Rite of Passage

or; Maximillian J. Caliver, Reluctant Thief.

I slammed the vault door behind me, and stomped angrily though the passageway out of the bank. Charges, check. Fingerprints done. Security footage wiped. I casually flicked the switch on a remote detonator as I strode out of the building’s revolving door, and asked myself not for the first time how the hell I got myself into this line of work.

Oh yeah, that’s right. I didn’t.

--

Fourteen years earlier.

“Happy Birthday, Max!”

The whole family was there, even Nanna. I was excited. I mean, hey. Who wouldn’t be? Balloons, streamers, silly hats... the whole deal.

I hurriedly blew out the candles on my towering chocolate monstrosity of a cake, and grabbed for my first present.

“This one’s an extra special one, Max. It belonged to your great-grandfather”

So not a Transformer then. I kept tearing, a little less enthusiastically. Jeez, did this thing have a lot of paper. At the bottom of a small nest of the stuff rested a wooden case, about four inches long. I opened it carefully, and stared. Sixteen bright metal lockpicks stared back. I looked up quizzically at the assembled family members. They seemed to have got a lot more out of this than I had.

“Cool. Thanks”. I reached for the next present, only to feel my Nanna’s talon-like fingers grasp my wrist.

“‘Cool’? You get handed a thousand years of heritage and you say ‘cool’? Why, in my day-”

“Calm down, Esme. Nobody’s explained any of that to him yet”

“Noone- Noone’s explained? You are a shame to this family! You-”

Needless to say it all went downhill from there.

We stood around the kitchen bench ten minutes later, having sat Nanna on the sofa with a cup of tea, into which I’m sure she slipped any number of stronger concoctions of your own. My dad got down on his knees, and looked at me.

“Max, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

I knew this one.

“An accountant.”

Dad gave a wry smile. Last week it was a real-estate agent, or something equally asinine.

“What if there was something more exciting, which you could do with all of us?”

I looked confused. “What, like, start a cor-por-ay-shun?” That was my new favourite word. I’d learned it yesterday, though where exactly escapes me.

Dad looked at mum. This clearly wasn’t going to plan.

“Um, sure. A family corporation.”

I looked even more confused.

“Look, Maxie. You know how sometimes people expect you to do what your parents did, and what their parents did?”

“Yeah?”

He took a deep breath. “Well, the deCaliver family has one of those. We’re theives. We always have been. The lockpicks on the tenth birthday, the locked chest on the twelfth, the passageway on the fifteenth and the mask on the twentieth.” He recited it like a chant. “Come on, Max, you’ve seen your cousins do it all. Don’t you want to join in?”

Even as a ten year old, I picked up that I wasn’t really being offered a choice here, and that if I persisted with my current weekly dream of accountancy, there would be Consequences.

“Awright. Can we have cake already?”

--

That’s how I ended up here, I thought to myself as detonation charges blew the sides out of a skyscraper behind me. A ten-year-old who wanted cake, and a twelve-year-old being heckled that even his Nanna could pick locks faster than that, and a fifteen year old not knowing whether to rebel against his family or the rest of the world, and a twenty year old with no other life skills, sunk too deep in to do anything about it now.

I dusted explosive residue off my hands and threw the takings into the getaway car, driven my my cousin Stefan, the best getaway driver in the business, who would take them to my Uncle Nate, who could flog anything to anyone.

I got my cake. I kept my Nanna happy. I was upholding tradition. And I was making a killing doing it. And if that meant postponing my dreams of cost-analysis accountancy, well, so be it.

---

Would you believe I literally got this idea from a dream? Specifically, the part with me standing there being heckled by a grandmother - not my real one, mind - that "EVEN NANNA CAN PICK LOCKS FASTER THAN YOU SONNY!". And I thought, what kind of demented family would that be? So I wrote it out, and boy was it depressing.

The moral of this story: Even the coolest things can suck if you get forced into them by your family of professional theives threatening to withhold chocolate cake from you at ten years old.