Pretty Crooked (14 page)

He pulled away and gave me a perplexed look. “Against my better judgment.”

I immediately regretted the hug. Awkward much?

“Well, I’m glad,” I said, toning down my enthusiasm. I was afraid that he might change his mind again. “So? Where do we start?”

“What do you need?” he asked.

“I just need to know some basic techniques, I guess.”

He smiled wryly. “Entry-level boost, huh?”

“More like pickpocketing. I don’t want to break into houses or anything.”

“You never know. One thing always leads to another—that’s what they say. Pickpocketing is just a gateway drug. Next thing you know, you’re sending bad checks and hiring a bodyguard.”

“Not in this case.”

“Of course. You’re
special
,” he singsonged.

His sarcasm and the suggestion that I was embarking on a life of black-market toasters and pool-hall pals with face tattoos was bugging me. “Can we just get on with it?”

“Fine. Well, I’ll tell you what I know, most of which comes from other guys. I never did a lot of this stuff myself, but it seems easy enough.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, the number-one thing when you’re trying to get into someone’s pocket, purse, whatever, is to be patient. You choose your mark and then you watch. And wait. You start at a store, maybe, and watch them pay at the cashier, so you can see where they keep the money. Or you notice them patting around, making sure it’s still there. Usually with guys, it’s a back pocket. Girls usually keep it in a purse, but you never know.” He picked up my bag. “May I?”

“Sure,” I said, already riveted by his lesson. I knew I’d picked the right guy to help me.

He unzipped the front pocket. “To get into the purse
you have to open it quick, no sound—muffle the snaps if it’s got snaps—and dip your hand in and get it in a single motion.” He demonstrated the motion with one pinching hand. “Looks easy but it takes practice.”

He handed the bag back to me.

“I’m gonna need practice for sure,” I said. My skillz were nonexistent.

“Sometimes it’s easier to just grab the whole bag, but don’t rip it off them. Wait for it to be left on the floor or on a chair. You have to move really fast or hand it off. Never run. Never. And if you get a whole bag, you have to get rid of the phone right away. Are you getting all this?”

I nodded. “Maybe I should take notes.” I reached into my bag for a pen.

“No. Don’t do that. Stay focused.” He pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at mine, commanding me to watch.
He should be a teacher
, I thought. I had a feeling he could make just about any subject interesting.

“All right. No notes.”

He tipped his head toward the café building. “Let’s go over there where the people are.” We walked over and stood outside, looking in through the large window at the brightly lit room. Inside were a counter and some vending machines. A bunch of young moms with strollers were sitting at one of the modern red booths. A teen couple was sitting at a small two-top and a few other older people, two men and a woman, were gathered around cups of coffee.

“See, the best mark is someone who’s busy and distracted, like that woman who’s trying to cut her muffin into five million pieces,” he said, pointing. “People on the phone are good. So are people carrying drinks. That guy there, with the tray of coffees? He’d be easy to get. See how far his hands are from his pockets?”

I stood on my tiptoes to see him. “Yeah. But what if he heard me coming?”

“You just smile at him, all cute. The last thing he’s thinking is that you’re robbing him. Especially you. You’ve got that innocent face.”

“Thanks—I think.” I squinted at him, trying to ignore the blush I felt creeping across my cheeks.

“You can also create the distraction. Like, you spill something on someone’s back—you have another guy show up to tell the person and pretend to help them, while you reach in and grab the wallet. Are you planning on working alone?”

“Yeah.” It hadn’t occurred to me to involve anyone else.

“Cannon-style. Okay. Okay.” He seemed to think this over. “So forget that last one.”

We walked away from the café and back into the park area with benches where we’d been sitting before.

“What we should really look at then are some simple maneuvers,” he said. “But distraction is still important. Say I have my wallet in my back pocket here. I’m going to walk down the street. You come up from behind me,
bump my shoulder, and say, ‘Excuse me.’ Maybe you’re listening to loud music on your iPod, or maybe you’re flirting with me, but you do something to catch my eye, while your hand slips back and grabs my money.”

“Distraction. Okay, I got it.”

“Now you have to work on your hands. They gotta be lightning quick. It’s all in the claw. Watch me.”

I imitated his gesture, joining my thumb to my index and middle fingers in a quick grasping movement, uncertain whether I was doing it right. “Like this?”

It was weird, pretending, but I guess people learned how to do this stuff like they did anything else. With practice.

“But faster.” He moved his wallet to his back pocket. “So let’s try it.”

“Try it?”

“You wanna learn this, right?”

“Yeah. I just wasn’t—” The idea of trying to get anything past Tre, who was towering over me, and already knew exactly what I was doing, was daunting. It was also a little bit intimate, dipping into his pocket—and I felt afraid, for some reason, of crossing a line.

He looked annoyed, like I was a child. “Let’s not mess around, Willa. If you’re gonna do this and not get caught, you need to practice.” He patted his butt. “Come and get it.”

I snickered into my hand at the suggestion, then took a breath to regain my composure. He threw me shade.
“Are you ready or what?”

He started walking and I sped up to catch up with him. As I walked by, I bumped him and started to reach back.

“No. It’s gotta be more subtle. It can’t be your bony hip slicing into me. Plus, I could see you and it looked like you were trying to hit me with a line-dance move. To the left. To the left,” he sang, mimicking my movement. “Now try it again.”

This time I came up using my shoulder, brushing against him as I passed. He turned to give me the eye. “Excuse me,” I said, and batted my eyelashes. He smiled and I reached back. He slapped my hand.

“Your smile looks fake. And I see you coming at me. Try it again.”

I cracked up the third time, just as he turned to look at me. It was probably just nerves. And I was feeling pretty silly.

“This isn’t a game,” he said, shaking his head. “Again.” After I came up with a reasonably good approach to the back pocket, we worked on side pockets, backpacks, and jackets. Each maneuver had its own set of challenges and each one seemed to require a ninja’s stealth. I had a newfound respect for professionals.

By six o’clock, the sun was setting, slipping behind the distant mountains and leaving a blurry halo of pink, but Tre was still going strong, trying to show me how to lift a watch off of someone’s hand—a move I considered
well out of my beginner’s grasp.

By now, my mom was probably waiting for me. I was hungry and tired and feeling a little uncertain about the whole future of this project.

“It’s getting dark,” I said. “Maybe we should call it a day?”

He held out his palms. “Hey, you tell me. This whole thing was your idea.”

“I didn’t know you were going to be such a drill sergeant.” I nudged his arm jokingly.

He smiled. “Anything you want to be good at takes discipline,” he said. “That’s something I learned from my dad. Besides, we’re just getting started here. I’ve got a lot more I can teach you.”

“You do?” His energy surprised me.

He shrugged. “This is kind of fun, actually. I never thought I’d get to show anyone this stuff.”

“Well, maybe we can keep going? Like once a week or something? I definitely feel like I could use more help. I mean, I don’t know if I’m ready to do anything just yet after one day.”

“I could do that,” he said. “Not much going on right now, really. I mean, I haven’t joined any clubs at VP or anything.”

“Me neither.” I unlocked my bike. “This could be our own little club, I guess.”

“Larceners Anonymous.” He laughed, then gathered his things to go. “I’ll see you.”

“See you,” I said, meeting his eyes to signal my appreciation. Maybe we would even become friends. I hoped we would. “And thanks.”

He walked away a few steps, then paused. “Hey, Willa.”

I threw my lock over my shoulder and turned around.

He opened his hand. My cookie coin purse rested on his palm.

He broke into a huge grin before tossing it back to me. “Gotcha.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“
ALORS, ÉTUDIANTS. MAINTENANT on va discuter les devoirs
. Mademoiselle Greene?”

Madame Bruning stood in front of our French class on Friday morning, dipping forward on her open-toe pumps. She was one of our youngest teachers, with thick red hair, huge blue eyes, and impeccably applied makeup, and consequently she was also one of the most crushed on. Our chairs were arranged in a horseshoe shape around the smart board, which she was using to go over some discussion questions on the reading, Camus’s
L’Étranger
.

I was feeling pretty strange, all right.

“Oui, madame?” Cassidy Greene sat up straighter in her chair, her blond head practically bouncing off of its skinny stem of a neck as she opened her book to show off pink-highlighted text. If there was such a thing as a nerd at Valley Prep, Cassidy Greene was it. In a school
of superhigh achievers with superhigh-pressure parents, the difference between nerd and normal was only by degrees of enthusiasm.

Madame Bruning was asking her about the themes of the story—or at least that’s what I thought she was talking about. My French from freshman year at Castle Pines High had not exactly prepared me for full-on discussions of existential novels, and Madame Bruning prohibited us from speaking in English during class. That left me stranded on Non-Comprendre Island. Even when I tried to focus, my brain coasted in and out on waves of indecipherable words.

But truthfully, I had my mind on other things, anyway—like Nikki Porter’s silver python leather purse, which was inches away from my feet on the floor. Left unzipped, it gaped open, its metallic Dolce & Gabbana logo plate gleaming tauntingly.

For my first hit, Nikki was the easiest and the most obvious target, for three key reasons: She carried around tons of cash. She was just flighty enough to leave her bag unzipped. And she was personally responsible for much, if not most of, the damage to Mary et al.

I’d set my sights on her during break earlier that morning at the coffee bar. I watched carefully as she pulled out her matching wallet and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill to pay for a three-dollar latte, all the while complaining to the woman behind the counter that she wanted almond milk and that last time she’d gotten soy,
which made her break out.

Yes, technically, Nikki was supposed to be my friend, and I was supposed to be hers, but this wasn’t about me and her. It was about what was fair. It was about what was right. It was about justice for the underdogs. Besides, I was pretty sure after that s’mores comment that Nikki could benefit from a little karmic kick in the butt.

In the meantime, if all went well, Nikki wouldn’t even know what was happening. My role was the invisible but just force, evening things out. Sort of like the wind in the forest or one of those ionic hair dryers.

I was thinking simple swipe. In my last session with Tre, he’d shown me how to cherry-pick cash out of a handbag but leave everything else behind. The name was kind of a misnomer—it was not really so simple. Your hand could get stuck. You could come away with nothing, and if you missed the first time you wouldn’t get a second chance.

But given where we were positioned, in the middle of class, it was my best shot right now at getting anything. The only question was whether I had the guts to go through with it.

“
‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.’ Quelle est l’importance de cette déclaration
? Monsieur Simon?”

“Meursault n’est pas heureux, mais il n’est pas très malheureux,”
David Simon replied.

“Il est malheureux,”
Nikki piped up next to me. “I mean, his mom just died, come on.”

Madame Bruning shook a finger in her direction. “Mademoiselle Porter,
en français
.”

“Fine.” Nikki rolled her eyes. Then she wrote the word
byatch
on her copy of the novel.

Madame Bruning turned off the lights and flicked a remote. The smart board lit up with a scene from a film based on the book. Like Valley Prep girls at a Burberry sale, everyone was immediately sucked in. It was hard to deny the power of the smart board.

This was it. The perfect moment. I pictured Mary in the locker room the other day. The faraway look on her face when she told me how they were struggling to stay here, like she’d stopped expecting anything good to happen. She deserved better than that.
Now or never
.

I dropped my notebook on the floor by Nikki’s purse and crawled under the table, pretending to retrieve it. Her oxblood stiletto boots dangled dangerously by my head as I plunged my hand into her bag. Using the notebook to shield my movement, I felt around until my fingers brushed against the scaly crocodile texture of the wallet.

Under the table, my sense of time got all funny. I closed my eyes so tightly that I was seeing stars on the insides of my eyelids. It was silly, I knew, but it helped me feel like I was less likely to be seen. Besides, I was too faint with fear to keep my eyes open. By the time I’d pinched the roll of bills with two fingers like Tre had showed me, it felt like twenty minutes had elapsed.

If that was the case, it had to be obvious to everyone around me. I was probably going to get busted right then and there. But it was too late to stuff it back. I had to keep going.

I shoved the money between the pages of my notebook, lifted my head, and sat up, not daring to look around, trying to keep my breathing even.