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else out of the ordinary, but our attention had been piqued, so I knew we’d be back.
     
     
    “Dave,” my mom said that night as I passed by the kitchen where she was making a pot of her trademark pizza soup. “I’m really proud of you.”
    “Proud?” I said. “For what?”
    “For getting that lifeguarding job.” She dropped sliced pepperoni into the tomato sauce.
    “Oh,” I said. Suddenly it was all I could do to get out of that kitchen. I mean, my dad had been completely wrong to force me to get a job at age fifteen. But when someone compliments you for something you didn’t do, for something that you have, in fact, totally lied about—well, you can’t help feeling guilty.
    “I know you didn’t want a job,” she said. “I know all the plans you and your friends had this summer. But youdid it anyway, and you didn’t even complain.”
    “Well,” I said. “What can you do?”
    I started to leave again, but my mom stopped me. “It really proves how mature you’ve become.”
    Okay , I thought, enough already! Was this really how she had thought of me? Not mature?
    “Oh, as long as you’re here,” she said, starting to grate mozzarella cheese for us to sprinkle on top of the soup, “would you mind taking the garbage out?”
    This reminded me that even though my parents had stopped my allowance, I was still expected to do all my chores. For free, apparently.
    I grabbed the garbage from under the sink. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so guilty about lying anymore.
     
     
    Curtis, Victor, and I met late the next morning at the coffee shop across from the bank.
    “I’m sure what we saw yesterday was nothing,” I said as we locked up our bikes. “We probably shouldn’t get our hopes up.”
    “Says you,” Curtis said. “It’s a robbery. A robbery in plain sight.”
    We sat at the same table as before. The same waitress took our order.
    “Just water,” I said. Yesterday’s Coke had pretty much broken the bank for me.
    “Water,” Victor said.
    But Curtis announced to the waitress, “I’ll have a Coke. And a side order of fries.” In other words, he was so confident we’d catch this bank robber that he was willing to spend another four dollars of his— our —money.
    The waitress just smiled, as if to say, Whoa, big spender .
    Over in the bank, everything looked pretty much the same as the day before. Gladys Kravitz and Happy Pants were both working quietly at their desks.
    It turns out that banks have a lunch-hour rush, so things were very busy for an hour or so. Then business slowed down, which was when the bank employees started to take their lunches, in shifts.
    The coffee shop, however, didn’t have a lunch-hour rush. That answered my question about who still ate in a greasy spoon like this: not many people. But all this thinking about food reminded me how hungry I was.Curtis’s French fries were long gone, and even burned split pea soup smells good when you’ve barely eaten since breakfast. But even Curtis’s self-confidence had its limit, so we just sat there sipping our ice water. After a while, the waitress stopped asking us if we wanted anything else. To her credit, she never stopped refilling our waters.
    “This is embarrassing,” I said as the afternoon wore on and the waitress had filled our glasses for the hundredth time. “We can’t sit at this table forever.”
    “They’ll forgive us once we finger Happy Pants!” Curtis said, still staring at the bank. “We can come back here later and drop some serious cash.”
    “Curtis,” Victor said quietly. “Dave is right. It’s not just the embarrassment factor. We’ve been here for over four hours. This is boring .”
    “But what about what we saw yesterday?”
    “We didn’t see anything yesterday. We saw a woman using her cell phone.”
    Curtis clutched the tabletop like a desperate drunk being told he had to leave the bar. “Let’s just stay till the bank closes at five. Can we at least do that?”
    Victor and