Chapter #74Noises Off by: Seuzz   Whether you do the next spell with Caleb or not, you'll need all the supplies on hand, so on your way to work you swing by the cemetery and pick up a sack of dirt.
Meanwhile, other plans are also ripening. During your smoke break you slip the three new brain bands to Trantham and catch up on a text from Kevin Hall: Talkd w/Wade, he's intrested. Talk 2 me after school tomorrow? Heres Wades pic, remember him? The attached photo does jog a few memories. He's a small kid, but wiry, with dark bangs that sweep rakishly over narrow eyes. There's a feral, rat-like quality to his intense gaze, and you could easily imagine him growing up into another Dwayne Macauly.
* * * * *
You meet Andrea in the library stacks after first period, and after exchanging a baggie for an envelope full of fifties and twenties you ask if she's seen Joe Thomason's ugly face around. She shakes her head.
Nor does a circuit of the school at lunch locate him either. You do spot Horner and Spencer, though, which surprises you, since you'd heard that they had stopped coming to school at all. And yet there they are in the hallway of C wing, sneering and leering and chortling at some joke only they are in on. Spencer in particular looks pleased, and there are few things uglier than Jeff Spencer when he's looking pleased about something. His dull, Neanderthal eyes get a gleam, and his dome-like forehead gets a filmy sheen of sweat; and if you're close up to him you might even glimpse a little bit of anticipatory spittle at the corner of his mouth.
You saw that little bit of spittle up close your sophomore year when Spencer and some of his friends caught you—Will Prescott, not Gary Chen—in a school restroom. You were just trying to get to the sink when Spencer shoved you into a wall and held you there. He'd sniggered and breathed heavily into your face—his breath stank like a gym shoe—and you saw that little gob of spittle just before he hocked it and a whole lot more into your face. All of his friends had laughed at that, and one of them whapped you on the side of the head, but Spencer let you go and just looked very pleased with himself.
You tried consoling yourself later with the sniveling thought that it must be terrible to be so stupid that spitting in someone's face can make you happy.
Right now, though, you just turn your head and push past Spencer without saying anything.
* * * * *
But after glimpsing Horner and Spencer, you're not surprised when you see their pal Joshua Call after school. You're waiting behind the portables, gazing past the fields that belong to the school and into the fields beyond that don't, when hear footsteps and turn. It's Call, in his usual wardrobe: heavy work shirt, dirty jeans, scuffed boots. Not so different from your wardrobe today. Only he hasn't got a ski cap atop his head, just greasy black hair in a ragged bowl cut. "Fuck are you doing here," you ask. "Thought you stopped coming to classes."
"Didn't have nothin' better to do." At the sound of a high laugh he glances back toward the school. "The fuck is that?"
"Hennepin and Semple, those guys." They're audible from the other side of the portables, and they're happy since you'd just sold them two eighths a few minutes ago.
"We should go fuck 'em up," Calls says, and you can tell by his expression that he's serious.
"Nah, they're okay."
"So why aren't you hanging out with them? You're queer like them."
"So? You like hangin' out with queers too. You'd hang out with Jelena," you jeer back.
"That cunt," he mutters, and glowers at you as though you've something to do with it, whatever "it" is. Then he stalks off again. You let him go.
It's coming up on four, and you're still in your spot, when Kevin Hall rounds the corner. "Hey, what are you doing here," he says in a loud voice. "Thought you'd be back there with Hennepin and them."
"Felt like thinkin'," you say, and contemplate the burning end of the cigarette. "How was practice?"
"Brutal." He drops to the ground with a groan, and drops his voice too. "So I talked to Ethan Wade yesterday."
"So you said. Details, man."
"Well, he's never done this kind of thing before. 'Cept hustling candy bars his sophomore year, part of a 'band candy' scam."
"Fuckin' amateur. Lemme guess, he got busted."
"Yeah, but he was running it in the open where people could check on his story."
"Fucking noob. He's not gonna fuckin' run this one in the open. Is this kid dumb or is he even more retarded than he sounds?"
"I don't know," Kevin sighs. "You're not on the hook if he fucks up."
"Like fuck I'm not. But what experience has he got besides a dumbass band candy scam?"
"Well, he says he's bought some on the street before."
"He says? Fuck 'im. You believe him?"
"He says he got it at the Warehouse, he and his friends pitched in a couple of times to buy an ounce. He said it cost 'em three-sixty, which I think means he's telling the truth."
"No, it fucking means he talked to someone who knows what he's talking about. So according to him, he and how many friends bought one ounce how many times?"
"Him and two or three guys, and they bought maybe three times or four. He said they didn't smoke it all themselves, and he even sold two of the joints to a guy he knows."
You sigh. "Does that fucker have a name?"
"Yeah." He checks his phone. "Anthony McFarland. I talked to him. He said he bought two joints off Wade and Dason Mitchell, and if they ever had more—"
"Wait, who? Dason Mitchell? The fuck kind of name is 'Dason'? That French for 'gaywad'?"
"I don't know. But McFarland said he'd definitely buy more from someone if he knew where to get it."
"Fucking great. So we can sell an ounce a month down in the junior class. Open wide, I'm about to jizz."
"I think he can sell more than that. He talked like he was really excited about that sale he made, 'cos he made a forty dollar profit on it."
That catches your ear. "Forty? You mean twenty profit each on two eighths that he bought for thirty-six an ounce?"
"Uh. Yeah?"
Click click click. Ka-ching! "He sold those two eighths to this McFarland dick for sixty-five each?"
"If that's what, uh, forty bucks' profit works out to."
"Christ, and we've been giving them away for fifty!"
"It might just be this McFarland kid. He's kind of dumb looking, and I think he's got money."
"Doesn't matter. Rising demand means rising prices." Suddenly you feel feverish. "Okay, tomorrow I'm gonna give you six eighths to pass on to this Wade fuck, no charge. We can gamble this far on him. Tell him he's not to smoke the shit himself or give any to his friends. But he is going to give them away, to other people, even this McFarland dope. He's to pass the shit around to whoever he thinks might be interested, he's trying to get a list of prospects. He's gonna tell people he got this stuff free, and he's sharing 'cos he loves to share, and he's to ask these dipshits if they want more in the future, but that if they want more they'll have to pay 'cos he's pretty sure he'd have to pay. He's to find out what they'd be willing to pay. In a week, he's to talk to you about what he's learned, names and prices, tentative demand level. If this works and he doesn't shit all over our plans with his fucking stupidity, in two weeks we'll have a supply for him. Here."
You hand Hall the paper you'd prepped for this meeting. "First month, we'll sell him twelve eighths at fifty-five per. Second month we'll sell him eighteen at fifty-one per. Third month we'll sell him twenty-four at forty-eight per. After that the cap comes off, but the more ounces he buys, the cheaper his per-unit cost is until it drops to thirty-nine per. That's our floor. So, the more he sells, the more gross he realizes, and the cheaper his per unit cost is so his profit grows in two directions. Bang, gives him an incentive to grow the market. But we're capping him at the start because we don't want him going crazy. Last thing we need are posters going up on the junior lockers. This is all very quiet. He's gotta understand that."
"I think he will," says Hall, though he looks a little dizzy.
"Good man." You clap him on the shoulder. "You handled this great. Ten percent of what he pays us will be yours for handling the business."
He looks very gratified by that: Obviously he's not nearly as good as you at calculating just how little ten percent of the take will be.
* * * * *
After he leaves, you consult the memorandum book you keep on the phone, adding updates and entering new info.
And right now you're looking at your balance sheet:
Inv. 10 That's the number of eighths you've left on hand.
Allowance. $9.50 That, in hundreds, is the amount of cash you've on hand from sales. It will cover the rest of the month's "tips" to your parents, with a little left over.
IOUs. $3.60 (TE) In hundreds, what Evans owes you.
Bank $16.15 In hundreds, what you need to pay Mathis to fully complete next month's order, and you won't be able to generate that from your remaining inventory while still contributing "tips" to the household budget. And you'll need a lot more than that to carry out the expansion Chen is demanding.
So you're receptive—for business reasons, not only social—when Hennepin shouts at you as you're walking back to your car. "Hey, we're goin' out to Andrea's in a bit. Wanna go along?" That draws guffaws from the rest of the crowd.
Andrea's got a giant cash till you can dip into.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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