“Well, you could have fooled me. I’ve never seen a first-timer do so good. You’ll be a great addition to the team.” We’d turned the corner and joined the crowd jogging down the stairs, around and around and around, like cars stuck in a traffic circle. I wondered if I’d ever be able to get to a class without feeling dizzy.
“What team?”
We reached the second floor, and Wesley took my arm and pulled me into the hallway. A button popped off my vest. Someone kicked it down the stairs—plink, plink, plink. Two buttons down, two left, and it was only the first day. Soon my vest would be hanging open, which was probably against a billion Pennybaker School rules and would make fancy Louis XIV want to croak.
Fashion faux pas fatality.
Wesley led me into a little alcove where there was a closet. It was dark and creepy, the fluorescent light above our heads buzzing.
“There’s this thing,” Wesley whispered. He paused, licked his lips, and looked around. “The Annual Boys Versus Girls Pennybaker School Spitwad War. We have it every October. Dates all the way back to … well, this is the first year. But I’ve heard boys have been wanting to spit wads of paper at girls for a long time now. At least as far back as the cavemen.”
“Cavemen? Did they have paper? And straws?” I asked, and Wesley shushed me, clamping a palm over my mouth. He gave me a meaningful look and took his hand away. “Why are we whispering?” I asked.
Again with the looks. You would think, by the way he was acting, that Wesley was about to tell me where he’d buried treasure. Or a body.
“If Nurse Hale finds out about it, she’ll get all ‘keep your saliva to yourselves’ and call our moms. And then we’ll have to watch that video about germs and snot and stuff in health class again.”
“And what does this have to do with me, exactly?”
Wesley put his arm around my shoulders. “You’re a natural, man. You have magic aim. You could probably even take out Abigail Thew, and she’s being scouted by the Olympics for shotput. The girl can throw. But you, my friend, can spit.”
“I got lucky,” I said.
“No! Never say that. You’re gifted, Thomas Fallgrout.”
I rolled my eyes. “So I hear. It’s my supposed giftedness that got me put here.”
Wesley nodded and gave my shoulder three hearty whacks. “Just clear out your calendar. October. We haven’t announced a date yet. Makes it harder for Nurse Hale to crack a fella if he doesn’t know the date.” He sniffed loudly and wiped his nose with one finger—his gangster persona.
“Whatever you say,” I said. We headed back toward the stairs, which had emptied out.
“So what is your gift?” he asked.
“Huh?”
His eyebrows waggled up and down. “You know, your unique skill. Why are you here?”
“Oh. That.” I thought for a second, then pulled off my tie. I held it up with one hand, then put my hands together. When I pulled them apart, the tie had disappeared. “Alacazam,” I mumbled, slipping the “disappeared” tie into my back pocket with my free hand while I showed him the palm of the other hand.
Wesley’s eyes grew big. “Whoa! You’re a magician?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I guess. More like an alchemist. No. Yes. I don’t know.”
Truth was, I’d never thought of myself as a magician or a scientist, and certainly not as a genius. I was just a kid who had a Grandpa Rudy trunk.
Grandpa Rudy was the real magician. Well, not a famous one or anything. Just the kind people hired for their kids’ birthday parties and stuff. “Rudy the Resplendent” was what he called himself. He had a cape and a top hat and everything. And a rabbit named Bill, but Bill hopped away during a show at a nursing home, and Grandpa Rudy was so upset he never replaced him.
Grandpa Rudy was cool. I used to watch him practice for his shows.
And I got to see how all the tricks were done.
When Grandpa Rudy died, Grandma Jo gave me his magician trunk. She figured I was the only one who would want it. It was mostly full of junk—rings with splits in them that you could barely see, old decks of cards, strings with knots, moldy rabbit food, and a dish with the word “Bill” on the side.
But inside the trunk, under all the bric-a-brac, under his cape and even under his top hat, was another box. A box full of jars with letters like “NaOH” and “Na2CO3” and “C2H3NaO2” taped onto the sides of them. There were also a tape recorder and three cassettes full of Grandpa Rudy himself talking about his growing interest in science tricks, how he thought he was perfecting something new and exciting, and instructions on how to use the powders and liquids in the jars.
I missed Grandpa Rudy. A lot. And I listened to those cassettes about a gazillion times. And after listening to them about a gazillion times, I suddenly knew how to turn pennies silver. And gold.
So, in a way, it was Grandpa Rudy’s fault that I was at Pennybaker School for the Uniquely Gifted with a sweaty brown bow tie in my back pocket.
“Make something else disappear,” Wesley was saying as we headed down the stairs.
“Nah,” I said.
“Make my tie disappear. Go ahead. Do it.”
“Maybe later.”
“Make this handrail disappear. My backpack. Make my backpack disappear. Oh, I know, make my homework disappear.”
I pulled the bow tie out of my back pocket and dangled it before him. “Abracadabra,” I said. “It was in my pocket the whole time.”
Wesley stopped. “I thought magicians weren’t supposed to tell how they do their tricks.”
“That’s what makes me not a magician,” I said. “I just had a Grandpa Rudy.”
Wesley’s eyes brightened. “Hey, I have one of those, too! Except it’s an uncle. My grandpa’s name is Lou.”
We’d reached the bottom of the stairs. I could see Mom’s car through the front doors. I started toward it.
“Wait,” Wesley said. I turned back impatiently. “You forgot.” He gestured toward the Heirmauser head with its rolly eyes and screaming mouth.
“Forgot what?”
He dropped to one knee, hand over his heart, head bowed. “May we always be mathly motivated the Heirmauser way,” he said in a sincere voice.
“Creepy,” I muttered.
“Huh?” Wesley asked, getting to his feet.
I bent my knees, acting as if I were just getting up, too. “I said, ‘Amen.’”
He squinted at me. “Nobody says that. That would be weird.”
“Right,” I said.
I would hate to make bowing to a bronze head weird, after all.
TRICK #4
A CHIP IN A TRACHTEN HAT
Chip Mason was on his front porch when I got home.
I slid down in my seat so my eyes were level with the door handle as Mom pulled into the driveway.
“What are you doing?” Mom asked.
“Just drive,” I said. “Act natural. Don’t look at me. Pull into the garage. Circle the neighborhood. Drive to the grocery store. Just do … something.”
“Why on earth … You’re acting strange, Thomas, and after your grandmother’s stunt today, I don’t have the patience for strange. Did you know I had to take her Rollerblades away from her? Again? Rollerblades. At her age. Can you believe that?”
Actually, yes, I could absolutely believe that. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Grandma Jo had been planning to use the Rollerblades to skate to a skydiving field. Come to think of it, Grandma Jo would have probably been a perfect fit for Pennybaker School for the Uniquely Gifted. Grandma Jo’s unique gift would be trying to get away with stuff she shouldn’t be doing.
But Mom would never see that as a gift. She would never think Grandma Jo was an Adventurer Genius Who Would Change the World of Daredevils Forever. She would never get behind Grandma Jo’s Rollerblading Adventure.
“I swear, I just don’t know what I’m going to do with that woman. Oh, look, there’s that sweet boy across the street.” Mom rolled down her window a
nd leaned out. I pulled the lever on the side of my seat and flopped backward, closing my eyes and groaning. “Hello, Chip! What luck—Thomas is just getting home. I’m sure he’d love to play. Sit up, Thomas. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I’m thinking a little fresh air might do you some good. Don’t you want to play with Chip?”
No. On so many levels, no.
First, no matter how many times I tried to explain to Mom, she would never understand that in middle school, a dude doesn’t play. He hangs out. He gets together. He chills with his buddies. Play? Never. Unless, of course, we actually were playing something. Like football or basketball. Or a board game. Or, I guess, technically, a play. But we wouldn’t be out there putting on a play. We certainly wouldn’t be playing a play. Unless the play was about playing football or basketball or a board game. Then I guess maybe you could say we were playing in a play while we were playing. It was a very complicated system.
But the bigger reason I didn’t want to play with Chip Mason was Chip Mason.
He was weird. And, trust me, if a kid wearing a brown vest and a second-head bow tie who spent half the day bowing to a bronze screaming head thinks another kid is weird, that kid is capital-“W” weird.
Chip Mason moved in across the street a few months ago. Technically, he and his mom moved in with the guy who already lived there—Old Huck Mason—who, it turned out, was Chip’s grandfather, and who, according to Grandma Jo, invented cranky. Mom said Old Huck was sick, and Chip and his mom were there to take care of him.
At first I was excited to get a new neighbor. Our neighborhood had no kids my age, which was why my best friends were a recording of my grandfather’s voice and a magic top hat. But the minute I met Chip Mason, I knew the top hat and I were going to stay buddies for a long, long time.
The first time I saw Chip Mason, he was standing next to the big moving truck in his driveway in a tuxedo shirt, gym shorts, and furry purple socks that crept up his legs like caterpillars, ending just above his knees. His feet were poked into regular old tennis shoes, as if it were nothing to wear regular old tennis shoes with socks like that. Actually … I wasn’t exactly sure what the appropriate shoe choice for socks like that would be.
“Greetings, native!” Chip said, waving with his whole arm. “I bring good tidings from the faraway lands of Long Field Middle. What say you regarding the atmosphere of this glad town? Any pertinent news or information? How hails my soon-to-be alma mater, Boone Public Middle School?”
“What?” I asked looking up, because “atmosphere” was pretty much the only word he’d said that I understood, but I didn’t see anything unusual in the sky. “It’s cloudy,” I ventured, and then said what was really on my mind. “Why are you wearing fur socks?”
He came across the street. “These,” he gestured toward his feet, “are my vocabulary socks.”
“Vocabulary what?”
He looked baffled, as if I had just crawled out from under a rock, moss hanging from my nose. “You don’t have vocabulary socks?”
I shook my head. Most of me was sure this Chip Mason kid was crazy, but I’ll admit, part of me was wondering if maybe I was supposed to have vocabulary socks. Like that time I was supposed to have black shorts for gym class and had to borrow a spare pair that made my underwear smell like cough drops for the whole rest of the day.
“That’s okay,” he said, smiling wide. “I’ll tell you the word of the day myself.” He pulled his foot up as high as it would go, cocked his head to listen, then nodded and looked up again. “The word of the day is ‘schnitzel.’ S-C-H-N-I-T-Z-E-L. Schnitzel. Used in a sentence, ‘I think I will have a wiener schnitzel and a bowl of graupensuppe for lunch today.’”
I blinked. “Wiener schnitzel? Like, a hot dog?”
He poked a finger in the air. “It’s a commonly held misconception that, due to the word ‘wiener’ in the name, a wiener schnitzel is some form of sausage link. But that’s not true. A wiener schnitzel is actually a piece of veal, pounded thin, dredged in bread crumbs, and fried. Not a hot dog, which is good with ketchup and served on a bun. The wiener schnitzel is Austria’s national dish. Not many people know that. Ironically, many would claim that the national dish of the United States is the hot dog.” He laughed as if he’d said something funny.
“Are you calling me stupid?” I asked, because I didn’t really understand anything he’d said, other than the “not many people know that” part, and I figured it was a fair bet that by “not many people,” he meant me. “It’s a little-known fact that Thomas Fallgrout is a stupid stupidhead,” he might as well have said, if he’d known my name. “Stupidly doomed with stupidity for all stupid time.” And something about hot dogs.
“Quite the contrary,” the boy said. “I do not know your intelligence quotient, and I am hardly a trained professional who could assess it in any case. But you seem to have all the hallmarks of a relatively intelligent young man.”
“What?”
I was pretty sure that the sixth graders at Boone Public Middle School were going to eat Chip Mason alive on a bun with ketchup, and it turned out I was right. According to Chip, his “unwonted idiosyncrasies” made it difficult for his peers to fully relate to him. According to Mom, that meant other kids thought he was weird and pretty much stayed away from him. It was one thing to avoid a kid for fifty minutes in your science class; it was a lot more difficult to ward him off when he was your neighbor. Even though his “unwonted idiosyncrasies” made it difficult for me to relate to him, it seemed that, other than his grandfather Huck, I was Chip’s only friend in the world.
Lucky me.
“Sei gegrüßt, neighbor!” Chip Mason called when I got out of the car after my first day at Pennybaker School. I gave Mom the evil eye, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Hey, Chip.”
He raced across the street, his shiny black shoes making clunky noises against the asphalt. “That’s German for greetings.” He hooked his thumbs into his suspenders proudly.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.
“Lederhosen!” he said, as if he were shocked that I didn’t know what the ridiculous homemade shorts he was wearing were called, even though he’d known me for two months and surely had caught on that I never knew what he was talking about. “And a trachten hat.” He took off his green hat and bowed with it pressed against his chest. “Pretty cool, huh? So how was school? What did you have for lunch? I made crepes as part of my after-school culinary studies exercise. Chicken cordon bleu flavored.” Except he didn’t say “blue” like normal people. He said it with an “eh” at the end of it, like, “Blu-eh,” which sounded a little like someone throwing up. Which made it sound like he had chicken throw-up for lunch. Which made my Uniquely Gifted lunch of mystery-meat pizza seem much tastier.
“School was fine,” I said. I edged toward my house. Chip edged with me. “I have homework, so I should probably go.”
“I hardly ever have homework,” he said. “Boone Public is way easier than my old school, so I do all my homework in class. Did you know there’s a teacher named Mr. Butts? Everyone laughs when you talk about him. I don’t get it. Do you get it? He’s really nice. What’s funny about that?” I shook my head and started to walk away. The kid could tell you what the square root of forty gajillion and eleven was, but he didn’t understand a pretty simple middle school joke. “Hey, you seem tense. Should I get my vocabulary socks? I believe today’s word of the day is ‘amphisbaena.’ Many people think a hydra and an amphisbaena are one and the same, but they would be incorrect.”
“Who? Who thinks that? Who has even heard of either one of those?” I asked. But when Chip Mason was on a vocabulary roll, it was impossible to sidetrack him.
“But, in fact, a hydra is a serpentlike monster with many heads, and each time you cut one off, two more grow in its place—whereas an amphisbaena is a serpent with one head on each end.” He pulled at his suspenders smugly.
“Who have you known who’s ever cut the head off a s
erpent monster, anyway?” I asked.
“Well, Hercules, of course. And then there’s Percy Jackson. If you’d like, I can get my mythology socks on and we can delve deeper into the world of the venomous multiheaded beast. It’s quite fascinating when you get into the weaponry possibilities of its poisonous blood.”
“No, really. I should get going.” I started to walk away.
“Okay,” he said. “But you still have to show me that water-bending trick, remember?”
“Sure,” I said, remembering that, in a fit of weakness when I was trying to just make him stop talking for ten seconds, I had bent water for Chip Mason and had promised to show him how to do it, too. Truthfully, the “trick” was just static electricity, and if Chip thought about it for a minute, he’d probably figure it out on his own, because he was way smarter than any other kid I’d ever known, and probably even smarter than Grandpa Rudy. But I suspected it wasn’t as much about the trick as it was about me showing him. Which I would never do. Because all I ever wanted was to get away from Chip Mason. I would be more likely to show him the Stalling Forever trick. I was getting quite masterful at that one. Grandpa Rudy would’ve been proud.
“Okay, so I’ll talk to you tomorrow!” Chip hollered. I turned just in time to see him polka back across the street, yodeling the whole way.
“You really shouldn’t have mythology socks,” I said to his back.
“I know! I’ve almost outgrown them. Which means I’ll be wearing my British literature socks in no time!” he called without looking back. “I can scarcely wait to dive into A Tale of Two Cities. Or walk into, as the case may be.”
I supposed if there was one thing I was thankful for, it was the fact that Chip Mason was going to Boone Public. Otherwise, he’d have been a perfect fit for Pennybaker School.
As if on cue, my chest burst into itchy flames. I ripped off my vest, letting one of the last two intact buttons plink onto the driveway and roll away. I wadded the vest under one arm and went inside.