JBIII looked calm and undisturbed. “One of the keys to our business,” he said, “will be making sure we charge more money for the finished items than we spent buying the supplies. And we’ll only buy what we need to fill our orders, nothing extra.”
This was sounding better and better. “Hey!” I exclaimed. “After you’ve printed out the cards—or the invitations or whatever—I could add special touches to them. You know, like glitter or ribbons or sequins. Of course, we’d have to charge more for those items.” I paused, frowning. “Huh. On the other hand…”
“On what other hand?” asked JBIII, looking slightly annoyed.
“Well, on the other hand, do you think people will really want to buy this stuff? After all, most people just send e-mail now. They don’t write actual thank-you notes or send invitations anymore. They just type a few lines into their computers and click Send.”
“Not everyone,” said JBIII. “Plenty of people like to do things the old-fashioned way. Like my mom, who only reads real books. She says she will never, ever get into bed at the end of a long day with a piece of electronic equipment. She wants pages that she can hold in her hands. She likes turning the pages and imagining who else might have held the book and turned the pages before she did. She says she even likes the way books smell and that nothing will ever take the place of that. And I think lots of people would rather send a nice handmade card or invitation—one with colorful flowers—”
“Decorated with sequins!”
“—that someone could put up on their refrigerator and admire. Anyway,” JBIII continued, “the very first thing we should do is make some samples to show our neighbors. Then we can take orders. If no one orders anything, well, it will be sad, but at least we won’t have wasted any money. I have enough supplies here so that we can make samples.”
So we set to work. JBIII found an old loose-leaf notebook and we replaced the lined paper that was in it with pieces of oaktag.
“We’ll glue our samples on these pages and then we’ll have a professional book to show our neigh—our customers,” said JBIII. “Now, what should we put in the sample book?”
“How about two designs for notecards—maybe one that says ‘Thank You’ on the front—and two designs for invitations and one design for address labels. And the art can be mix-and-match.”
“What do you mean ‘mix-and-match’?”
“Well, if someone likes the art on the address labels but wants it on invitations, we could do that. Any of the designs could go on any of our, um, products.”
“Oh, that’s good!” said JBIII admiringly. “Actually, if we use the designs that way, I can make up more than five samples.”
I got out my markers and paper and by lunchtime our sample book was ready. I had drawn bumblebees and tulips, a mouse holding a piece of cheese in its front paws, and a simple vine of leaves and flowers like this:
And JBIII had used all the designs to make note cards, invitations, and labels. I had also designed a fancy pink-and-green THANK YOU, which he’d made into another notecard. We wanted to start taking orders right then, but we could both hear JBIII’s stomach growling, which we thought might not be good for business, so we made peanut butter sandwiches and ate them in a big hurry before carrying the sample book into JBIII’s living room.
“Mom, Dad,” said my best friend, “you have the honor of being our first customers.” We sat together on the couch, the sample book open across our laps, Mr. and Mrs. Brubaker on either side of us.
“These are lovely!” exclaimed Mrs. Brubaker as she examined our product lines. She said this in a genuine way, not in that way some grown-ups have of sounding all excited when you know that what they really mean is, “How pathetic. And look at all the trouble you went to. I guess I’ll have to buy something out of pity.”
“I’ll say,” agreed Mr. Brubaker, also in a genuine way.
And before we knew it, JBIII and I had taken our first orders—a box of the thank-you notes for Mrs. Brubaker, and a sheet of bee-and-tulip address labels for Mr. Brubaker, but with JBIII’s mother’s address on them.
“I guess we don’t have any designs for men,” JBIII whispered to me, and we decided to get to work on that as soon as we had time.
JBIII wrote down the orders on a notepad and then we closed the sample book and set off.
“Only go to the neighbors you know!” called Mr. Brubaker as JBIII and I stepped into the hall.
Our first stop was at the apartment next door, where a very old man seemed absolutely thrilled to see JBIII and me and ordered some mouse and cheese notecards for his granddaughter. Across the hall an annoyed-looking teenage boy answered the door and I knew right away we weren’t going to make a sale and I was right. But down the hall in the apartment by the elevator a young couple ordered three sheets of address labels, and just as we were about to leave the man suddenly said, “Oh, wait! Emily, we should order invitations for Brielle’s birthday party.” And then the woman said, “The bumblebees are awfully cute.” And I said, “I could hand-decorate them with glitter.” And her eyes grew wide and she asked for twenty special-order invitations.
By the time we had visited people on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, we had taken orders for fourteen different items, including three special items that would be hand-decorated.
“This is amazing!” I exclaimed.
“Definitely. Okay. Let’s stop here and go buy supplies.”
“Stop here! Why? Everyone’s ordering stuff. We should keep going.”
“Nope. A good businessperson doesn’t get in over his head,” said JBIII, which was probably something he had heard his father the lamp salesman say from time to time. “We should fill these orders first, just to make sure we can actually do it, and also so we don’t make anyone wait too long for their merchandise. Come on. Let’s go to Steve-Dan’s. How much money do you have?”
I gaped at my friend. “Zero.”
“Oh.”
“How much do you have?”
“Three dollars.”
“How much do you think the supplies will cost?”
JBIII frowned up his face and did some arithmetic in his head while we waited for the elevator. “I’m not sure,” he said finally, “but more than three dollars.”
We went back to JBIII’s apartment, where we found a calculator and figured out how much money we would need at the store, and then how much money we would have after we had filled our orders and gotten paid. If we borrowed some money from his parents we could pay them back quickly and still have a profit for ourselves.
“But remember, after this, we’ll always have to use our earnings to buy supplies,” said JBIII, which is the annoying kind of thing my father the economist would say.
“Yeah, but what’s left over is just for us,” I replied.
Like for investing in an iPod or a hamster.
The Brubakers weren’t too thrilled with the idea of lending their son and me money until JBIII showed them our math. Then Mr. Brubaker drew up a document for us, which I think was his way of saying that even though we were kids he still expected to be paid back promptly. So we signed the paper with our best signatures:
And then JBIII said, “Can we go to the store by ourselves?” and his mother was like, no, and she came with us. BUT … when we reached the store, she said, “You know what? There’s too much air-conditioning in there. I’ll wait for you outside,” and that was her way of giving us a little independence, since we were businesspeople with profits and good math.
In the store I lingered by the display of rubber stamps and then by some hot-glue guns and by a whole lot of other items that weren’t on JBIII’s shopping list, and finally he said, “If you want to buy any of those things you’ll have to pay my parents back with your own portion of the profits,” so then we just put blank notecards and invitations and sheets of labels in our basket and boringly paid for them.
Still, it was exciting when the salesman saw us shopping all by ourselves without an adult and I
was able to say to him, “We’ve gone into business. We promise to buy all our supplies here. Do we get a discount?”
“Not a discount,” he replied, “but a frequent shopper card.” And he punched a little hole in the top of a plasticized card and handed it to us. “When you have ten holes punched in the card,” he said, “you’ll get ten percent off of your next purchase.”
JBIII and I were officially in business.
21
X. JBIII and I went into business.
A. JBIII got an excellent idea.
B. I surprised my parents.
When JBIII and I returned to the Brubakers’ office with our supplies it was late in the afternoon, but we got to work filling our orders anyway. JBIII said that responsible businesspeople wouldn’t waste time and that we should keep our customers happy. I was just eager to start gluing glitter to the bees. Plus, I wanted my money.
By the time Mom phoned to tell me to come home for dinner, JBIII had printed out three sets of notecards and packaged them in tissue paper tied with ribbon, and I was nearly done with the glittery bumblebees. The cards were drying on every surface in the office, and if you must know the truth, I had sneezed and blown yellow glitter across the carpet, which JBIII said we would have to clean up before his parents saw it. And also that we should use newspapers the next time we got a glitter order. But we were happy with our progress and couldn’t wait to get back to work the next morning.
On Sunday, without being asked, I showed up at the Brubakers’ at 8:00 a.m. in the morning, which may have been a little early, because Mr. Brubaker was still in his pajamas, and he ran into the bedroom when he saw me. But JBIII and I were all businesslike and I didn’t pay any attention to his father’s GOT MILK? T-shirt with the giant rip in the underarm.
We just set to work, and an hour later JBIII announced, “Okay. All the seventh-floor orders have been filled. Let’s deliver them.”
“Shouldn’t we finish the rest of the orders first?” I asked. I was busily attaching pink ribbons to a special set of thank-you notes for a lady on the ninth floor.
“If we deliver these, we’ll get paid for them,” JBIII pointed out, but we decided to wait since it was only 9:00 and we didn’t want to embarrass/annoy/wake up any of our clients.
Sunday turned out to be quite a day for us. Here’s what we’d done by dinnertime:
1. Filled all the orders we had taken the day before.
2. Delivered the orders and gotten paid for them.
3. Reimbursed (which is a fancy economics word meaning “paid back”) the Brubakers for their loan. (I made them tear up the contract since I didn’t want a piece of paper hanging around that said JBIII and I owed anybody $$.)
4. Taken orders on floors 2–4 of JBIII’s building.
5. Bought supplies for the new orders and paid for them out of our profits from the first orders. IMPORTANT NOTE: I still had some $$ left over, and I had a brand-new idea for what to do with all the cash I’d be earning.
6. Started filling the new orders.
“And just think,” said JBIII happily as he set to work printing out a sheet of mouse-and-cheese address labels, “when we get paid for these orders, we’ll make even more money than before because we won’t have to pay my parents back for anything.”
* * *
The next week was very exciting. JBIII and I took orders every morning and spent the afternoons filling them. When we ran out of people in JBIII’s building we went door-to-door in my building.
“And when we’re done with my building we can show our products to our parents’ friends,” I said. “Oh! Oh! And we could go to The Towers and show the sample book to Daddy Bo’s friends.”
“My dad could take the book to his store,” suggested JBIII.
We were going to be millionaires.
JBIII and I were careful with our money. We never bought more supplies than we needed and we always bought the supplies as soon as we’d gotten paid, so we didn’t have to borrow any more $$. And one day we even gave $10 to the Brubakers since we were using their computer equipment so much. And they accepted it, instead of saying, like, “Oh, no, children, you hang on to this,” because they knew we were running a professional outfit.
I was very busy. And happy. It was hard to believe that not long ago I’d been dragging pathetically around the house with nothing to do except make a necklace for Bitey and sing mean songs about Lexie. Now I saw JBIII every day. We took orders and filled them, and in my spare time I thought up new designs. Our sample book was growing. I wasn’t rich exactly, but my wallet was getting fatter. And the days were flying by.
Which is why I was surprised when one afternoon as JBIII and I were working in his room (his mother needed the computer so we had temporarily moved our operations out of the office), my best friend said, “I can’t believe the summer is over.”
“It isn’t over,” I said automatically.
“Well, I know it isn’t technically over. That won’t happen until the end of September. But school starts in six days.”
“WHAT?” I was working on a special-order card—gluing white pom-poms onto bunnies where their tails should be—and I stopped with my hands in midair.
“Yup,” said JBIII. “Six days.”
“But that’s impossible.” Hadn’t I just been sitting in Mr. Potter’s room, lying to my friends about my nonexistent trip to the Wild West?
“Nope. It really is six days.”
Then it was time to carry out the idea I’d had.
That night Mom and Dad and Lexie and I ate dinner in the family room as usual. Since I was now a businessperson, earning $$ and being responsible (finally) and mature (sort of), I cleared a space for myself at Dad’s desk and ate my tuna-noodle casserole without spilling a bit. Every now and then, particularly when I reached for my glass of milk, one of my family members would look at me nervously, but the meal was uneventful.
I waited until we had all finished eating and then I cleared the table. Dad stood up to help me, but I said, “No, you stay there. Let me do this. I promise I won’t drop anything.”
And I didn’t.
This was surprising enough, but I had another surprise in store for my family. When I returned to the table I reached into my pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, and set it on the table. The wad was so fat that when I’d tried to stuff all the $$ into my wallet a little earlier, the wallet wouldn’t close.
Lexie looked at the bills and raised her eyebrows. “Where did that come from?”
“From P&J Designs,” I replied, which that is what JBIII and I had named our business.
“You earned all that?” asked my sister.
“Well, more really, since JBThree and I have to buy our supplies with our earnings. And also, I wanted a yo-yo. But this is what’s left over.”
“Pearl, I am so proud of you!” exclaimed my mother.
“You and JB had a good idea and you carried it out very professionally,” added Dad.
“Well, actually, JBThree had the original idea,” I said modestly.
“But you have the artistic talent,” said Mom. “And you really are treating your idea professionally.”
Mom and Dad had each ordered something from P&J Designs, and they had received the finished products in a timely fashion, which had impressed them.
“Are you still getting orders?” asked Lexie, eyeing my wad again.
“Yup. Every day. We take orders in the morning and fill them in the afternoon. I guess we’ll have to slow down when school starts, though. Speaking of which,” I continued, “are we going to BuyMore-PayLess for back-to-school shopping on Saturday?”
We went there so often now that we had each been given a free green canvas SHOP HAPPY AT BUYMORE-PAYLESS! bag. We left the bags hanging on the knob of our front door so we wouldn’t forget to take them with us every time we headed for the subway to Brooklyn.
Mom nodded. “I think we’d better. Saturday will be our only chance before school begins.”
“Go
od,” I said. I pushed the $$ farther across the table toward my parents. “That’s for the trip.”
“What?” said Mom and Dad.
“You’re kidding, right?” said Lexie, and I couldn’t tell whether she was surprised or jealous.
“I don’t know if it will pay for everything I need,” I went on, “because I kind of grew out of a lot of my clothes over the summer, but I want to pay for as much as I can.”
“All your earnings? Are you sure?” said Mom, and tears filled her eyes, which is not a normal thing, in that I mostly make her cry by dropping eggs out of the window or forgetting to hand in my homework for an entire week.
“I’m sure,” I said. And I was. There was just one sad thing about the success of P&J Designs, which was that now Dad was the only Littlefield without a job of his own. His wife was employed and his daughters were employed and Dad was sort of earning some $$ here and there, but it just wasn’t the same as when he was the important economics professor, a job he loved and wanted back.
* * *
Two days later Mom and Dad and Lexie and I walked through the entrance of BuyMore-PayLess, each with a SHOP HAPPY bag slung over one shoulder. Mom was holding a list that was almost as long as the one she’d consulted while packing me up for my overnight week at Camp Merrimac. She glanced at it, then said, “Okay, grab two shopping carts. The list is long and the morning is short.” (Sometimes I can sort of see why my mother became a writer.) She tore the list in half and handed the bottom part to my father. “We’ll split up. You and Lexie go together, and I’ll go with Pearl, since she might need some help trying on clothes.” (Which I didn’t, since I was ten, for heaven’s sake, but whatever.)
“Now,” Mom went on, looking around the store, which is approx. the size of an airport, “school supplies are over there, winter coats are over there, and girls’ clothes are over there. We don’t need any food, so we can avoid the grocery aisles. All right. Let’s get going.”
I looked at our half of the list as Dad and Lexie trundled away. I certainly did need a lot of things—notebooks, a new backpack, an assignment pad, a calculator, socks, underwear, sneakers, a winter jacket, jeans, a fleece top … I guess this is what happens when you enter fifth grade and also have a growth spurt.