AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What do I think?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not that.”
“Look, I don’t know what to think,” I admitted. “So you’re going to tell me why the fuck you have four grand in an envelope taped to the back of our toilet.”
She crossed her arms over her chest in silence.
“Waverly, where did it come from?”
Waverly bit her lip.
I knew that look. It was the look she always had right before she spilled the beans about a long-term lie she’d been telling.
“Let’s go for a drive, and I’ll show you.”
I let Waverly drive. I was too angry to get behind the wheel, and my sister was eerily calm. Calm and confident in a way I’d never seen before.
We drove into the industrial part of town where all the old brick and cement warehouses were. We passed shirtless men working on muscle cars, punks spray painting graffiti on brick walls, and homeless in groups from one block to the next. A couple of skater kids were doing tricks on their boards, one of them with a blunt hanging from his mouth.
Waverly turned down an alley of sorts and parked the car.
“Please tell me what the hell is going on here,” I said, climbing out of the car.
She held her keys in her hand as we walked down the alley to a small warehouse. There was an old, rusted steel door to get into the building, but there was also a rolling gate large enough for a car to drive through. Waverly looked at her keyring, found the one she wanted, and unlocked the door. She stepped inside ahead of me and flipped the light on.
The smell of sawdust and varnish hit me immediately. It was the scent that had been on her clothes, I realized.
There were a few pieces of furniture scattered about the warehouse floor, along with sanders of different types, tools I didn’t recognize, and paint brushes.
“I must be slow on the uptake here because this almost looks like a furniture warehouse,” I said.
“That’s exactly what it is.”
I blinked stupidly. “You’re making furniture? Waverly, what the—”
She snorted a laugh, interrupting me. “No. I’m not that skilled. We don’t make the furniture, we furniture flip.”
“Come again?”
“We furniture flip. Jess, Dylan and I find old furniture, either for free that’s about to be picked up for trash, or we get it online. We get it into Jess’s Mom’s SUV and we haul it here. Then we wood putty any holes and make repairs, sand it, paint it or stain it and then sell it. We pay for the warehouse—but it belongs to Dylan’s uncle so he’s cut us a deal.”
“And you’ve done enough of this in the last few weeks to make four thousand dollars?” I asked in shock.
“No. Not in the last few weeks. The last few months.”
“The tutoring sessions,” I said in realization.
She nodded. “I had to convince Dylan it was a better use of our time, but yeah. Mom had no idea what I was really doing, of course. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret once you were home more. It was only a matter of time before you found out.”
“How did you ever get the idea for this?” I asked.
“Saw it on YouTube.”
“Of course,” I said dryly.
“And it didn’t look that hard. And you know what? It’s fun. The hunting for furniture is fun, then turning an old piece of junk into something beautiful is fun, and making money is the funnest.”
“No doubt. Whose tools are these?”
