Albert had created a currency based on gold bullets and McDonald’s game pieces. He’d wanted to call the currency something else, but no one remembered what. So, ’Berths they were, a play on “Albert,” coined by Howard, of course, who had also come up with “the FAY” to describe their weird little world. Sam had thought Albert was nuts with his obsession with creating money. But the evidence was in: Albert’s system was producing just enough food for kids to survive. And a lot more kids were working. Far fewer were just hanging out. It was no longer impossible to get kids to go into the fields and do the backbreaking work of picking crops. They worked for ’Berths and spent ’Berths, and for now at least starvation was just a bad memory.

Lies