The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison Read Free Book Online Page A

“Between the two of us, we can do it. We clean this place out first, then expand the operation. It already belongs to us, anyway. We just need to claim it.” With Francie’s voice hoarse from cigarettes, it was always hard to tell how serious she was. Of course, by then I had learned that questions like that were basically immaterial.
    “We’ll clean this place out,” I said, going along with her. “Then move on to the Smithsonian.”
    So Francie and I went to the mall every day after school. We held our little black bags close to our hips and closer to our fingers, always looking out for that one thing that caught our eye. “It’s easy,” she explained to me when I asked her for her secrets. “Just pretend you’re the sun. Too hot to look at. Anyone looks at you too long—burn ’em. Remember that and you’ll never get caught.”
    It wasn’t exactly that easy. There were tools and techniques. There were strategies she taught me—strategies in which I will never lose my expertise. Rubber bands, bottle openers, booster bags, decoys. Angles to be worked out. You had to know the blind spots. But, according to Francie, not one of those specifics was nearly as important as what she called “the becoming.”
    “The becoming” was what you told yourself before the hit. It was reminding yourself that it all belonged to you, and that you were doing nothing wrong. It was leaving your own body and letting something fearless and hungry inhabit it instead. In Francie’s case, it was donning a spooky, blindingcamouflage. It was channeling the sun. Too hot to look at. That was just Francie. For me, it turned out, it was something entirely different.
     
    Francie knew that the closer it got to Christmas, the less anyone at the mall had time to worry about a couple of teenage girls. Around the holiday, according to her, you could really go crazy. So we ditched seventh period on Friday afternoon the week before Thanksgiving and caught the bus down Georgia Avenue to the mall.
    I still hadn’t stolen anything big. Up till then it had been all trinkets for me; junky crap that no one would care about if they caught me. And even when it came to that stuff, I was so unsmooth that I couldn’t figure out why Francie thought I would make a suitable accomplice. Just the intention of stealing anything made me edgy: eyes darting, mouth twitching, movements all jerky, totally suspicious-looking. It was a miracle I hadn’t been busted.
    For some reason, Francie believed in me despite my complete amateurishness. She believed that I had something special and had decided that it was time for me to take it to the next level. To steal big, earn my stripes. Thanksgiving being the perfect time for it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea. Okay, I did know how I felt about it. Not good.
    “It’s all about the becoming,” she explained for the trillionth time on the bus ride over. “You get that down andyou’ll be able to steal anything at all. You’ll be fine, I promise. I can always tell.”
    I hadn’t really figured out what she was talking about with that business, which sounded kind of New Age-y to me. But I tried to act confident as we marched into the Limited, the two of us with loping, tigery strides, Francie in a pink tulle ballerina skirt and me in a checked micromini jumper.
    The confidence was just an act, obviously. I hadn’t gotten any more comfortable dressing this way since my haircut. I just kept it up to make Francie happy. To experience the look of unvarnished pride on her face when she saw me in a shorter skirt, a higher pair of heels. She said it gave me gravity, and I guess that part was good, because before I’d met Francie, I had been worried that I might just float away.
    As soon as we stepped into the store that day, Francie touched my hand, smiled, and made a casual beeline for the sale racks in the back corner, leaving me by myself. We had a plan. Or more like Francie had a plan and I was a part of it.