D: Stealing the Aluminum Cans

Chapter: Kid, Stealing the Aluminum Cans

The dining room of our apartment, which is really just a part of the
living room, is full of aluminum cans in black plastic garbage bags.
The bags are stacked on top of the fake wood table, along the walls,
and on top of each other. They almost reach the ceiling in some spots,
and my big sister has hung one bag from the chandelier, making it tilt
even more than it usually does. Each bag is so light that I can pick up
two with each hand and lift them above my head. They rattle when I do
this, and I do it several times. We're waiting for my mother and her
boyfriend to come home. My mother's boyfriend has a truck, so old that
he turns it off whenever he gets to a red light so that it doesn't
overheat. He is going to take us to the machine that takes aluminum
cans into its big mouth and spits out money. Inside the bags, the cans
are different colors, the colors of each kind of soda the high school
across the street sells to the students.

The cans belong to the high school across the street, or us, depending
on how you look at it. My big sister and I spent the day before waiting
until dark, then made my little sister stand guard while we took down
the wire fence holding the cans. It was a lot easier than I thought it
would be. All I had to do was take a pair of pliers I found in the
kitchen drawer and twist the tiny wires holding one side of the fence
up. When I was done the fence just fell onto the concrete, barely
making any noise but still making us crouch down low, just in case.
When nobody came my big sister looked at me and said, "You did it!" Her
voice was louder than the fence falling.

It was my idea. My sister goes to the high school, but I'm still at the
junior high, a whole bus trip away through neighborhoods and real
houses and no old couches or chairs or cars sitting on the street. My
school has fence all the way around it, and the only way to get in is
through the gate in front. Even the kids who live around my school have
to walk out the front gate, and sometimes traffic backs up so much at
the gate that the lady who drives my bus honks her horn in long, low
beeps, pointing her finger at whoever is blocking the bus's way.

But my sister's school, the high school, is different. It has a fence
around the football field, and that's it. It's all open. We can walk
through anytime we want, and climb up on the roof or roller skate on
the tennis courts. My big sister usually doesn't, though. The one time
she roller skated on the tennis courts, she ran into of the nets,
flipped over it, and busted her chin. She says she's at the school
enough and once, when I was playing sick, I saw her running around the
track in her blue and white striped gym clothes, sweating and wearing
her ugly face. I believe her when she says she hates the school.

I was roller skating when I found the bags. At first I thought they
were trash, but then I saw a bag partly torn open, more cans falling
out of it than we could ever find now that we don't live around any
construction sites. I pushed a stick through the fence and the bags
rattled, and I knew there was a lot of money in the cans, if we could
get to them.

That was the easy part, getting the cans. The hard part was carrying
them back to our apartment, and stacking the bags the bags so they
wouldn't fall over. My sister said to act natural when the neighbors
kept watching us. I think they knew what we were doing, but they're the
same people who scream at the high school kids when the kids honk their
horns and shoot the bird at each other. Their cars are a lot nicer than
anything parked in front of our building. The neighbors wouldn't tell
on us.

My mother wasn't home, out with her boyfriend since the night before.
Now I know that even though she says she comes home at night, she
really doesn't. I don't think my big sister cares, because she's gone a
lot, too. When my mother tells me she gets up before us to go to work,
I just keeping watching the television or reading my book. I have
stayed up on Saturday nights, waiting for her. She never comes home. I
quit trying to stay up, unless I wanted to, and I don't let my mother
know that I know her secret. My little sister doesn't know it, either.
She cries all the time anyway, and I like being able to do what I want,
when I want.

Like stealing the cans. We got all dressed up in dark clothes, which
was hard to do because none of us has very many clothes. We hung one of
my mother's old lady shawls over my little sister. It pretty much hid
her blond hair. In the dark, and with her bare legs sticking out from
the bottom, my little sister looked like a fake Christmas tree. To
stand guard, she stood in a doorway that was halfway between our
apartment and the fence with the cans, a good spot in case anybody got
worried about what we were doing. If my little sister saw somebody
coming our way, she was to let them go by and then start yelling,
"Here, kitty kitty. Here kitty kitty." We made her practice in the
apartment first, telling her to yell as loud as she could and like she
was really looking for her cat. My big sister said she should probably
take the shawl off her head if she had to start yelling, because it
might look weird if she was walking up and down the sidewalk all
covered up and screaming at the top of her lungs. We
made her practice until we were satisfied, and then started on our own
clothes.

I wore a black ski cap that pulled down over my face so that only eyes
and mouth showed. It's the same kind of cap that burglars wears on the
television, except that when the police pull them off the burglar's
hair is still all neat and combed. I also wore a dark blue jacket and
jeans. After our first trip back to the apartment, carrying the bags, I
saw the neighbors watching us and rolled the cap back up over my face
so I wouldn't stand out so much.

My big sister's clothes were harder to put together. She didn't have a
cap like mine, and for almost a year she has been wearing nothing but
T-shirts with strange pictures of skulls and fire on them. She wore a
gray shirt of my mother's and smudged her face with makeup, making me
laugh. She looked the same, but kind of dead, because she used blue
makeup.

No one caught us. My little sister never had to come out of the doorway
and call for a cat. We took every single bag, stuffing the cans that
had come loose under our shirts. We even put the fence back up,
twisting the wires back around just as easily as they had come off.
That was my sister's idea. She thought that if the fence was back up,
the school might not think the cans had been stolen, and then they'd
put more bags in there for us to get later. I didn't think they would,
but you never know.

Now we're waiting for my mother and her boyfriend to come and take us
to the can machine. I keep picking the bags up, seeing how much they
weigh and if any of them are heavier than the others. I've asked my big
sister how much she thinks they're worth so many times that she finally
told me to shut up, so now my little sister and I bend over the bags,
lifting them and whispering dollar amounts to each other.

We'll tell my mother we've been collecting cans all day. That's why
there are so many. We'll say we went around to the dumpsters, and found
a bunch behind the U-Totem. I'll say my big sister even helped, and
boy, are we tired after all that work.

My mother may not fall for it, but we won't know until she gets here.
When she and her boyfriend bring the truck.