Free Nina, the Bandit Queen by Joey Slinger

like there are two things where there only used to be one, and you happen to have one of them. And so does the bank.”
    “Somebody doesn’t have it any more. The insurance company doesn’t.”
    “No. It doesn’t work like that.” Nina was drawing a lot of diagrams in the air to illustrate how it did work. “Bank insurance isn’t paid by a company, it’s paid by the government. The government! ” She underlined “government” with her index finger. “And when the government needs money to fill the gap that was left by paying off some bank insurance, it just prints more. Governments can do this any time they like.”
    “You don’t believe this either,” JannaRose said.
    “I do so. Absolutely.” Nina hadn’t spent years listening to D.S. argue without learning a thing or two. “You ever heard of victimless crimes? Robbing banks is the biggest one of all.”
    It was very important that JannaRose not back out on her, and especially not because some complex issue like stealing made her start thinking. Without her for support, Nina would never have the nerve. This was one thing she absolutely did know for sure.
    JannaRose backed out on her halfway through Nina’s explanation of how bank insurance worked. She never exactly said she did, but it became obvious when she started hmming loudly and staring at the ceiling every time Nina mentioned anything about the trip they’d made the week before to scout out the bank.
    “What about a bake sale?” JannaRose had said the morning of that expedition.
    She’d been hanging back — so far back it was hard to hear her. Nina knew it wasn’t because she was looking up in awe at the office buildings that rose sixty storeys and more that she was moving so slowly. She had hardly lifted her eyes off the ground since they got off the subway.
    Nina turned and waited. “What?” she shouted when JannaRose got within hailing distance.
    “Lots of groups have them,” JannaRose said, “parents’ groups. When they want to raise money. For the school. Or, you know, for trips to the zoo.”
    “A bake sale?” When Nina got exasperated with somebody, she had to struggle to keep from sounding as if she had doubts about their intelligence. She didn’t always pull it off.
    “I don’t know,” JannaRose said.
    “Do you know anybody that knows how to bake?”
    JannaRose’s voice had become so faint it was barely a whisper. “I don’t know.”
    “Trips to the fuckin’ zoo. Jesus Christ.” Nina had to struggle to keep from saying it out loud.
    What worried her was knowing that JannaRose didn’t know whether she’d be too chicken to help her rob a bank. JannaRose never said anything about this, but it was something she would more or less have made it a point not to mention even to herself. There were other things she was like this about, such as her husband Ed Oataway being a criminal. She did everything she could not to think about that, because now that they had children, if Ed went to jail again it would be The End as far as their happy family life was concerned. And how come he was in a line of crime where, even though he was extremely successful, he didn’t bring in enough for them to live on unless they were both on welfare? If Nina came right out and asked her about this, JannaRose would have answered, “I don’t know,” so she never did.
    The most important thing to do right there was reassure her. “We have as much right to be here as anybody,” Nina said.
    “What?” JannaRose said.
    The picture most people see when they think of the city is the downtown skyline, and that’s where they were, in the middle of it, right down at the very bottom of all those bank buildings. Nina felt some kind of reassurance was called for, because she knew the other thing upsetting JannaRose was that they were the only people wearing sweats and T-shirts. As far as Nina knew, JannaRose had never been anyplace where nobody else was dressed like that.
    “Us being here,” Nina