CHAPTER 4
MONEY ON THE MIND
The folder from Dr. Larkin's office sat on the kitchen table for three days before Vanessa finally opened it all the way, spreading the paperwork out like she was studying for a test she couldn't afford to fail.
Numbers Varnell wasn't supposed to see but saw anyway, walking past on his way to the bathroom, glancing down long enough to feel his stomach drop.
He didn't say nothing about it. Didn't know what there was to say.
He brought it up with Rodney instead, the two of them posted on the stoop outside Ellis's gym one evening, gloves slung over their shoulders, sweat still cooling on the back of their necks.
"My moms stressing about money," Varnell said, picking at a loose thread on his glove strap.
"Ain't everybody moms stressing about money."
"Nah, like — bad. Doctor stuff. For me."
Rodney looked over at him then, something shifting in his face — not pity, Varnell was grateful for that, just understanding, the particular kind two boys share when they both know what it's like to watch a mother count change at a register and pray it stretches.
"How bad."
Varnell told him the number. Rodney let out a low whistle, shaking his head.
"That's crazy money, bro. Insurance ain't cover none of it?"
"Some. Not enough."
They sat with that a minute, the block moving around them same as always — somebody's music thumping from a passing car, an old man walking a dog too big for him, the particular hum of a Newark evening settling in. Rodney was the one who broke the silence, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.
"We gotta get some money then. For real money. Not lunch money, not sneaker money — real."
"How."
"I don't know yet. But we smart. We'll figure it."
That became the thing that sat between them for the next couple weeks, underneath every conversation, every round on the bag — a low hum of ambition neither one of them had the first idea how to act on yet.
They floated ideas back and forth, most of them useless.
Selling candy at school got shut down by a teacher within a day.
Shoveling snow for the block only worked till the snow stopped.
Rodney's cousin offered them a couple dollars for helping move boxes at a corner store, which helped, some, but nowhere close to the kind of number Varnell needed.
It was Rodney's idea, eventually, to start stealing — small at first, out of a place more like curiosity than criminal intent.
A bike left unlocked outside a bodega, resold to a kid three blocks over for twenty dollars.
A couple of packages snatched off a porch before somebody noticed, split down the middle.
Nothing that felt like much, but it added up faster than the snow shoveling had, and it came with an ease that unsettled Varnell a little, how quick wrong started to feel normal once it started paying.
They got louder about it than they should've — young enough still to mistake momentum for mastery, talking too free about plans in places they shouldn't, voices carrying further than they realized on a quiet block.
That's how Marcus Boone found them.
He was posted outside a garage on the edge of the block, older, maybe mid-twenties, leaning against a car with the hood popped like he was working on it, though his eyes had been on the two boys longer than the engine had.
He called them over with a lazy wave, unbothered, the kind of confidence that made younger kids listen without knowing exactly why.
"Y'all be loud as hell, you know that?"
Rodney squared up defensive out of instinct. "What that mean to you?"
"Mean somebody could be listening who ain't got your best interest at heart. Lucky it was just me." Marcus wiped his hands on a rag, looking between the two of them with something like amusement. "Y'all trying to make real money or nah?"
Varnell and Rodney exchanged a glance.
"Depends what you mean by real," Varnell said.
Marcus laughed, short and genuine. "I like him.
Alright — I move cars. Not selling parts off bikes and popping locks for twenty dollars, real cars, off the lot and out to buyers who don't ask questions.
Young enough, quick enough, y'all could be useful to me.
Ain't gotta answer now. Just saying it's out there, if y'all serious about that money y'all been talking too loud about. "
He gave them an address, told them to come through if they meant it, and went back to his engine like the conversation ain't happen at all.
? ? ?
They meant it.
Two nights later found them a few blocks further out, in a section of the city with nicer cars parked on the street — the kind of block where people left garage doors half open and alarms unset, comfortable in a way that made them careless.
Marcus walked them through the basics quick and cold: which cars to look for, how to get in without tripping alarms, where to drive them once they were moving.
The first one felt like fire in Varnell's chest, hands shaking so bad he almost couldn't get the door open, Rodney hissing at him to hurry up from where he kept watch.
But once it started, once the engine caught, something in him went quiet and focused in a way that surprised him — like his body understood what to do even while his mind was still catching up, scared.
They dropped it where Marcus told them to, got paid more in one night than the porch packages had made in a month combined, and split the money on the walk home in a silence that felt equal parts thrill and dread.
It became routine after that. Not every night, but enough — Rodney and Varnell working their way further from their own block into wealthier sections of the city, targeting cars that would pay better, Marcus pleased enough with their work to start trusting them with more.
They got greedy with it, the way young boys with easy money tend to. Started staying out later, pushing further into unfamiliar streets, chasing the next payout without fully weighing what they were risking to get it.
It caught up with Varnell on a Thursday night, three blocks from a car they'd just dropped, walking home alone after Rodney split off toward his own building. A patrol car rolled up slow beside him, window coming down.
"Little late to be out here, ain't it?"
Varnell kept walking, kept his face calm even as his heart kicked up. "Just heading home, officer."
"Curfew's ten. It's damn near midnight." The officer pulled the car to a full stop, stepping out, and Varnell got his first real look at him — older, gray creeping into a mustache, tired eyes that had seen this exact conversation more times than he probably wanted to count. His nameplate read O'brIEN.
"Yeah, I know. My bad. Lost track of time."
"Where your people at?"
"My moms home. I was just at a friend's."
Officer O'Brien studied him a long moment, something in his face doing more work than the routine stop called for, like he was looking for something particular and not quite finding it — or finding it and not sure what to do with what he found.
Varnell shifted under the attention, unsure why this stop felt heavier than the couple others he'd had before.
"You got school tomorrow?"
"Yes sir."
O'Brien sighed, glancing back at his car, then back at Varnell, some internal debate playing out behind his eyes that Varnell couldn't read. "I'mma let you walk. But I catch you out here past curfew again, I'm bringing you in, you understand me? Doesn't matter whose son you are."
Something in the way he said it — whose son you are — sat strange with Varnell, though he didn't have the first idea why, chalking it up to just the way cops talked.
"Yes sir. Thank you."
O'Brien nodded, watched him a moment longer than the exchange required, then got back in his car and pulled off slow, looking back once in the rearview before he turned the corner.
Varnell walked the rest of the way home fast, spooked without fully understanding why, the weight of the night's work — the money folded up in his sock, the car they'd dropped a few blocks back, the look on that officer's face — all of it pressing down on him harder than it had a right to for a twelve year old walking home in the cold.
He didn't tell Vanessa about the stop. Didn't tell her much of anything those days, the distance between what he was doing and what she knew about growing wider by the week, a gap he told himself he'd close eventually, once there was enough money that it wouldn't matter how he got it.