The Fourth Stall

by Chris Rylander

  “Yeah?” he asked as he stepped into the fourth stall from the high window.

  “Fred, do you think you could meet me here after school today?” I asked.

  “Sure, I guess. My mom said she’d be home late today anyways.”

  “Thanks. Just meet me here at three twenty-five. The door will be open.”

  “Okay,” he said, standing up. “I guess I’ll see you then.” He opened the stall’s door.

  “And Fred, one last thing,” I said, prompting him to stop before leaving the stall. “Don’t be late.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  The bell rang a short time later. I had just a few hours left until my meeting with Staples. Maybe only had a few hours left to live, depending on how it would all go down.

  After class I packed my stuff into my backpack and trudged across the school to my office. My stomach ached like it knew something I didn’t, which was a strange feeling for me. I wasn’t used to being so nervous and jittery all the time. Just a few weeks ago I had been in total control of this school. Or I thought I had been. Now I had been reduced to nothing but some friendless, penniless kid with a key to an abandoned bathroom in the boonies of the school’s East Wing.

  The halls were crowded that day, but the kids didn’t shout greetings like they normally did. I had been pretty popular around here simply because of what I could do for people. But lately kids seemed to care less. I think they knew my business was all but finished. Too many kids had witnessed my surrender plea to Justin Friday night at the football game, and my office had hardly been open at all in the past two weeks.

  I got to the East Wing entrance and waited there for the janitor. He locked the door every day at 3:20. Only two of the school’s eight entrances remained unlocked after 3:30. And those only stayed open until four o’clock.

  “Hey, Mac, how are you?” he said as he reached for his keys.

  “I’m okay. Say, a friend is coming to visit me, so do you think you could leave this one open until 4:00 today?” I asked.

  “Sure, no problem,” he said, and walked back down the hallway. He whistled some catchy tune that I recognized from somewhere.

  Just like that. No questions asked. You don’t ask questions that don’t need to be answered. That’s rule number one when dealing with a business like mine. And the janitor seemed to understand that. He was by far the coolest adult I had ever met. Kids in most schools make fun of their janitors because it’s usually some creepy guy with gross hair, a funny smell, and a collection of bent spoons in his work closet. But our janitor is downright awesome.

  I went inside the bathroom and sat in my office. Fred entered a few moments later. I heard him sit in one of the chairs across from the sink. It was three minutes until three thirty. I wasn’t sure if Staples would show. And if he did, could I go through with it?

  The first question was answered just a minute later, when the door to the bathroom swung open. I heard heavy footsteps scuff across the dirty tile floor. Then I heard Fred’s voice.

  “Staples? What are you doing here?”

  Fred didn’t sound all that shocked to see Staples, though. You’d have thought he would sound terrified. But he didn’t. There was a silence and then Fred spoke again.

  “Uh, Mac, Staples is here! Why is Staples here?”

  I got up and stepped out of my office. Fred was still seated in his plastic chair and Staples stood by the sink a few feet away. They were both looking at me.

  “Oh, Fred, I think you know why Staples is here,” I said.

  Fred shook his head, “I don’t. I don’t know what—”

  But Staples cut him off. “So I heard you finally want to accept my offer? Having problems with your business, are you?”

  I looked at Staples with a blank face. I didn’t really feel all that afraid of him anymore. Because this time, for once, I actually did have the drop on him. This time I had the element of surprise.

  “I guess you could say that,” I said, trying to sound calm, bored. “But I most definitely do not want to accept your offer.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Then why am I here? I don’t like being jerked around, Christian.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t like being jerked around either, Barry.”

  He shook his head and took a step back. He looked so shocked that I knew his real name that I thought he might have a heart attack right there in my office.

  “How? How do you know my name?” he demanded.

  “All in due time,” I said. “First, I have an offer to make you. Well, it’s more of a demand than an offer. One: I want you out of my school forever. I don’t want to hear about any of my classmates placing a bet with one of your bookies again. Two: I don’t ever want to see you or any of your high school cronies near my friends ever again.”

  Staples laughed. He had gone from scowling and confused to laughing in just a second’s time.

  “So . . . so . . . .” He tried to talk but was too busy laughing.

  I waited while he calmed down.

  Eventually he composed himself enough to say, “So what exactly are you going to do if I refuse your offer?” When he said the word “offer,” he made bunny ears with two fingers from each of his hands and then curled his fingertips downward.

  “Well, right now, as we speak, a few friends of mine are currently raiding the shed in your backyard. They’re going to kidnap your dog, search the place, and take any money or information that they find. They’re going to call me in the next few minutes to confirm all of this, and if I don’t answer, they’ll know something is wrong, and they’ll take your dog out to a field and leave him there, call the cops and give them all the stuff they found, and keep all of your cash. Which, to answer your question, is also basically what will happen if you refuse our offer.” I made the same bunny-ears-curl-downward gesture, then pulled my phone from my pocket so Staples could see it.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, but he was no longer smiling.

  “No? Your address is 1808 Academy Road South. Your dog is a pit bull with a pink camouflage collar. Your office is in a shed in your backyard, and you have a pretty remarkable bobblehead doll collection. My friends will use a bolt cutter to break into your shack. They’ll use sleeping pills to disarm your dog. Oh, and they better find my Emergency and Game Funds, too, because I want those back.”

  Staples shook his head. He looked a little shocked and maybe a little scared, but also very, very angry. He rubbed his left eye and then balled his hand into a fist. His knuckles turned white as snow.

  “But I don’t have your stupid little Funds. How could I have stolen them? I don’t even know where they are,” he snarled.

  “I know, but your snitch does.” I turned to Fred. His eyes went wide.

  I continued. “Fred knew where I hid my Funds and he told you where they were. Then breaking into my room Thursday afternoon probably wasn’t all that hard, was it, Barry? Considering that you found my window open? I still can’t believe that Fred has been working for you all this time.” I looked down at him in the chair.

  Fred looked away quickly.

  “I know it was you, Fred. You broke my heart.”

  He looked at his feet. I could tell he was ashamed of himself. He shook his head and whined, “He made me do it, Mac!”

  “Whatever, Fred. It doesn’t matter now.” I looked back at Staples. “You see, I found a Nintendo DS inside your desk, Staples, when I broke into your shed on Saturday. It struck me as odd that you would be into the DS, being that most of its games are for little kids. So I powered it up and found something pretty shocking: messages from Fred in the in-box. All the time I’d thought Fred had been playing games on his DS, he was really taking notes with the stylus and sending them to you.

  “I also found a few records in the file cabinets detailing who is still on your payroll, and sure enough Fred is listed. And Vince isn’t. Up to that point I really had thought that Vince was the snitch and had stolen the Funds. I really had believed that Fred was inn
ocent and had been telling the truth about everything and that I was ruined. It had all added up. It had all made such perfect sense. And that’s because that’s what you had wanted me to think all along, isn’t it, Staples? You’re clever, I have to admit that. You staged everything to make me think Vince stole the Funds and was the snitch.”

  Staples just stared at me and didn’t say anything.

  Sure, I was happy when I found out I was wrong, that my best friend hadn’t stabbed me in the back. But the news had also hit me like a three-ton semitruck going one hundred miles per hour. Because it meant I had questioned my best friend’s loyalty in the worst way imaginable. And thinking back to everything I’d said to him, no wonder he was so angry he could barely even talk or deny my accusations. I’d acted like a true jerk not to trust him or even give him the chance to explain.

  Which made it extra hard to go visit him on Sunday morning to try and apologize. When I got to his trailer and his mom answered the door, the first things I saw on her face were relief and then a smile.

  “Christian, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I don’t know what happened between you guys on Thursday, and it’s none of my business, but he’s barely even left his room since then. He hasn’t changed, showered, anything. I can barely even get him to eat.”

  I hadn’t thought I could feel much worse up to that point but I had been wrong. I wanted to compost myself and let some crazy lady use me as fertilizer for her tomato plants. I wanted to cover myself in honey and then get lowered slowly into a huge vat of fire ants. I wanted to strip the skin off my arms with a cheese grater and then take a lemon juice bath. I wanted to poke a sleeping lion in the ribs with a short stick. I wanted . . . Okay, you probably get the idea.

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” I said, walking past Vince’s mom.

  I went to his room and saw that the sign I’d given him for his birthday was no longer hanging on his door. Really, would there ever be an end to just how low I could feel?

  I knocked. Nothing.

  I knocked again. Again, nothing.

  I slowly opened the door and poked my head inside. What I saw, I will never forget, though I wish I could. Vince was lying on his bed wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing on Thursday when we had our fight. His face was the color of cigarette smoke or one of George Romero’s zombies. His eyes were vacant and he lay motionless, and for just a second I thought I was looking at an actual zombie. Which was fine, because you can add getting my brains eaten to the list of things I deserved right then.

  But then he saw me and spoke.

  “What are you doing here?” he said so quietly it was nearly a whisper. “Get out. Don’t ever come back.”

  “I know. I am the worst friend you could have. I should have at least talked to you before jumping to conclusions. All I want is fifteen minutes to try and make things better. After that I’ll leave, I’ll give you my three Ryne Sandberg rookie cards, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll even finally try eating waffles with hand lotion for syrup like your grandma sometimes tries to feed us.”

  He glanced at me and looked away. But he did sit up and I thought that a little color might have returned to his face. He nodded at me to continue. Like a true friend would.

  “First, Vince, I’m sorry I believed that you could have done that to me. It was ridiculous of me to think that, and you have a right to be mad. But just at least try to imagine how it looked from my standpoint. Please. Before this you’d never lied to me before. And then within days of each other I find out that you lied to me about your grandma’s birthday, you’ve been stealing money from our business, and you accepted a payment from Staples. Then my Funds go missing on the one day you happen to miss school for the first time in years?”

  “Our Funds.”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘my Funds,’ but they were our Funds,” Vince said, still not looking at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They were.”

  “You’re right. I can see how that probably looked bad,” Vince said. “But still . . .”

  “I know, Vince. I should have trusted you above all else. That’s why our business succeeded in the first place. I remembered that when I was thinking about how it was your idea for me to first hire Tyrell back during the Graffiti Ninja debacle. I remembered that it was all you who got this business started in the first place. It was your idea from the start because you recognized what we could do together even as kindergartners. And I should have remembered those things when it mattered most, but I didn’t. And I can’t really forgive myself for that.

  “This whole thing had me feeling paranoid. I just didn’t trust anybody anymore, not even myself. And I guess sometimes I lost sight of the fact that this business has always been about you and me, not the money at all. It has never mattered how much money we made, not even for a Cubs World Series game. But I’m not going to make those mistakes again. You’re probably the funniest, most trustworthy kid I’ve ever met. I can’t believe I ignored that fact even for a day, or an hour, or a second.”

  Vince sighed. “I’m sorry, too. This whole thing wasn’t all your fault. I mean, I stole money from you. That’s about as honest as telling a chimp that having thumbs on your feet makes up for having to wear a diaper.”

  I let out a laugh in spite of the mood. “Your grandma?”

  “No,” Vince said, shaking his head slowly. “My mom.”

  “Oh,” I said, and stopped smiling. I remembered then that he had said she’d been acting crazy since losing her job. I guess I kind of knew how she felt because I’d kind of lost my job recently, too.

  “So what I’m saying is I forgive you if you forgive me for stealing money and lying to you,” Vince said.

  “Well, before you go getting all sappy on me, I need to know one thing,” I said. “What was the deal with taking money from Staples?”

  Vince actually chuckled. “That’s the thing, Mac. I had no idea that Barry Larsen was Staples. It still just blows me away. I grew up with that kid. He used to live just seven trailers down from me!”

  “I know, it shocked me when I found out, too,” I said. “I remember playing football with him once or twice.”

  “Deep down I think I kind of knew something was up when he stopped by that morning because I hadn’t talked to Barry in a while, but I was so desperate for money, I think I just switched off my common sense there for a second.”

  “But why did he give it to you? Why did you miss school that day?”

  “Barry’s been trying to get me to sell my bike to him for years,” Vince said. “This time he offered me three hundred and fifty bucks for it and I just couldn’t resist. I mean, that pays our electric bill for like three months. He paid me half and then said that he’d be by later that day sometime before three to pick it up and pay the other half. So I faked sick and stayed home. I know that whole scenario is so suspicious and I should have known better, but being in this kind of mess does things to you. I especially should have known better when he never came by to get it. I mean, what kid just forgets to collect the merchandise at that price? I can’t believe I was that stupid.”

  Vince must have been really strapped for cash to be willing to sell his bike. It was his dad’s bike when he was a kid, a true vintage. For him to sell it for under a grand, or even sell it at all for any price, meant that things really were pretty bad for his family. It was basically the last part of his dad that Vince had left.

  “Okay, deal. I forgive you if you forgive me,” I said.

  “Cue the music,” Vince said as he started wiping at his eyes dramatically.

  I laughed. “Whatever.”

  “I still can’t believe you questioned my Cubs fandom. Especially after I’m about to finally beat you,” Vince said.

  “Bring it on,” I said.

  “What Hall-of-Fame Cub had the nickname Three Finger?”

  That was a tough one. I tried to clear my head, which was difficult considering I still had to deal with the Stapl
es issue. Though, really, now that I had Vince back on my side, I felt like we could take down anybody. I felt like if we were playing on the Cubs together as pitcher and catcher right then, we’d break a hundred-year-plus curse that even guys like Greg Maddux and Mark Grace and Aramis Ramirez and Carlos Zambrano and Ernie Banks hadn’t been able to break.

  “Mordecai Brown,” I finally said.

  Vince shook his head in defeat. “Well, then.”

  I grinned at him. “All right, Vince. We still have to deal with Staples somehow. A lot has happened since I last talked to you.”

  I proceeded to fill him in on the weekend’s events. We called over Joe and the bullies and filled them in as well. And then it was time to plan. We stayed up well past dark Sunday formulating the master plan for Monday.

  So that’s everything that had happened since Saturday, and everything that had led me up to this point. What happened next would all depend upon how Staples reacted to my offer. He was either going to accept and we’d all go home, or he would decline and the cops would be called in. Then again, there was always option three: He’d ignore my offer and simply beat me to a bloody pulp.

  Chapter 25

  Staples stood next to the sink near the fourth stall from the high window and glared at me. I took the silence as a chance to ask something that had been bothering me ever since I’d found out that Fred was the snitch.

  “I guess there’s still one thing I don’t get, though, and that’s why. Why would you send in Fred to reveal yourself when you could have just kept operating right under my nose?” I asked.

  “You can’t figure it out for yourself?” Staples sneered. “I thought you were a genius or something. Well, I’ll spell it out, then. Rumor had it that you ran a pretty tight business, that you solved everybody’s problems. And, well, I knew that eventually all the little wusses around here would go and whine and cry to you about how they had lost all their money, and ‘Staples is threatening me,’ and blah, blah, blah, and you’d stick your big nose into my business. So I struck first. I knew that if I could take out your lame little business that I’d be home free to do whatever I wanted in this school.