The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [16]
“Yeah. My grandma always says the Pope is Gouda, but I think that’s a cheese and not a religion,” Vince said while grinning. “Did you get Fred home okay?”
“Yeah, the little kid actually saved me.”
“You were saved by a third grader,” Joe said.
Vince laughed.
“Whatever,” I said. “What matters is that this is bigger than just Fred now. We’re in for a fight. A dirty one.”
Joe and Vince nodded.
This was nowhere close to being worth twenty bucks. But I had a reputation to uphold. And Fred needed my help. He had saved me back there. Not many third graders would have had the courage to do that.
Tomorrow we had to start thinking about ourselves. We would get revenge for what they had done to Joe and for the attack this morning. We obviously had more to worry about than just protecting Fred now. Or even just protecting ourselves. The whole school was at risk. Staples was dangerous, and he wasn’t going to just shut down his operation on his own.
Besides, what else did I expect? I couldn’t just keep protecting Fred forever. Eventually I’d run out of money. Eventually more kids would come to me for help with Staples. We couldn’t live like this. The only way to end this was to get Staples out of my school for good. We definitely needed to do more than simply protect Fred; we needed to take down Staples.
Chapter 7
I guess that this is as good a time as any to take a moment and tell you about how our business got started. How Vince and I built it up out of nothing.
It all started when my family lived in this trailer park called Bella Vista. I was in kindergarten and we had just moved to town. Vince lived in the trailer next to mine. He was really nice to me right from the start, which was cool because nobody likes being the new kid.
The day we moved in, my parents were moving boxes inside and unpacking and stuff like that. I sat out in the grass in front of my trailer playing with some Transformers.
“Hey,” I heard someone say.
I looked up and saw a kid about my age standing over me. He had dark hair and dark eyes and he was smiling.
“Hi,” I said.
“Is that Soundwave?” he asked, nodding at my Transformer.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Cool. He’s my favorite. Hey, do you like nachos?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah, why?” I asked.
I was pretty sure that he was going to ask me to come over and have some with him because that’s usually what followed a question like that, but of course at that time I didn’t know what Vince was like.
“Cool. Me, too. Hey, do you want to go play football?” he asked.
“Uh, okay, sure,” I said.
After I got my parents’ permission, we set out walking toward the huge playground across the street. I saw some kids of all ages in a clearing running around and throwing a mini football. I’d never played with older kids before, so I was already really nervous. At that time I didn’t realize that that’s just how trailer parks are. They’re kind of like their own little club. There were only so many kids living in Bella Vista trailer park, so they all usually kind of hung out and played together regardless of how old they were.
“My name’s Vince,” he said as we walked toward the clearing.
“Cool. I’m Christian.”
Right before we got there he said, “Have you ever seen a rattlesnake in real life before?”
“No, have you?” I asked, hoping that he had and that he’d tell me all about it.
“Nope,” he said, and then he didn’t say anything else.
After a while longer he said, “My grandma says that pudding is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning.”
I started laughing and so did he. I knew it already—I was going to love hanging out with this kid. He’d made me laugh even though I was so nervous I felt like crying.
When we got to the playground, Vince coughed loudly and said, “This is Christian. He’s a good friend of mine and he wants to play, too.”
“Okay,” said an older kid holding the football. “I’m Barry and this here is Eric.” He pointed to another older kid. “We kind of run the football games here. You’re totally welcome to play if you want.”
“Thanks,” I managed to say. I was still nervous, but these kids seemed pretty