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assured her. “I just don’t want to take your favorite. It’s just a stupid speech. What if something happens?”
    “Coo isn’t scared,” said Ginny. “He is always strong and brave. H-he will be the b-best ruler of the w-w-world!”
    “Well, I wouldn’t count on Coo winning,” Armpit cautioned. “I get real nervous when I have to give a speech.”
    “Coo will help you,” said Ginny.
    Armpit held Coo in one hand. It was soft and spongy, the kind of toy given to babies because it was easily held on to by tiny fingers. “So is there something wro—” He caught himself. “Does Coo have a disability?” he asked.
    “Leukemia,” Ginny whispered. “But we don’t talk about it.”

7
    Friday, with the concert just eight days away, Armpit went to the Stop & Shop after school to buy a newspaper. He had paid thirty dollars for the ad; he might as well pay another fifty cents to see it.
    He dropped two quarters into the newspaper vending machine and pulled up on the handle, but it wouldn’t open. He pressed the coin return and got back nothing. He pulled harder on the handle. He slammed his hand against the coin return.
    He was already mad that X-Ray had waited two days to buy the ad because he only wanted to pay for one week, and now the machine had eaten his money. He shook it so hard he might have broken it, but then a voice in his head reminded him that it wasn’t worth going to jail for fifty cents.
    Instead, he went into the store and told the clerk what had happened.
    “You have to wait for the coins to drop,” the guy told him, and wouldn’t give him his money back.
    Armpit asked him for change for a dollar.
    “No change.”
    So he bought a bag of chips for a dollar and nineteen cents, then used part of the change to buy another paper.
    This time he listened for each quarter to drop before pulling on the handle. When the door opened, he took three copies of the
Austin American Statesman,
just to get even, and left two of them on top of the machine.
             
    Back home, he spread the classified ads out across the kitchen table. He’d told X-Ray not to ask for too much, since they only had a week. There were a number of ads for Kaira DeLeon tickets. The prices ranged from seventy-five to a hundred and ten dollars. Then he came to the one with X-Ray’s phone number.

    KAIRA DELEON TKTS. $135
    Close to the front. 555–3470

    X-Ray answered on the second ring.
    “Are you insane?” Armpit shouted.
    “Yes, but it hasn’t stopped me before!”
    “Did you see all the other ads in the paper?”
    “Yeah, so?”
    “So they’re all at least twenty-five dollars cheaper.”
    “And your point is?”
    “I told you to keep the price low.”
    “It is low. They sold for seven hundred and fifty in Philly.”
    “We’re not going to be able to sell any tickets.”
    “You’re thinking east Austin,” said X-Ray. “You got to think west Austin.”
    “What?”
    “See, you and me, we’d buy the cheapest tickets. But that’s not how they think in west Austin. They don’t worry about money over there. They just want the best. And the ones that cost the most got to be the best, right?”
    Armpit had installed enough sprinkler systems in west Austin to know that people worried about money over there just as much as they did east of I-35. Their homes might have been worth half a million dollars, but they still expected Armpit’s boss to reimburse them five bucks if Armpit accidentally stepped on a daffodil.
    “Okay,” Armpit said. “Even if somebody wanted to pay a little more to be up front,” he said, “row M is
not
the front!”
    “The ad doesn’t say it’s in the front. It says
close to
the front.”
    “It’s not close to the front. Row F is close to the front. G maybe.”
    “So then they’re
close to
close to the front,” said X-Ray.
    “Just call the paper and tell them to lower the price,” said Armpit.
    “You need to relax. I promised you I’d double your money, didn’t I?