Nuts and Dolts by Marc Jedel

Author:Marc Jedel [Jedel, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BGM Press
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

“Awfully melodramatic, aren’t you?” commented Laney.

“I can’t help it if I’m the superior storyteller,” I replied, lifting my nose in the air to attempt a haughty sniff.

She ignored my efforts to provoke a response. “This was right before we moved, right?”

“Yeah—”

“Then what happened?” asked Megan, uninterested in this boring side conversation and eager to get back to the revenge, chase, and so on.

“Well, I decided to bike back home, careful to go a few blocks out of my way to avoid Mrs. Hoxha’s house. I didn’t go in my house, just went into the garage and found some duct tape and a marker. I loved duct tape—the best tool ever invented—and even kept some in my room. It worked for everything—hanging posters, bandaging cuts, even waterproofing a hole in your bedroom wall.”

“How’d you get a hole in your bedroom wall?” asked Skye.

“Not important. So anyway, I used some duct tape to fix the rips on the package, but perhaps my philosophy of ‘more is better’ when it comes to duct tape wasn’t the best plan for that situation. When I’d finished the repair job, the package had more duct tape than brown paper visible. Some of the strips of tape had stuck to themselves and others zigged and zagged across the package. I was in a hurry, after all, so it wasn’t my fault that the result looked so unusual. My timing was getting tight to finish shopping and get back home safely before Felix and his gang finished their run.”

“Mom, do we have any duct tape?” asked Megan.

“Why?” Laney’s eyes narrowed as she scrutinized her daughter.

“Just in case. For emergencies. You know, you always say we should be prepared.” Megan plastered an angelic smile on her face. It didn’t fool anyone.

Ignoring the side conversation, I hesitated. “This next part isn’t really part of the story, but it’s why I was late to the store.”

Skye merely raised both eyebrows with a slight chin tilt, indicating I should get on with it already. I continued, “Anyway, since the address was smudged and partly covered by duct tape, I had to rewrite it. I finally found some scrap paper in the recycle bin and used more duct tape to attach it to the package. I started to redo the address on the package, but then . . .”

I swallowed. This part of my adventure wasn’t my brightest moment, but it didn’t feel right to leave it out. Wasn’t there some famous saying about “the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

I shook away the distraction. “A great idea had popped into my head. Instead of making only twenty bucks from Mrs. Hoxha’s son, I figured out how to keep all forty dollars. With more duct tape, I attached another scrap of paper to the upper left part of the package, then wrote the Los Angeles post office box as the return address. I couldn’t risk the package getting delivered to Mrs. Hoxha’s house so I put our home address on the front.

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