NOTICE
This is a notice that the sale of the property, plant, and equipment—Wild Nights Bookstore building and lot—is under consideration with the West Garden Property Group and will likely be finalized in the next fourteen days. Please consider yourself advised.
Regards,
Archer Hunt Jr.
Owner, Hunt Properties, LLC
Tempus Fugit …
Leave it to Archer Hunt to not even put a greeting at the top of a message that told his oldest and most senior employee that she was going to be without a job and out on her ass in two weeks. Attached to the email was a series of documents—unsigned—but all looking like pretty official contracts. The valuation of the property that the bookstore sat on was blacked over. Like Jo deserved to be given two weeks’ notice to find a new job but not to understand the basic underlying numbers and monetary value of what she was being sold out for.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
Eli was used to this by now. He was under no illusions that the world was a fair place. He had accepted that as true and real for as long as he could remember. The world was an unholy and random dumpster fire, so stick it to the man as much as you can.
The problem was, Eli realized, that he kind of was the man. Or, at least, he very easily could become the man in, like, twenty years. He had all the traits that could boost him into that vaunted position. Fair hair and the kind of chubby-cheeked smile that—combined with the fact that he was a straight white dude—meant people just believed him, without really trying. Meant that people honestly wanted to help him, in whatever his endeavors were. Remove roadblocks rather than set them up in his way. Hell, courtesy of his eighteenth birthday, his petty criminal record had been wiped clean. Nobody in Chicago had even considered trying a fourteen-year-old white boy with curly blond hair as an adult for a string of grocery and convenience store beer thefts. He was just a boy to them, being a boy. And while maybe he deserved a little reprimand, he didn’t really deserve a permanent record.
That was how Eli knew that life wasn’t fair. It had never been fair to him. It had been unreasonably kind to him. He had to make up for that somehow.
Eli put down the vape pen. Playtime was over. Really, he had two choices now.
1. Help Jo make a case for what Wild Nights Bookstore was worth.
2. Give up and go back to being as complacent as he’d ever been.
That was it. Help out the person who had given him a real chance—back when Eli’s record was still a thing that kept him from being hired—or give up now. He could easily go back to being the kid who thought stealing six-packs was the best way to show the world that he saw it for what it was.
Or he could save the day. Like the real Batman.
Eli started searching for commercial property values in Wicker Park. He whistled when he saw how many zeros gentrification added to a purchasing price. Eli wasn’t sure how to compete with that. But maybe if he could make a case for a strong, sustainable business, Archer Hunt wouldn’t want to sell.
Eli started searching through the office, looking for old invoices. He found them—daily takes stretching back to the nineties—in a series of binders on the bookshelf behind the desk. All the numbers were down, year over year. For decades. Not that these were exact data. But he could see the downward trend as he looked. The worst of it was recent, too. Almost a year ago to the date, the numbers started to really and truly spiral downward. The more Eli flipped through, the more he realized that there wasn’t a real case for Wild Nights staying open. If Eli just took the last twelve months of data, he’d probably make an excellent case for closing the store down permanently.
Eli had been right. Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium was going under.
He went back to the laptop. Maybe Jo had found more info than he had. She must have put together her own case of what the business was worth, or at least what the finances looked like. Maybe she had found something that Eli had missed.
Eli opened up Jo’s calendar on the web browser. He looked over the week. Jo had, in all her anal-retentive glory, made a note on her calendar for this Friday—
last day of full staff.
It was such a simple note. No caps lock. No exclamation points. Just a direct statement of fact marked into her calendar.
Here was the thing—Jo had taken Eli in and given him a chance when nobody else would. She’d hired a kid with a record, and instead of yelling at Eli and lecturing him, she had handed him responsibility and told him to step up to the plate. She’d made this space—Wild Nights—a place for the art kids like AJ and the book nerds like Rinn and the angry girls like Imogen. Even Daniella Korres didn’t mind working at Wild Nights, and Danny was disdainful of nearly everything. She rolled her eyes whenever Eli called her Danny. True, when he’d started calling her that, it was kind of a joke. But by now, he couldn’t help it. She had white-blond hair and a heart made out of stone. If anyone could have been a real-life Mother of Dragons, it was Daniella Korres. But she was also more than a fictional queen, so Eli elongated her name when he said it, made sure it sounded like he’d added an extra n and made the nickname her own.
And Jo, she had made the bookstore a haven. She had made it theirs, even though none of them were at all alike, except for the fact that some piece of them didn’t fit in anywhere else. Wild Nights couldn’t just close. Staff couldn’t be let go on Friday, without warning. Jo couldn’t suddenly not have a job. It wasn’t right.
Eli opened a new tab on the browser and started searching. The patron saints of the internet had to tell him something useful.
Because what to do was tough to say.
The first problem was—Eli didn’t have any money.
And he didn’t come from money. And even if he had, given how much trouble he’d gotten into in the past, he doubted his mom would have forked over any funds, no matter how legitimate Eli’s reasons. After her last desperate bid to take Eli back to church had failed to produce any results, Eli’s mom had largely washed her hands of him. That was the problem with being found out as a good liar—people couldn’t trust that Eli was telling the truth rather than telling a good lie in a true-sounding way.
Eli started typing the names of large banking institutions into the browser bar of a series of new tabs. It was a desperate bid for information and resources. Usually the accounts logged you out.
Usually.
But Jo—oh God, Jo—had left herself signed into her password manager. Eli could practically envision her clicking Trust This Device and not giving it a second thought. He found an account where two-step verification hadn’t been turned on and he was, miraculously, in. It was a petty-cash account, but Eli had money to play with now. He had resources.
He cracked his knuckles. He opened a new tab.
What could he do with nine thousand dollars?
As he searched, he found a staggering number of pyramid schemes. Weight-loss supplements. Protein powders. Laxative teas. Tupperware. Makeup. The inventory was irrelevant, really. But the key was to buy volume and then trick someone else into buying more volume.
Eli wanted to get rich quick with a low-capital investment here. Not get stuck with massive overhead costs. The more he searched, the more he saw that all those multilevel marketing schemes cost people money. Besides, if he was going to buy inventory, it had to look like something the bookstore could legitimately sell. Nobody came to Wild Nights looking for detox-laxative tea. At least not intentionally.