Meaner Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

so.”
    “Just think, you and me together, roaming the world. Think of all the good we could do too, while we were enjoying ourselves.”
    “Yes, that would be very nice.” I gave her a squeeze. “I can’t think of anything I want more.”
    She gave me a serious look. “So how would you get all this money?”
    I thought for a minute.
    “I’d probably break into the place I worked last summer.”
    “Tell me how you’d do it,” she insisted.
    That’s what started it. My casual mention of the museum warehouse changed our relationship. Everything afterwards centred on that damned question how ? How would I break into the place? How would I locate the most valuable stuff? How would I get out again without getting caught? Initially it was just a silly mind game for me. I was happy to play it; it was something she wanted to talk about every time we met and I wanted to keep her happy so that we’d continue going out together.
    After a few days of this, I thought she was getting a bit obsessive about it. She got me to describe the warehouse in detail to her, even to sketch plans of its layout which she pored over afterwards.
    “Let’s go down, do some reconnaissance,” she said.
    That’s when it dawned on me that she was deadly serious; she actually wanted to do it.
    “Come on, Emma, you’ve got to be kidding.” But deep down I knew she wasn’t.
    After that, there was a friction between us. The next time we met up her responses were curt, as if she was preoccupied. When I broached the topic of the warehouse heist she became even more sullen.
    “I’ll get somebody else to do it if you won’t,” was all she said.
    That scared me. I knew I was losing her.
    When I went home that night I sat in my room with the light switched off and thought long and hard about it. Emma was the most stunning girl I’d ever seen, brainy too, and had a whacky craziness that blew away any small defences I might have had left. I could hardly believe I was going out with her. Truth was, I was wild about her. If I wanted to keep her, I knew what I had to do. I rationalised things, convinced myself it was a victimless crime, a one-off never to be repeated.
    I called her the next morning and told her, and we met that evening. We began planning in earnest. From then on she took a different tack altogether, praising me for my planning abilities and telling me I had a gift for this kind of thing. By the time she was done, I felt like Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven .
    I have to admit, there was some truth to it. After a while I didn’t need much encouragement. She lit the torch and, once I’d made up my mind, I ran with it. I went downtown for a ‘recce’, the first of many, and discovered scaffolding along two sides of the Orthodox church. When my eyes lit on it, a thrill of elation ran along my spine and my brain started buzzing with possibilities. I walked all the way around the church, checked out the courtyard at the back – the sign said ‘Garden of the Immaculate Virgin’ and had a statue in it – and noted some small trees and shrubbery where tools could be concealed.
    I crossed the street and stood directly opposite the church’s scaffolding and the warehouse roof next to it. From this vantage point the gap between them seemed tiny. A temporary plank bridge might do it. Perhaps our crazy idea really was achievable via the roof.
    From that point on there was no holding me back. The intellectual and practical challenges of planning the break-in completely consumed me. Before I knew it, I was handing essays in late and getting in trouble with my professors because I was too busy working on the heist.
    *
    I knew from working in the warehouse that the best stuff was kept in the big room on the top floor. Trucks from the museum were unloaded at the back of the building and their freight, usually packing cases, brought up in the big service elevator. The top-floor storage room was more like a small gallery – I think a dividing wall