How does Jamie acquire his money in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
Claudia Kincaid has made the fateful decision to run away from home. She divulges her escape plan to Jamie, her second youngest brother, with whom she plans to run away. Jamie feels rather flattered that Claudia wants to take him along for the ride. It makes him feel rather important.
Once he's on board with the escape plan, Jamie is all ears; he wants to know all the details. Claudia tells him that they're going to take off on a Wednesday, which is music lesson day. This will give Claudia the opportunity to take her violin out of its case, which can then be filled with clothes; Jamie will do the same with his trumpet case.
As well as clothes, the Kincaid siblings are going to need to take some money with them. It turns out that Jamie has quite a lot of money stashed away; twenty-four dollars and forty-three cents, to be precise.
Apparently, he made all that money from gambling. Every Friday, he and Bruce play cards, and Bruce pays him for every card Jamie has more than Bruce. And as Jamie always ends up with more cards than Bruce at the end of a game, he manages to make quite a tidy little sum.
How does Jamie earn extra money in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
While Claudia saves money every week for her grand escape, Jamie has been saving money to buy a transistor radio (which he succeeds in doing), and he has savings leftover. Jamie has saved money by playing the card game War with his friend Bruce for money. Each day on the bus ride home from school, Jamie and Bruce play an ongoing game of War, which involves breaking a deck of cards into two piles and flipping over a card from each deck. Whoever has the higher card, wins. At the end of each day, Bruce and Jamie split and agree not to shuffle their cards. Each winning card is worth .02, and each ace is worth .05. Jamie has been doing this for long enough to purchase the transistor radio, as well as to save $24.43, and this is perhaps the main reason that Claudia has selected him to accompany her on her adventure.
When Claudia and Jamie are low on cash while hiding in the Met, Jamie considers playing the guards at War for money, but Claudia tells him that this idea is ridiculous, because the guards will certainly remember him if they are playing him at War. It is while musing on this plan that Jamie admits how he has beaten Bruce often enough to save that much money; he has been cheating. He says that Bruce has trouble remembering which cards are higher, and Jamie has been able to beat him at War for over a year.
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