The Get Rich Quick Club

by Dan Gutman

  There I was, watching TV, and suddenly our gazebo appeared on the screen.

  “This is Channel 6 News,” the lady reporter said as she walked through our field. “The quiet village of Farmington was rocked today when it was revealed that five youngsters spotted an unidentified flying object in this field last week and managed to snap a photograph of it.”

  As Eddie Bogle talked about the UFO landing, Channel 6 put scary music in the background and our UFO photo on the screen. To my amazement, they were treating our UFO “sighting” like it was for real.

  Well, let me tell you, it took about thirty seconds for word to get around town. For the next few hours, the phone in our house did not stop ringing. Everybody I knew called, plus a lot of people I didn’t know. It was the same at Rob’s house, Quincy’s house, and especially at the Bogles’ house.

  People wanted to know what we saw. What color was the UFO? (No color—there was no UFO.) Were we scared? (Of what?) Did we think the aliens might return? (Of course not. They were never here to begin with.) And most of all, people wanted to know what those mysterious words “inky dinky pinky” meant.

  I didn’t have a lot of answers.

  A couple of days after we were on the local TV news, USA Today ran an item about us, and that’s when the story exploded all over the country.

  Suddenly, our little town was the UFO capital of the world. People started streaming into Farmington like gold had been discovered here.

  First it was the UFO nuts, as Rob called them. They came from all over, sniffing around for evidence. You could tell who they were right away, because they were all walking around with fancy cameras, looking up in the air, ready to take a picture at a moment’s notice. With no UFOs to shoot, they took pictures of the spot where we had seen the UFO.

  UFO nuts were camping out in the field, hoping the UFO would return. While they waited, we could see them skulking around the grass with tape measures, metal detectors, magnifying glasses, and binoculars. One guy from California set up a portable satellite dish and told everyone that he was going to capture the next transmission from outer space. Somebody else claimed he’d decoded the words “inky dinky pinky” and declared that it meant “we’ll be back.”

  The media jumped all over our story. UFO “experts” analyzed our photo on TV and argued about whether or not it was real. Sixty Minutes devoted a show to UFOs (“The Myth That Will Not Die”).

  Before this, I had had no idea that UFO sightings drive some people into a frenzy.

  A lot of other people came to town just because it seemed like the place to be. Families would drive into downtown Farmington on Saturday on the off chance that they might see a UFO. They would end up spending a lot of money in the local stores, and the mayor proposed putting up a big billboard on the highway to draw in more tourists. Somebody suggested changing the name of Farmington to UFOville.

  Up to this time, Farmington’s only claim to fame was that Chester Greenwood, the guy who invented earmuffs, used to live here a long time ago. But this was something completely different. It was the most exciting thing to happen in Farmington since some flood washed away just about the whole downtown sixty years ago. You could feel the excitement in the air. All anybody talked about was the UFO sighting.

  Meanwhile, me and Rob and Quincy and the Bogles were becoming celebrities. Every day another reporter would be asking for an interview. A camera crew came all the way from Japan to talk with us. We got so many phone calls that the twins’ parents had to get an unlisted number. People would stop us on the street to take our picture.

  After the UFO article ran, the Farmington Journal had to print ten times as many papers as usual, so they kept running follow-up stories about us. They interviewed our teachers, our friends, anybody who ever knew any of us.

  Photographers hid in the trees outside our houses with lenses as long as my arm, waiting to shoot pictures of us. Reporters would follow us down the street shouting out questions: “Are you hiding aliens?” “Were the aliens friendly?” And, of course, “Is the picture real?”

  The Bogle twins were the most popular of all. People would come up to them asking for autographs. Eddie and Teddy could barely write in cursive, but people wanted them to sign autographs! Some kids in Missouri started a Bogle Brothers Fan Club. At least three websites devoted to the Bogles popped up. They put a photo of their stupid dust box online.

  You’d go by the Bogles’ house, and there would be reporters and photographers hanging around, waiting for the twins to come out. There was an item in the paper about some Hollywood producer who wanted to tell the Bogle twins’ life story.

  It was ridiculous! It seemed that a couple of years before, they weren’t even toilet trained, and now people wanted to see their life story!

  The only people who didn’t fall for our hoax were the kids we knew from school. They all knew right away that we had faked the UFO photo, and they thought it was a big hoot that the rest of the world didn’t catch on. I suppose that’s why none of them told on us.

  “This is Captain Moonbeam from the planet NiCAd,” some kid said when I picked up the phone one day. “Deliver a pizza to the gazebo at eight o’clock and we will take it with us back to our home planet. Extra cheese.” Then he started giggling and hung up.

  Much to our amazement, the words “inky dinky pinky” quickly become a national catchphrase. Everybody started saying it. When Jay Leno or David Letterman told a joke that bombed, they would simply add “inky dinky pinky” at the end, and everybody would crack up.

  The newspaper reported that scientists were analyzing the mysterious phrase on computers to determine what the hidden meaning was. It wasn’t long before we started seeing T-shirts that said INKY DINKY PINKY on them.

  That got me a little angry. This was our hoax. If anybody should be making money off it, it should be us. That was why we shot the fake UFO pictures in the first place.

  There was no need to worry about money, though. Pretty soon the offers started pouring in. A company that made disposable cameras wanted us to be in their commercial, acting out our UFO sighting. Somebody who made breakfast cereals wanted to put our picture on the box of a new UFO cereal that had little marshmallow flying saucers in it. My dad, who is a lawyer, said he would help us handle all the paperwork as soon as these companies put their offers in writing.

  We got offers from companies that wanted to make alien wind-up toys, inflatable unidentified flying mobiles, unidentified flying tub blocks, unidentified flying candy in flying saucer–shaped containers. Even the National Truth, which hadn’t wanted to publish our photo in the beginning, was leaving messages on my home answering machine. Now they were offering thousands of dollars just to talk to us. Sweet!

  “Big bikkies!” Quincy bubbled. “We’re gonna make big bikkies!”1

  A million dollars started to sound like small change. We were going to be more successful than I ever imagined in my wildest dreams. Once the contracts arrived for all the offers we were receiving, the money would start rolling in by the bucketful.

  I had to admit I’d been wrong about those Bogle boys. They had done the right thing by making up that crazy story for the TV cameras. None of this would have happened if not for their wacky imaginations and their skill at lying.

  There were some UFO nuts hanging around our gazebo, so Rob, Quincy, the Bogles, and I climbed up into the tree where it had all started for us.

  “You know,” I said, feeling as good about everything as I could possibly feel, “someday this tree will have a plaque on it in honor of us.”

  “At my last checkup, the dentist said my teeth had plaque on them,” Eddie said.

  “It’s not the same kind of plaque, dingbat.”

  Everything was going just as I had hoped. The Get Rich Quick Club was actually going to get rich, quick.

  12

  Good Liars, Bad Liars

  The next day we held a board of directors meeting up in the tree, where the UFO nuts wouldn’t notice us. I had car
efully tallied up all the money we would earn if all the offers we had received came through. The total was…Are you ready for this?

  Ten million dollars.

  Quincy just about fell out of the tree when I said that. I was on a high, and I didn’t think I’d ever come down. I would be making more money at the age of eleven than most people make in their entire lives. When Bill Gates was my age, he hadn’t made his first dime yet!

  Back in the old days (that is, before we were famous), we used to sit around fantasizing about what we would do if we had a million dollars. Now we were planning what we would actually do with the millions of dollars that would be coming to us.

  “I’m going to buy a seven-fifty-seven jet,” Quincy said.

  “Why?” we all asked.

  “So I can go visit my rellies in Australia whenever I want,”1 she told us. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “I’m gonna buy the best skateboard in the world,” announced Teddy.

  “The best skateboard in the world only costs a few hundred dollars, ning-nong,” I informed him.

  “Oh, then maybe I’ll get two of them.”

  “I’m gonna buy the Super Bowl,” Eddie said.

  “You can’t buy the Super Bowl!” Quincy pointed out.

  “Why not?” whined Eddie. “I’ll have lots of money.”

  “But the Super Bowl is not a thing you can buy,” I explained patiently. “You can’t buy everything. You can’t buy a cloud or an ocean. These things are not for sale. You can’t buy Mexico. Do you see what I’m trying to say?”

  “Maybe Teddy and I could chip in together and buy the World Series,” Eddie said.

  It was useless.

  Rob had been unusually quiet. I asked him what he was going to buy with his share of the money.

  “You can’t buy happiness,” Rob said quietly. “I think I’ll give my money to charity.”

  “Charity?” we all asked, openmouthed.

  “There are a lot of poor people who need it more than I do,” Rob explained.

  I was going to give Rob a hard time about donating his money to charity. But I decided not to. The whole fake UFO idea had come out of his brilliant-but-twisted brain. It figured that he would want to do something weird with the money. He had that right.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with my cut,” I announced. “I’m going to invest my money in our company. We need to hire employees now. Rent office space. Print stationery. Set up a line of credit. Hire accountants and lawyers. We need to do all the things a young company needs to do if it wants to grow.”

  “What?!” Nobody could believe it.

  “Do you think Bill Gates took his first million dollars and used it to buy a skateboard?” I scoffed. “No, he put it back into his company. That’s why he’s the richest man in the world today.”

  They all said I was crazy, but I didn’t care. What did any of them know about running a business anyway?

  “I’m gonna buy a truck filled with Kit Kats,” Eddie suddenly announced.

  “No, a truckful of Twix,” Teddy said.

  Naturally, that led to a heated argument over whether Kit Kats were better than Twix. Personally, I always felt that the caramel in Twix is a distraction from the flavor of the chocolate. If you want the taste of caramel, in my view, you should just buy a caramel. Quincy disagreed, insisting that Kit Kats, without the caramel, were no more than glorified Nestlé’s Crunch bars. Rob, strange as he is, said he preferred Milk Duds.

  “Milk Duds is a stupid name for candy,” I told the group.

  “Not as stupid as Mr. Goodbar,” Quincy said.

  “No, Mr. Goodbar is the perfect name,” I told her. “It’s a bar, and it tastes good. Compare that with Milk Duds. They’re made with milk, which kids are forced to drink, and they’re duds. Who wants to eat a dud?”

  “I do,” insisted Rob.

  We could have argued the point for hours, but some kid ran over to the tree. He was waving a newspaper.

  “Did you hear the news?” he shouted.

  “What news?”

  Wordlessly, the kid handed me the new issue of the Farmington Journal. There was a big headline on the front page:

  UFO PHOTO WAS FAKED!

  SIGHTING WAS ALL A HOAX

  On the front page was a big article explaining exactly how we had planned and shot our bogus UFO. The paper apologized to the readers for deceiving them.

  I felt my heart start beating like there was a bass drum inside me. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not after all we had been through.

  “How did they find out?” I sputtered.

  “Beats me,” Eddie said, scratching his head.

  “Beats you, huh?” I said, pointing a finger at him. “How could you? You blew it for all of us. Do you think any of those companies are going to pay us a dime when they find out that we faked the photo? They’re going to laugh in our faces. You cost us millions!”

  “Don’t chuck a spaz, Gina,” Quincy said. “No worries.”2

  “We didn’t tell!” Eddie and Teddy whined.

  “Oh sure!” I was furious now. “We made a pact, remember? We agreed not to tell anybody. We said we would all stick to the story. We promised not to break the oath or terrible, horrible things would happen to us. We sealed it with blood, remember?”

  “It was grape juice.” Teddy was covering his head like he was afraid that I might hit him.

  “That’s not the point,” I told him. “We made an agreement. I never should have let you sprogs into the company.”

  “We didn’t tell anybody,” Eddie said, wrapping his arm around his brother. “Honest!”

  “Oh sure, like we can believe anything you say!” I fumed. “Both of you are liars!”

  “Gina,” Rob said quietly, “this time they’re telling the truth.”

  “Huh?”

  “The twins didn’t tell the newspaper we faked the photos,” Rob admitted. “It was me.”

  “What?! You?!”

  It was inconceivable to me that Rob would rat us out. He was the most trustworthy kid I ever met.

  “You told them we faked the photo?”

  “I felt guilty,” Rob said quietly. “Ever since I came up with the idea of shooting the UFO, I felt guilty about it. I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about it. I guess I’m just not a good liar. It didn’t feel right.”

  “It didn’t feel right?” I exploded. “Ten million bucks would have felt right, wouldn’t it? Does it feel right to ruin everything for the rest of us? How could you do that? If you had to go and be all honest and moral about it, couldn’t you have waited awhile? Couldn’t you have waited until after we signed the contracts and collected the money?”

  Rob didn’t say a word. He just jumped out of the tree and went home.

  13

  The End of the Get Rich Quick Club

  As I expected, all the companies that were going to pay us millions of dollars bailed out of the deals as soon as they heard the news that our UFO photo was a phony. All the reporters and camera crews and UFO nuts who had invaded Farmington cleared out of town like it was radioactive. Nobody wanted to interview us anymore.

  We had already bragged to all the kids we knew, telling them what we were going to do with the money we were going to make, so they made fun of us pretty badly. We were the laughingstock of Farmington.

  For days, I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Rob. I was so angry at him for leaking the news that I was afraid I might hit him or throw something at him.

  But as August passed and I started to think about school again, I saw Rob at the supermarket. For a moment, I thought about ducking out of there before he could see me, but I decided that would be cowardly.

  “Look, I’m sorry I yelled and everything,” I told him. “I was a jerk.”

  “I’m sorry too, Gina,” Rob said. “I should have thought about you guys before doing what I did.”

  We agreed that we should have one last meeting of the Get Rich Quick Club, so w
e could officially shut down the company and clear our stuff out of the gazebo. Rob said that he and his mom were going to buy his back-to-school supplies and soccer gear that afternoon, so we agreed to hold the meeting that night. I said I’d pass the word to Quincy and the Bogle twins.

  It was a beautiful night. Not a cloud in the sky. Just one big, round moon. While I waited for the others to arrive at the gazebo, I stared up at the stars. The little chill in the air said that fall was coming. Soon the leaves would start turning colors. The days were beginning to get noticeably shorter.

  The others were probably thinking I was going to scream and yell about how we had blown millions of dollars, but I had gotten over my anger. Even though we hadn’t gotten rich, the Get Rich Quick Club had accomplished a lot.

  “We were a great team,” I began when everyone had arrived. “Quincy, we couldn’t have done it without you. You figured out how to make a UFO photo that would fool the world. We couldn’t have done it without Teddy or Eddie either. You were the ones who got us on TV and made us famous.”

  They beamed up at me like angels. I don’t think they ever fully realized exactly what we had done, or what had gone wrong.

  “And Rob, well, if it hadn’t been for you, we never would have come up with the crazy idea in the first place.”

  “We couldn’t have done it without you either, Gina,” Rob replied. “You were the leader. None of this would have come together if we didn’t have you as our CEO.”

  It was true, and I appreciated that he said it.

  “Well.” I sighed, unlocking the metal box. “I guess we’d better divvy up the company assets.”

  There were fifteen dollars in the box. We paid back Quincy the $10.95 she had spent for film, plus the sixty cents she owed her dad for postage. That left $3.45. Rob divided that by five on the calculator from the metal box and came up with sixty-nine cents. Luckily, he had a lot of change in his pockets, so we changed some of the dollar bills, and I handed out the right number of coins to everyone. Then I tore up the last profit and loss statement and dropped it into the box.