“Cross our hearts,” Max said. She elbowed Lola and Lola nodded.
Margaret took a deep breath. “She told me that the people who live on your street, the devil worshippers, are getting more angry about the Nazis.”
“They were already angry?” Lola said. “I thought devil worshippers and Nazis would get along great.”
Margaret shrugged. “I guess the Nazis, or at least a lot of them, are more devout Christians than we Americans are. Apparently a lot of the Nazi teachings come from the same guy who started the Lutheran church.”
Lola raised her eyebrows. “Well, ain’t that a kick in the head?”
“Yeah, so anyway, she told me that the devil worshippers found out about the show that you’re doing. Only they heard wrong or something, ’cause they’ve got it in their heads that you’re actually doing the show for the Nazis.”
Max and Lola exchanged a look. This was beginning to sound far too similar to the truth for their liking.
“So what are they going to do about it?” Max asked.
“She said they’re putting a curse on you for it.” Margaret shrugged. “But you don’t believe in that sort of thing, so I guess you shouldn’t be worried.”
She was right on both counts. Max did not believe in those sorts of things and she shouldn’t be worried. Which was why it was so incredibly frustrating that she was.
“What sort of a curse?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret said. “The whole thing spooked me out so much that I left her house before she even got a chance to read my palm. But I haven’t been able to stop feeling like I should tell you. So there, now I have.” She took a step toward the school building. “Can we go back to class now?”
“You go ahead. Tell Mrs. Conrad I got sick.”
“I don’t really want to lie,” Margaret started.
Then Max vomited on the ground and no lie was necessary.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Ugh. Why did I ever want assistants?”
—Max’s Diary, Friday, March 24, 1944
The Vanishing Box stood next to the storm cellar door in the backyard—intact, painted, and frustratingly fully functional. Shoji, Carl, and Eric had just carried it off Carl’s dad’s truck and set it up. Max hadn’t helped them with the lifting. After all, she hadn’t been invited to the building, so she assumed the last leg of victory should be theirs alone. Besides, they had filled the base of the box with sandbags, and if they were going to be that stupid, they might as well deal with the consequences.
“So now we can rehearse, right?” Max asked.
“Of course,” Eric said. “Wait, you haven’t started rehearsing yet? You’ve only got four days before the show. Man oh man, you’re going to bomb so bad.”
Shoji slapped his shoulder. “Shut up. She’s been practicing, she just meant rehearsing with all of us.” He looked at Max with question marks in his eyes. “Right? You have been practicing.”
“I’ve been practicing my whole life for this, so yes,” she said. “Now, let’s run over what everyone is going to be doing.”
“Yeah, I figure you’ll want Carl doing the heavy lifting of stuff,” Eric said. “And I can run the lights. I’m pretty good at that.”
“I have a list, actually,” she said. “I’ve got all your jobs picked out.” She held out a piece of paper to him.
He took it and read it quickly. “You want me to hand out programs? That’s stupid. I’ll do the lights.”
Max clenched her fists. “It’s not stupid. It’s how a magic show is run.”
“Look, it’s cute, really, but I’m the smart one, remember? Let me do what I’m good at and you can do what you’re good at.”
Lola, who was sitting inside the box waiting for Max to test and see if it worked, stepped out. “Come on, this is her show, stop being a jerk.”
“No, it’s not just her show,” Eric said and ripped up the paper in his hands. “This is the replacement for pranking Judy and her morons. Which means this is all of our show, all of our efforts. So you need to do it the way I’m saying to do it, ’cause I’m the brains.”
“Right now, I don’t see a resemblance,” Lola muttered.
Max clenched her eyes shut and attempted to somehow convince herself that literally sawing Eric in half would be a terrible thing to do. If only there was a way to actually put him back together. Or perhaps animate his lifeless body so no one would be able to tell what had happened. His disposition might even be better then. His mother would probably thank her.
“Okay, fine, Eric you can do the lights. But I want Carl and Lola working the crowd. Shoji will be my assistant.”
Eric snickered. “Does he need to wear a skirt?”
“Obviously, yes, now can we please get started?” She went over to a table they’d set up for her to the side of the Vanishing Box. Carl and Lola took seats on the grass while Eric climbed on top of a ladder and pretended to have a spotlight.
Shoji came and stood next to her. “Do I really have to wear a skirt?”
“Not unless you want to,” she said.
“I don’t think I do,” he said with a grin.
Then Max turned off the girl who was frustrated with the humans she had chosen to work with, put on her top hat, picked up her wand, and turned into THE AMAZING MAX. “Ladies and Gentlemen—”
“There won’t be any ladies, you know,” Eric called from the ladder.
THE AMAZING MAX waved his comment away with her hand. “Esteemed Gentlemen—”
“Esteemed? Really?” the single member of the peanut gallery said with a groan.
“Gentlemen,” she corrected. “There are many nights in history that have been notable—nay, even notorious—which we can all recount at a given whim. The night of Lincoln’s assassination. The night Paul Revere rode to call the Minute Men to arms. The night the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.”
“They aren’t gonna care about American history, you know.”
THE AMAZING MAX stormed off the stage, leaving Plain-Old Max to fend for herself. “Can you just let me get through my lines, please?”
“Can you write better lines?” Eric retorted. “My gosh, I hope your magic tricks are better, otherwise this whole thing will be considered cruel and unusual punishment for the prisoners. And they’re Nazis. They don’t deserve much.”
“You think you could do better?”
Carl leaned over and whispered something to Lola. Lola laughed.
This was a very unfortunate decision.
“Oh, this whole thing’s a joke for you guys, isn’t it?” Max yelled. “You aren’t taking it seriously. You don’t care what happens. All you people want is for us to get through this thing so we can go back to pranking those stupid girls that you all are so obsessed with.”
Eric jumped off the ladder. “Yeah, I do.”
“Well you sure aren’t showing me that you’re taking it seriously.”
“That’s not what I was answering,” he said as he walked up to the table. “I mean, yeah, I do think I could do better.”
He could have stabbed her in the chest, and it would not have hurt as badly as his words hurt in that moment. She took off her top hat and threw it on the table, then threw her wand at his chest.
“Fine, that’s it. The show is canceled.” She glared at the rest of the Gremlins. “Why in the world did I ever think putting on a show with three stupid, backward, hillbilly misfits and an Oriental cowboy would ever work?” She winced when she said that, but not as much as she’d winced at Eric’s words. She turned and ran into the house, the screen door slamming shut behind her. She ran through the living room, where her mother was entertaining Mrs. Morris, and straight for her bedroom.
“Honey, Mrs. Morris says your ferret was in her house the other day,” Mrs. Larousse called after her, but Max pretended not to hear. Because she’d already heard enough from people for one day.
She lay facedown on her bed so any sounds she might make while crying wouldn’t escape and be used aga
inst her. And then she allowed the tears to flow, because they’d been begging to come out for weeks, and if she could at least make them happy, perhaps it would start a chain reaction that would eventually solve everything else in her life. At least, it would if there was any magic in the world. Because, if there was any magic in the world, surely the most magical substance of all would be the tears of a child. And if they were also the tears of a magician? Well, then they would be double the magic. If only.
Houdini peeked his head out from the bottom drawer of the dresser. He knew nothing of the idea that tears might be magical, or that they could be the building blocks of miracles, or any other nonsense imagined by humans. Instead, he only knew one fact about tears: They were, as every ferret knew, bunny bait. And so, because he was not quite in the mood to fight off a swarm of rabbits on this day, he climbed out of the drawer and up onto the bed, and he proceeded to quickly lick away every tear that his precious human leaked from her eyeballs.
Max rolled over and clutched Houdini to her chest. There was no magic in tears, but there was comfort in ferret hugs. And Houdini didn’t mind his position within her arms. It gave him prime position in case any vicious bunnies happened to have caught a whiff of those infernal tears.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Max sat at the piano in the rec hall, tapping at the keys absentmindedly. She had four people to tell about the show being canceled: Gil, who she knew would be heartbroken; her parents, who would probably be relieved, or at least her mother would; and Felix. She wasn’t sure how he would take it, but considering the information Gil had given her, she was pretty sure she didn’t care.
But Gil was first. Of course. Best to get the hardest task out of the way.
After five minutes of staring at the stage and imagining the show that now would never be, Gil came in carrying armfuls of sheet music.
“Hey! You’re early,” he said. “Boy, give you a magic show and suddenly you’re as diligent as Mozart.” He set the stacks on top of the piano and took his place next to her on the bench. “Now, I don’t know how you feel about jazz, but I feel like it’s the perfect accompaniment to an American magic show. Here, I’ll give you a sampling.”
He reached for a piece of music and she stopped him. “There isn’t going to be a show anymore.”
He retracted his hand and expanded his eyes. “What? Why?”
Oh dear. He had to ask that question. Of course, she knew the reason. It was because it was too hard, and it wasn’t even her show anymore, and nobody was listening to her about it—and anyway what kind of a girl tries to be a magician? Sure, in Brooklyn, why not? But in Abilene? That was not the way the road went there, at least not for her.
But all of that was too hard to say, so instead she just shrugged. “It didn’t work out.”
He shot her a suspicious look. “On account of what, exactly?”
“I don’t feel like talking about it.”
He watched her face for a few seconds. “Okay, that’s fine.” He pulled down the piece of music he’d been aiming for. “Not gonna stop me from playing for you, though.” He started in to the piece—a nice, slow jazz waltz.
She scrunched up her eyebrows. “You were going to play this for the show?”
“Prelude,” he said. “Soothe the savages so that, when you got up there, you were the jolt of electricity they didn’t know they were looking for.”
“Wow,” she said. “You put a lot of thought into this.”
“A lot,” he said. “Apparently more than you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He kept playing.
“No, really, what do you mean by that?” she asked again.
“I just thought you were more of a performer than this, that’s all,” he said.
She bristled. “I’m a performer. Trust me, nobody loves performing more than I do.”
“A true performer doesn’t give up until the show is over,” he said.
“What? You were the one who tried to convince me to cancel in the first place.”
“Yeah, and you fought me on it. That’s when I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that you were a legitimate showman. Or show-woman, I guess. And a show-woman wouldn’t give up on her show.”
She stood up. “Yeah, but what if the show isn’t the show she wanted anymore?” She stepped away from the piano and looked out over the empty room. “What if the show isn’t even really hers anymore?”
“Okay, now you have to explain what happened,” he said.
She came over and leaned on the piano, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and spilled the whole story to him. And, once she’d finished, she could finally see it for what it was. “They stole the show from me,” she said. “They didn’t mean to—well, except maybe for Eric—but they did. They took my dream and left me out of it.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that happens.”
“It does?” She tried to think of how many other scenarios could play out like hers to make anyone truly believe that this event was just a thing that “happens.”
“Sure,” he said. “Dreams have a bad habit of changing on their way to becoming reality. Take me, for instance. A few years ago, I wanted to be a concert pianist, move to Paris, fall in love, and live a long life getting paid to play for thousands.” He finished the waltz with a flair. “And now, here I am. Scrounging to play piano for Nazi prisoners, only going to Paris if I’m following a tank, and if I make it past this bloody war I’ll consider myself the luckiest son-of-a-gun that’s ever lived.”
She thought about what he said, the matter-of-fact way he was dealing with the second-rate version of his own existence. “And you’ve never fallen in love,” she said with a broken smile.
He chuckled. “Hey, let’s not go that far. But that’s a story for another day.”
“So what do you think I should do?”
“If you’re half the performer I’d thought you were? You’d finish the danged show. I mean, I don’t know beans about magic shows, but in music you learn that you’ve got to play to the changes.”
She hadn’t ever heard that phrase before in all her years of piano lessons. Of course, she barely remembered what a quarter note was, so that didn’t mean very much. “Play to the changes? What does that mean?”
“It’s a jazz saying. Underneath every song, no matter what kind it is, you have the changes. The chord changes, that is. And sometimes you’ll go to play with somebody and they’ll know the song differently, or they’ll want to take it in a different direction. But as long as you remember to play to the changes, you’ll be fine.” He shrugged. “I’ve always kind of made that my life motto.”
She liked that a great deal. “Play to the changes.”
“Exactly. No matter what happens, no matter the circumstances, you don’t stop until you’ve made it to the last chord. Or, in your case, until you’ve said the last ‘abracadabra.’ Because you’re playing to the changes.”
She sighed and buried her face into her arms on the piano. “But that’s so hard. Maybe I’m not half the performer you’d thought I was.”
He laughed, rolled up the sheet music in front of him, and tapped her on top of the head with it. “Get out of here, Miss Pity Party. And promise me you’ll at least think about what I said. Before you go canceling the show, I mean.”
“It’s only three days away!” she exclaimed.
“Which means you probably ought to get busy, huh?” His eyes glimmered as he smirked at her.
“Fine, I’ll think about it. As I’m walking to my dad’s office to tell him it’s canceled, I’ll think about it. Okay?”
He gave her a thumbs-up, pulled down another sheet of music, and started an upbeat stride piece. “Here, I’ll play you out. So you know what talent you’ll be missing if you cancel this whole shindig.”
She shook her head and stepped to the beat out the side door.
She could still hear him playing when she turned the corner and came face-to-face with Felix. His face was pa
le, and his eyes seemed ready to shed tears.
He dropped to his knees in front of her and grabbed her hands.
“Fräulein, please,” he said, his voice gruff and breaking. “Please do not cancel the show.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The first time you witness an adult crying, it is always a memorable experience. Particularly if it’s a grown man. Double-particularly if the grown man is also a Nazi.
Max, who, as has already been established, did not put much stock in the magic of tears, did believe wholeheartedly that public displays of affliction were humiliating, not only for those doing the crying, but also for those on the receiving end. Thus, whether she felt any sort of pity or empathy for this grown, tear-soaked man in front of her was neither here nor there. She had to make him stop crying. This became priority number one.
“Okay, okay,” she said to the man weeping before her. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
He nodded and they walked briskly to the supply shed. He opened it and motioned for her to go inside. This was, of course, a very bad idea. The supply shed was cluttered with tools and supplies that could very easily be used to murder someone and hide the evidence in less than an hour. However, the alternative to stepping into the dark and creepy shed was remaining in the warm, inviting, and always-revealing sunshine. She decided to forego safety in an attempt to also escape embarrassment.
Once they were inside and the door was closed, they stood illuminated by only a single lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling.
“Please, do not cancel the show,” Felix started again.
She held up her hand. “Hold on,” she said. “Were you eavesdropping on my conversation with Gil?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I overheard you say you were canceling the show, and so I listened because I could not believe such a thing was true.”
“Well, it is true,” she said, even though she was actually no longer sure how true it was.
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