The other four Gabis seemed divided on that question. Two looked hopeful, if doubtful. Two made cacaseca faces.
“For my plan to work,” my Gabi continued, “we need to make FixGabi believe she is slowly breaking down Brana’s defenses. Over the next few days, we’ll tell Brana to make FixGabi think she’s winning. That way, she won’t get discouraged and go looking for an easier universe to crack.”
I remembered StupidSal—that really, really StupidSal from the universe with the other sick Iggy. If FixGabi found his universe, she’d make short work of him and do whatever she wanted with that Papi’s remembranation machine.
I sighed. I wasn’t crazy about being stuck with FixGabi in my universe for all eternity. But for the sake of the whole raunching multiverse, it was a sacrifice I knew we had to make. “Okay,” I said, heavy with the burden of duty. “I’m in. So when do we spring the trap?”
“We will fix FixGabi,” said my Gabi, reeling in an imaginary fishing rod, “on the night we Break the Night.”
“SALVADOR VIDÓN!” SAID MRS. Waked, speaking, as she always did, with italics you could hear. “Would you be so kind as to help me attach this bedeviled bubble-blowing hookah to the caterpillar cake’s mouth?”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Waked,” I answered. I handed my hammer to one of the other set builders working with me and headed over to her.
The five other set builders and I had almost finished transforming Mrs. Waked’s classroom into one of four Culeco classrooms that would play out the Caterpillar (Oruga in Spanish) and Pigeon (Paloma in Spanish) scenes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But it hadn’t been easy. Even before we could start turning Mrs. Waked’s room into a mushroomy forest that also looked like the Everglades, we had to clear out the million costumes, props, pictures, and acting awards Mrs. Waked had collected over the years. Only after carting all that stuff out of there could we start building the set—which included painting a round table to look like a big old mushroom, for the Oruga cake to sit on—and turning a ladder into a very Florida-looking mangrove tree for the Paloma to roost in while accusing everyone passing below of being a serpent.
It had taken this team almost two full days, but finally, we were nearly done. Basically, we just needed to finish up a few signs. As you walked up to the Oruga’s mushroom, a sign that read PARA ENCOGERSE pointed to the right, where there was a wall of fun-house mirrors that made you look shrunken and squat and flattened. The other sign, PARA AGRANDARSE, would point to the left and guide you to the fun-house mirrors that made you seem tall and weirdly stretched out. The last mirror on the left, the one next to the mangrove where the Paloma would be sitting, elongated your neck to make it look three feet long: just like in Adventures in Wonderland, when the Pigeon mistakes snaky-necked Alice for a serpent.
It was a great idea, and it worked perfectly in real life, too. I wish I could take the credit. But it was Adam’s idea, and I’d praised him up and down for it.
However, I deserve full credit for being smart enough to make Adam my assistant director in charge of set design.
That was the first thing I’d done at school the day after Gabi and the Sisterverse and I concocted our plan to catch FixGabi. Aventura really wanted to concentrate on making the costumes more Cuban and Cuban American, so she asked me if I’d handle the other stuff. I said sure thing, if I could recruit some extra help.
Minutes later, in Señorx Cosquillas’s homeroom, I had deputized Adam and Widelene and Teresita. They would be my assistant directors.
Over the next week, I found out what a smart choice I’d made. They turned out even better than I thought they’d be.
Adam was way more experienced than me at being a director, which meant he was used to working with people on planning out scenes and making them look good. He called that “set composition.” I had him work with the set builders to adapt the previous sets and props to make them look and sound and even smell more Cuban and Miamian. The result? Gems like the fun-house mirrors in the Oruga/Paloma rooms.
I made Widelene the assistant director in charge of safety. Her job was to work with the actors on how to fall, tumble, punch, slap, pour “hot” tea down someone’s pants, and in general do terrible things to each other—100 percent safely! Aventura’s four-hour snore-fest of a play hadn’t required any physical training, since her actors had barely even had to move onstage. But now that we were asking our actors to make stuff up on the fly, we wanted to help them tell physical jokes as well as verbal ones. Widelene showed everyone how to perform acts of violence on one another without actually performing acts of violence on one another. As I’d been strolling the hallways for the last few days, I’d seen tons of simulated bodily harm being done to Wonderland characters, and the actors cracking up and loving it. Mission accomplished, Widelene.
And Teresita? I made her the assistant director of character consistency. The reason was simple: She was already a Wonderland character in real life. You know how almost all the characters in both Alice books are snappy, quibbling, snarly, snotty, nonsense-speaking know-it-alls? This was a chance for Teresita to use her natural talents to help the performers act more Wonderland-y.
In fact, she was in Mrs. Waked’s room with me at that moment, coaching Octavio Murillo—my very tall climbing-wall buddy, a super-nice guy, and, most importantly for this role, a person who wasn’t scared of heights—on how to be a more annoying Paloma. His pigeon costume wasn’t as fully detailed as the original one Aventura had made (some kid in another room was wearing that one). Also, this version, because it had been made in a hurry, was a little too small for Octavio. But honestly, that just made it funnier.
“You’re too nice, Octavio!” Teresita told him, in a way that meant that she really, really, really liked how nice he was, except for right now, when he was supposed to be playing the unreasonable Paloma. “Try it again. Call me a serpiente like I’m a long-necked weirdo who’s gonna eat your babies.”
“‘Hey, you, serpiente!’” said Octavio, trying his best to sound like a mean girl but coming across more like a mensch. “‘Get lost! You don’t want to squab-ble with me!’ Get it, Teresita? Because, see, a ‘squab’ is another name for a pigeon, so—”
He saw her face. Stopped talking. Gulped.
“Pigeons. Don’t. Pun,” said Teresita, moving only her lower lip. “Try it again!”
They were going to be there awhile. But I got the sense that neither of them minded too much. Ah, kids these days.
“Did you forget about your dear teacher in her hour of need, Sal?” Mrs. Waked asked me, with all the despair a three-time Emmy nominee could jam into a single sentence.
“Coming!” I said, and bounded over to her.
Mrs. Waked. She really was the best. She always made me laugh, even when she was doing seemingly innocent things. There she was, halfway up a ladder, looking utterly perplexed. Next to her stood the mushroom table, on which rested the four-foot cake that looked like a caterpillar. Also on the table was a bubble-blowing hookah, currently turned off. She had the end of the hookah’s hose in one hand.
She was dressed like a Spanish countess. Today’s outfit was a blooming red gown with lace like a spiderweb running along every edge. A bustle the size of a blimp protruded from her posterior; she does a great egg-laying magic trick that I am 95 percent sure makes use of that bustle. Her heels were mostly rhinestones. Her hair was a garden of red and pink and white roses, and her makeup consisted of two rouge balls, one on each cheek; an X drawn in lipstick over her lips; and painted-on eyebrows that whirled and swirled all over her forehead like a wrought-iron fence. She loved clowning, loved fooling around. But there was always a super-seriousness beneath it all. She was someone who thought of acting the way a priestess thinks of religion. Jokes were holy to her.
Which I think explains why we got along so well.
“How can I help?” I asked her once I was near enough.
“Where,” she italicized, “am I supposed to stick this thing?”
&nb
sp; She meant the end of the hookah hose. “I think the mouth is traditional,” I answered.
“I know that, Sal. It’s just—” She made a few jabbing attempts to place the hookah into the cake caterpillar’s mouth but couldn’t commit. “I don’t want to ruin it. The Culinary Arts students did such an extraordinary job making this caterpillar cake. I would hate to be the author of its destruction.”
I knew where she was coming from. The cake was a masterpiece. It wasn’t actually a cake, technically, but rings of Rice Krispie Treats stacked on top of one another to create the caterpillar body. Then all those Rice Krispie circles were covered with fondant, which, I learned, is a rubbery sheet of sugar that is easy to paint and is shapeable, like clay. They had made it look exactly like a caterpillar—well, except that it was four feet tall. Its stripes were gold and green and white. They’d used black cotton candy to cover it in fuzz, and they turned its freaky mandibles into an almost mustache.
I really liked that they had gone super realistic with it, because that made the fact that it was wearing one of Papi’s peach-colored guayaberas and a woven palm frond hat even funnier.
I smiled at Mrs. Waked. “I’ll stick the hookah in its mouth for you. Hey, if I mess it up, they can’t yell at me. I’m the director.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” phewed Mrs. Waked. She placed the tip of the hookah hose on the table and then—this surprised me—jumped off the ladder. Landing square on her bustle, she doinged onto her feet a tenth of a second later. That thing had to be made of springs or something! But wait, didn’t she have the egg for her egg trick in there? Or maybe she had all sorts of bustles for all sorts of tricks?
Mrs. Waked always left you with more questions than she answered. I applauded her dismount—she took a bow—and climbed up the ladder, picking up the end of the hookah on the way up.
The reason why we had cake Orugas instead of students in costumes playing Orugas was because Principal Torres didn’t want any kid even pretending to smoke. It’s also why we had this no-smoke hookah. And here was where our Culinary Arts students came through again.
“You are going to love this, Mrs. Waked,” I said to her, even as I jabbed the end of the hookah right between caterpillar’s mandible mustachios. I shoved and kept shoving until the end was halfway through the Rice Krispy head—that way, there was no chance of it falling out. “The bubbles the hookah blows are candy bubbles. Turn it on!”
Clearly, Mrs. Waked had a sweet tooth, judging by the way she scurried over, like a mouse toward a freshly cheesed trap. She turned on the hookah.
Nothing happened.
I descended the ladder to solve the problem. In my thirteen years of life, I’ve learned that the solution to 80 percent of all problems comes to you right after you ask the question “Did you plug it in?” And yep: The hookah hadn’t been plugged in. So I took care of that. Plug, meet socket.
A motor started whirring. A smell like a carnival slowly filled the air. Then, less than a minute later, but not much less, pink and blue bubbles started spouting out of the bowl of the hookah and planeted all around us, iridescent and changeable. Bubbles instantly make everything more magical.
And in this case, more delicious. I bit the bubble nearest me. It exploded and gave me a one-second taste of sweet raspberry.
“The [chomp] pink ones [chomp chomp] are strawberry [chomp]!” said Mrs. Waked. Clearly, she really liked strawberry. She was biting bubbles like a dog biting water from a hose.
The more the room filled with bubbles, the less work got done. Teresita, Octavio, and the set builders all stopped what they were doing to take a little snack break. And me too. I didn’t know what the sugar content of a floating sugar bubble was, but it couldn’t be much, right?
“You know, Sal, [chomp],” said Mrs. Waked, between bites of bubbles, “this is pure genius.”
“The hookah?” I replied. “Yeah, I know. I mean, they even went to the trouble of putting in two flavors. Those Culinary Arts kids go above and beyond.”
“Yes, they do at that [chomp]. But I was [chomp] referring more to the changes that Rompenoche [chomp] en general [chomp chomp] has undergone. They are brilliant.”
I stopped destroying this sugary solar system for a second and walked a step closer to Mrs. Waked. Her opinion really mattered to me. “You think so? Because, I mean, the sets are great, and the props are great, and everybody seems to be having a lot of fun, getting ready for it. But it’s so wild now. So many things happening at the same time. There’s no way to keep control of it. Anything could happen.”
“Exactly, my brilliant [chomp] young man [chomp chomp]. You’ve turned a play into a carnival. And that [chomp] is really what [chomp] Rompenoche [chomp] should be all [chomp chomp chomp chomp…].”
She never finished her sentence, because an especially agile bubble was dodging her like a fairy trying to lure her into a bog. But I’d gotten her message. Mrs. Waked liked the new Rompenoche, as messy and as unruly as it seemed from my end. That made me feel better—which I needed, since the closer we got to showtime, the more I worried that it would be a complete disaster.
“Really, Sal? With one day left before the show and all the work we have to do, here I find you all goofing off ?” said Gabi.
She was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, tapping a foot. Today’s barrettes: owls and pussycats in rowboats. Today’s T-shirt: “YOU’VE GOT TO JUMP OFF CLIFFS ALL THE TIME AND BUILD YOUR WINGS ON THE WAY DOWN.”—RAY BRADBURY.
Gabi was just kidding, of course. She knew how hard everybody had been working all week. But, committed to her bit, she said, “I’d like to borrow you for a minute, Sal. I mean, if you can take a break from chasing bubbles.”
“Take him [chomp] away,” said Mrs. Waked, only half noticing Gabi. “We have got this room [chomp] under complete control at this point.” And I’m not sure, but I think she added, in a squealy little voice, “More bubbles for me!”
It was easy to forget, in the middle of all the stress that comes with codirecting a school-wide production, that we had a multiverse to save and a supervillain to capture. Luckily, I had made Gabi my assistant director in charge of fixing the universe. And I knew she wasn’t about to let me slack off.
HALLWAY 2C WAS JUST about ready for Rompenoche. Gabi and I paused outside of Mrs. Waked’s room so I could take it in.
For this corridor, we’d decided to concentrate on tropical island life, since both Cuba and Miami are famous for their beaches. It would be the perfect place to set up actors playing the Morsa (Walrus), the Ostra (Oyster), the Langosta (Lobster), the Falsa Tortuga (Mock Turtle)—basically any character that could use water and/or sand as its backdrop.
The good news was that the school already had a ton of props for tropical locations. Apparently, Culeco students like plays that take place on deserted islands. So we had all the fake palm trees, real umbrellas, towels, lifeguard chairs, life preservers, and beach balls we needed to set the mood. They even had photorealistic yoga mats that looked like sand.
Even better, though, learning coordinator extraordinaire Daniel had blown up and printed out some old photos and postcards of Cuban and Miamian beaches, and these decorated the walls. At first, they just looked like pictures from a time gone by. When you looked closer, though, you’d see that standing alongside the Cubans and Miamians in the photos were the Dodo in a bikini, Bill the Lizard in a Speedo, and the Mad Hatter in one of those old-timey striped one-piece bathing suits—and a big ole top hat, of course. Daniel, like all librarians, had a million secret skills that he was dying to use. Photoshop was definitely one of them.
Best of all, though, was the fact that hallway 2C was basically done. Since I’d arrived at school that morning, I’d been working in Mrs. Waked’s room and unable to monitor the progress. Turns out I hadn’t needed to.
“Phew, baby,” I said. “At least the beach set is ready.”
“One task down,” said Gabi, “and just six billion more to go.”
Yeah, thanks Gabi. Wa
y to make me feel better
Gabi and I turned right. That put Culeco’s massive stagecraft and set design studio on our right-hand side as we walked. We went in and strolled down a path in the room that looked like Miami’s most famous street, Calle Ocho, in miniature. This was going to be the first thing that parents saw when they entered the school, with facades of some of the street’s most famous buildings lining both sides of hallway 1W.
The real Calle Ocho already looks like the multiverse vomited all over it, because the buildings come from all different time periods. So our movie-set version had to seem just as random. Actually, even more random: It also had to look like something that could have appeared in the Alice books, if Lewis Carroll had been Cuban.
Sound impossible? Well, I know I’m biased, but I think our set builders were killing it.
First, they’d painted eight huge rooster statues in all these crazy colors and styles, just like you see on Calle Ocho, except ours were themed around Wonderland. One rooster was painted with living playing cards all over it; another with living chess pieces; another had a white-knight mannequin riding it; another was done up like a gryphon, all eagle-y and lion-y, yet still chicken-y; and so on, each rooster statue more maravillosa than the next.
All those roosters would be placed throughout hallway 1W, alongside everyone’s favorite Calle Ocho locales. And instead of throwing a tea party, we were going to throw a cafecito party, with the Wonderland characters from that scene drinking espresso in front of our replica of Cafe Versailles. The real Ball & Chain is a nightclub now, but we wanted to go back to the 1930s with it, because that was when it was frequented by gangsters. Its entrance, all chrome and neon, would be guarded by two frog footmen—but instead of wearing tabards and tights and floppy hats with feathers in them, the frogs would wear pinstriped suits and porkpie hats and carry tommy guns. Our King of Hearts was going to be their mob boss. He’d wear a loud red suit, and he’d be all smarm and charm, handing out kiss-of-death playing cards to parents as they passed by. He had this whole bit about giving someone a “Cuban necktie” that ends with him giving someone in the audience, well, a clip-on necktie that has ¡VIVA CUBA! printed on it.
Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe Page 28