Read Online Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger - Free Book Online

with glassware and towering vases from Planet Warehouse.
    We found the jelly-bean display under a big glass cube in the main entryway to the mall. The jar itself was at least four feet tall, corked and completely filled with colored jelly beans. It rested on a small podium, and a collection of decorative moneybags—small white sacks marked with dollar signs—had been piled around the base. To one side was a small treasure chest spilling forth fake gold coins, and on the other side was a stack of fake gold bars. Behind it all was a cardboard rainbow arcing down into a pot of more gold.
    As displays go, it was overkill—too much stuff packed too closely together. But it had definitely attracted a crowd. People were staring in at the jar with eyes squinted and fingers pointed, whispering to themselves, trying to count the thousands of jelly beans. Others were busy scratching their guesses on little slips of paper, then stuffing them into the big box coveredwith dollar-bill wrapping paper.
    Curtis went over to read the contest rules, which were posted on a stand near the display.
    “What did you mean when you said that we wouldn’t be guessing?” I asked Victor.
    “We won’t be,” he said. “We’ll know the right number of jelly beans. I think so, anyway.”
    “How?” I said.
    “It’s really a very simple math equation.”
    Curtis returned. “Bad news,” he said. “Since we’re under eighteen, we’ll need our parents’ permission to collect the money.”
    “I bet if we ask Dave’s Uncle Brad, he’ll let us use his name,” Victor said.
    “Only one guess per household,” Curtis went on.
    “We’ll only need one guess,” Victor said.
    “They’re accepting entries up until Wednesday night and announcing the winner on Saturday morning,” Curtis said.
    “Oh, we’ll definitely know by then,” Victor said. He was growing more confident by the minute.
    “How?” I said. “You say we won’t be guessing, that it’s just a simple math equation. But how exactly are wegoing to know the right number of jelly beans?”
    Victor leaned in close to Curtis and me. “It’s a question of volume. We just calculate the capacity of the jar, then divide it by the space occupied by a single jelly bean.”
    “But we can’t measure the jar,” I pointed out. “It’s behind glass.”
    “Correct,” Victor said. “But we can measure a single jelly bean. We can buy some right here at the mall, at the candy shop. With that jelly bean as a reference point, I can then write a simple computer program that will calculate the volume of the entire jar, which I’ll then divide by the size of the jelly bean. That should tell us almost exactly how many jelly beans are inside the jar. We just need to take a picture of the jar.”
    “Ah,” I said. “But you sold your digital camera in our garage sale two weeks ago, right?”
    “Right,” he said. But then he smiled again. “Which is why I borrowed my mom’s.” He patted a lump in his pocket. “Cover me.”
     
     
    As we were leaving, we ran into two girls we knew from school, Lani Taito and Haleigh Gilder. Victor hashad a thing for Lani since about the sixth grade; he can barely get a word out whenever she’s around. It’s pretty clear she has a crush on him too, because she whispers around him despite the fact that she’s not a particularly shy person. But even though they are both totally hot for each other, neither one of them has ever done anything about it. They’ll go on like this, I am certain, until their senior year, when they’ll finally get together the night of the graduation party. Then they’ll stay up till morning, talking about how stupid it was that it took them so long to get together.
    Curtis, meanwhile, has his own weird relationship with Haleigh. For one thing, he always kicks into slacker mode around her, even though he usually has energy to burn. They tend to insult each other too, in a way that you just know means they like each other.