“Meet me at the Crenshaw tonight at nine forty-five,” Thurman said in angrily clipped wordsizeclipped.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
THE AFTERNOON PASSED quietly enough. I logged onto the BBC website and perused the world, starting in Africa. I always start there, looking to see what the news providers of American TV didn’t deem important.
I had worked my way through South America and Asia before Twill came back to mind. I couldn’t let him know that I had bugged his IP. Not that I was worried about him getting upset but because this wouldn’t be the last intervention I’d have to make in his formative years. It wasn’t the first, either.
At the age of fourteen he had already spent six months in a juvenile facility for stealing middle school property.
“I got the idea from something you said, Dad,” he’d told me when we got home from the police station after his initial arrest.
“From me?”
“You were always sayin’ how people in Africa and other places didn’t have the tools they needed to compete, so I found out about the School Supply Fund and set up a fake office to sell computers to them.”
“How much property did you move?” I asked. The boy had been arrested for stealing five computers and three microscopes.
“A lot,” young Twill answered.
He’d organized a group of adolescent thieves at eleven schools, kids that he’d met through his sister’s Leadership Camp the previous summer.