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site on Ninety-third Street?”
    “All right, I guess.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but once we arrived at the tall sheets of plywood that fenced off the demolition area, she started to perk up a little. The week before, Jeremy and I had found a loose board on one corner. Security around these places is shockingly slack. Every so often I consider writing the mayor of New York and letting him know what a shoddy job the demo crews are doing and that little kids could really get hurt, but that probably wouldn’t be in our best interest.
    We slipped inside. The site was a mess of rubble, of course. The tenement had a blazing fire a few weeks before and had burned down partway. The demolition crew knocked the rest of it down a little while after. There were some real gems scattered around. To date, we had scavenged the motors from a washing machine, a heap of bicycle chains, an old laptop that worked some of the time, half of a pair of handcuffs (no keys), and a really beautiful slab of marble.
    One time, we ran into a young guy who was also hunting there. He looked totally normal. Nice button-down shirt and jeans. He said he liked to furnish his apartment with recycled items. I thought that was a very polite way of saying he was a garbage picker, just like us. He was a pretty friendly guy, and he did give us some advice about new demo sites and a warning about metal scavengers. He said that they we should watch out for them. They were really protective of their sites, because they made a living out of collecting stuff like copper pipes, brass valves, and aluminum heating coils and selling it to scrap metal dealers. He said that they weren’t beyond using violence if they caught you on their sites. That scared the heck out of me, but it made Jeremy even more eager to go scavenging. She liked anything that might pose bodily danger.
    Back home, we dumped our haul in my room. Mom wasn’t home yet—she never gets home before six thirty—and Honey’s back teeth were swimming she had to pee so badly, so first thing I did was take her for a walk. Honey is a pit bull that Mom found in front of our apartment building one evening. We named her Honey so that she wouldn’t seem quite so scary to people, but it never really worked. In the elevator people press themselves up against the opposite wall and give her the evil eye. She doesn’t seem to care. She wags her tail at them anyway. She’s so easygoing that she never fusses when I put the Crap Catcher on her. It’s one of my first inventions. Fairly primitive—a strap around the waist and a loop fitted under her butt, made of wire slipped into a sleeve of plastic. Attached to the loop is a tiny motor, scavenged from an electric shaver I found at a demo site on Seventy-seventh Street. What you do is you fasten a plastic bag around the loop with a rubber band and walk your dog. When she does her thing, you push one button on a handheld remote and the band cinches together quickly. The rubber band pings off the loop and the plastic bag falls to the ground, ready for you to pick up and put in the garbage can. It works beautifully. You wouldn’t believe how many people stop me in the street and ask where they can buy one. The only weak spot is the rubber band pinging off somewhere.
    After I walked Honey, I opened the fridge and found a plate on the bottom shelf with an apple, a slim slice of cheese, and a handful of zucchini sticks. My afternoon snack. I devoured it in two minutes flat. It made zero impact on the empty hole in my stomach where the three Oreos should have been.
    I knew where the package of Oreos was kept. The cabinet above the refrigerator. My mom calls it the Stop-and-Think Cabinet. In order to reach it, you have to find the phone book and the dictionary, drag over a chair, put the phone book on the chair, the dictionary on top of the phone book, then balance yourself on top of the phone book and the dictionary in order to reach the shelf. All that dragging