The Emptiest-Hill Millionaire
It took Kabir a moment to name what was wrong. Then he had it.
The hill had gone quiet.
The line was gone, because everyone had already paid and slid, or had run out of cards, and a kid with no cards is a kid at the bottom of the hill, looking up, not sledding. The whole crescent was down there, at the flat cold bottom, out of money, watching the two richest boys in Moose Jaw stand alone at the top of the best hill in the world with nobody to share it.
“Why isn’t anyone sliding,” said Kabir.
“They’re broke. You took all the cards.”
“But the hill’s empty.”
“You own an empty hill,” said Aarav. “Congratulations. It’s the emptiest hill in town. You’re the emptiest-hill millionaire in Saskatchewan.”
Down at the bottom, a small kid named Nita, who had spent her one card an hour ago, sat on her sled and watched the top of the hill she could no longer afford. Not crying. Just watching, the way you watch a thing that has been fenced off from you for reasons you are too small to fight.
Kabir knew that look. It was the look of a kid on the wrong side of a fence, and this time he was the one who had built the fence, for a box of cards he could not even play.
Kabir looked at the silent hill, and the crowd of card-less kids at the bottom, and the box of a hundred and forty somethings, and felt the specific dissatisfaction of a boy who has gotten exactly what he asked for and discovered it was the wrong thing. An empty hill was not a hill. It was just a slope with a rich boy on it.
“This is a bad hill now,” he announced. “I made it bad. A full hill is the best thing there is and an empty hill is nothing, and I traded one for the other for a box of cards I can’t even play.” He picked up the box. “Aarav. We’re going to have the worst going-out-of-business sale in history.”
What Kabir meant to do was give the cards back, one careful handful at a time, in an orderly way, with a new and better sign.
What actually happened was Biscuit.
Because at that exact moment Mr. Doerksen came along the top path in his big coat, walking his exchange student, and Biscuit, who was a dog, and who had spent his whole hungry life until recently believing that all boxes contained food, saw a boy holding a box, and did what any reasonable dog does about a box.
He took it.
He took it and he ran, down Coulee Hill, the best hill in Moose Jaw, a mop-coloured streak with a shoebox in his mouth and a hundred and forty hockey cards fountaining out behind him into the wind, and the entire card-less crowd at the bottom looked up and saw money, actual money, their money, raining down the best hill in the world, free, and the hill erupted.
Every kid in the crescent went up that hill at once, screaming, diving, sledding, grabbing cards out of the snow and the air, and Biscuit ran through all of it delighted, having started the best game he had ever been part of, and the tollbooth empire of Kabir Gill ended the way all empires end, which is suddenly, and in the snow, and with everybody having a wonderful time.
Kabir sat down at the top and watched his fortune become a blizzard and his empty hill become the fullest hill in the history of Moose Jaw, and he was, Aarav noted, grinning like he’d won something.
“You lost everything,” said Aarav, sitting down beside him.
“I got the hill back,” said Kabir. “Look at it. It’s a party.” He watched Biscuit tear past with the empty box, chased by eleven laughing children. “That dog is the best treasurer we ever had. He gave it all back in one go. It took him nine seconds.”
Down at the bottom, Nita had a fistful of cards she had not paid for and her sled already pointed back uphill, climbing for another run, and the fence Kabir had built was gone, buried under a hundred and forty units of we-don’t-know and the boots of every happy kid in the crescent.
Down at his own fence, Mr. Doerksen leaned and watched his dog run a whole hillside of children ragged, and did a thing the crescent had not seen him do in years, which was laugh, out loud, in the cold, at nothing that had cost anybody a single card.