Page 42 - SpringBoard_Writing_Workshop_Grade7_Flipbook

When school finally ended, I limped my way over to the mall. I hadn’t figured out My Notes just how I was going to get the money out of the boot when I started buying stuff, but
I figured I could always just take the boot off, whip the money out, and become a local
legend.
We have a pretty good mall, with a lot of places where you could spend a hundred dollars. I started by trying on a leather jacket. It fit perfectly, and it made me feel great. I also liked the idea of buying just one perfect thing with the money. After all, if I bought a lot of little stuff, I could buy any one of those things on my own, and it would just be a case of quantity, not quality. But I’d have to save for years to buy a leather jacket, until by the time I could afford it I probably wouldn’t want it anyway.
The jacket was on sale too. It had been $120, but it was marked down to $98. I took it over to the sales register, where the woman looked me over real carefully and asked if it was cash or charge.
“Cash,” I told her, feeling for the thousandth time the money in the toe.
She rang the numbers up and said “That will be a hundred and four dollars and three cents.”
“No,” I said. “It’s ninety eight dollars. See.” I showed her the price tag.
She looked at me like I had just emerged from the primordial swamp. “Sales tax,” she said. “A hundred and four dollars and three cents.” I didn’t have a hundred and four dollars and three cents. I had two dollars and thirty-five cents, and a hundred dollars stuffed in my boot. Add the two together, and you do not come up with a hundred
and four and three cents. Believe me, I tried five different ways of adding the numbers together, and none of them worked.
“I can’t afford it,” I muttered.
“Kids,” the saleslady said. I nearly took my boot off to throw at her, but then I decided I didn’t want to buy anything that cost more than the hundred dollars anyway. It would have been cheating, somehow. So I left the store and looked for something that cost just a few dollars less. I didn’t mind having a couple of bucks change left, just as long as I didn’t go over my original total it was kind of like game show rules.
I must have walked through that mall a half-dozen times, upstairs and down, trying to find just the right thing to buy. Most of the stuff I looked at I would have killed to own ordinarily, but somehow nothing was special enough to spend my hundred on. And things didn’t cost what I thought they did. I finally decided to buy
a Walkman, so I went into one of the department stores to price them. Only they had one on sale, AM/FM radio and cassette player for $29.95. That seemed awfully cheap to me, only there was no point spending more than that for another brand just because it wasn’t on sale. So I didn’t buy one, and I didn’t get any cassettes either. And all the books I used to dream about owning looked like crap, and suddenly I realized there was nothing at the mall I really wanted.
I sat down then, by the fountain, to collect my thoughts. There was no water in the fountain area, because of the water shortage, and its tile floor was littered with pennies and nickels. I couldn’t get over how people had just tossed their money away like that, when I couldn’t even make myself take my boot off.
It occurred to me then that I could buy a car for a hundred dollars. Maybe not a great car, but a car, nonetheless. I had this entire fantasy about being behind the wheel of my very own car, driving my friends around, parking in the high school lot, going to drive-ins, moving around the way you could if you owned a car. It was a pretty picture, and I was just about ready to spend part of my $2.35 on a newspaper so I could see what cars were available for a hundred bucks, until common sense made me stop.
Writing Workshop 4 • Narrative Writing: Short Story 5
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