#4 Know a secret about the other person and threaten to tell it: You can get people to do all sorts of things if you’ve got a juicy secret about them. The Germ is AMAZING at this. He also did it all the time as Tito’s manager when Tito was a professional wrestler.
#5 Make a deal with the person: If signature moves #1 through #4 don’t work, you may have to trade something the other person wants for something you want. Tito did this in Steel Cage 2: Back in the Cage, when (spoiler alert) he traded his scientist boss’s secret science formulas so that his mother would be released from the laboratory where she was being held captive.
So far, we had used the signature moves only for minor schemes, like to get Brain’s parents to let us stay up late or to get kids at school to switch partners so we could work together on a group project. But they worked for Tito the Bonecrusher. And they were the only signature moves we had.
To get money for the gala tickets, we came up with a harmless scam involving signature moves #1 and #2. It also involved signature move #3 and my stepdad, Carl.
Like his mom, Carl is really rich, but he hardly spends any money, which doesn’t make any sense. He drives a beat-up Honda and wears jeans and T-shirts. He buys the jeans at the same wholesale place where we get our toilet paper and trash bags, and his T-shirts have sayings on them that don’t make any sense, like I FOUGHT THE LAWN AND THE LAWN WON. If I was rich like Carl, I would spend my money on things that actually make sense, like my own limousine and lifetime tickets to UWE events. And on rescuing people from bad places.
The only thing Carl really loves to spend money on is dorky computer gadgets like his fancy photo printer. It’s supposed to be for his job, but he mostly uses it to print pictures of famous people and write goofy fake messages from the famous people to my mom. For example, he once printed a photo of this famous chef, Julia Child, and he wrote, “To Diane from Julia: Keep making that great mushroom casserole. It’s your husband’s favorite!” My mom thought it was completely hilarious and put it on the refrigerator with the other goofy pictures.
That gave Brain and me the idea to take some of the jokey photos and turn them into cash. We borrowed a couple of the pictures from the refrigerator (signature move #3) to use as examples. Then at recess on Wednesday, we told our classmates that thanks to my amazing stepdad, Carl, they too could have the autograph of any famous person for the bargain price of only five dollars.
We projected confidence (signature move #1) and acted extra friendly (signature move #2), and the next thing we knew, a bunch of kids were placing orders. Some kids wanted pictures with messages to themselves, like “Congrats on scoring a basket, Bobby! From NBA All-Star Stephen Curry.” Others got photos for their friends, with notes like “Marco, I’m in your corner. Never quit trying! From Tito the Bonecrusher.”
I sold six of Tito’s pictures. I used the same picture for every autograph: It’s a classic photo of Tito from his first movie, Steel Cage, which was filmed right after he quit professional wrestling. A few other UWE wrestlers had done action movies, but Tito was the first masked one. And even though most of Tito’s face is covered by his mask, it’s amazing how scary he can look just with his eyes and mouth. He’s not smiling at all, so he looks extremely dangerous. It helps that his mask for Steel Cage was designed to look like he was scowling at you.
* * *
Brain and I were raking in the cash so fast that on the third day of selling autographs, we got sloppy. I should have been suspicious when Brain’s and my former friend, Sharon Dunston, asked me for an autographed picture of Clara Barton. I did what I’d done for all the other phony autographs: I printed Clara Barton’s picture from the internet, wrote “Good luck in the spelling bee, Sharon! Love, Clara Barton” with a permanent marker, and handed it to Sharon at recess.
“That’ll be five dollars, please,” I said, holding out my hand so she could put money in it. Brain unzipped the fancy purse her mom had given her, which we were using as a cash register.
“Ha!” Sharon smirked. She marched across the playground to the teacher on recess duty. Brain and I stood and watched while Sharon pointed at us, waved the photo, and gestured dramatically. The teacher then sent us to Headmaster Nurbin’s office.
I learned a couple of interesting things in Headmaster Nurbin’s office. Turns out that (1) Clara Barton was a famous nurse who actually passed away a long time ago, and (2) there’s a rule that you can’t run a private business on school grounds between 7:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. So our photo-selling days were over.
Headmaster Nurbin said he was disappointed in us and told us we had to give back the money we’d made by duping students with forgeries.
Brain had been quiet up to then, but at this she cleared her throat. “To be clear,” she said, “we never actually told anyone they were real autographs. It’s not our fault if kids thought they were authentic.”
“Did you tell them they were fake?” Headmaster Nurbin asked.
“I didn’t think we had to,” Brain said. She lowered her eyes and shook her head slowly, the way my mom does when she’s not mad, just disappointed. “I thought Haselton Academy students would have better critical thinking skills.”
She looked back up at Headmaster Nurbin.
He didn’t go for it.
“The money will be returned to your classmates,” he said.
“If they return the photos, you mean,” Brain added. “They shouldn’t get to keep them for free.”
“Fine, Brianna,” Headmaster Nurbin said.
There was a knock on the door. Someone from the main office needed to talk to Headmaster Nurbin.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he told us, stepping out of his office.
Brain looked over at me. Before I could freak out about the money, she said, “We shouldn’t worry about this one. I have another idea.”
Before I could ask what it was, Headmaster Nurbin was back.
He gave us a little speech about how, since he’s a “big believer in second chances,” we wouldn’t get punished other than having our parents notified. But if we landed back in his office again, there would be “more serious consequences for your behavior.”
Then he said, “You may return to class, Brianna.” Brain and I both stood up, but he stopped me. “I would like to speak to you for just another moment, Oliver,” he said.
Brain gave me a little nod, and I sat back down as she left the office.
Headmaster Nurbin leaned forward and folded his hands on top of his desk like he was about to announce something very important. “Oliver,” he said, “I am sorry that this is our first conversation since you arrived at Haselton Academy this year.”
“Oh, um, that’s okay,” I replied.
“I had wanted to welcome you to our school,” he continued, “and tell you that we at Haselton Academy are committed to ensuring that all students get the help they need.”
“Okay,” I said. This was the weirdest conversation. “Could I please go back to class? I don’t want to miss out on any more learning,” I said in my most polite voice. “And don’t worry, I won’t be back in your office,” I promised. “I’ve learned my lesson.” Learned my lesson that Sharon and I still definitely aren’t friends, I wanted to say.
The headmaster wrote a note to my parents about what Brain and I had done, and he said I needed to return it with my mom’s signature. “Her real signature,” he added. “Not another forgery like those autographs.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, barely listening. Instead I was thinking about the fact that our autograph scheme had failed and we were exactly zero dollars on our way to the gala tickets. But we would never quit trying. And apparently Brain already had a next step for our plan.
* * *
I had decided to do some research for our plan, the way Tito probably would, when Dad called at 7:00 that night. Mom used up a bunch of the phone-call time talking to him about the plans for Louisa’s and my visit, so when it was my turn, I dove right in.
“Hi, Oliver. What’
s new?”
“I need information. I’ve got some questions about getting in and out of the … place where you are.”
“For when you visit?”
“Um, sure.”
“Okay, I can do my best to explain it.”
“Is there any way in and out other than through the front entrance?”
“There’s a back door to the yard where we spend time outside, but I think that’s it. And all the visitors come in through the front.”
“How do they bring in things for you? Like deliveries?”
“I think they all come through the front entrance. Are you planning to send me something? You can just bring it when you visit. I’ll have Uncle Victor email you the rules.”
“That’s okay. I was just wondering.”
“Mom said she got a note from the headmaster about you taking money from kids?”
“No, that was a big misunderstanding.”
“You know you are very lucky to go to that school, Oliver.”
“No, I’m not. The kids are jerks, and they rat people out.”
“I know kids can be jerks,” Dad said, “but don’t let them ruin your education. Not everyone has what you have.”
“I know,” I said. Dad has always been hyped up about school and how it’s important for my future and all that, but now it was like it was the only thing he wanted to talk about.
“How are your grades? Do you have any major assignments coming up?”
My grades weren’t that awesome, so I ignored the first question. “Um, nothing too big … I think we have a science test next week.”
“You’re great in science!” Dad said. “You’ll have to let me know how it goes.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You may not know that I had to leave school,” Dad added.
“I know,” I told him. “After high school.” Dad didn’t get to go to college, so he’s kind of obsessed with it, and he asks a million questions every time he’s around a college kid.
“Yes, but before that,” Dad said. “I was out of school for a while when I was eleven, when we were moving a lot.”
Dad’s mom, my grandma Olivia, had had some problems, so the two of them had moved around, staying with aunts and uncles and stuff, before they settled down with Uncle Victor’s family.
“That’s … Isn’t it illegal for kids to be out of school?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “but someone has to come looking for you before it becomes an issue.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t really imagine being out of school and no one thinking it was a big deal. One time Louisa skipped health class to finish a math project, and when the attendance office called our house, Mom’s whole head turned red and almost popped right off.
“It was a complicated situation,” Dad said. “Sometimes I wonder…” He kind of trailed off. “It doesn’t matter. Things happen and you just keep going. But anyway, Spaghetti-O, do yourself a favor and stay out of trouble at school. Do your work and keep your grades up. That would be a big help to me.”
Yeah, right. That wasn’t a “big help.” That was the kind of “help” you assigned to someone you didn’t think could help at all. Like when I was little and my job at Dad’s restaurants was to “help” count the spoons. And then Louisa told me that counting spoons wasn’t a real job; it was just to keep me out of the adults’ way.
Tito the Bonecrusher wouldn’t stay out of the way.
“I gotta go,” I told Dad. “I’ll … Let me see if Louisa is here.”
“Okay,” Dad said quietly.
Louisa had refused to talk to Dad every time he’d called from jail.
I knocked on Louisa’s door. “Are you here?” I asked.
“No,” she said from the other side of the door.
“She says … she’s not here,” I told Dad. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Dad said quietly again.
We hung up.
* * *
After I got off the phone, I watched Tito’s old lucha libre videos on the internet for an hour. It was awesome. If you ever want to know more about something like lucha libre, or you need to keep your feelings pushed down, I recommend watching videos on the internet.
4
SMASHFEST
Conversations with Dad had never been so serious before. Usually we would talk about wrestling, or Dad would repeat funny or ridiculous things his coworkers had said, or we would make plans for our next visit. I reminded myself that it would be like that again, after we rescued Dad from FCI South Florida.
After Mom and Dad got divorced, but before Dad moved to Florida to help Walker Stewart open the new steakhouses, Dad’s apartment was just a couple of miles from Mom’s. Louisa and I would go back and forth between them. At Haselton Academy, the kids I know with divorced parents have these tight schedules, like they go to their dad’s at exactly 4:00 p.m. on Friday and return to their mom’s at exactly 4:00 p.m. on Sunday.
For Louisa and me, it had never been like that. Since Dad worked at two different restaurants and Mom ran her own housecleaning business, their work schedules were all over the place. Sometimes we would be with Dad for days at a time, sometimes for just a few hours. Basically one parent would babysit us while the other one had to work. “Mom and Dad can’t afford to hate each other,” I remember Louisa reassuring me once, back before she was either ignoring me or mad at me all the time.
If we were with Dad on nights he wasn’t working, we would watch wrestling. Sometimes it was UWE, and sometimes it was lucha libre, depending on the TV schedule. The lucha libre stuff we mostly watched online. By the time I was old enough to follow wrestling, Tito was already big in the UWE, but we would watch old matches from when he competed in Mexico. My dad’s favorites were the matches in Mexico City at Arena México. Dad had been a lucha libre fan since he was a teenager, when some of the older guys at his first restaurant job introduced him to it and would invite him over to watch old tapes of matches and luchador movies. “It was like my substitute for watching sports with a father growing up,” Dad told us once.
We were all big wrestling fans, but Louisa probably knew the most about it. She followed a bunch of UWE websites and could tell us what the rumors were about upcoming events, what was unscripted during matches, and why UWE would turn good wrestlers bad or bad wrestlers good. And she would get really annoyed if you used the wrong wrestling terms.
Even though Tito had started using American pro wrestling moves when he joined UWE, his wrestling style was still more like lucha libre, which meant wrestling against him was like getting your butt kicked by a super-strong acrobat. He flipped and leapt around the ring in ways that always surprised you. People say Tito quit wrestling because he couldn’t handle the moves anymore and he couldn’t risk losing his mask. But they’re wrong. He has never been unmasked. And he never will be.
* * *
A few years ago, when he still lived in Virginia, Dad said he was taking a Saturday night off to take Louisa and me on an adventure, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was. He said we could each bring a friend, but all of Louisa’s friends were busy, so I invited Brain plus Sharon, who was still our friend at the time. We were all together at Brain’s house while my mom was working. Brain spent the early part of the afternoon trying to figure out where we were going. “It’s probably within a thirty-minute drive of here,” she said, and she studied a map for the possibilities, cross-checking it with the local online listings of activities suitable for kids. Our list included Disney on Ice; a high school singing competition; something called Bible Mania at the Baptist church in the next town; and the usual kid-friendly activities like go-karts, roller-skating, and the movies. Brain puzzled over the list for a while, and then she turned to me.
* * *
“We’re going roller-skating,” she announced. Brain and I both looked at Sharon. She had worn her fanciest party dress, which was pale pink and covered in lace, in case the surprise was a royal wedding …
“W
hat?” Sharon said. “I can roller-skate in this dress.”
At 4:30, my dad picked us up in his van. Louisa was already with him. He drove us to Samburgers, a hamburger place run by this guy named Sam. We used to eat there all the time.
“Samburgers is our surprise?” I said, trying not to sound too disappointed.
Dad just grinned and ordered a big tray of burgers and fries. The five of us sat down, and Sharon put like twenty napkins all over her lacy dress. Dad pulled out an envelope.
“The surprise is somewhere else,” he said, “and it’s about an hour away, so we should eat first.”
Brain gave a little yelp when he said an hour away.
He handed the envelope to Louisa. She peeked inside. “Yahoooooo!” she exclaimed.
“What is it?” I demanded.
She pulled out some tickets and handed one to each of us. They said:
UNITED WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS:
SMASHFEST
Brain and I stood up and danced around. “Wrest-a-ling! Wrest-a-ling!” Brain loved to watch wrestling with us at Dad’s apartment, but none of us had ever been to an actual live match before. I noticed that the tickets were pretty expensive.
We wolfed down our burgers and fries and headed back to the van. During the whole ride to the arena where SmashFest was happening, we were basically bouncing in our seats. Louisa was going on and on about everything that was supposed to happen at SmashFest.
“There’s a rumor that Tito the Bonecrusher is coming to this one,” Louisa said.
“People say that every time,” Dad said, kind of chuckling at Louisa. “They are still saying that every time there’s a big match at Arena México, and he hasn’t wrestled there in years.”
“A lot of people are saying it this time,” Louisa argued. “Like, reliable sources. They say he’s going to return to make some kind of big announcement.”
Tito the Bonecrusher Page 3