“I think they were twins.”

“Are you sure?” says my brother.

“I am pretty sure,” I say, then I walk away to our house.

My name is Dave and I am 16. My brother is Sammy, and he is 14 and annoying. But he and I need to rob to make a living because we are poor. We live in the Netherlands and right at this moment, we are thinking of how to rob the twins.

“So I think that we should go down the chimney,” I say.

“Well, I think that we should pick the lock and walk right in,” says Sammy.

“It would be less dangerous if we went through the chimney, because less people would be looking at us.”

“But it would be way easier to get the stuff out through the door than out through the chimney.”

“Well, we could just go through the chimney and then take the stuff out the door.”

Eventually we just end it by flipping a coin, our only coin. He takes tails and I take heads. It lands on tails. So, the next night, we end up picking the door lock, going inside and stealing their TV. When we are coming out, the cops see us.

They say, “Put down the TV and stand there!”

I’m feeling nervous. They’re pointing a gun at us. My heart is beating really fast. They come over and put us in handcuffs and shove us into their cop car. My brother doesn’t say anything. Soon, we get to jail. The next day we find out that we’re going to have a trial.

When we get into the court, we are really nervous. We don’t say anything. We look at the judge and everyone around us. The judge starts talking. The judge asks us to speak.

”We live in a shack with one bed and it’s tiny. We needed money. There’s nothing to really do except flip our only coin. So can you please understand,” my brother and I both say.

At the end of the trial we end up winning and I feel so good and I say to my brother that he should do what I suggest.

“Ok.”

PART TWO

(Sammy’s perspective)

When we are in the twins house it looks like a mansion compared to our house. The T.V. is so big, it is amazing! But when we get caught my heart’s on fire.

I want the T.V. not just for money but also to have something to do. All we can do is flip a coin all day. In the twins house we are talking, “ I think when we get this thing in the house we should sell the next day,” says my brother.

“I think that we should keep it at home and watch T.V. whenever we want!” I say.

“We will flip when we get home,” says my brother.

I wish I could just sit down on the bed in our house and watch T.V. I’d watch any show. I’d watch the news to see if people are trying to find us and put us in jail. After I get the T.V., maybe the next night we could get something different and disguise to sell it. I wish I could have a big house with anything I wanted to do and a lot of money and a car.

We get caught, and we find out we’re getting a trial and after the trial we end up winning but we have to give back the T.V.

We are thinking about robbing a different place with different people. But it has to be smaller so we can bring it back more easily. Maybe a little phone or something. We are nervous, because if we get caught, we’ll most likely not win a trial because we’ll have been caught for the second time.

I think we should wait a little longer, but my brother doesn’t. I wish my brother would always agree with me and do what I say. But after that trial I agreed to do what he said.

We’re thinking of robbing some place with a brother and sister because there’s probably more stuff there than if it was an only child. We walk and take the subway a couple times until we end up at the home. The parents are out, so it is just the brother and sister. The brother ends up awake and comes down the stairs and sees us there and we say, “We are friends of your sisters.” He goes back upstairs and we take some of their phones and leave the house. When we get home, we take the phones out and I say, “When are we going to get a charger?”

My brother says, “We will soon!”
“Ok,” I say.

I think we should go to a different place because if they do see us, they’ll know we’re not friends since we stole from them.

I wish sometimes that we could be a regular family. We could live in a regular townhouse and not have to rob people to survive and we could hang out with friends.

Well anyway, I think that in a couple of weeks we should get some chargers.

A couple weeks later, we rob a family with an only child, because all we need is a charger and it’s far away from the other family we robbed. But we have to cross the ocean to get there. We want to go far away from our neighborhood so it will seem like someone else had done it. We sell one of the phones to get a raft and an oar. We sell Dave’s phone, so we’re going to share my phone now. We get the raft and ask them to inflate it there and we bring it home. The next night we go out on the ocean, which is pretty dangerous in a teensy little blow up raft.

We feel like we are going to fall into the ocean and die. Dave says, “I want to sell the phone charger and the phone to get money so we could get a big home to live in.”

“But I want to keep the phone and the phone charger to entertain ourselves!”

“Well then how are we going to get the money to get food and have a bigger house?”

“First we should start with something more entertaining than flipping a coin!” I say.

“We’ll decide when we get home.”

A big wave comes and flips us over. We lose the oar. We get back on the raft and we have to paddle back with our hands. We feel like we are icecubes. We think that we will try it the next day and sell our other phone to get more oars. When we get back to our house I say, “Do you think we should really sell our phone? We could just rob around here and not sell our phone to get a phone charger. I think that we should just get a phone charger around here.”

Dave says, “I think we should get the phone charger in the neighborhood but that we should sell it after.”

I say, “We’ll decide now.”

So we flip a coin and he wins.

I feel sad, because I just want to entertain myself. I start thinking that my brother could rob a place while I rob another one so we can get more stuff at the same time.

The next day, we walk around and talk quietly about which places we’re going to rob tonight. We decide we’re going to rob a pretty big house with a lot of fancy carvings on the outside. It has a really nice prickly lawn. Dave’s going to rob this one. I’m going to rob a regular townhouse with two kids.

I feel like it will be unfair, since my brother gets to rob a big fancy mansion and I’m just robbing a regular town house.

Dave’s Perspective

Tonight I will be robbing this nice place and Sammy’s going to be robbing a regular townhouse because he wants to keep the stuff so he can get a phone and phone charger. I think we should just sell all of it, but he’ll have a phone and phone charger and then we’ll sell the rest.

When I get to the house I’m robbing, I climb up the roof and then go through the chimney and then come out of the chimney and I see this beautiful gold-lined and velvety red wallpaper. I see a really big flatscreen T.V. and a really nice kitchen with a marble floor and in the living room there are a bunch of antique couches and another huge flat screen T.V. There’s a huge bureau with a whole bunch of electronic stuff. It’s around midnight, and I keep it dark because I think that the dad and kid are home. I’m having a hard time deciding what I’m going to take and what I’m going to leave. I can’t take a T.V. because I don’t have a helper. So I decide I’m going to take two phones, a phone charger, an iPad and an iPad charger. I fit everything in my pockets that I could and then I carry the rest out the door.

I go out and I see Sammy coming out of his townhouse with a phone and phone charger and an iPad, just no iPad charger.

We run down the block and I get inside the house, but Sammy doesn’t.

SAMMY

I got caught by the cops again! I’m thinking about what I saw in the house. I saw toys on the floor and family pictures on the wall and I felt sad. I miss my parents. I wish I had a big happy family, even if we had to live a little shack.

I am in the same jail cell as I was in when we were caught the first time. They come in the next day and say, “You are going to be hanged and then shot.”

I look at the two guards that came to talk to me.

“Follow us,” they say.

I follow them outside to a huge crowd. I can see Dave in the crowd. He’s crying. I see three ropes. Two smaller ones for the hands and one for the head. The sun feels hot, I’m sweating. I hear cheering and crying. My body is collapsing. They put me into the ropes. There is a guy who is just about to shoot me. I feel a burning pain.

Dave

I’m watching and crying and I don’t know who’s going to rob with me and I’m going to miss him a lot. I see the bullet go into him and x’s in his eyes and he’s gone–gone–gone!!

I go home and jump on my bed and start crying. I start playing on my iPad so I can get a little bit happier. I try to forget for a moment, but I can’t. I wish I didn’t have to rob anymore.

THE END