I decided to let the carpet argument build just a bit more, then dropped my fork on my plate loudly. “Jeez! What’s the big deal? Put down a hardwood floor and each of you can buy a rug.”

“Watch that fork, you’ll break the plate!” Mom says.

“What? Are you gonna pay for a wood floor?” Dad grumbles.

“My friend’s got a wood closet to keep away bugs,” says Christina.

“That’s cedar,” Mom explains.

“We oughta build a cedar closet,” says Dad.

And that was that. The conversation lapsed into an endless stream of other topics, and I went back to pushing my food around my plate. They never noticed I had stopped the argument, just like they didn’t notice I wasn’t eating. Sometimes the Schwa had nothing on me.

“What do you think he’ll make us do?” the Schwa asked as we walked as slow as we dared from school to Crawley’s the next afternoon.

“I really don’t want to think about it.” Truth was, I spent most of the night thinking about it. I could barely get my homework done, which is not all that unusual, but this time it wasn’t because of TV, or video games, or my friends. It was because all I could think of were the many forms of torture Crawley could devise. I once had a teacher who said my imagination was about as developed as my appendix, but I don’t agree, because I came up with a whole bunch of possibilities of what Crawley could do. He could make us clean his dog-fouled patio with our toothbrushes—they do stuff like that in the army, I hear. He could send us on dangerous errands to Mafia types where we might get whacked, because anyone that rich in Brooklyn has gotta know a few of those guys. Or what if he wanted us to move the bodies he’s got locked up in a cellar beneath the restaurant? At three in the morning, when you’re tossing in bed, it sounds almost possible, proving that my imagination is alive and well, or, I guess I should say, alive and sick.

“I think we’re gonna wish we were arrested,” I told the Schwa.

The restaurant only had a few customers at this hour of the afternoon. We identified ourselves to the maître d’, who I guess doubled as Crawley’s doorman for what few visitors he got.

“Ah,” said the maître d’oorman, “Mr. Crawley is expecting you. Follow me.”

He glided up the grand staircase real smooth, like it was a fast escalator and not stairs, then he took us through an unused part of the restaurant stacked with dusty old tables and broken chairs. We went down a hallway that led to the door of Mr. Crawley’s private residence.