“Why do we need more girls in this town?” an unidentified boy shouted from the back. “We’ve got too many as it is!”
If this kid had set off a bomb, it would’ve caused less of a stir. There wasn’t a closed mouth in the whole place. Girls were yelling at boys, boys were yelling at girls, farmers were yelling at meat-eaters, environmentalists were yelling at big-business polluters. It took Jill a full five minutes to calm everyone down.
“Okay, no more discussion! We’re just gonna vote on this thing! Form a single-file line at the box. Alice will give you a piece of paper. Write down your vote and put it into the box.”
The process was remarkably civilized, considering that everyone had been at each other’s throats just moments before. Everybody cast his or her vote, and then the polls closed. Jill and Alice voted last, and then they took the box to be counted. It didn’t take long to count 36 votes, so I knew we would get the results almost immediately.
Alice and Jill came back with a piece of paper. Alice held it in her hand as she stood at the table. The crowd was motionless as she unfolded the paper. Not one for dramatics, Alice came right out with it. “The budget passes, 20 to 16.”
The place erupted with simultaneous joy and pain. Nelson buried his head in his hands. Valerie’s feminists jumped up and down and hugged. The farmers pulled metal trowels out of their pockets and started waving them back and forth. The animal rights group barked like dogs.
Nelson looked up long enough to make eye contact with me. He shook his head and left.
The new laws went into effect immediately. My first order of business was to deal with Valerie and the feminists, because I knew they would make a big fuss over getting what they wanted before anybody else did. I thought about government jobs, and the one that came to mind as I stared out at my big list of things to do was to get myself a secretary. Of course, I would have to call her an “administrative assistant” to please the feminists. An assistant would take a lot of the burden off of me.
I looked over my list of citizens, and one name stood out: Lauren Luzinski. She had never held a steady job, so She was definitely available to work. She had never done anything to catch my attention in either a good way or a bad way, so perhaps this would be a chance for her to stand out for once. She could sit in on city council meetings and take notes.
I informed Valerie that I was going to hire Lauren, and She was pleased. Lauren had not been a member of Valerie’s feminist group, but she was a girl and that was enough.
Lauren was surprised when I asked her. “You want me to be your administrative assistant?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because … I think you’d do a good job.”
“Really?” she said, her eyes sparkling.
“Sure. You interested?”
“Well … yeah. I’d love to.”
“Then you’re hired.”
“Wow.” I felt like I had just told her she’d won the lottery.
“Come on, then. I’ll show you everything.”
“I believe a new day has dawned in Kidsboro. We are now not just—”
“Too fast.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I was dictating a press release to Lauren. She was writing down everything that came out of my mouth and would deliver it to Jill later.
“That’s really good,” she said, writing down the first sentence.
“What’s good?”
“That first sentence: ‘Anew day has dawned.’ That’s nice.”
We smiled at each other. “Thanks,” I said.
I waited for her to give me a signal that she was done. She nodded.
“We are now not just a government by the people—”
“This pen’s out of ink.”
“Oh. Here. Try mine.”
As I bent down to give her the pen, I noticed that she smelled really good. When I backed away, we looked at each other, and I noticed something I’d never noticed before. She had freckles on her nose. Possibly the most perfectly circular freckles I’d ever seen.
“Okay, we are now a government of people …” she started.
“No, no. We are now not just a government by the people.”
“Oh, I see. That’s different. And a lot better.”
“Thanks. But your way was good too.”
No one was wasting any time using the money they’d received from the government. I strolled around town just to see if anything had changed, and there was more activity than there had been in months. The farmers were busy in their garden.
“What are you planting?” I asked them.
“Oh, just the standards. Cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, carrots, turnips.”
The government was buying turnips from them?
They continued to hoe, looking very much like they knew what they were doing.
The Clean Up Kidsboro group was making a trash run. They had been at it for a couple of hours by the time I walked by, so they had pretty much cleared the entire town of any trash. But still they searched.
“The place looks really good,” I said to Mark.
“I know,” he replied. His eyes darted wildly as he continued to scan the ground.
“So, why are you still looking?”
He stopped suddenly and looked at me as if I had just told him I thought the capital of Florida was France. “Ryan, litter is thrown on the ground every two seconds in this country. This is not a one-time clean-up project. It is an ongoing quest. It is a lifestyle. Our land is too important to ignore for even one minute.”
I felt like standing at attention and covering my heart. “Then by all means, get back to it,” I said. I wanted to tell him that 27 people had littered while we were having that conversation, but I felt that would put too much pressure on him.
“Would you get that dog out of my house!” I heard someone yell from across town. It sounded like Valerie. I rushed over to her clubhouse. She was trying to drag a big German shepherd out of her house by the collar. “Get over here and get your dog!” she shouted. The dog’s owner, Melissa, the leader of the animal rights group, came over slowly, as if to torture Valerie for as long as possible.
“Why do we have all these mangy animals here?” Valerie pointed to several dogs and cats being held by their owners. “They should be chained up.”
“What?” Melissa said.
“They’re a nuisance. We should have a law saying that if they’re going to be here, they have to be chained up.”
“No way!”
Valerie turned to me. “Ryan, I think you should bring this up at the next city council meeting.”
“I guess I could.”
“No!” Melissa shouted. “You gave animals equal rights. People aren’t chained up. Why should animals have to be?”
“Um …”
“Oh, perfect. Nice decisive answer there, Ryan,” Valerie said. “Meanwhile, this place has turned into a pound.”
“Don’t say ‘pound’ in front of them,” Melissa said in a harsh whisper.
“If this dog gets into my house again, I’m grabbing one of those slingshots,” she said, pointing away from us.
I looked in the direction she was pointing, and saw that the slingshot boys were meeting in a group not too far from the dogs and cats. They were comparing their equipment, and every now and then, they would fling a nut away from town. I could tell the animal owners were getting nervous with these flying nuts, even though it looked like the slingshotters were being careful. Scott was with them, looking anxious to learn some slingshot skills.
A squirrel ran by, and I saw one boy aim at it but stop as soon as he saw me looking at him. Or maybe It was just my imagination. The animal rights group was keeping a close eye on the slingshotters.
The groups may not have been getting along with each other, but they were all happy about getting the chance to do something they believed in. I was proud I’d given them the opportunity, but now came the hard part: collecting taxes.
5
REALITY S
ETS IN
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE the budget debate, we had passed out an income tax form to all residents of Kidsboro. Everyone was supposed to keep good records of the money they had made over the year. People could try to lie, but in a town as small as Kidsboro, it was hard to hide how much money was spent where. We had records of most transactions.
When we added up everyone’s salary and how much the new budget was going to cost, we figured out that the tax rate for this year had to be 19 percent. I knew this was a little high, but we had a lot of new programs to pay for. People were not going to be very happy about having to give up 19 percent of everything they made, but It was something that had to be done, and they all knew it was time for sacrifice.
When we came up with the 19 percent figure in the city council meeting, Nelson had almost fainted. He would have to fork over a huge amount of money. “I’m so glad I’m paying for vegetables I’m not gonna eat and a bathroom I’m not gonna use,” he said as he stormed out.
We calculated what everyone would have to hand over, and then Alice and I went door-to-door to collect. Usually she went alone, since she had no trouble squeezing money out of people—sometimes literally—by herself. But I went along this time to offer an explanation.
The first door we knocked on was Roberto’s. Roberto was Jill’s assistant at the Chronicle. He usually had very little to say about anything. But he had yet to see how much he owed.
“Eleven starbills?” he asked.
“Yes. That’s what you owe in taxes for the year,” I told him.
“I don’t have that much money,” he said with a Hispanic accent.
“I’m sorry, that’s why we told everyone to save up. This is tax day.”
“I don’t understand the taxes.”
“The tax rate is 19 percent, which means you owe the government 11 starbills. This was all explained in the memo we sent out to everyone.”
“I cannot pay that much.”
“Then we may have to set you up on a payment plan. Give us what you have now.”
“I have nothing.”
“You don’t have anything?”
“No.”
“Well … then … you’ll have to give us your full salary every week until you pay us back.”
“My full salary?”
“Yeah. How much do you make?”
“About three starbills in two weeks.”
“Okay, then it’ll take about nine weeks for you to pay off your taxes.”
“Oh,” he said, the impact of this finally dawning on him, “almost the whole summer.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d always liked Roberto. He had been compliant with all our laws, he worked hard at the Chronicle, and he was a model citizen. I wanted to give him a break, but that would’ve been unfair. I wouldn’t be giving a break to anyone else.
“Thank you very much,” he said, disappearing into his clubhouse. His shoulders were sagging.
Alice and I looked at each other. We had to do this 33 more times.
After crushing the hopes and dreams of 34 people, I went back to my office to take a break. Jill walked in as soon as I closed the door behind me.
“What is this?” she asked before she was even all the way inside. She was holding up a piece of paper.
“What is what?”
“Were you sleepwalking when you wrote this press release?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s got all sorts of spelling errors and incomplete sentences. I can’t even tell what you’re trying to say sometimes.”
“Oh,” I said with a slight chuckle. “That’s my new secretary … er … administrative assistant.”
“Administrative assistant?”
“Yeah, this was her first dictation. She’s still learning.”
“Why do you need an assistant?”
“I’ve got a lot of paperwork. And it’s a government job.”
“Who is it?”
Right on cue, Lauren walked in with a handheld pencil sharpener. “I’m having … oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a visitor. Hi, Jill.”
“Lauren? You’re his new assistant?”
“Yes. It’s a great job, very challenging.”
“Really?”
“Ryan, I’m done sharpening pencils,” Lauren said. She handed over a shoebox full of sharp pencils.
“Thank you. Good job.”
We looked at each other as she moved away. She briefly touched my arm and said, “Thanks. You’re welcome.”
“No problem.”
I watched her leave the room. She gave me a little wave as she turned out. Jill had her hands on her hips. “Lauren’s your assistant?”
“She’ll be fine. She just needs some time.”
“I’m so glad my tax dollars are being used this well.”
Ten minutes after Jill left, Scott walked in. He was wearing his detective outfit—a Sherlock Holmes coat with matching hat, a magnifying glass sticking out of his pocket, and a bubble pipe that he claimed helped him think when he was on a case. I figured he was on one right now.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m on a case.”
“What case?”
“I talked to Jake this morning at Whit’s End. He told me that he wasn’t the one who spilled the information about you to the Barnacle.”
“Yeah. Right,” I said sarcastically.
“Pardon me for walking the earth, but don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, if Jake really did do it, wouldn’t he love to tell everyone? He would love it if everyone knew he’d exposed you.”
That was true.
“Plus, you let him into Kidsboro because he knew about your past. That’s how he got you to do everything for him—blackmail. So why would he play the only card he had? Seems like he would’ve tried to hold on to it to get something else out of you.”
Maybe the bubble pipe really did work; all of this made sense. “Who else could it be? No one else knew that stuff.”
“I don’t know, but it could be worth some investigation. I say we head over to the Barnacle.”
I was tired of thinking about taxes and the budget, so I decided to follow him. I couldn’t imagine that we would turn up anything.
The Barnacle office was a regular clubhouse, only bigger than any of the ones in Kidsboro. Max Darby was King of Bettertown, and he wanted his town to be bigger and better than Kidsboro in every possible way.
For whatever reason, there were very few people in town. On most days, tourism was high, and the place was buzzing with activity. Maybe they’re all someplace shedding their skins, I thought to myself with a mischievous grin.
Scott knocked on the door of the Barnacle, but no one answered. Neither of us heard any rustling inside, so Scott took a quick glance around to see if anyone was looking, and then he opened the door.
I followed him but immediately protested, “This is breaking and entering.”
“I’m just visiting the newspaper office.”
“Max will hang me if we get caught breaking a law on his turf!”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be in and out in 10 seconds.” He scanned the room. It was littered with papers—all over the desk, on the floor, tacked to the walls. A filing cabinet in the corner was half open. I had no idea what we were looking for, but Scott seemed to think the filing cabinet was a good place to start.
He opened one drawer and flipped through the labeled tabs on top. “Nothing,” he said, moving on to the next drawer.
I scanned the table. There were handwritten notes on yellow sticky paper everywhere. The notes said things like “Kidsboro police corruption,” “Kidsboro lawyers corrupt,” and “Judge Amy paid off?” The Barnacle specialized in scandal.
“Bingo,” Scott said in true TV-detective fashion. He pulled out a file labeled “Cummings” and leafed through it. He gave me a stack of papers from inside and took the rest himself. I didn’t hesitate to look at it, even though this was surely illegal.
; “Look at this,” Scott said. “Notes from the interview.”
“Let me see that.”
He turned so we could look at it together. It was hard to read the chicken scratch. It looked as if someone had written quickly to keep up with someone talking. It was a list of random facts about me. I read some of the things that appeared in the article—where I lived, my real name, the names of my pets …Wait a minute.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “There’s information here that wasn’t in the article.”
“They probably decided not to print everything.”
“The name of my cat when I was little is in here.”
“Not very print-worthy.”
“This is impossible. The cat was dead before I ever knew Jake. He couldn’t have known about it.”
“Did you ever talk about your cat?”
“I was three. I barely remember it. I doubt I ever mentioned it, and if I did, I can’t imagine Jake remembering it.”
I scanned more of the page. “There’s more stuff in here that he couldn’t have known.”
“So you don’t think it was Jake?” Scott asked.
“Not unless he talked to my dad.”
“Does he know where your dad is?”
I shook my head. “Nobody does.”
“Then who?”
I stormed out of the Barnacle, not caring who saw me. We had to find the writer of that article. I just might have punched the wrong guy.
The reporter’s name wasn’t on the article. The Barnacle kept its authors secret because if the facts in the article were proven incorrect, which they almost always were, then the person who was offended by the article didn’t know who to be mad at. But I did know the editor: a boy named Leo, who’d been a citizen of Bettertown since it began the previous fall. He had wanted to be a citizen of Kidsboro, but all he’d wanted to do was be the editor of a newspaper. There were no openings at the Kidsboro Chronicle since Jill was already the editor and she had a reporter, Roberto. So when Bettertown opened up, Leo pounced on the opportunity, even though working for the Barnacle meant he would have to publish garbage. I don’t think this was what he really wanted, but in Bettertown, everybody did what Max told them to do, or they were thrown out. Leo had started the Barnacle reluctantly, but I got the feeling that he was starting to enjoy publishing scandals because the articles were getting more and more mean.
The Fight for Kidsboro Page 29