The Get Rich Quick Club

by Dan Gutman

  We figured the Farmington Journal might be interested in our photo. After all, as far as we knew, there had never been a UFO sighting in Farmington, Maine. Rob made me promise not to pretend to be somebody else when I called the offices of the Journal.

  “Journal,” a man’s voice said.

  “May I speak with one of the editors, please?” I asked.

  “You’re talkin’ to all the editors. Brian McNight. I’m the editor, and the owner, and I sweep up around here too. What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. McNight, my name is Gina Tumolo,” I said, trying to sound as serious as possible. “I am an eleven-year-old girl, and my friends and I spotted a UFO recently.”

  “Kid, I’m busy,” Mr. McNight said.

  “Don’t hang up!” I shouted into the phone. “We have a photo of the UFO.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, a little interest in his voice. “You kids shot a picture of a UFO right here in Farmington?”

  “That’s right, and we were thinking that maybe you might want to put the picture in the Journal.”

  “What does this so-called UFO look like?” he asked.

  “It’s…sort of hard to describe,” I stammered. What was I going to say? It looks like a round pillow we threw up in the air? “You’d have to see it.”

  “I have a hole to fill in next week’s issue,” Mr. McNight said. “Why don’t you bring your photo over so I can take a look at it? It might make a good human-interest story.”

  Well, Rob, Quincy, and the Bogles were about as excited as puppies at dinnertime. They wanted to go over to the Journal right away, until I reminded them that we didn’t have the photo back from the National Truth yet.

  When the photo did arrive two days later, we rode over to the Farmington Journal office like we were Olympic bicycle racers. Panting and out of breath, we left our bikes in a pile and dashed inside. The receptionist asked us who we were, and we told her we had come to see Mr. McNight. She called him on the intercom and led us down the hall to his office.

  Brian McNight was a heavy man with a mustache. His desk was cluttered with papers, coffee cups, Chinese-food containers, and junk.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” he said when we burst into his office. “You’re the kids who saw the UFO, right?”

  “How did you know?” Rob asked.

  “I’ve got ESP. I’m on deadline. Lemme see your photo.”

  I handed him the UFO picture, and he looked it over carefully. Then he took a magnifying glass out of his desk drawer and looked at it even more carefully. He kept stealing glances at us, and we kept stealing glances at one another.

  “You shot this yourselves?” he finally asked. “It’s not bad. Not bad at all. Now tell me the truth. Is it real?”

  I figured Rob—Mister Always-Tell-the-Truth—might crack. It looked like he was about to say something, but I stepped on his foot and he kept his mouth shut.

  “Sure it’s real!” Teddy Bogle piped up. “I oughta know, ’cause I was the one who snapped it!”

  I could always count on the Bogle boys to tell a lie. For once, I was glad I had decided to let them hang around with us.

  “Well, this is your lucky day,” Brian McNight said. “I was holding page one for the school board election, but they postponed it.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to print our picture?” I asked, trying to pretend I wasn’t excited.

  “If I don’t, I’ve got a hole on page one the size of Greenland.”

  “All right!”

  We all started jumping up and down and yelling like game show contestants who had won the grand prize.

  “Calm down,” Mr. McNight said. “This isn’t a playground.”

  I gathered my composure and went back to Mr. McNight’s desk. It was time to “talk turkey.” That’s what my dad always says when it’s time to discuss money.

  “How much will you pay us for the photo?” I asked.

  “Well, how much were you expecting?” he replied.

  “We were thinking,” I said bravely, “of a million dollars.”

  “I’m thinking of a million dollars too,” he said, smiling, “but I’ll pay you fifteen.”

  “Fifteen million?” Rob said, gasping. I thought his eyeballs were going to pop out of his head.

  “No.”

  “Fifteen thousand?” Quincy asked.

  “Fifteen,” Mr. McNight repeated. “One…five. That’s a ten-dollar bill and five singles. I think you kids are old enough to do the math.”

  Fifteen dollars! He had to be kidding. Mr. McNight pulled a ten-dollar bill and five singles out of a box on his desk, holding it out to me. I wasn’t about to accept his first offer.

  “We’re willing to negotiate,” I said. “How about a half a million dollars?”

  “Fifteen bucks,” McNight replied. “Take it or leave it.”

  “Will you excuse us for a moment?” I asked, pulling the others out into the hallway.

  “Sure.”

  “What do you think?” I asked the group.

  “We could flog it to another rag,” Quincy suggested.

  “They might say the same thing,” I said.

  “Maybe we should take the money,” Rob suggested. “Fifteen bucks is fifteen bucks. That’s more than we have now.”

  “Kids,” Mr. McNight shouted from his office, “I don’t have all day.”

  “Okay,” I shouted back. “We’ll take the fifteen dollars.”

  When I went back to his office, Mr. McNight handed me the money and also a yellow piece of paper.

  “Sign this,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “A contract,” he said. “It basically says we paid you the fifteen dollars, and the Journal owns the rights to publish the photo.”

  The contract was only one page, but the page had a lot of words on it. They were printed in really small letters. I couldn’t even figure out what half the words meant. But I didn’t want to look stupid. I nodded my head knowingly and signed the line at the bottom of the paper. I handed the sheet to the others for them to sign.

  “Great, kids,” Mr. McNight said as he walked us back to the reception area. “Look for your photo in next week’s Journal. If you want, you can stop by the office and I’ll give you some extra copies to put up on your refrigerators at home.”

  We rode our bikes home from the Journal a lot slower than we rode them getting there. Personally, I felt guilty. After teaching the others the fine art of negotiation, I had negotiated a crummy deal.

  “I think we got the rough end of the pineapple,”1

  Quincy muttered as we pedaled.

  “He took advantage of us because we’re kids,” Rob commented.

  “You can’t even buy a video game with fifteen dollars!” Eddie Bogle complained.

  “Hey, we made fifteen bucks,” I said, trying to look on the bright side. “That’s better than nothing.”

  “We sold our souls,” Rob said dejectedly as we pulled into the gazebo, “for fifteen lousy dollars.”

  “Don’t think that way,” I told him. “Sure we sold our souls. But this is just the beginning. You’ll see. We’re going to make millions from this. So down the road we will have sold our souls for a million dollars. Does that make you feel any better?”

  “No,” Rob said.

  I put the fifteen dollars into our metal box, and everybody went home without saying good-bye.

  10

  Alert the Media

  While we were waiting for the Journal to publish our UFO picture, I made up another profit and loss statement and presented it to the group.

  * * *

  PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENT

  EXPENSES

  Film (pay back Quincy)

  $10.95

  National Truth

  1.75

  Bubblicious gum

  .65

  Postage (pay back Quincy’s dad)

  .60

  $13.95

  INCOME

  Sale of photo

&
nbsp; $15.00

  NET PROFIT

  $1.05

  * * *

  Pretty pathetic. Summer was nearly half over, and all we had earned was $1.05. We could have made more money selling lemonade.

  But then, in next Thursday’s mail, there it was—the Farmington Journal. Splashed across the front page was our photo and a big headline:

  UFO SIGHTED IN FARMINGTON?

  This is what the caption under the photo read:

  This alleged UFO was photographed by eight-year-old Theodore Bogle of Farmington last week, when he was playing in the field by the Franklin County Fairgrounds with his brother Eddie and friends Rob Hunnicutt, Quincy Biddle, and Gina Tumolo.

  For the moment, I wasn’t thinking about how we had been ripped off by the Journal. I was thinking about how cool it was. That was our photo, right in the newspaper! I grabbed for the phone to call Rob.

  “Did you see it?” he hollered as soon as he heard my voice. He sounded just as excited as I was.

  “Doesn’t it look cool?”

  We arranged to get the Get Rich Quick Club together at the gazebo to celebrate.

  “What’s all the fuss?” Mom asked as I was hanging up the phone. Then I showed her the paper.

  “You saw an alien spaceship,” she asked, astonished, “and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I…forgot.”

  “You forgot?” Mom put her hand over her heart like she was going to faint. “You spotted an alien spacecraft and you forgot?”

  This is a lesson that every kid should learn as early in life as possible. Pay attention now. If you ever get caught in a lie, don’t admit it. Don’t deny it. Just say, “I forgot.”

  You see, forgetting stuff is not quite as bad as lying, and nobody can ever prove you’re lying when you say “I forgot.” Believe me, this is bulletproof. I pull this off all the time, and it never fails.

  “Yeah, I forgot,” I told her. “Is forgetting against the law?”

  Mom started giving me the usual lecture about telling the truth or doing the right thing or some other such mumbo jumbo, but I was already out the door.

  By the time I got to the gazebo, Quincy, Rob, and the Bogle twins were already there. They were looking over their own copies of the Farmington Journal excitedly.

  “I can’t believe they actually put our UFO photo in the paper!” Eddie Bogle marveled.

  “Boy, did we put a swiftie over on them!”1 Quincy beamed.

  While we were buzzing, a white van pulled up to the street closest to where we were sitting. It had one of those satellite dishes on the roof and CHANNEL 6 NEWS painted on the side. A bunch of people piled out with cameras and other equipment. They started lugging it over to the gazebo.

  “Are you the kids who spotted the UFO?” a blond lady asked, sticking a microphone in my face.

  “Uh…yeah,” I said. I figured that as CEO, I should be the spokesperson for the group.

  “Where did you see this UFO?”

  Two big video cameras were trained on me. I felt like I was an animal in the zoo. I glanced at Rob for help, but he clearly didn’t want to do the talking.

  “It was over there somewhere,” I said, pointing in the general direction of the field where we had shot the picture.

  “What did it look like?”

  “I…forget,” I stammered. Almost immediately, I realized that “I forget” works much better with parents than it does with the news media.

  “You forget?” the lady asked. I didn’t want to look at her, because it’s easier to lie to somebody if you’re not making eye contact with them. The only problem is, not making eye contact with somebody is a sure sign that you are lying. So either way you lose. That’s another one of those life lessons that every kid should learn as soon as possible.

  “Well, it was sort of nondescript looking,” I explained.

  “Yeah, it didn’t have a specific look about it,” Rob said, trying to bail me out.

  “It was sort of…general looking really,” I added lamely.

  We all stood around shuffling our feet for a while until Eddie piped up.

  “It was humongous!” he exclaimed, spreading his arms as wide as they would go.

  The cameramen turned away from me like I had bad breath, and he stuck the cameras in Eddie’s face. He didn’t seem to mind at all.

  “And it had big glowing green lights!” Eddie continued.

  “Yeah!” agreed Teddy. “And it made a weird humming sound!”

  Rob, Quincy, and I waved our hands at Eddie and Teddy, trying to shush them, but it was no use. Once you got those twins started telling stories, there was no way to stop them. And the camera crew was lapping it up like starving animals.

  “A weird humming sound?” the reporter asked. “Can you describe it for us?”

  Eddie and Teddy pinched their nostrils together and started humming. The noise they produced sounded like one of those annoying Hawaiian hula songs. The reporter turned to me again.

  “Is that what it sounded like to you?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah, something like that.”

  Well, what was I going to do, tell the truth? If I admitted that we had faked the UFO picture, our whole story would be blown. This was our chance to get famous and make some money. I just wished those Bogles would keep their mouths shut. If they exaggerated too much, our story would be blown anyway.

  “And then,” Eddie said, almost in a whisper, “the spaceship landed in the field over there and the aliens came out!”

  Oh no.

  I looked at Teddy with murder in my eyes, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was busily concocting the next part of the ridiculous story in his head, I was sure.

  “You actually saw the aliens?” The reporter was down on one knee now, so she could get on the same level as Eddie and Teddy. A cameraman elbowed me out of the way so he could get a better shot of the twins. I don’t know why people always think twins are so adorable.

  “Sure!” they exclaimed simultaneously.

  “We saw the aliens! They even talked to us!” said Teddy.

  Rob, Quincy, and I rolled our eyes. I knew what they were thinking. Those little Bogle twerps were ruining everything. We should have put muzzles on those sprogs to shut them up. How come for once in their lives they didn’t have to go to the bathroom?

  “What did the aliens say to you?” the reporter asked breathlessly.

  Eddie looked at Teddy. Teddy looked at Eddie. Rob looked at Quincy. I just cringed. Who knew what crazy thing the Bogles might come out with?

  “‘Inky dinky pinky,’” Eddie said.

  Oh man. If he had said something like “Take me to your leader,” it would have been almost believable. But “inky dinky pinky”? Nobody would buy that in a million years!

  “‘Inky dinky pinky’?” repeated the reporter. “The aliens said, ‘Inky dinky pinky’?”

  “Yeah,” Teddy agreed. “Just like that they said it. ‘Inky…dinky…pinky.’”

  “Is that true?” the reporter asked me, Quincy, and Rob. We looked at one another.

  “Well,” I finally said. “The sound was muffled and difficult to understand, but it sounded something along the lines of ‘inky dinky pinky.’”

  “This is fascinating!” exclaimed the reporter. “What do you think ‘inky dinky pinky’ means? Could it be some…secret code?”

  “It must be some sort of high-level communication system that humans don’t have the intelligence to understand,” Rob guessed. “Or maybe it’s an intergalactic nursery rhyme.” Even Rob was getting into the spirit of lying!

  “Was that all the aliens said?”

  “Yup,” Teddy replied. “Inky dinky pinky. Then they got back inside the UFO and it flew away.”

  Before the newspeople had gathered up all their equipment, the Bogle twins managed to tell them that the aliens were twelve feet tall, hairy all over, and had noses on the back of their heads. Rob, Quincy, and I made no effort to stop them. It was no use. The news-people even seemed int
erested in the stupid box of dust the Bogles carried with them everywhere.

  Afterward, Teddy and Eddie were strutting around as if they had just won the lottery.

  “We’re gonna be on TV!” they chanted. “We’re gonna be on TV!”

  “Why did you make up all that stuff?” I scolded them. “You made us look like a bunch of idiots! They’re never going to use that video. You ruined everything!”

  “We were only trying to help,” Eddie whined. I thought he and Teddy were going to start crying, but they just hung their heads.

  It was really all my fault, I realized. As head of the company, I never should have let the twins get into a position where they could mess things up. As soon as the TV crew arrived, I should have asked Rob or Quincy to get the twins out of sight so they couldn’t say anything stupid. They weren’t old or mature enough.

  Certainly they weren’t old enough to lie convincingly. Only when a kid reaches the age of ten or eleven can he tell a lie good enough for grown-ups to believe. I should have known that. How stupid of me!

  All our hard work shooting the fake UFO pictures was for nothing. I was crushed and defeated. Now we would have to come up with another plan to make a million dollars.

  11

  Fame and Fortune

  Well, I guess I overestimated the intelligence of the human race. I assumed that when the Bogle boys started spinning their ridiculous tale of our “alien encounter,” Channel 6 would kill the story and show some real news. But I was wrong. Not only did they put us on TV, but they even ran us as the top story on the news that very night.