Island Boyz by Graham Salisbury Page A

number.
I’ll
call her.”
    “Do I look like a phone book?”
    “Well, where’s her house then? You know that?”
    Maya finally relented and said she’d show us where Lynnette lived. But only if she didn’t have to talk. Three of us went—me, her, and Willy. Julio and Liddlebiddyguy had chores.
    Lynnette’s place was twice the size of any of ours, and the yard was neat and clean—grass mowed, green and healthy, edged, not all ratty and brown with armyworms.
    Maya waited out in the street, where she couldn’t be seen from the house.
    Willy and I went up to the front door.
    “This is too weird,” Willy whispered.
    “No, it’s brilliant. You watch.”
    I knocked.
    Nobody came, so I knocked harder.
    The door flew open. “What!”
    Lynnette scowled at us, annoyed as a scorpion with its stinger curled up.
    “Uh . . . we . . . we . . .”
    I couldn’t say the words. The look on her face suggested that this might not have been the best idea.
    “Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want it.”
    She slammed the door.
    I waited a few seconds, then knocked again.
    This time when she opened the door, she took a step toward me.
    I stumbled back.
    “We’re not s-selling anything,” I said, putting up my hands. “We want to hire you.”
    “Who’s we?”
    I turned to Willy, but he was gone.
    “Uh . . .”
    She smirked, like maybe it amused her to see me so nervous. At least she had a sense of humor, which I could really have used just then.
    “There’s this guy,” I said. “He—he always steals from us.”
    “So?”
    “Well, we need a—a . . . we need somebody to sort of . . . you know, make him go away . . . like you did with the guy in the parking lot at school.”
    “You saw that?”
    “We were walking by.”
    Lynnette studied me closely. “You want me to help you stop some guy from stealing from you? Is that what you’re saying?”
    I nodded. Exactly.
    Lynnette’s mind was working. I could see it in her eyes, looking at me but not looking at me, you know? Thinking.
    “Do I know this guy?”
    I shrugged. “His name is Frankie Diamond. He’s in eighth grade, in your school.”
    “Eighth, huh?”
    “Yeah, I think.”
    “Big guy?”
    “Bigger than us,” I said.
    “Is he cute?”
    “Pshh. Not to me, he ain’t.”
    She laughed. “I was joking. Come inside. Oh, and tell your friend he can come in, too.”
    I turned and looked back.
    Willy came slinking out of the bushes.
    “Come, come,” Lynnette said, waving us in.
    We both hesitated. Maybe it was a trick.
    “We need to talk, right?”
    We went in. She closed the door behind us.
    And locked it.
    She saw us looking at the door and said, “My mom makes me do that. Someone broke in and took our TV.”
    We followed Lynnette through the house and out to the backyard. I couldn’t believe it. She had a swimming pool, turquoise blue and clear as ice. A vacuum was snaking over the bottom with its pump purring like a cat. Man, I thought, I could move into this situation
today.
    We sat around a white iron table in white iron chairs with white iron arms on them. And you know what Lynnette did? She went inside the house and came back with three ice-cold Cokes.
    Had to be a trick. This was too easy.
    “All right,” she said. “Tell me about this Frankie Diamond.”
     
    Lynnette met us after school three days in a row, carrying a math book and a spiral pad so she’d look like us. “I don’t carry books,” she said. “This is a disguise.”
    But Frankie never showed.
    We did find out why Lynnette had been so nice to us, though—Maya. Lynnette had seen her that day we stumbled onto her parking lot fight, which we also discovered was just the end of a bad week with her boyfriend, now her
ex
-boyfriend.
    The first day she met us, Lynnette said to Maya, “I remember you from those stupid beach picnics.”
    “You saw me there?”
    “Of course. You were the only one who didn’t look boring.”
    Maya snickered. “I know what you mean.”
    “One