The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [6]
Fred nodded and sniffled.
“It’s okay, Fred. We’ll protect you.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked at Vince again. We both knew this might be bigger than a simple protection job. Had business been slow lately because Staples was cheating my customers out of the money they’d normally be spending on my services? Whatever the reason, I knew I had to focus on trying to protect Fred for now. First things first.
But would I actually be able to protect a defenseless little kid from a monster like Staples?
Chapter 3
You really think it’s true?” Vince asked after Fred left. He tossed a baseball in the air and caught it. Vince was always playing around with a baseball. Some of the best ideas we ever came up with happened while we were just tossing the ball back and forth.
I nodded. “Didn’t you see this kid? He was terrified.”
Vince pondered the situation for a bit longer. “This is a real dilemma. It’s like that one time that I wanted barbecue chicken but I couldn’t have it because I decided to be a vegetarian for two weeks to see what it was like to be a giraffe.”
Joe and I laughed. Vince has this way of making me laugh at the most serious times. It’s part of why I love him so much. And the things he says usually don’t make much sense because he reads so many books and knows about so much obscure stuff. Nobody usually knows what the heck he’s even talking about.
After Fred explained his problem to me, I had Joe post a sign on the bathroom door that said the office was closed for the day. Well, the sign didn’t actually say that exactly. It really said, “Caution: Wet Floor,” but all the kids know that is code for “closed for the afternoon.” If we put up the sign that says “Closed for Plumbing Repairs,” then the students know that the office is closed until further notice, which might be several days. I hated closing early. It meant disappointed students and lost money—which was not good for our Game Fund. Right now, though, we needed to think. We sat on folding chairs in the bathroom, eating the lunches that my mom had packed for us. My mom made all three of us lunch almost every day. She always liked to make food for my friends. She was cool like that.
We were supposed to be strategizing, but mostly we chewed and kept saying how much trouble we were in.
Now, you have to understand, I’m not usually afraid of much. I own this school. But if all the rumors about Staples were true, then we were dealing with one dangerous guy. And the last thing I needed was a kid that dangerous to have it in for me before I even had a plan for how to handle him. I needed to think of a way to protect Fred without revealing who was doing it.
“So?” Vince asked. He had been watching me think.
“Let me worry about it. You just make sure that Brady sticks to Fred like gum to the bottom of a desk.”
Brady was this third grader who did odd jobs for me sometimes. He happened to be in the same class as Fred, so we decided we were going to pay him a dollar a day to keep an eye on Fred during class and especially in the halls between recesses and lunch.
There are teachers who monitor the halls, but I’ve found over the years that most teachers are pretty clueless when it comes to how things work among kids. They are never around when the real stuff goes down.
“What about at recess? Who’s going to protect Fred then?” Vince asked.
“We’ll have to hire more help, right, Mac?” Joe said.
Vince gave him a look. He didn’t like the idea of hiring more help because it would be expensive. The more money we spent on this stuff, the less money we’d be able to put into the Game Fund. Vince was always worried about our profit margin.
“He’s right, Vince,” I said. “We need to hire an older kid to watch over Fred during lunch and recess. We’ve got to keep the office open, and that’s when he’ll be most vulnerable. Brady isn’t big enough to do it on his own.”
“I know we need help, Mac,” Vince said as he tossed me the baseball, “but we’d have to get a seventh grader at least. Do you