving the side of her head and writing poetry, but since we broke up, she'd become just another preppy in riding boots. Dylan laughed at whatever she was saying. They looked like a couple of hyenas circling a carcass.

More stares from the rest of them, hanging out by their lockers. People who would call out my name and fist bump me just last week were now keeping a creepy distance, like I was diseased.

I knew if I could be funny, then no one would feel sorry for me.

“I guess you guys found me out!” I called out. “Yes, I got a nose job. Now can I have some privacy, please?”

That did it. Only a few people laughed, but at least most of them stopped staring. I sauntered down the hall as if it were all a big hilarious joke.

Mondays generally sucked, but this one went down in the books. It was almost like being the new kid all over again. Those days in middle school. Torture.

Jessica Katz snorted when I passed her desk in Algebra. In French, I could swear Monsieur Rydel was extra evil, curling his tongue over the “
s'il vous plaît
” when he asked me to read out loud from
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Even Dianne the lunch lady gave me a pitying grin when she plopped a carton of fries on my tray. “Rough times, huh, Jason?”

“Very rough,” I said. She'd always been nice to me, even when I was the new kid. She used to save me the end slices of the Sicilian pizza, because she knew I liked the pieces with the crust. And then it occurred to me that what my dad did could affect her, too. If the school was in trouble, she could get . . . I didn't even want to think about it.

“I hope everything is okay.”
With you
, I meant.

“It'll be fine,” she said, scraping the tray for strays. “HF isn't going anywhere.”

I took my tray and sat down at my usual table at the back of the dining hall, next to the guys in my band. Zack was there, chowing down on some unidentifiable foil-wrapped object he'd smuggled in from home. He raised it in greeting.

Zack was basically the reason I'd survived middle school or HF at all—we'd met at an afterschool music program, and we'd started what later became our band Mixed Metaphors, with him as the lead singer and me writing most of the songs and playing guitar.

Zack called teachers by their first names, and they never bothered to call on him in class. He had a hot new girlfriend every semester, and he barely had to talk to them. His older brother got us into parties at UPenn, and even the dudes in his brother's fraternity didn't mind having him around. I had to give him props—he was untouchable. And I was too, just by virtue of sitting with him at lunch.

“What's up, sucker?” I said.

“Not much,” he replied. “Hey, listen, as your friend, I should warn you that The People are talking.”

“Who's talking?” Then I thought better of it. “No, forget it. I don't want to know.”

I was pretty sure The People involved at least one of my exes, and including Chloe, there were enough of them to start an official Anti-Jason squad. Hey, it wasn't my fault that girls always seemed to get mad at me.

The contents of Zack's sandwich lodged in his cheeks. “It's bad, dude. I heard that some kids think you were in on it.”

WTF?
“So I'm an accomplice now?” I laughed, probably too loudly, over the lump in my throat. “I guess I broke into everyone's lockers too, then hacked into their library accounts.”

He gulped his Gatorade, his dark hair hanging over the bottle. “I'm being serious, man.”

“I know, I know. But you told them it wasn't true, right? I mean, he's innocent.”

“Of course, bro. I tried. But I'm only one man. I can't slow the tide of misinformation. It flows where it will.”

“Like shit?” I asked. I looked up and saw a few cute freshman girls staring at me, and not in a good way. Why was
I
on trial now? This was crazy.

“
Exactement
.” He was back to his lunch tube. “You know how it is. These people love drama. Don't sweat it.”

Right. Easy for him to say. I got up to leave, wrapping up my uneaten food. I couldn't keep the smile going, and I definitely didn't want to break down in front of Zack, who had a black belt in apathy.

“Where are you going? I thought we were going to discuss band business. You're cool, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. I forgot my phone. Tell the other guys I'll see them at practice.” I needed to get out of the fish bowl. I needed to be alone.

In Rankin's art class I could almost pretend things were normal. It was the last period of the day, and in art, at least, I didn't have to answer questions. I didn't have to speak at all. Which was good, because my brain was spiraling into a blur of dark thoughts, like that night Zack and I got some bad pot from his brother, and I ended up lying on the floor of his room, my heart racing, thinking I was going to die. None of which I'd mentioned to Zack as he went on about how it was totally kind bud and how he felt like butter melting over a plate of pancakes.

Rankin went around the room asking everyone what we were going to do for our Mint follow-up projects, due the following week. We were supposed to come up with a proposal for a piece for the Mint that would demonstrate “design at work” or some BS like that. I'd been too busy trying to calm my mom down and figure out if I had any savings from my summer jobs that we could cash out.

I stared out the window at the arts quad. In the center was the sculpture my dad had commissioned from Simon Lamberton, the guy who pioneered land art in the 1960s. It was supposed to look like flowing water, “the fountain of knowledge,” but right now it was just a gigantic hunk of metal. Lamberton's assistants were constructing it right here, forging iron in our workshop in the arts center. My dad thought it would be a “wonderful learning opportunity” to install it where we could watch the progress, and some of the arts classes were even invited to help Lamberton's assistants. (The great artist himself had never been on campus, to my knowledge. They were communicating with him via Skype.) He wanted me to help out too. “Come on, Jase,” he'd said to me. “This doesn't happen every day. Take advantage. Use your talents.” What did he think, that I could be Picasso or some shit? Didn't he realize that almost
everyone
got a C in Rankin's class? Rankin was a hardass. My supposed art skills definitely wouldn't help me here.

For the moment, though, no one was working on the sculpture. Since the ground froze over in December, it had been closed up with a padlocked chain-link fence.

I thought the statue was kind of cool, but it was controversial. Some of the parents were pissed that my dad was replacing the flagpole that had been there for the entire 150-year history of the school. My dad said it was a symbol of HF moving into modern times, part of the bigger capital plan for campus expansion, when the school was going to build five new facilities and branch out over another ten acres. This was just the beginning. In the meantime, original art would give us an edge, he said. How many schools could boast a museum-quality sculpture on their grounds? Of course, now I had to wonder where the money for that thing had come from, and I probably wasn't the only one.

How many schools could boast a thief in the headmaster's office?

Suddenly, Rankin was standing in front of me, his blond beard level with the top of my head. “Hodges? You with me?”

So much for not having to speak. I was not with him. I had nothing.

“Your idea? Yes no maybe?”

I shrugged and gave him the smile I usually gave teacher's when I knew I was about to blow smoke up their ass. “Still thinking, sir. The wheels are turning and whatnot.”

“You only have two weeks to complete the project from start to finish, so I suggest you come up with something quickly.” He tapped my desk with two fingers, a warning signal. “Don't blow it off, Hodges. You're better than that.”

Was I, though? Of all the teachers in school, Rankin was the only one who pushed me. But I kind of liked Rankin, even if he clearly hated me. Yeah, psychoanalyze that.

Thankfully, we were on to the brainstorming part of class—free time. Drawing always helped calm my brain. It was something I was good at without having to try. And at least it would look like I was working.

I walked over to the paper drawer, where Dakota Cunningham was already standing with one of her clones, Junibel Simmons. The real Dakota was bad enough, but here was a weak imitation—skinnier, shorter, with frizzy hair and a nervous twitching mouth. Junibel just had that aura of desperation about her.

“'Scuse me,” I said, trying to push past them.

“Jason! Do you seriously not have a follow-up idea?” Dakota asked me, pretending to be all concerned. She'd been my middle-school girlfriend, but it wasn't like we were still friends or anything. It didn't matter. Everyone's business was Dakota's business. She turned everything into her own personal task force.

I shrugged.

“He'll give you an incomplete. Why don't you just sculpt something, one of the famous medals? I can give you one of my ideas.”

“I've got it covered.”

I'd done very well up until now never doing my homework. Why should I change a winning formula? My dad's voice came into my head:
Because you can do better.
Then my voice back to him:
Oh yeah? Like embezzlement?

“You could at least make an effort for once,” she said. “I mean seriously.”

Had my dad put her up to this? “This isn't a group project,” I said. Back when we were ‘going out' in sixth grade, we'd spent two weekends working on a papier-mâché manatee, but I'd bailed the day before it was due, because my friends were going to a rock-climbing gym. Our manatee ended up being flipperless, basically just a gray blob. By lunchtime, Dakota had publicly dumped me in the hallway, saying that she'd only liked me because I was new and now she realized I was a loser. Only she could get away with dumping someone for as nerdy a reason as a grade and still come away as the cool one.

“She's just trying to help, Jason,” Junibel said.

“I don't need help,” I finally snapped. Only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize that Dakota was, yet again, getting a rise out of me. All these years and she still made me feel like crap. I quickly smiled and tried to make a joke. “Unless you want to coordinate outfits. Then you can definitely help.”