Free Can I See Your I. D.? by Chris Barton Page B

less attention than her work on Felicity . In 2006, as she entered her forties, she published a novel, Before I Go , about a teenage ice skater with terminal cancer. She hoped it would become a movie, starring herself.

26-YEAR-OLD WITH SUFFICIENT FUNDS?
    FRANK W. ABAGNALE JR.

SPRING 1964
NEW YORK CITY
    Boy, that was easy.
    You’re no master con artist. You’re no master anything, actually. You’re just a sixteen-year-old runaway with a lot of gall. But it looks like that just might be enough to get by on.
    That money in your hand couldn’t have been easier to come by—you wrote a check out to “CASH,” the teller handed over the bills, and the bank is just microscopically worse off than it would have been if you’d never walked in the door. So what if, technically, there’s not actually any money left in the account behind that check? And so what if, truth be told, you’re not really the twenty-six-year-old the teller thought you were?
    You needed something the bank had, the bank needed it less than you did, and nobody got hurt. Easy.
    Easy, that is, once you overlook the hard situation that got you where you are in the first place. No, not just hard—devastating. Your parents had separated for a while, and then one day, without warning, they called you out of school and down to family court. Before you’d fully grasped what was going on—and without so much as looking at you—the judge asked you which parent you wanted to live with after the divorce.
    What kind of question is that? Well, in your case, it’s the kind of question that you answered by running away, leaving Westchester County that very day and heading twenty-five miles south to Manhattan. You didn’t take much with you, but you did bring the essentials:
    Your driver’s license.
    A book of personalized checks for that $200 bank account your dad opened for you a while back.
    Your own six-foot-tall, prematurely gray-haired self.
    That’s right—gray-haired already, just like your dad. It started when you were fifteen, and it’s the number one reason folks always think you’re older than you really are. Not having any acne helps too.
    Anyway, you knew midtown Manhattan well from making deliveries for your dad’s stationery store at Fortieth and Madison. And when you got to midtown, all you wanted was to get by. You were even prepared to do it honestly, though that scam you pulled back home with your dad’s Mobil gas card—charging set after set of tires, then selling them back to the dealers for 2,500 bucks in cash—showed a certain flair for other approaches.
    You rented a boarding room by the day and started looking for a job. But what you found was a fairly limited set of career opportunities for a sixteen-year-old dropout—imagine that. So the obvious solution was to not be a sixteen-year-old dropout. Maybe you could have forged a high school diploma and passed yourself off as a precocious adolescent with a go-get-’em attitude. But you chose a simpler route. Why fake a whole document when you can fudge just one teensy little number?
    Without much effort, and definitely without anything resembling a plan , you turned back the clock on your date of birth: On your pictureless driver’s license, you changed the 1948 to 1938. Now you were twenty-six-year-old Frank W. Abagnale Jr. Trouble is, the twenty-six-year-old version of Frank Abagnale was just as much of a high school dropout as the sixteen-year-old version. More employable, perhaps, but as you soon found out, getting employed and getting decent pay are two very different things. Your income wasn’t nearly enough to keep you afloat in Manhattan.
    All along, of course, you were tapping into that $200 account. A $15 check cashed here, a $25 check cashed there—you kept them as small as you could, but those numbers added up. Within a week or two of your arrival in the city, your account has