It was the twelfth of December, and the cold in Medford was still bearable with the right winter clothes on. No snow yet, just a biting chill in the air. Georgie and I stood out on the curb waiting for a potential buyer after he'd called ahead, figuring it was better to be visible outside than risk him driving right past the house without noticing it.
I spotted them approaching from down the street, and Georgie waved them over the second he recognized the truck. The guy turned out to be someone I knew from school, a big kid off the football team, riding along with his father in the passenger seat.
I'd told Georgie early on to spread the word about the car around school and the neighborhood, since between the two of us and Dad being a well-known teacher in town, people already trusted that we weren't running some kind of scam. That reputation alone did a lot of the heavy lifting before we'd even shown the car to a single person.
Word got around faster than I expected. Within just two days we had more offers than I'd anticipated, more than I really knew what to do with. Fords carried a certain reputation around here, popular, reliable, easy to find parts for, which only made the whole thing move faster once people heard we actually had one running.
I had to explicitly tell Georgie not to invite every random kid who just wanted to kick the tires and waste an afternoon without any real intention of buying.
Tom had come by the house the day before to look the car over, and it was obvious right away that he was serious about it. Georgie, without so much as blinking, quoted him an asking price of forty-two hundred dollars, a number that caught me off guard since Appraisal had pegged the car's realistic value closer to three thousand.
Real life, it turned out, didn't always match the numbers so neatly. It depends on the region and popularity of the vehicle as well. Sometimes you got lucky. Sometimes you didn't. For example foreign second hand cars were worth less than listed on appraisal because of the unavailability of the parts around here.
Once we'd wrapped up the last of the actual work, I remembered swinging by Herschel's place to get his honest read on where we should be pricing it. He told me thirty-five hundred to four thousand was a completely fair market range for a car in the shape we'd gotten it into, and he didn't bother hiding how surprised he was at both the speed and the quality of what we'd managed to pull off.
Since Tom was genuinely serious about buying, he let us know his father would want to come take a look himself before anything got finalized, which made sense given Tom was still only seventeen and needed somebody with actual authority to sign off on a purchase this size. We agreed to have everything ready to show the following afternoon.
"Hello, Mr. Johnson. Good day to buy a car," Georgie said, switching on his effortless salesman charm and turning every bit of attention straight toward the man clearly holding the actual decision-making power. He shook Mr. Johnson's hand firmly, then stepped back and let him do most of the talking from there.
"So this is it, huh," Mr. Johnson said, circling the car slowly. "Looks good on the outside, at least. Keys? Let me take it for a drive."
Georgie handed them over without hesitation.
Tom rode along beside his father, and by the time the two of them pulled back into the driveway a few minutes later, I could already read the outcome on both their faces. Tom was practically beaming, and his father wore the particular kind of quiet smile that told me the car had already sold itself before a single number ever got discussed.
Mr. Johnson worked in transport, hauling vehicles for a living, which meant he actually knew a fair amount about cars from years of handling them professionally.
He seemed genuinely impressed as I walked him through everything we'd done, every part we'd replaced and every adjustment we'd made to fine-tune the car beyond its original factory specs.
Still, he couldn't quite shake his skepticism about the fact that two teenagers had done all of it themselves, and he made a point of trying to talk the price down before committing to anything.
"How about thirty-five hundred, since I'm the one taking on the risk here? What if there's some hidden issue with this car nobody's caught yet?" Mr. Johnson said. Tom stood a step behind him, letting his father handle the negotiating, though it was clear from his expression he was hoping this wouldn't fall apart over a few hundred dollars.
I had to give Mr. Johnson credit, his caution was reasonable enough on its face. Still, I was confident in the work we'd put into that car. As far as I was concerned, it was in better shape than anything rolling off a showroom floor, given everything my skill had quietly done to it.
"Mr. Johnson, we're genuinely good at what we do," I said, feeling a flicker of pride I didn't bother hiding. "Here's what I'll offer. If anything breaks down over the next two months, and it isn't something Tom did to cause it, I'll refund you in full. But the price stays at four thousand."
Georgie backed me up without missing a beat, and between the two of us, we managed to hold the line at four thousand. Mr. Johnson counted out the cash and handed it over to Georgie.
After they'd driven off with the car and the signed title in hand, I felt a small pang of something close to sadness watching the Maverick disappear down the street. That feeling didn't last long, though, not with a stack of cash sitting in Georgie's hands to make up for it.
"We're rich, Charlie. Think about everything we could buy with this. Muahahaha," Georgie said, already lost in some daydream about how he planned to spend it.
I snatched the cash out of his hands before he could get too carried away.
"No. We're buying a car first, and this time I've already got something special in mind. Let's go," I said.
We hopped on our bikes and rode straight for a car I'd already had my eye on for a while. Over the past few weeks, I'd made a habit of visiting both dealerships in town whenever Georgie had football practice, quietly running Appraisal over every vehicle I could get close enough to touch. It hadn't taken long before I found exactly what I was looking for.
Samson Motors sat at the edge of town, a modest gravel lot ringed with faded plastic pennant flags snapping in the wind, a couple dozen used cars lined up beneath a hand-painted banner promising low prices and easy financing.
The salesman standing near the office looked less than thrilled to see me walking up, though I couldn't entirely blame him. In his eyes, I was probably just some strange kid who kept showing up to run his hands over every car on the lot without ever actually buying anything.
Georgie and I walked straight over to the car that had caught my attention on an earlier visit, a 1987 Ford Mustang GT 5.0. Despite being barely two years old, it looked worn down well past its age, sitting there under a thin layer of dust with the kind of neglected air that comes from a car nobody wanted to drive anymore.
I rested a hand against the fender, letting Appraisal confirm what I already suspected. This was going to be an easy fix.
Phantom stalling, the kind of maddening electrical gremlin no ordinary mechanic could easily track down without a healthy dose of luck and some fairly specialized diagnostic equipment. For me, it was practically a gift waiting to be unwrapped.
All it really needed was some cosmetic work, a fresh coat of paint, and a few focused hours chasing down the wiring issue. Easy money, if I played my cards right. Cars like this one were about as close to a guaranteed profit as I was likely to find, and I made a mental note to keep an eye out for more of them going forward.
"Wow," Georgie said, staring at the car.
"Tell me about it," I said, just as taken with it myself. In whatever life I'd lived before this one, I'd always dreamed of getting behind the wheel of a Mustang, only to eventually learn that not every country in the world even had roads built for a car like this. This time around, though, I finally had my shot at making that dream real.
I waved the salesman over. He looked thoroughly unimpressed already, probably because he hadn't managed to sell a single car all week.
"Kids, don't waste my time," he said flatly.
"Sir, how much for this one? We're interested," Georgie asked, polite as ever. I'd already told him beforehand that I could fix whatever was wrong with it, and that we should only commit if the asking price came in under twenty-one hundred dollars.
As far as the salesman and the dealership's own mechanic were concerned, this car was a lemon through and through, one neither of them had ever managed to properly diagnose. It had likely come in as a desperate trade from some previous owner terrified of getting stranded on the side of the road again, probably handed a measly fifteen hundred dollars toward their next purchase. Since then, it had just been sitting out back, quietly taking up space nobody wanted to think about.
"Kids," the salesman said, sighing as he looked over at Georgie's obviously eager expression.
"Look, I know this car looks cool, but it'll die on you halfway down the road and won't start back up. It's junk, good for parts and not much else. Don't waste your time, or mine," he said. Credit where it was due, at least he wasn't trying to pull anything shady on us.
"Just give us a number. How much?" I asked, since Georgie looked like he was starting to second-guess himself.
"Two thousand," the salesman said, already turning to walk off.
"Deal," I said.
He spun back around, clearly caught off guard. "What?"
We ended up negotiating him into throwing in a free tow to get the car back to our house, which he was more than happy to arrange the second we actually showed him the cash in hand. Buying cars in this era, I was quickly learning, was refreshingly simple. I couldn't have been happier about it.
____
That evening, just before dinner, the whole family was gathered around the table, plates already half filled, when Mom glanced over at me and asked the question I'd been waiting for all day.
"So how'd it go with that boy? I don't see the car anymore. Did you sell it" she asked, passing the mashed potatoes down the table without looking up.
"Sold it," I said, keeping my tone as casual as I could manage.
Dad's fork paused halfway to his mouth. "Already? To who?"
"Kid named Tom, from school. His dad came by and looked it over first," I said.
"He plays football. Good kid," Dad said, nodding approvingly, like that settled any lingering doubts he might have had.
"And? How much did you get for it?" Mom asked. Narrowing her eyes a bit.
"Four thousand," I said.
The table went dead silent for a second. Georgie, unable to help himself, grinned wide enough to show every tooth he had.
"Four thousand dollars?" Dad repeated, setting his fork down entirely now. "For that car? The one that was sitting in our driveway a month ago looking like it belonged in a junkyard?"
"That's the one," I said.
"Lord have mercy," Meemaw said, letting out a low whistle from her end of the table. "You boys. I'm proud of you, I really am."
"What are you two planning on doing with all that money?" Mom asked, and there wasn't a trace of a smile behind her eyes when she said it, more a kind of braced curiosity than anything approaching relief.
"We already spent some of it," Georgie said, way too eager to let that detail slip before I'd had a chance to ease into it properly.
Mom's eyes narrowed instantly. "Spent it on what, exactly?" she asked, already bracing for something worse than whatever she actually expected to hear.
"Another car," I said simply, and let that sit in the air for a second before continuing. "A Mustang. Got it for a good price."
"You bought another car? Already? Today?" Mom asked, her voice climbing half an octave.
"Yes ma'am," I said.
Dad actually laughed at that, shaking his head slowly. "Well, I suppose if it worked once."
"Mary, let the boy work," Meemaw added. "He's making more sense with money right now than most grown men I know."
Mom still looked a little shell-shocked by the whole thing, glancing between Georgie and me like she was trying to decide whether to be proud or worried, and settling somewhere uneasily in between.
"Boys and their cars. Honestly," Missy said, waving a hand dismissively and going right back to her plate, doing her best impression of a girl thoroughly unimpressed by the whole conversation.
_____
After dinner, the tow truck dropped the Mustang off right on our porch, and the two of us wasted no time pushing it straight into the garage. I couldn't wait to get started. The second the hood was up, I was already elbow-deep in the wiring, tracing the stalling issue back to its source.
It just needed some fine-tuning and a bit of careful rewiring, nothing beyond what I could handle without much trouble. Between the mechanical work and the paint job combined, I figured we could have the whole thing wrapped up inside a week and a half atmost.
This was shaping up to be a good stretch for me.
____________
AN: I have an idea. I plan to make him use his knowledge of future but not for stocks for now. If you know any major events during this era suggest some.
I plan to make him bet on Mike Tysons loss. That fight was something major so he knows about it.
Should I do it or not?