How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater by Marc Acito Page A

$250. “Maybe I better use pencil,” he says, pulling one from his pocket protector. He writes $250, his tongue sticking out as he does. “Okay,
Anything Goes,”
he says. “That kills weeknights.”
    “And after school there's play practice,” Kelly adds.
    Natie scrunches his doughy face. “That doesn't leave a lot of time for a job.”
    “The shows are both over by Thanksgiving,” I say. “I could get a holiday job.”
    “That's right,” Kelly says, smiling. “You could wrap gifts or, like, hand out samples or something. You'd be good at that.”
    “Yeah, how much money could I earn doing that?”
    “Well,” Natie says, “let's say you get a retail job that you can keep the rest of the year at twenty hours a week . . .”
    “Twenty hours? Do I really need to work that much?”
    “How much does Juilliard cost?”
    “Ten thousand dollars a year.”
    He shoots me a gimme-a-break look.
    “Okay, I get your point,” I say. “What does twenty hours a week add up to?”
    “Twenty hours a week from December through June is, let's see, seven months or twenty-eight weeks. Twenty-eight times twenty hours a week is 560 hours, at minimum wage of $3.35 an hour equals $1,876.”
    “That's it?”
    “Calm down, will ya'? I'm not done yet,” Natie says. “If you work full-time during vacations and all next summer, you could presumably earn another fifteen hundred bucks, which brings the total up to $3,376.”
    “Plus 250 from
Anything Goes,”
Kelly says.
    “Three thousand six hundred and twenty-six dollars. That's more than a third of the way there!” Natie looks up and smiles his lippy, no-tooth smile. He's got tiny little teeth like a row of Chiclets, which embarrasses him, so he's gotten in the habit of smiling the goofy way he does. He glances at his list. “Number two: scholarships.”
    My head droops. “Al earns too much for me to be eligible for scholarships.”
    “Don't be so negative,” Natie says. “You're bound to get a couple of talent scholarships. Let's say $1,000 to be conservative. That's $4,626. Now we're almost halfway there. See how easy this is?”
    “Assuming I don't spend any money between now and . . .”
    “Number three: theft.”
    “You're not really suggesting I should steal, are you?”
    Natie takes off his glasses and gazes upward like he's pondering the cosmic ramifications of theft. “Steal is such a cold, ugly word, don't you think?” he says. “Think of it as simply borrowing money that you don't intend to give back. Think embezzlement.”
    “Is that as bad as theft?” asks Kelly.
    “It's better,” Natie says, his button eyes bright. “That's when you steal from a company. It's a victimless crime. Or fraud. Oh, fraud is good.”
    “What kind of fraud could I do?” I say.
    “Oh, I don't know, send bills to old people for stuff they haven't really bought . . .”
    “That's not very nice,” Kelly says.
    “I'm just brainstorming,” Natie snaps. “What about defrauding an institution, like a college or a university? When you consider how many of them fund research that supports Reagan's missile defense plan, fraud is really more an act of civil disobedience than an actual crime.”
    “I don't think Juilliard is researching missile defense.”
    “Good point. Let's stick with embezzlement. Does Al have any bank accounts you could siphon money out of without his knowing about it?”
    “Are you kidding? Al knows where he keeps every nickel he's ever earned.”
    “There's just got to be another way for you to raise that kind of cash,” Natie says. He gets up from the table and paces, tapping his forehead the way Winnie-the-Pooh does when he's trying to think. “Oh! What about blackmail? Blackmail's a great source of income.”
    There's something about the way he says it that makes me uncomfortable. The voice of experience, perhaps?
    “Don't look at me that way,” he says. “Just add it to the list.”
    Kelly takes his pencil and writes down the word