“Yeah, thanks for that,” he told her dryly. “We’ll talk about it on the way home,” he said to the girls. “Come on. If you hurry up, we’ll have time to get a pizza before Mommy gets back.”

“Pizza!” The piggy banks forgotten, they ran past him outside. “Bye, Shannon!” “See you tomorrow! “Thank you, Mrs. Carrell!” “Yeah, thanks!”

“We really appreciate your help,” he said. “Again, sorry to impose. I promise we won’t make a habit of it.”

“Glad to do it,” she told him honestly.

Jillian and Sue were speeding down the sidewalk and already halfway home. He could see the pink pigs in their hands bobbing up and down as they ran, and he grew angry at the thought that someone at the bank had tried to both bribe and bully his daughters into opening accounts there.

When he had a chance, he was going to have to go down there, find that asshole and give him a piece of his mind.

Brad sighed as he hurried to catch up to the girls, wondering why every problem in his life lately seemed to involve banks.

4

The gym was silent, and Nick could not recall ever experiencing such a thing at an assembly. Even if students tried to be quiet, low conversations and muttered comments inevitably echoed off the wooden floor of the cavernous room, and in a crowd this size, there were always smartasses who made the kids around them laugh at rude jokes mocking whatever was being said.

But today you could hear a pin drop, and when some kid near the top of the bleachers coughed, it sounded like a lion’s roar in the stillness.

It had not started out this way. When they first heard about the assembly over the morning announcements, a cheer went up in Nick’s biology class, which was supposed to be taking a test today. All the way down the hall and into the gym, the jostling students were loud and boisterous, and as they stomped up the wooden steps onto the bleachers, they laughingly celebrated their unexpected good fortune. All of the classes entered the gym excitedly and enthusiastically, and when Principal Whittaker, standing before the lone microphone in the center of the basketball court, made a plea for silence, very few people even heard him.

But the volume of the PA system was turned up, the more forceful Vice Principal Bollinger ordered everyone to be quiet, and the clamor gradually subsided enough for the principal to again address the students and inform them that the assembly today had been called in order to introduce them to an important aspect of adult life that they would all soon have to deal with: finances.

“So let me introduce,” he said, “from The First People’s Bank, the bank manager, Mr. Worthington!”