PLUR-MAkKikM, just outside Honolulu, HI

Paul Clair Macon and Paula Claire Akron set in the living room of Ted Michaels, their legal guardian. Their heads were bowed, and they were frowning. Ted was there, as were several of their friends’ parents. These parents were glaring at them, and even Ted seemed unhappy with his charges.

Paul and Paula had been caught. Their friend Neil had stolen six dollars from his parents and, when confronted, had sang like the proverbial canary. His parents had quickly contacted the parents of seven other children and then those parents, en masse, had come to PLUR-MAkKikM to take the matter up with Ted Michaels.

The child-couple had hemmed and hawed and hedged, but they didn’t lie, and when it became clear they were truly busted they confessed all. All that they themselves were guilty of; they did not implicate any other child, and so Annette, Edwin, Sally, Fredrick and Mickey were still unsuspected.

Twenty-four hours earlier these children had been smiling, laughing, and having a great time. Nobody actually had sex, but things went on in that treehouse which I can’t share with you. So, I’m going to REDACT all those juicy details, and you’ll just have to use your own perverted imaginations for those.

One boy who had not been there was Neil. He had blown most of his allowance, and so had stolen six dollars from his parents so that he could tip Paula, buy a root beer and, this time, get a special dance. But he wasn’t as careful as he thought he was, and his parents had caught him, and that’s how there was this meeting at PLUR-MAkKikM the next day.

Would you believe that, by the wildest of coincidence, Fred Conyers and Frida Dayton had done the same thing a year earlier? And, they never got caught. Slightly older, slightly sneakier.

Music had blared through the clubhouse and fifteen year old Frida danced naked as Mike and Edward tossed quarters into a hat. The song ended and Frida picked up the hat, blew the two boys a kiss, and slipped into the stairwell, closing the door behind her as just over a dozen teenagers of similar age applauded loudly.

“Frida will be back after this next song,” Fred shouted, “so grab another drink and get your Abe Lincolns ready if you want a special dance.”

As the DJ, Fred had picked slow songs for between dances and upbeat tunes for the dances them-selves. Songs ranged from 1950s doo-wop to 2010s hip-hop. Several teenagers gave Fred fifty cents each for a Pepsi or a Sprite, and Ryu expressed the concern that five dollars was a lot of money for one song’s worth of dancing.

“In a grown-up strip club,” Fred pointed out, “special dances cost thirty dollars, even more. But we’re kids and we don’t get paid umpteen dollars an hour, so we knock that down to five.”

Ryu rolled that around his head a little. Fred decided to drive the point home.

“Instead of quarters,” he pointed out, “you tip with dollar bills. Every tip is a dollar, and every special dance is thirty or forty dollars. But the good part is there’s more than one dancer; there might be six or eight, and maybe three or four dancing at the same time.”

After considering this, Ryu felt that five dollars to have the pretty teenage girl dance right at him was quite reasonable, and he had his fiver out as soon as Frida returned. She was now wearing a bandana headband and carrying a sword, a real one from the looks of it. A song from the 1980s, “The Warrior,” played as the naked teen performed a dramatic series of swooping, slashing, circular motions, switching hands and back again as her admiring audience kept well back. She then handed the weapon to Fred, who leaned it against a bookcase.

“Anybody want a special dance?” she called.

Ryu took her up on the offer and she took him to a spot behind where a tree grew right up through the floor. The kids liked this: gave it a real treehouse aesthetic. The other teenagers could see, but they had to stay at least six feet away, and the tree sometimes blocked their view of Frida, if only a little bit.

The boy sat in a chair and as a new song began Frida did her best burlesque, shaking her small but growing breasts in the boy’s grinning face before lying on the floor, splaying her legs wide apart so that he would miss nothing she had. When she sat on his lap and ground her hips there were calls of “OOOOO!!” from those watching. Ryu reached his hand out to touch the dancing girl, but then decided against it. Frida, however, took the teen’s hand in her own and placed it against one puffy nipple, rocking her chest back and forth. When the other boys saw that, many of them dug out their own five dollar bills. Just getting to see her a little closer might not be worth twenty quarters but having her in your lap and getting to touch her boobs very much was.

A year later at PLUR-MAkKikM Takeo’s mother was speaking.

“If he wants to see titty dancers when he grows up, well there won’t be anything I can do about that. But right now, he’s still my little boy, and I don’t appreciate having his ... carnal nature exploited like this.”

“I remember being eleven,” Neil’s father said. “I admit that I snuck looks at my uncle’s Penthouse. Wouldn’t be surprised if Neil’s done the same. Haven’t caught him at it, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I even played doctor once or twice. But no kids in my neighborhood ever opened a damned strip club and danced naked for money. Just what are you teaching these children, Michaels?”

“Book-keeping, I hope,” Ted answered. “And it’s either ‘Mr. Michaels’ or ‘Ted,’ by the way. I don’t call you ‘Spade,’ after all.”

Ted turned to the children.

“Just how much money did you make at this little enterprise?”

Paul answered, “Out records are up in the treehouse.”

“One of you go fetch them,” Ted ordered, and Paul offered to be the one to do so. After he had left the legal guardian turned to Paula.

“I assume you did the actual book-keeping?”

The little girl nodded. “Yes. I handled all the numbers and danced. Paul was the DJ, bartender, and made sure other boys at school knew about the club.”

“Bartender?” George’s mother asked.

Ted asked, “Was there any alcohol?”

“No,” Paula answered. “How were we supposed get any alcohol? We didn’t even think of that. Really, if we’d thought of it, we wouldn’t’ve done it, because as soon as some kid goes home drunk, boom, there goes the secret.”

“Thank God for small favors,” muttered Billy’s mother.

Before long Paul was back with the paperwork, and Ted looked it over.

“It looks,” he pointed out, “that you lost money on soft drinks.”

“Yes,” Paula nodded. “They were a loss leader. We made it back in dancing.”

Ted was surprised. “Loss leader?”

The little girl rolled her eyes. “I know you know what it means.”

Yes, he knew; Ted had explained it to her a month ago when she’d asked how a local fast food place could have one cent French fries and not go out of business. So, the little girl had been paying attention.

“I don’t think I know what it means,” George’s father spoke up.

“A loss leader,” Ted explained, “is when a business offers something for less than cost, as a way to bring in additional customers. In this case, the club was losing money on every Coke or Pepsi they sold, but kids who came for the cheap drinks then spent money on the dancer, and so the club turned a profit overall.”

“Oh Jesus Christ.”

Ted didn’t know which mother had said that, but in truth he was about ready to call on Divine Powers himself. This was very bad, and it might be more than he could do to keep it from getting worse.

Ted thought it over as Billy’s mother demanded punishment. Ted knew that a stern lecture wouldn’t be enough, and in truth the kids had done wrong, wrong enough to warrant some penalty. He had, over the past two years, had to deal out small punishments, like “no dessert tonight” or “no bicycle tomorrow,” but that hadn’t been often, and this was bigger. In part, it was bigger because of the other parents, parents who had no reason to be lenient or, more importantly, quiet.

“The first part of the punishment,” the legal guardian stated, “is that the club is hereby shut down. There will be no more loss leader selling of soft drinks, no more tipping the dancer, no more lap dances ... There were lap dances?”

Paula’s expression told him that there were. Ted took another look at the papers, covered in Paula Akron’s neat tiny print.

“It seems,” the legal guardian said, “that you brought in two hundred thirty-three dollars and seventy-five cents, and cleared a profit of one hundred eighty-seven dollars and thirteen cents.”

The gathered parents murmured; this was better money than mowing lawns.

Paula nodded. “That sounds right.”

“Too bad you’re not going to be able to keep any of it.”

The look on both kids’ faces was, Ted hoped, satisfying to the parents gathered about.

“The most important thing about punishment,” Ted was saying, “is that the wrong-doer isn’t allowed to profit from the crime. If I stole Mr. Spade’s car, the most important thing isn’t how long I spend in jail, it’s that I don’t get to keep the car. In this case, the most important thing isn’t how long you’re grounded, and by the way you are SO grounded, the important thing is that you don’t get to keep the money.”