“I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.”
Eyes that matched mine locked onto me. “But you’re not.”
I could see the wheels turning in his mind, and I didnotlike it.
I scoffed. “Just because I know how to stay out of trouble doesn’t mean I’m a good liar. And I don’t know how to play poker.”
Joel’s brows lifted. “Not poker. Blackjack. You could learn.” He pushed up to sit straight but groaned in agony the moment his knee shifted.
His complexion turned an alarming shade of green that had me reaching for a trash can.
Joel swatted it away and looked up at me. “You could play for me. Your semester is over. You’re on break.”
“I don’t know the first thing about?—”
“Come on, Mia,” he begged. “You know as well as I do that all it takes is you looking at something for five minutes to memorize it.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with gambling.”
“Blackjack is just probability. You could learn basic strategy in an hour. And with your idiotic memory?—”
“Eideticmemory,” I said, drolly correcting the way he used to tease me when we were kids.
But Joel was dead serious. “You could count cards.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
Joel shook his head, but I didn’t exactly believe him. “Using your brain isn’t illegal. If you get caught, they can kick you out and refuse to let you back in, but it’s not like they can put you in jail. And you’re a girl. I doubt they’d beat you up.”
“Youdoubt?” I shrieked.
“This is my best shot, Mia.” For the first time, desperation flooded his voice. “It’ll be easy. You’re just playing cards.”
“Joel—”
“What do you have to lose?”
I swallowed. “My brother.”
Saturday, May 17 | 7:34 p.m.
“I can’t believeI’m doing this,” I grumbled as I scrolled through the notes on my phone. I had spent the last twenty-four hours doing a deep dive into the rules of blackjack and how to count cards.
Honestly, learning basic strategy really wasn’t that hard. Had it been under different circumstances, it probably would have been fun. If I got us out of this mess, I might even work it into next semester’s syllabus. My students would probably get a kick out of it.
Joel had played the part of the dealer, practicing different scenarios and even switching up the deck mid-game.
Card counting wasn’t going to be the hard part. I rarely mentioned it to folks in casual conversation, but Ididhave an eidetic memory. It made remembering which cards had been dealt already and were out of play easy. I could recall hundreds of cards, in order. That, paired with my statistics background, I was basically a blackjack supercomputer.
But the more Joel told me about tricks dealers used to make sure the house always wins, the more it solidified for him that this was the plan. But the more I learned about the world of casinos, the more I was sure the house would win.
Still, I couldn’t let Joel go down without a fight. I’d never forgive myself for it.
“Remember, nicer casinos use cameras with AI systems to automatically count cards for the entire table. It flags security if it notices you matching the system too much, so it’s okay to lose occasionally. Just make sure you come out on top at the end of the night.”
“Lose. Right.” I let out a sharp breath. “I don’t think I’ll have totryto lose.”
Joel shifted in the passenger’s seat. Dripping ice packs were wrapped tightly around his knee. Thankfully, a neighbor had lent him a pair of crutches.
