The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower

  If there was one thing Bernetta Wallflower, magician’s assistant, knew for a fact, it was that there was no such thing as magic. Illusions, sure. But real magic simply didn’t exist. Maybe it looked like magic when you ripped a jack of diamonds out of a sourdough bread roll, but the trick lost some of its sparkle once you knew that a gray-haired waiter had placed a special basket of bread with a card already inside it right in front of you. The card didn’t appear. It had been planted there all along.

  Bernetta stopped chewing. She took in a deep breath of air, then let it out very slowly.

  Suddenly she got the feeling that she’d spent the past four weeks staring at Gabe’s right hand, when all along he’d been hiding a quarter in his left.

  16

  REVELATION : n: the act of discovering an object or a piece of information previously unknown; often the finale of a trick

  It was a good thing Gabe’s house was only one story high. That meant Bernetta didn’t have to climb any trees in order to pound on his bedroom window first thing Monday morning.

  She peered through a gap in the curtain to make sure it was Gabe’s room. His bed was right next to the window, and she could see him sleeping peacefully. “Hey!” Bernetta hollered, banging on the glass with her fist. “Hey! Wake up!”

  Gabe sat up in bed with a start and looked toward the window, rubbing at his eyes. “Huh? What’s going—”

  “Wake up!” Bernetta pounded on the glass again.

  Gabe looked nervous, but when he pulled back the curtain and saw Bernetta, his face relaxed. “Oh,” he said, “it’s you.” He threw back his covers and sat up in bed to open the window. “You kind of freaked me out, Bernetta,” he said with a smile. “What time is it anyway?”

  Bernetta glared at him, plaid pajamas and all. Yesterday she might have thought his hair looked sort of cute, all tousled like that, but now she was wiser and completely unfazed by messy-cute boy hair.

  She set her palms down flat on the windowsill and leaned in, putting her weight as far forward as possible. She was pretty sure this made her look intimidating. She was going to roast him now. Mess with Bernetta Wallflower, she thought, and you’re as good as dead.

  Too bad she didn’t feel intimidating.

  “Bernetta?” Gabe asked. “Something wrong?”

  Bernetta sighed a deep sigh and scratched a bug bite on her arm. She couldn’t roast him. She just couldn’t. She looked at him then, dead in the eye, and she could feel her entire face crumple. Her voice came out tiny and thin.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked. “Why did you write her name on my backpack?”

  He didn’t deny it. And he didn’t call Bernetta an idiot either. His face crumpled too, just like a napkin. “I’m so sorry,” he said. And then he sat back on his bed and stared at his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  Bernetta bit her bottom lip. Her eyes were brimming with tears, and she wasn’t even sure why. She’d been betrayed before. That was nothing new. And it wasn’t like she and Gabe were best friends or anything. She’d known him only a month. Still, it hurt. Right in the center of her stomach. It hurt something awful.

  “So it’s true?” Bernetta asked. Her voice was almost a whisper. “You set me up? I mean, all along, you were—You never even—”

  Gabe nodded. “I’m sorry.” It seemed to be all he could say.

  “But why? Why would you do that? You didn’t even know me.”

  Gabe looked up at her then, with the saddest eyes Bernetta had ever seen. “I was friends with her,” he said. “Ashley. Back when she still went to Kingsfield with me.” He shook his head. “We did all kinds of stupid stuff. Shoplifting, stealing kids’ lunch money from their backpacks, even the kindergartners. We set up this whole gambling thing too, and we’d rake in money from the middle school soccer games. It was crazy. We thought we were fifth-grade bookies or something. I don’t know. It was exciting, I guess. You never knew what was going to happen with Ashley around.”

  You never knew, all right, Bernetta thought. All of a sudden the sight of Gabe in his pajamas was making her sick. How could she ever have liked him? When all this time he was using her? She was just a part of one of his cons. What was it called, the mark? The victim. Bernetta was the mark for a perfectly choreographed long con, starring Ashley Johansson as the expert con artist. And Gabe had been the roper.

  “But,” Gabe continued, “then I found out she was going to a new school, Mount Olive, and I was kind of relieved. Because well, things were getting out of hand. I had to, I don’t know, watch my back all the time. I guess I was just getting tired.”

  “So?” Bernetta said, drumming her fingers on the windowsill. “Why didn’t you just quit? If she left your school, why didn’t you just cut things off with her?”

  “I did!” Gabe said. “I tried to. But . . .” He heaved another deep sigh, as though just the memory of what he was about to say made the air around him harder to breathe. “Right before Ashley found out her parents were sending her to a new school, we made this bet. Me and Ashley. It was her idea, and it was totally crazy. I never really thought she was serious about it.”

  Bernetta tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She wished she could just walk away right then and there. Gabe didn’t deserve to have anyone listen to his stupid stories. But she was curious despite herself. “What was the bet?” she asked.

  “Well, Ashley was always bragging about how great she was at making money. She said she could make five thousand dollars in one year, just pulling stuff on kids at school, and she’d never even get caught. Back then I thought it was ridiculous. Five thousand dollars? I mean, we did pretty good, but we only made a couple hundred bucks the whole year of fifth grade. And I thought we were millionaires, you know? But Ashley was always talking about five thousand dollars. That was her big number. So somehow I got roped into this bet with her. She said if she couldn’t make five thousand dollars in one year, then she’d have to give me half of what she had made. And if she did make the money—” He stopped talking then and chewed on a fingernail.

  Bernetta leaned a fraction of an inch closer into the window. “If she did make the money . . .” she prompted.

  Gabe spat out a bit of nail. “Then I’d have to match her,” he finished.

  “What do you mean, match her?” Bernetta asked.

  “You know, I’d owe her as much money as she made.”

  Bernetta raised her eyebrows. “Five thousand dollars? You’d owe her five thousand dollars?” He nodded. “But that’s crazy! Why would you ever agree to that?”

  “I thought it was impossible! I didn’t think there was any way she could do it. I thought I’d be making easy money.”

  “You should’ve known better.”

  Gabe groaned. “You’re telling me.” He went back to chewing on his thumbnail. “Ever seen Guys and Dolls? There’s this one line, where Marlon Brando is talking about betting, and he says that if someone ever tries to bet on something ridiculous, like that they can make a jack of spades jump out of a deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear, you shouldn’t take it, because no matter what, you’re going to end up with an earful of cider.”

  Bernetta couldn’t help smiling. Only Gabe could think about movies at a time like this. But then she frowned again. Gabe wasn’t the only one with cider in his ear. She’d fallen for his bets too, hadn’t she? With the grandmother and the bookstore gift card and the movie quotes. Gabe wasn’t exactly a poor, pitiful victim in all this. Bernetta couldn’t believe she’d ever thought he had chocolate eyes. They were mud. Mud, plain and simple. She turned around and slid down until she was sitting on the grass, back leaning against the house. She folded her arms across her chest.

  “So then what?” she said up toward Gabe. “So Ashley made the five thousand, and you owed her big, and then what happened? How did I get involved?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. Bernett
a could just barely see that he’d leaned his head out the window to talk to her, but she didn’t look at him. “She went to Mount Olive for sixth grade and made all that money. I couldn’t believe she did it, but she showed me the cash herself. And she told me how she did it, with that cheating ring, slipping those notes in everyone’s lockers. And she told me about you, too, and how she could never get caught because she’d pinned it all on you, used you as a—as a scapegoat or whatever.”

  Bernetta could feel her insides tightening up. “Did she tell you I thought she was my best friend?” she said. She wiped the tears away quick. There was no way she was going to let Gabe know she was crying. “Did she tell you that she used to spend the night at my house and bake cookies with me and my little brother? And that she let me tell her all my secrets and pretended like she cared?” In all that time, Bernetta realized, she hadn’t known Ashley at all. Because in all that time Ashley had never said one word about Gabe.

  “No,” Gabe said, and he began to speak more slowly. “I didn’t know any of that.” He paused. “I didn’t. . . . See, all of a sudden I owed her a ton of money, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew that if I didn’t give it to her, I’d . . . well, I knew it would be bad. She said I had until the end of the summer. She said I should’ve been saving up all along, that I should’ve known I was going to have to pay her. But I didn’t think I could do it. And I figured if she’d made all this money by setting you up . . .” He paused again. “Well, I thought I could too.”

  “You thought I sounded gullible, right?” she said. “You thought I’d make a good mark.”

  “But I didn’t even know you then!” Gabe said. “And now that I do, I’m sorry I ever—”

  “So is that why you went to my dad’s club that night? So you could rope me into something?”

  He sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t even know what I was thinking. I was desperate. Ashley told me you worked there on Saturdays, so I convinced Patrick to have his birthday party there. I didn’t find out until later that you’d just gotten in trouble for Ashley’s whole thing at school.”

  Bernetta wiped her wet hands on her shorts. “I think I should go,” she said into the air.

  “No!” Gabe cried. “Wait. Please.” And before Bernetta knew what was happening, Gabe had crawled out his window and was sitting right beside her on the grass in his blue plaid pajamas. “Look,” he said, and he put a hand on Bernetta’s knee. She sucked in a quick gasp of air but turned her head the other way. He kept talking. “Bernetta, I went there, and I met you, and you did that watch trick, you know? And I realized right then that I couldn’t do it. You weren’t like Ashley, you weren’t like anyone I knew at all, and I don’t know, I guess I . . . liked you.”

  Bernetta didn’t know if Gabe meant he liked her or he liked her, but she refused to look at him either way.

  “I knew I couldn’t do it,” Gabe said. “You didn’t deserve that. So I decided I’d just leave you alone and find some other way to make the money, but then I ran into you again, and I swear I thought it was fate, just like in Close Encounters, how I said, with the potatoes. And I needed money, and you needed money, so I thought we should be partners. And we were really good partners. I was right. Bonnie and Clyde.”

  Bernetta wiped the last of her tears away and looked down at her knee. Gabe’s hand was still there. She looked him in the eyes again and then shook her head, drawing her legs in close and wrapping her arms around them. Gabe took his hand back. He seemed hurt about it. Good.

  “That’s a nice story and everything,” Bernetta said, sniffling her very last sniffle, “but I know you’re still lying.”

  “I’m not!” Gabe cried. “I swear!”

  “Oh, yeah?” Bernetta was done being upset now. She was mad. “Well, if that’s true, if you thought we made such great partners, if you liked me or whatever, then explain why you set me up. Tell me exactly why you put Ashley’s wallet in my backpack, Gabe, and why you wrote her name on there so she could steal everything right out from under me. Hmm? Why’d you do it?”

  Gabe closed his eyes and leaned all the way back, resting his head against the side of the house. He pressed his knuckles against his eyes and was quiet for a long while. He seemed to be thinking, but Bernetta couldn’t tell if he was angry at himself or busy coming up with new lies.

  “I just . . .” he said at last, opening his eyes and staring straight ahead as he spoke. “I guess when I saw all that money you had that day, I just went a little crazy or something. And I thought that if I could get it from you, then I could give it to Ashley along with what I’d made too, and I’d be done. I’d never have to worry about her anymore. So I called her, and I—I told her about the money in your backpack. And she came up with that idea, that I should put her wallet in there and everything. She thought it up, I swear.”

  “But you did it.”

  Gabe scratched at the side of his face. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  They were quiet for a long time again, both of them staring straight ahead in silence. Bernetta noticed that they were breathing right in time with each other, in and out, and she tried to change the rhythm of her breaths so they wouldn’t match Gabe’s anymore, but it was a hard thing to do once you started to think about it.

  “Bernetta? I’m just—I need to say I’m sorry. I mean, I know I said it before, but it’s true. I’m really sorry. I never should have done it, and I wish I hadn’t. I’ve been thinking about it since Friday, and I—I need to make it up to you. I want to get your money back, Bernetta. I want to help you. And I think I know how we can do it.”

  “Gabe . . .” Bernetta said softly, but he cut her off.

  “It’s a long con. You know, how I was telling you before, like in The Sting? I found one we can actually do. Wait, I’ll show you.”

  He leaped up, leaned in through his open window, and stood on his toes as he tried to reach something. When he slid back down to the ground, he was holding a book, a thick one entitled Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses, and Swindles. He began to flip through the pages frantically.

  “I was looking at this before I went to sleep last night. I thought we might find something in here we could use to get your money back. And look. Look right here.” He smoothed his hands across a page. “‘Green goods swindle,’” he read. “‘Counterfeit money con game.’ Bernetta, it’s perfect. We can totally do this.”

  Bernetta hoisted herself off the ground and wiped off her shorts. “I’m gonna go now,” she said softly.

  “But”—Gabe got to his feet too—“you can’t just leave, Bernetta. Look, I know we can pull this off. It’s perfect for us. And we can get your Mount Olive money back. I’ll give you all the profits. Everything. One hundred percent. I owe you. Please.”

  Bernetta took one last look in his eyes, and yes, she was certain they were chocolate after all. But chocolate could be bad for you too. She looked down at her feet and dug the toe of her sneaker into the lawn.

  “How do I know I can trust you anymore?” she said.

  Gabe shook his head slowly. “I guess you can’t,” he answered with a frown. “I mean, you shouldn’t. Not really. Not anymore. But . . .” He looked up, and Bernetta thought he might almost be grinning. “Well . . . do you?”

  Bernetta bit her lip and thought about that. It was a very good question.

  Even though Bernetta knew it was probably the stupidest thing she would ever do in her entire life, she agreed to trust Gabe. Just one last time. One last con. They spent the morning planning and scheming, poring over details on the floor of Gabe’s room. They tried to work through every moment, and plan for every scenario, so that no matter what happened, they’d always be in control of the game. There were phone calls to make, numbers to crunch, and stratagems to plan. And late that afternoon, when they couldn’t think of any more wrinkles to straighten out, Gabe made Bernetta watch The Sting with him. They s
at side by side on Gabe’s living-room couch, a bowl of popcorn between them. There was no more knee touching, but Bernetta was okay with that for the time being.

  When Gabe paused the movie to get up for more soda, Bernetta plucked a loose thread from the couch. “So where are your parents, anyway?” she called into the kitchen.

  Gabe appeared in the doorway with two cans of root beer. “At work. Why?”

  “Don’t they care that you’re alone all day?”

  Gabe shrugged. “Most summers I go to camp, but my dad missed the application deadline this year, so my parents decided I’d be fine by myself. Anyway, it’s not like I’m bored or anything.” He tossed her a soda. “I’ve been hanging out with you.”

  Bernetta looked around the room as she took a sip of root beer. Besides the giant bookshelf crammed with more movies than Bernetta had ever seen, the house looked pretty normal. “I thought you were rich,” Bernetta said. “You said you were raised by a nanny.”

  Gabe plopped down next to her on the couch and reached for the remote control. “I lied,” he said, but he was grinning.

  “Oh,” Bernetta replied. “Well”—she grabbed a couch pillow behind her—“just don’t do it again, all right?” And she tossed the pillow at his head.

  “Deal,” he said. And he lobbed it right back.

  17

  FORCED CARD n: a card that the spectator believes he has chosen of his own free will but that has been unknowingly forced upon him by the magician

  The next morning Bernetta had trouble keeping her eyes open as she chomped on her toast. It had been a long night, with numbers and schemes and plans whizzing through her head, and she’d hardly slept a wink, worrying about the big con she and Gabe were planning.

  Across the breakfast table her dad took a bite of oatmeal as she got up to put her plate in the sink. “Hey, Bernie?” he said.