Finders Keepers

by Peter Speakman

  The metal rings that were supposed to lock together and then separate at a magic word refused to come undone. The bit where he poured a pitcher of milk into a rolled-up newspaper ended with a soaked newspaper and a puddle of milk on the stage. The cane that was supposed to turn into a bouquet of flowers steadfastly remained a cane. By any objective measure, he was really, really terrible at magic.

  Reese and Theo watched the fiasco from the side of the stage. Reese was wearing a newish blue dress that matched the streaks of color that ran through her dark hair and clunky black boots her mother absolutely hated. She had already gone on, playing part of Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 on her viola. Reese practiced hard and had performed flawlessly, but Mahler was a tough sell to middle-school kids, and she was greeted with bored applause. Next time, she thought, she would go with something from this century.

  “This totally isn’t fair,” said Theo, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest. “I should be the one doing the magic.”

  “I thought you said magic was for geeks.”

  “Magic acts are for geeks. I can do real magic.”

  “Yeah, but if it was you out there you wouldn’t get to watch Parker eat it hard onstage.”

  Theo grinned. “That’s true.”

  It sure seemed like Parker was in over his head. He swiped a hand across his forehead and tugged at his shirt collar. Underneath his cheap top hat his brown hair was wet with sweat. “Okay!” he said, picking a grapefruit-sized crystal ball and a white handkerchief off the folding table that held all his props. “This is just a plain, ordinary crystal ball, right? Just like the kind you use for—” Parker stopped. Nobody ever used a crystal ball for anything. “Um, just like the kind they sell at crystal-ball stores. I’m going to wrap it in this handkerchief, like so….” He did. “And then, with just a wave of my hand and a hypnotic stare, I will cause it to float in midair!”

  He pulled his hand away and the crystal ball that was supposed to levitate fell to the wooden stage with a clunk that echoed all the way to the fire doors. There was laughter and sarcastic applause through the crowd.

  “Oh. Man. Okay. Okay, I got this….”

  In the audience, Parker’s mom was dying along with her only kid. She cringed and occasionally muttered something that sounded like “Oh, jeez.” No mother should have to be put through something like that.

  “He should quit while he’s ahead,” said Parker’s uncle Kelsey.

  “When was he ahead?” asked his aunt Martha.

  Through it all, Mr. Rommy sat, silent and impeccably dressed in a dark suit. If he had any opinions at all about the show he was keeping them to himself.

  Parker chased down the crystal ball before it rolled off the stage and plopped it down on the table. “All right! Well, it looks like my time’s almost up. I just have one more trick to astound and amaze you! I need a volunteer!”

  No hands shot up. No one wanted their fingerprints on this particular disaster.

  “Anybody! Anybody at all!”

  In the wings, Theo sighed. “Break a leg,” Reese told him.

  “With my luck I probably will.” Theo took a deep breath and walked out onto the stage to tepid applause.

  Parker said, “Perfect! And what is your name, young man?”

  Theo squinted up into the bright lights. “Um…Theo Merritt?”

  “Theo…Merritt, did you say? And can you confirm that we have never met before this moment?”

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  Groans and laughs spread through the crowd. There wasn’t a person there who didn’t know that Theo and Parker were first cousins.

  “Okay! If you just give me a second, here….” Parker fumbled on the table for a large red tablecloth (one of Martha’s abandoned craft projects) and then realized he couldn’t hope to hold the thing open by himself. “Oh. I’m going to need a little…” Parker gestured desperately to the wings for Reese to come out.

  “No. No way,” she said under her breath.

  Parker gave her a pleading pout. Reese clenched her teeth and plodded sullenly onto the stage. Once again, Parker Quarry was dragging her into something she didn’t want to do. It was the story of her life.

  “Reese Lorden, everybody!” said Parker. She frowned and Parker handed her one end of the tablecloth. “Now, what I’m going to do is, Theo, could you move a foot to the left here, please? Okay, now my assistant Reese and I—”

  “Your assistant?” Reese asked.

  “Reese and I are going to hold up this cloth, like so…”

  Parker and Reese stretched the cloth between them so that Theo was completely hidden from the audience.

  “…and then I’m going to give the magic incantation….”

  Parker met Mr. Rommy’s eyes in the audience. The wannabe magician attempted a subtle nod, but nothing Parker ever did was subtle and his black hat toppled off his head.

  Mr. Rommy waved his hand gently in the direction of the stage. If you had been looking right at him you might have seen that his eyes changed color slightly, going from a light blue to a stormy gray. A slight whiff of ozone could be detected in the air, the smell of a small electric charge.

  “Akka! Makka! Za-zakka!” With sudden elegance, Parker dropped his corner of the cloth, snapped his fingers, and stepped away.

  There was a collective gasp from the audience. Theo Merritt was gone.

  Parker looked over the audience, now in complete control. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you will kindly turn your attention to the doors behind you.” He gestured to the back of the auditorium. Everyone in the crowd turned around. A spotlight hit the doors. Parker shouted, “Ta-da!”

  And nothing happened.

  “Ta-da!” Parker’s newfound confidence faded. “Um, Theo? You can come out now!”

  Still nothing. As a confused murmur worked its way through the audience, Reese whispered in Parker’s ear. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing! I just—”

  And then Reese’s phone rang. She fumbled in her pocket and put the phone to her ear. “Theo?” she said. “Where…” She turned back to Parker with a look of panic on her face. “Oh no.”

  The crowd gathered below and cheered, astonished, at the sight of Theo. He was on top of the school’s roof, safe but stuck.

  “Come on, Parker, tell us how you did it!” Uncle Kelsey said, his eyes never leaving his son on the roof. “I mean, there’s not even a staircase that goes up there! They have to get a ladder to get him down!”

  “Sorry, Uncle Kelsey, but a magician never reveals his tricks.”

  Reese rolled her eyes so hard she thought Parker might be able to hear it. As Uncle Kelsey and Aunt Martha went with his mom to help Theo off the roof, Mr. Rommy leaned in to Parker and Reese. “I believe I explained to you that teleportation was a very bad idea.”

  “Come on, Rommy, he’s fine! The trick killed!”

  “Yes, but young Theo could just as easily have ended up a thousand feet over the school’s roof, or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Teleportation is unpredictable and very difficult to harness.”

  “Theo was never in any danger. It was a controlled environment. Besides, look at him! He’s having the time of his life!”

  Theo was not having the time of his life. As the custodian and Theo’s dad leaned the ladder onto the roof, Theo’s face was the color of a fire truck.

  “Well, you have to admit it was a memorable talent show,” said Reese.

  “We should be thankful it will not be remembered as the day Theo died,” said Mr. Rommy.

  “As always, you’re a ray of sunshine, Fon-Rahm,” Parker said.

  The custodian and Uncle Kelsey finally got Theo off the roof, to the scattered applause of the teachers, parents, and students still gathered around. After his folks made sure he was okay, Theo stomped over to Parker, obviously displeased at the turn of events. Before Theo could get within punching distance, Parker gave him a weak shrug and a comic bow.

  “Ta-da!” he
said.

  Later, after Reese had gone with her parents and Theo, Kelsey, and Martha had piled into Kelsey’s old work truck, Parker and his mom got into their secondhand (okay, thirdhand) Ford Focus and shut the doors against the night. Kathleen was always a little surprised when the car started right up. The Saturn she’d owned when they lived in LA was more temperamental.

  She let the car idle.

  Parker waited. “Are we going, or have you decided we’re going to live in the school parking lot?” he asked.

  She turned to her son. “Things are working out, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not perfect, but you like it here, don’t you?”

  Parker thought for a minute. He was as surprised as anybody to find that he did like it in New Hampshire. “Yeah. Why?” His face fell. “Oh no. Are we moving? That’s not fair! I’ve got friends here! I’ve got a whole—”

  “No. No! We’re not moving! I swear. I wanted—” She stopped. “I have some good news, and I was waiting for the perfect time to tell you….”

  “You got a raise at the drugstore!”

  “No. I am going to get a raise, just as soon as I can work up the courage to ask for one, but no. This is about Dad.”

  Parker’s father, J.T., had been in prison for the last two years, convicted of convincing a group of senior citizens to invest in real estate in South Dakota and then charging outrageous fees for helping them buy land that turned out not to exist. J.T. always denied he’d done anything illegal. The federal prosecutor and the jury saw otherwise. Illegal or not, Parker knew what his dad had done was wrong, and he knew his mother knew it, too. J.T. was the reason they’d had to leave everything behind in the first place.

  Parker shrank back in his seat. “What about Dad?”

  “Parker, they’re letting him out early.”

  Parker froze. “I thought he wasn’t even up for parole until the summer.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, but the DA made some kind of deal with him. He’s coming home!”

  “And by home you mean here?”

  “Of course I mean here! He’ll stay with us at your aunt and uncle’s until we all get an apartment together. Or a house! How would that be, all the Quarrys together in an actual house with a yard and plumbing and everything?”

  “I guess it’ll be great.”

  “You guess it’ll be great? This is incredible news! It’s a new start for us, kid. And I don’t believe for a second you’re not excited about it. Come on. Admit that it’s amazing. I’m not moving the car until you admit it’s amazing.”

  Parker forced himself to smile. “It’s amazing, Mom.”

  She reached out and messed up her son’s hair before she put the car into reverse. “It’s a new start for all of us.”

  As they pulled away, Parker looked out the window. Fon-Rahm was flying silently alongside the car, unseen by anyone but his master, blue lightning streaming down his arms as he continued his constant vigil.

  2

  REESE WATCHED THE CLOCK.

  The last fifteen minutes of Mr. Nilmeier’s seventh-period photosynthesis lecture (come on, she had learned this stuff herself two years ago) had been excruciating, but in twenty seconds the long school day would be a thing of the past and it would be time for the single greatest thing ever: Historical Math Club!

  The bell rang and she leaped out of her seat. In the hall she exchanged cursory hellos with Erin, Alicia, and Jennifer. The three girls were always together. For the millionth time Reese thought about how cool it would be to have some friends who were girls for once—just one would be fine, really—and for the millionth time she packed that thought up and stored it alongside other ideas that had merit (she had a great concept for a pop opera based on the life of Marie Curie) but which she had no way of currently implementing. This wasn’t the time to be worried about things she couldn’t control. Historical Math Club!

  The Historical Math Club was the single least-popular after-school club at Robert Frost Junior High. Potential members were turned off not only by the unsavory combination of history and math but also by the fact that the club meetings took place in Mr. Rommy’s classroom. Mr. Rommy was stuck with the worst room in the whole school. The heater was overbearing in the winter. The air conditioner was on the fritz when it was hot. The windows didn’t close right, and the blinds were all tangled in a bunch near the ceiling. When you put it all together, you got something that did not in the least appeal to students trying to decide what to do with their precious moments between the end of school and the beginning of dinner.

  Which was exactly the way the members of the Historical Math Club wanted it.

  Parker had come up with the idea after Uncle Kelsey began asking questions about all the time they were spending in the barn. The truth was that the barn was where Fon-Rahm lived, but they couldn’t tell him that. Parker’s first instinct had been to order Fon-Rahm to remove the memories from his uncle’s brain, but he knew Theo wouldn’t like that and he wasn’t sure if Fon-Rahm could actually do it, so he decided he and his friends needed an alternate place to hang out. Reese’s house was out of the question because her parents had an annoying habit of showing up right when you didn’t want them around, and the last time Parker had told his genie to build them their own clubhouse it had alerted Xaru, who nearly annihilated the human species. The next logical meeting place was the school.

  The three members of the Historical Math Club (Parker, Theo, and Reese) had been meeting here two days a week with their adviser, Mr. Rommy, ever since. The particular genius of the name was that while it scared away other students, it reassured adults. Their children would not be exposed to anything dangerous or questionable in the Historical Math Club. Of course, dangerous and questionable are relative terms.

  In the weeks since its inception, the club had trudged through exactly zero math problems and no history. They had, however, been rock diving in Cancún, shopping in Mumbai, surfing in Maui, and horseback riding in Argentina. On one of their trips, Fon-Rahm had piled them into his beiger-than-beige Toyota Camry and magically flown them all to a ski resort in Utah where Parker had the genie give them the skills of professional snowboarders. After they hitched a ride on a SpaceX test flight, Theo had puked on a multimillionaire boy-band star who had waited years for the trip. Reese thought Parker would never stop laughing.

  And now, it was finally time for Reese to pick their activity. She was superexcited, but when she came into Mr. Rommy’s room she found both Parker and Theo moping around like they were in pre-algebra.

  Parker was usually bouncing off the walls at Historical Math Club, reeling off insane idea after insane idea, any one of which would prove irresistible to Theo while still causing the catastrophic failure of his digestive system. Instead, Parker was slumped in the noisiest and most uncomfortable of the noisy and uncomfortable desks, staring morosely out the window. Theo was absently scratching paint chips off a radiator. Fon-Rahm, still in what Reese liked to think of as his Mr. Rommy disguise, sat at his desk at the front of the classroom correcting math tests taken by seventh graders who had exactly zero idea that their boring teacher was really a genie older than history.

  Instantly deflated, Reese turned to Fon-Rahm with a what-gives look that went right over the genie’s head. Fon-Rahm was hopeless at reading body language.

  “It’s like a morgue in here. What’s wrong with you guys?”

  Nothing from Theo. Parker’s desk squeaked.

  “Wow. It’d be more fun to hang out with Vesiroth.”

  Fon-Rahm frowned. “I do not believe that to be an accurate statement. Although I have felt no changes in the Nexus, I feel we can expect an attack once Vesiroth has amassed the power required to ensure his victory.”

  “Yeah, I was being sarcastic, but thanks for reminding me we’re always in constant danger.”

  Theo snorted. Parker stared out the window. His desk squeaked.

  “Nobody? Wow. Okay. Great. Don’t say anything, just sit there and pout.”

&nb
sp; “Leave me alone, will you?” Parker finally chimed in. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Maybe if you told us about it we could help!”

  “And maybe you would just make things worse.”

  Reese threw up her hands. “Fon-Rahm, can you please help me out here?”

  Fon-Rahm took a moment before he answered. “I find that human emotions can be infinitely complex.”

  “Deep,” Parker told his genie. “It’s that kind of sparkling insight that makes me glad I’m literally forced to be within earshot of you a hundred percent of the time.”

  “Perfect,” said Theo. “This again.”

  Parker said, “You don’t know what it’s like, buddy. You get all the benefits of having a genie without being chained to him. You can just walk away.”

  “I have problems, too, you know,” said Theo.

  “Yeah, like which Patriots shirt to put on in the morning.”

  Parker wasn’t angry at Theo or Fon-Rahm, and he knew it. He was angry at his father. He had been angry with him since he went away. In Fon-Rahm, Parker had found an adult (kind of) who was there whenever Parker needed him, and now that J.T. was coming back into his life Parker didn’t know how to feel about it. He wanted to give his father another chance, but he’d been burned before.

  Reese said, “Guys? Can we just get past whatever this is and go do something fun? We have a magical genie right here, and it’s my turn….”

  There was a knock and the door to Mr. Rommy’s room swung open.

  Reese stopped midsentence. Theo quit picking at the radiator. The distinctive, grating squeak from Parker’s desk went mercifully silent.

  “Hi, sorry. It’s my first day here and they gave me this list of after-school programs with available spaces.” The girl held out a creased list of clubs. “Is this right? Historical Math Club?”

  The kids just gaped. This had never happened before.

  Fon-Rahm was the only one who kept his composure. “Yes. We were just discussing Euclid’s proof of the infinitude of primes and the effect early mathematics had on the politics of his time.”