Small Steps - Louis Sachar [9]
“Listen to what Jerome tells you,” said Kaira’s mother. She gave her husband a kiss on his puffy cheek. “He’s made you what you are.”
5
X-Ray picked Armpit up at four o’clock in the morning, and they drove to the Lonestar Arena. “Anything in the first row is pure gold,” he said. “Pure gold. The second row too. Anything in the first two rows.”
Armpit brought his economics book along. He knew he’d probably miss speech, but there was a test in econ and he couldn’t afford to miss that.
When they pulled into the parking lot, they saw that a line had already formed at the ticket window. Tickets wouldn’t go on sale until eight o’clock.
“Man, I told you we should have spent the night here,” X-Ray said.
“You never said that.”
“Well, I thought it.”
They got in line. There were already twenty-nine people ahead of them in line. X-Ray counted it twice.
Armpit lay on his back in the gravel parking lot with his eyes closed. His economics book was his pillow. He planned to study when there was enough light. A piece of gravel dug into his back, but the more he tried to smooth it out the worse it got, so he did his best to ignore it.
Somebody in line had brought a boom box, and The Fountain of Youth, Kaira DeLeon’s CD, was playing. Armpit was lying there, his eyes closed, only half listening, when he suddenly heard her sing:
These shoes, these jewels, this dress,
A perfect picture of success.
Oh, you would never guess, Armpit,
A damsel in distress.
At least, that was what it sounded like.
Save me, Armpit!
A damsel in distress.
He sat up. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” asked X-Ray.
“Never mind.”
If he told him, X-Ray would never let him live it down. Why would she sing “Armpit?” It was impossible. There was no possible way. He must have fallen asleep for a second and dreamed it.
In line behind them were five men who seemed especially dirty and ragged. Armpit might have guessed they were street people, except for the fact that they were waiting in line to buy sixty-dollar tickets. From the way they smelled, he thought maybe they worked for the sanitation department and had come here after work.
“I’m thinking third row,” X-Ray said. “Third or fourth. As long as we’re somewhere in the first five rows we’re golden.”
Armpit looked at the people in line ahead of him. Nearly all were white, even though Kaira DeLeon was African American. Several wore shirts and ties.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If everybody buys six tickets—”
“Not everyone’s going to buy six tickets,” X-Ray interrupted. “Besides, you really don’t want to be too close. It’s better to be a few rows back. The best seats are between row three and row seven. Those are the ones that will bring in the big money.”
Shortly after sunrise, Armpit opened his book and tried to understand the difference between fixed costs and variable costs. Graphs illustrated how these changed as more goods were produced. The line representing fixed costs was flat, and the one representing variable costs angled upward.
It might as well have been written in Chinese.
“Look at all the people behind us!” X-Ray pointed out. “They’d pay a hundred dollars just to have our place in line.”
“I’ll take it,” said Armpit.
X-Ray laughed. “We’re going to make a lot more than that, my friend. A lot more.”
After a while a guy wearing a Lonestar Arena T-shirt came out and tried to adjust the line so that instead of sticking straight out from the ticket window, it went parallel to the building. This caused a lot of grumbling from the grubby guys sitting behind Armpit.
“What difference does it make?”
“I was just gettin’ comfortable.”
“Just because you got the T-shirt doesn’t make you God!”
But they got up and moved along with everyone else.
The mystery of who they were was solved shortly after seven-thirty, when the guys who were paying them showed up. One was a fast-talking, skinny white guy. With him was a big dude wearing a cowboy hat and boots.
“Now listen up, ’cause I’m not going to repeat myself,” said the skinny guy. He wore a pearl