Herschel was, for the most part, a laid-back and easygoing guy, the kind of man who didn’t get worked up over much of anything.
He genuinely seemed pleased to see two young teenagers taking a real interest in the automotive world, especially two kids who actually wanted to earn their own money doing it.
Despite that welcoming attitude, though, his first reaction to hearing our plan wasn’t exactly encouraging.
He didn’t hesitate to advise us against diving headfirst into something so risky.
“My honest advice to you boys is just don’t do it,” Herschel said, leaning back against a workbench with a serious look settling over his face.
He clearly believed that anyone hoping to make real money in this business needed to learn the fundamentals of how cars actually worked first, from the ground up, before ever attempting to flip one for profit.
Jumping straight into buying and reselling vehicles without any hands-on experience, in his mind, was practically a guaranteed way to lose every dollar we’d managed to save.
“Y’all really need to understand the physical work from the ground up,” he continued, wiping the grease from his hands with an old, oil-stained rag.
“How about this instead?
You both come down here after school lets out and work for me part-time for a few weeks.
I’d even pay you, if you two actually turn out to be useful around here.”
Herschel was, in his own generous way, trying to talk us out of what he clearly saw as a badly flawed plan.
He assumed, not unreasonably, that we were just a couple of naive kids chasing quick money without any real understanding of what we were getting into.
By offering us a safe, paying job instead, he was giving us a far more sensible alternative, hoping to steer us away from doing something foolish and burning through all our savings on a worthless junker.
“That’s really not a bad offer at all,” Georgie whispered to me, his eyes practically lighting up at the idea.
Ever since we’d first stepped through the garage doors, he’d been staring around the place like a kid in a candy store, clearly captivated by the massive engines, the heavy machinery, and the whole buzzing energy of the workspace around us.
Even I found myself a little tempted by what Herschel was offering.
Looking around the shop, I realized I somehow recognized every single tool hanging along the pegboards without even trying.
One glance was enough to tell me exactly what each one was called and precisely how it was meant to be used.
Still, I had no interest in fielding an endless stream of questions about how exactly I’d gotten so good at fixing cars overnight.
Georgie was a different story entirely.
He’d believe whatever half-baked excuse I fed him without a second thought, but someone like Herschel wasn’t nearly that gullible.
If I spent my afternoons working directly under his supervision, there was no way I’d be able to quietly use my repair and restore skill without eventually raising some very uncomfortable questions.
“We really appreciate the offer, Herschel, but I think we’re just going to learn as we go,” I said, speaking confidently on behalf of both of us.
Deep down, I already knew I was sitting on an overpowered skill that I fully intended to put to good use, and I wasn’t about to let anyone get in my way this early.
Steering the conversation back toward our actual goal, I asked, “So herschel, are there any age restrictions or legal hurdles we’d need to worry about when it comes to buying a vehicle?
Since we’re only fourteen, I figured there might be some paperwork issues to deal with.”
Herschel nodded slowly, reaching over to grab a clipboard off a nearby shelf, and started walking us through the basics of Texas automotive law.
He explained that things tended to run a little looser out here in East Texas, but the state still enforced strict rules when it came to minors.
A fourteen-year-old couldn’t legally sign a binding contract to buy a vehicle from a dealership, and if we wanted everything handled entirely by the book, we’d need a parent or legal guardian to sign off on the paperwork.
That said, Herschel pointed out that private sales between regular folks worked a bit differently out in the country.
If we showed up with cash in hand, most private sellers wouldn’t care in the slightest how old we were.
They’d simply sign the back of the title, hand over the keys, and leave the rest of the legal details entirely up to us.
The real complication came down to the Department of Public Safety and the local tax office.
Legally driving or registering a car under our own names would require an adult’s involvement.
But since our plan was really just to fix the car up in the driveway and flip it quickly, Herschel let us in on a shady, though fairly common, workaround known as floating the title.
By floating the title, we’d simply hold onto the signed document from the original owner without ever officially registering the car under our own names.
It technically avoided paying sales tax twice and kept our names off any official record, though he was quick to warn us that it was heavily frowned upon.
“Do you have any beat-up cars around here we could buy for our project?” I asked him.
Herschel let out a long sigh.
“Alright, I’ll show you what I’ve got, but you’re not buying anything expensive.” He led us around to the back lot, where a handful of cars sat in various states of disrepair.
After walking the row and running my hands over each one, I found myself genuinely interested in several of them, though one in particular caught my attention more than the rest.
I asked him what was wrong with it, since on the surface, most of the body looked intact.
I already knew exactly what the problem was the moment my hand touched the hood, but I still had to ask, if only to keep up appearances.
“Engine’s busted,” he said.
“Wouldn’t be worth the time to fix it.
You’d sink more hours into that thing than it’s ever going to give back.” He clearly knew something was wrong under the hood, just not exactly what.
It turned out to be a 1971 Ford Maverick, the kind folks around here liked to call a poor man’s Mustang.
“Engine’s got some kind of problem that’ll mean tearing the whole thing open just to see what’s wrong,” Herschel said, sighing.
“You’d need specialized tools even to get it open in the first place.
Not worth the trouble.
It’s basically a metal ornament at this point.”
“What would it be worth?” I asked, since he’d made such a point of how rough its condition was.
“It’s just metal at this point, maybe good for parts here and there.
Let’s say two hundred dollars.
That’s about what I paid for it,” Herschel said, and it sounded like a fair enough number on the surface.
My appraisal, though, put its actual value closer to one hundred and fifty, without factoring in any potential profit.
Herschel had also picked it up for around one hundred and fifty a year earlier, which meant he was padding the number a little in his own favor.
“For that tin can?
No way,” Georgie said, clearly unconvinced, though I shot him a subtle look that told him I was actually interested.
“Alright, since we’re really just here to learn, how about a hundred for it?” Georgie said, going into full haggling mode.
He and Herschel went back and forth for a while, with Herschel eventually asking if we even had the cash to back up our offers.
We assured him we did, and that we’d be more than happy to show him.
“Alright, one sixty is my final number.
Ain’t no way I’m going any lower than that,” Herschel said, crossing his arms.
“One sixty, and you tow it to our house tomorrow,” I said, cutting in right as Georgie opened his mouth to counter again.
I knew it was a fair price as it stood.
We’d still need to have a serious talk with our parents tonight about using the garage, so tomorrow worked out fine either way.
Even if Mom said no, I figured I could at least talk Meemaw into letting us use her garage instead.
“Alright.
Deal.
This is just because I like you boys and you are my neighbour.
If there is a next time.” Herschel said with a tired laugh, clearly convinced by now that we were serious about the whole thing.
It was not hard for him to tow the car since he owned one and we were neighbours afterall.
He even offered to give us some pointers along the way if we ever wanted his advice.
Herschel really was a good man, nothing like his grumpy wife, and I found myself liking him more with every conversation.
Looking around the lot one more time, I noticed there were still a handful of other rough, half-dead cars sitting around that he’d probably be glad to unload for the right price down the line.
“Alright, hold onto it for me,” I told him while handing him 50$ for now and with that, the two of us headed back toward school.
Georgie had football practice waiting for him, and I had my own work cut out for me.
This time, I was actually going to take that physics problem seriously and give Sheldon a real run for his money.
Studying always felt a lot more fun once there was an actual goal attached to it.
I got to the library right after school let out and started pulling everything I thought might help me.
For once, I actually let myself read at full speed instead of holding back the way I usually did.
Most days I kept myself deliberately slow, but not this time.
At full capacity, I could tear through roughly eight thousand words a minute without losing a shred of comprehension, and even faster than that whenever the material was just text or literature rather than something technical.
I made my way through advanced physics, higher mathematics, and a handful of mechanical engineering texts the library happened to have on its shelves, eight books total, finished in only a few hours.
I picked a quiet corner in the back where nobody was likely to wander over and bother me.
Once I’d gone through everything, I picked out five of the books to bring home with me, planning to go back over the key sections again before bed that night.
In truth, I was fairly confident I could already work out the solution to the problem on my own, but the books would still be useful for actually writing it all down properly, since I’d need solid references to back up whatever I put on paper.
The harder part, honestly, wasn’t solving the problem itself.
It was figuring out how to explain my own thinking to people who didn’t process information the same way I did.
I understood things instinctively that most people had to be walked through step by step, which made translating my reasoning into something readable far more difficult than the actual physics involved.
It was, I supposed, the kind of problem that only ever showed up for people wired a certain way.
Genius people problems that normies won’t get.
I thought about Ramanujan, that guy was something else, the best mathematician history has seen in my opinion.
The way he’d filled entire notebooks with formulas and theorems that mathematicians are still working to fully prove, decades after his death, even though the results themselves had always been correct.
People are still combing through his old notebooks today, trying to catch up to wherever his mind had already gone.
Will Hunting gets compared to him in the film, and lying there thinking about it, I figured I probably wasn’t all that different myself.
Still, I had no intention of using everything I had right now.
I planned on saving my full capabilities for college, where I will have access to all the books that I would ever need.
Oh man, I miss the internet.
I spent most of the ride home lost in thought, turning everything over in my head without saying a word.
Mom eventually glanced over and asked if something was wrong, and I just told her no, nothing was wrong, before turning back to the window and letting my mind keep working.
Really, I was still sorting through everything I’d read that afternoon, piecing it together and letting new ideas take shape on their own.
It was one of those quiet moods I slipped into every so often, content to just sit inside my own head for a while and let my thoughts run their course without needing to explain any of it out loud.
Teeheee