When he was little, Louie had been fascinated by magic. Not that magic wand stuff that you saw in cartoons and kids' movies, but real magic, sleight-of-hand tricks that made coins appear out of nowhere and playing cards travel through a still deck. Even the mediocre magician at Owlivia Hoot's birthday party had captured his interest. No matter how hard he tried, he could never quite figure out how the magicians did their tricks. Unfortunately, Uncle Donald didn't know any magic tricks.
"Besides," Uncle Donald had said, "a magician never reveals his secrets."
Louie's face fell.
"However," Uncle Donald had continued, "we can go to the library and see if they have any books about it."
So they did, and Louie came home with a stack of books promising to teach him those secrets.
Louie practiced and practiced, perfecting each trick in the mirror before debuting them to his brothers and uncle. He performed each trick for his classmates and teachers, earning himself a reputation as a magician and a showman. He even made friends with the school janitor in order to widen his audience. And if anyone asked, he told them he wanted to be a magician when he grew up.
But then Louie got older, and money became tighter, and Uncle Donald had an even harder time holding down each job he took, and Louie's deck of cards fell to the wayside as he tried all he could to help out.
It turned out that the training Louie's fingers had received to do all of those magic tricks lent themselves well to certain other skills. He practiced them in the mirror before debuting them to his brothers and Uncle Donald, though this time, they often didn't know it. Instead of showing these new skills to the kids at school, he used them on crowded streets, carefully plucking a wallet or a watch out of an unsuspecting business man's pocket or a well-dressed lady's purse. He never kept them, of course-what would Louie do with all those credit cards and driver's licenses? Not to mention the wallets themselves-there was no way he could hide all of that from his family. No, instead of keeping them, he'd run after his victim, claiming that he'd just seen them drop their wallet on the pavement and wanted to return it. If he was lucky, the unsuspecting person would give him a few dollars in gratitude. No one seemed to notice when the fridge was a little more well-stocked than it had been that morning or that Louie seemed to have a knack for finding dollars hidden between the couch cushions and on his route home from school.
The other skill Louie's magic tricks had given him was one he only used when things got really bad. When someone got sick and they'd run out of cough medicine, or the fridge was as empty as Uncle Donald's bank account and he wasn't getting paid until Friday, he'd sneak off and swipe a bottle of medicine or a box of granola bars. It helped when his brothers were around-they were good at providing a distraction, and three kids wandering around the store was a little less suspicious than just one. And those granola bars or that cough medicine went a long way in keeping them in one piece until Uncle Donald got paid again.
Still, Louie hated having to steal. It was wrong. Uncle Donald would be so upset if he ever found out. And every time he took something, Louie imagined the employees of the store-minimum wage workers who were just trying to eke out a living, same as them-getting in trouble for it.
Louie couldn't wait for the day when he no longer had to rely on his fingertips to keep his family going.