Help Wanted by Gary Soto

could speak. And he was, and was especially sorry because she had the teapot that was going for hundreds.
    "I understand how you might not believe me," Veronica nearly sobbed.
    "I do," he lied.
    "You do?"
    "Yeah, totally."
    She asked what he was doing later. Her father had
flown his jet from New Mexico and was going to rent a helicopter to view some vineyards outside of town. Her father was thinking about buying them.
    She won't stop,
Javier thought.
She lies and lies and lies.
But could he be wrong? The idea flashed in his mind.
    "I'm playing baseball," he said. "With some friends."
    The friends were little kids and the game was with plastic bats and balls. When she asked where, he told her the vacant lot at the corner of his street.
    "I know the place," she said. "That's where people sometimes throw garbage."
    "Yeah, that's it."
    Javier repeated his apology and had to repeat it a third time when she said she couldn't make out what he was saying. She said she had just gotten a cell phone, the kind with a small screen.
    Liar!
he shouted in his heart.
    He was about to ask her about the teapot when she said that she had to go, that her brother was calling from France. "
Ciao,
" she said, "I'll see you later."
    Dang!
Javier groaned as he hung up. He had been stupid to trade the teapot. He got back on the computer and searched eBay. It was going for over four hundred dollars.
    "It's not fair!" he cried in anger. For a moment he wondered if he was wrong. Maybe she was rich. After all, she did wear nice clothes and he had heard she
sometimes had parties at her house. He did remember her buying ice creams for all the girls in third grade. Plus, didn't she seem to pull out hundred-dollar bills from her pocket whenever she wanted? In the end, though, he figured she couldn't be that rich. "No way," he told himself. "She's just like me—like the rest of us."
    Javier left the house just as his mother was mixing a bowl of egg whites, a concoction she would apply to her throat. The mixture, she said, would keep her throat from sagging.
    "I'll be back," Javier hollered.
    He went into the garage to see if there was something worth anything. He kicked among the boxes. He scanned the shelf where his mother kept the detergent and bleach—nothing. He rifled through a laundry basket of old clothes; the sour smell nearly brought tears to his eyes. He wrestled a lawn mower and car parts out of the way to get to a chest of drawers. "It's got to have something," he told himself. When he opened the top drawer, a mouse leaped up and scampered over his shoulder.
    "Ahhh!" he screamed.
    He hurried out of the garage and seconds later returned to retrieve the plastic bat and balls. Late for the baseball game, he ran to the vacant lot and found the little kids sword fighting with branches.
    "You're going to hurt yourselves," Javier said.
    "We're already hurt," one kid said. He showed him
the skinned elbow from when he had fallen. Another kid showed him where he had been whacked on the back of his hand.
    "Man, you guys," Javier snarled. "Your parents are going to blame me."
    "No, they won't," one chubby kid claimed. "They won't care unless we die. That's what they said."
    Because he was thirteen and they were only eight-year-olds, Javier played himself against them. But he couldn't concentrate. The image of the teapot kept floating behind the back of his eyes. He imagined it on eBay and its auction price rising to over a thousand dollars.
    "She's such a liar," he found himself saying as he swung through a pitch. "Yeah, right, your brother lives in France and you've got a cell phone." He swung and missed again. "Yeah, right, you have the lightbulb that once belonged to Thomas Edison." He swung and missed badly.
    He was out, but none of the kids in dirty T-shirts cared. An ice-cream truck rolled up the street and the kids ran after it. Javier was glad they were gone. He sat in the shade of a pomegranate tree and stuck a blade of grass in his mouth. He