“Are we ready?” I asked. I could feel the blood pulsing at my ears. I knew I was excited. Excited and just a little afraid.
Jack drew close and squeezed my arm gently. “It’s going to be awesome,” he whispered in my ear.
Then he turned back to the others. “Okay. Keep it real, everyone. And don’t hold back. It’s a robbery, remember. Harlow will play along. He’s ready. He’s going to be great.”
Jeremy tossed his beer can in the wastebasket behind the bar. Ivy and I started to the basement stairs.
“Oh, wait. One more thing,” Jack said. He motioned us back to the air-hockey table.
I groaned. I was eager to get the show on the road. Too much time in Jeremy’s basement was making me tenser and tenser. I felt like a rubber band all twisted tight. I wanted to spin free.
We all gathered at the table again. Manny had his phone raised and appeared to be texting someone. Jack reached into the carton he had brought—and pulled out a small gray pistol.
“Whoa!” Manny let out a cry and dropped his phone onto the game table.
Ivy and I both gasped. I saw Jeremy narrow his eyes in disbelief, following Jack’s hand as he raised the pistol.
Ivy found her voice first. “Jack, come on, dude. You never said we’d bring a gun.”
“No way,” I protested. “Ivy is right. We’ve been talking about this for two weeks, and you never said anything about a gun.”
Jack scowled at us. “What do you want to rob Harlow with—a popsicle stick?” He twirled the gun in his fingers.
“Is it . . . real?” Jeremy asked timidly, eyes on the twirling pistol.
Jack nodded. “Yeah. It’s real.”
Shivers started to roll down my back. I wrapped my arms around myself to stop the trembling.
I have a thing about guns. My dad kept guns in the house. He was kind of a gun nut. He was always taking them out and cleaning them. He kept bullets in a locked drawer in the basement. Sometimes he took a gun to some kind of target practice. I don’t know where.
I didn’t want to know. I guess I was supposed to feel safe with all those guns around. But I didn’t. I was always afraid whenever I saw one. I guess I have too good an imagination. I had all these fantasies of one of us getting shot.
When my parents split and Dad moved out of the house, he took all his guns with him, and I was glad. But now here I was, staring at the gun in Jack’s hand, all the bad feelings from my childhood rushing back at me.
“Let’s roll, everyone,” Jack said. He took long strides toward the basement steps, waving the pistol like a pennant. “It’s showtime.”
He glanced back at me. He saw that my eyes were on the gun in his hand. His face grew solemn. “Let’s just hope we don’t have to use it.”
I gave his shoulder a shove. “You’re joking—right? Right?”
