Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

by Jennifer Brown

  “You should name her,” I said. “Think of the nicest, friendliest person you know, and name her after that person.”

  He thought for a minute, then brightened. “I know!” he said. “I’ve got the perfect name for her.”

  I rubbed my fingers along her quills, careful not to get stuck. “What is it?”

  His smile was so big it looked like it might break his face. “Helen!” he said. “Helen Heirmauser Hedgehog.”

  Oh, brother.

  TRICK #12

  THE BROKEN PENCIL

  When I got home, I went up to my room and locked the door. I changed into a T-shirt and jeans, letting my sandpapery brown vest and tie crumple into a corner of my bedroom. The weekend was officially here, and I wouldn’t have to look at that stuff for two days. Bliss.

  I got down on my knees and reached under the bed, dragging out Grandpa Rudy’s old magic trunk.

  It had been a while. I hadn’t noticed, but the fact that my magic was what sent me to Pennybaker School made me kind of hate it a little. And the fact that Owen, Flea, and Wesley—not to mention Chip Mason—asked me nonstop to show them my tricks made me hate it even more.

  But as soon as I opened the trunk, I remembered that I actually really loved magic. The inside of the trunk smelled like Grandpa Rudy—spicy and sweet at the same time, with a little undertone of smoke and black licorice. It was a smell I imagined Houdini had; the scent of magic. It was a smell that made me want to do some basics. Oldies but goodies, Grandpa Rudy called them. Tried and true.

  I picked up a deck of cards, worn and soft from years of being shuffled. “You see, Tommy,” I said aloud in my Grandpa Rudy voice. “The thing about magic is, people will see what they want to see.” I shuffled the cards using just one hand, the way Grandpa Rudy used to do. It was a move that had taken me a whole summer to learn but really impressed people when I did it correctly. I split the deck and spread it out in an arc across the floor. “So you have to make them want to see magic. Make them look away from the trick.”

  I held a card between two fingers and turned my hand, and it disappeared. I reappeared it behind my back.

  “So much of successful magic,” I said, doing a double lift, and then doing it again, “is about practice. About being so good, so smooth, that nobody will question you.” I did a pinky break. “They. Will. Believe.”

  When I was a kid, I would sit at Grandpa Rudy’s feet for hours and watch his hands so closely that my eyes got dry and felt like they would fall out of my head.

  But even though I would watch with everything I had, I still would never see the trick. I would only see the magic. I was floored every time he passed two metal hoops through each other or pulled a toy out of an orange or made a glass of milk disappear. How did it happen, and why couldn’t I see it, even when I was looking?

  I supposed that was why I was so interested in learning the tricks after Grandpa Rudy died. I wanted to be the one to know there was no magic there. I wanted to do the tricking.

  After a while, I got bored with practicing my sleight of hand and decided I would try something more challenging. I had once seen Grandpa Rudy pass an index card through a pencil. I was pretty sure I knew how the trick was done, but I’d never tried it myself.

  Grandpa Rudy would have someone from the audience come up on stage. He would give them a pencil and have them check it out to make sure it was a real, whole, intact pencil. While he was doing this, he would tell them a story around the cigar he liked to chew while performing, about how he was in a special government program during the war, and how they taught him to use just about anything as a weapon.

  “Tell ya what,” he’d say, taking the cigar out and laying it on the table (where about eighty percent of the time it would burn a hole into Grandma Jo’s tablecloth and make her start yelling when we got home). “I’ll prove it to ya.” He’d pull an index card out of his jacket pocket and hold it up. “I’ll bet you I can break that pencil in half, using only this index card.” He’d have the volunteer inspect the index card to make sure it was an ordinary index card. He’d then tell them to hold the pencil nice and tight, count to three, and … boom. Pencil broken. “See?” he’d say, retrieving his cigar and popping it back into his mouth. “Trained to use anything as a weapon.” And then he’d make a joke. “You should see what I can do with a carrot,” or “I once fought off a whole village with a single blade of grass,” or “Now, hold your arm out real straight, and I’ll get a bigger card.”

  What I loved most about those kinds of tricks was that even the volunteer helper had no idea how it was done. They were part of the trick and still didn’t see the trick happen. Because they weren’t looking for it. All they saw was the magic.

  I dug through my desk until I found a stray index card and an old pencil. I just needed to find a volunteer.

  I found Erma on the couch, watching one of her dumb teenage-girl drama shows, as usual.

  “Hey, Erma,” I said.

  “No,” she intoned, without even looking up from the TV.

  “I just need some help real quick.”

  “No,” she repeated.

  “It’s for a—”

  “No,” she said, louder. “And hush, I can’t hear my show.”

  This again. Sisters were no help at all.

  I went into the kitchen, where Mom and Grandma Jo were trying to make dinner, although that wasn’t so easy with the two of them still being mad at each other.

  “I’m just saying, it’s a low blow to steal someone’s skateboard,” Grandma Jo said, furiously peeling a potato into the sink.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mom said, but she was talking so lightly that it was obvious she was the culprit. “I didn’t steal anyone’s anything.” She stirred something in a pot. “Besides, you were going to break your neck on that thing, and someone had to do something.”

  “I knew it was you!” Grandma Jo cried, pointing at Mom with the potato peeler. Louis XIV: Peeled by a potato peeler. Snuffed by a spud. “A woman’s board is her best friend. You are a best-friend stealer!”

  “I said I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mom yelled back, stirring faster and faster until stuff started to slop over the sides of the pot. “And I did you a favor by getting rid of that thing!”

  This was quickly turning into a Mother-Daughter Potato Skateboard Smashdown Adventure, so it was definitely not the right time to ask either one of them to help me. I turned and wandered around until I was back to Erma.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  “On his way home,” she said, still not looking up, even though it was now a commercial.

  I sighed and plopped into the recliner. I was tired of doing card tricks by myself in my room. I didn’t want to watch a bunch of girls fight and cry and put on lipstick on Erma’s show. And the kitchen wasn’t a safe place to be. I had no homework. I had nothing to …

  Just then I noticed movement outside the front window. I slid over to the love seat and parted the curtains.

  Chip Mason. Of course.

  He was running through his front yard, wildly swinging a net. He swooped one way and then another, then leaped, stumbled forward a few steps, and kept running. Then he ran too close to the big oak tree and tripped over a root. He fell, his head torpedoing right into the net on the way down. He struggled for a few seconds to free himself, then just lay back, his chest rising and falling with deep breaths as he stared up into the sky.

  I wondered what he’d been trying so hard to catch.

  I wondered how tightly he could hold a pencil.

  Sighing again, as dramatically as I could, even though all the drama I could muster couldn’t take Erma’s attention away from her show—in which someone had lied to someone else and another someone had let the lie slip, and now all the someones were slamming doors on one another—I pulled myself off the love seat.

  It was pretty nice outside. Still warm enough for shorts, but not for much longer. Summer would soon be gi
ving way to fall, and something about knowing that I would be heading into the Christmas season at Pennybaker School made it all the more permanent to me. It was depressing.

  “Hey, Chip,” I said, standing over him once again.

  “Oh, hi, Thomas,” he said, pulling himself to sitting.

  I hated to even ask this, but, “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, really,” he said. “Trying to capture something, but I’m not having much luck.” He picked up his net and inspected it.

  “What are you trying to capture?”

  He stood, letting the net dangle by his side. “No idea,” he said, offering me a huge smile. “I won’t know until I capture it.”

  This, oddly, made more than a little bit of sense, and the fact that it did kind of scared me. I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected that once someone got to understand a guy like Chip Mason with no further explanation, things were looking pretty doomed on the You’re Weird Now, Too, Buddy scale.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool, though, if I caught a dragon?” he said.

  “You mean a dragonfly?” I asked.

  “No. A dragon dragon,” he said. “One with scales and fire and everything.”

  I nodded slowly. “Yeah, Chip. It would be cool.” It would also be a miracle, since dragons don’t exist, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. There were just some dreams you didn’t crush for a guy. “Hey, I don’t suppose you’d be willing to help me with something.”

  Chip’s face brightened. He dropped his net to the ground. “Sure,” he said. I could tell he was making an effort to keep cool about it, but he was failing miserably. He cleared his throat, looked down at the ground, and then looked back up at me with a very serious expression. In a low, “manly” voice, he said, “I mean, what can I do for you, Thomas?”

  I held out my pencil. “I need you to hold this for me.”

  “Okay!” He didn’t even ask why. Just took the pencil and held it as if it were made of gold. Which was probably something I should have really liked about Chip Mason—when Erma was telling me to hush because she couldn’t hear her show, and Wesley was telling me I didn’t understand things, Chip was all in, all the time—but it actually kind of annoyed me. Don’t do it just because I asked you to, I wanted to shout. Resist, man! Be a little bit difficult at least!

  But I didn’t say anything. Just positioned his hands so he was holding it the same way Grandpa Rudy always positioned the hands of his volunteers.

  “So you didn’t know this about me,” I began, “but when I was in the war—”

  Chip lowered the pencil. “What war?”

  I rolled my eyes impatiently, pulling his hands, and the pencil, back into place. “World War Two, I guess. Now, when I was in the war, the government taught me—”

  Chip lowered the pencil again. “Not possible. World War Two took place from 1939 until 1945. Your parents weren’t even alive yet. Your grandparents were probably babies. Grandfather Huck wasn’t even in elementary school yet.”

  I raised the pencil again, his hands trailing along. “I don’t mean I was literally in the war. Now. When I was in the war, the government taught me—”

  He lowered the pencil again. “Well, I suppose it’s possible for one to be figuratively in a war. I mean, tug-of-war doesn’t technically involve any sort of munitions or force of arms. Of course, unless you mean literal arms, like the ones on your body. Which you definitely use when playing tug-of-war. Only in that case, it would literally be a war again.” He cocked his head to one side. “Oh. But what about when two celebrities are having a flame war? I believe that is a figurative sentence all the way around, because there is neither literal flame nor literal war going on in those circumstances. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  I had totally forgotten what I was even out here for. “What?”

  He held the pencil back in position. “Carry on.”

  Reluctantly, I went back to making a show of aligning his hands just so. “So, as I was saying …” I drew a blank. “What was I saying?”

  “You were in the war. The figurative war, of course. Although World War Two was quite literal. And I contend that, while it is possible to be in a figurative war, it is really not possible for one to be figuratively involved in a literal war. But carry on. We shall suspend disbelief for the sake of the tale.”

  I dropped my hands to my sides and sighed. “Forget it.”

  He thrust the pencil toward me. “No, no! Keep going! I want to hear your incogitable war story.”

  I stared at the pencil for a second. It seemed so silly now, breaking a stupid pencil while talking about being a trained weapon. Grandpa Rudy wasn’t a trained weapon. He was a guy with kind eyes and a soft laugh who loved cigars and Bill the rabbit and didn’t mind his grandson sitting around watching him practice his magic all the time.

  And I was definitely no trained weapon. I wasn’t even sure what I was trained at anymore.

  I sat in the grass, letting the index card I’d brought out flutter to the ground next to me. “Nah, it’s a dumb trick,” I said. “You hit the pencil with your finger, which is hidden behind the index card. That’s what breaks the pencil. Not the card, the finger. And it probably hurts.”

  Chip Mason looked completely crestfallen that I’d told him the trick. He stared at the pencil as if it were the one at fault. Finally, he sank to the grass next to me.

  “Oh.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, Chip picking blades of grass and, one by one, inspecting each blade, as if he expected to find a treasure on one of them. Which, knowing Chip, he probably did.

  I was starting to think maybe I would go inside and practice sharpening my spitwad skills out my bedroom window, when Chip said, “So what do you want to do?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know. Do. What do you want to do?”

  “With you?”

  He nodded. “Sure. I’ve got my playing socks on.” He kicked off one shoe and showed me what appeared to be a totally ordinary white sock beneath. “Mom’s got Huck at the eye doctor, and I’ve already done all my schoolwork today. I’m free for the afternoon, and I’m feeling rather footloose about it.”

  “Footloose?”

  He nodded again, eagerly, and then stood and did a little jig in the grass. “And quite fancy-free, too!” He jumped to the side and clicked his heels together.

  “Why do you talk like that?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “You know. ‘Quite fancy-free, too.’ That’s weird.”

  He blinked thoughtfully. “What’s weird about it?”

  “Nobody talks like that. Nobody even knows what it means.”

  “I know what it means,” he said.

  “But don’t you care what kids your age think of you?”

  He squatted next to me again. “Not really. Should I?”

  Before I could answer, there was a screechy voice to my left. “Thomas Fallgrout, looks like you’re hard at work doing nothing, as usual.”

  A terror on a banana bicycle seat, Erma’s best friend, Arthura Crabbe, stood on the sidewalk in front of us, straddling her lavender bike, the glittery pink handlebar tassels blowing in the breeze. A helmet chin strap squeezed into her cheeks, making her face look even more pinched and angry than usual. Her cheeks squished and squeezed around a piece of bright blue bubblegum, which Arthura was always chewing, her glittery pink lip gloss sticking to it as it passed by her lips. Arthura wasn’t my biggest fan, but Dad always told me that with girls that age, the meaner they were, that meant the more they liked you. Which made me not her biggest fan, either.

  “Hi, Arthura,” I said, without enthusiasm.

  “I heard about what happened at your school,” she said. She placed her hands on her hips haughtily.

  Chip Mason perked up. “What happened at your school?”

  I ignored both of them.

  “My mom was talking all about it,” Arthura said. “Mrs. Heirmauser was her favorite teacher of all time, ever.” Sh
e said this last bit accusatorily, as if I were somehow involved in who Mrs. Crabbe got for teachers when she was a kid.

  “She was everybody’s favorite teacher,” I said, trying to keep emotion out of my voice. I didn’t want to give Arthura any reason to keep talking to me.

  “What happened?” Chip repeated. We both ignored him.

  “Yeah,” Arthura said. “She was everybody’s favorite. Which makes it so weird what happened, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I haven’t really thought about it. I had never even heard of the lady until I started going to that school.”

  Arthura’s eyes narrowed, and her pinched cheeks strained against the helmet strap gleefully. The blue gum shone from between her teeth. “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “What happened?” Chip asked again.

  “Nothing,” Arthura and I said in unison.

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Thomas Fallgrout,” Arthura said on a grin. “It doesn’t mean anything at all. I’m sure whoever did what they did probably had no idea what a big deal it was when they did it. But he will for sure know soon. They’ll catch him. And then he’ll pay.” Her face got hard and intense. “My mom cried when she talked about it. A lot of people are crying. Sure is unusual when you see someone who isn’t crying, isn’t it?” She scootched back onto her bike seat and lifted one foot to the pedal. Her face changed to total innocence. “Is Erma home?”

  It was my turn to narrow my eyes at her. I didn’t know if she was saying what I thought she was saying, but whatever she was saying, it sure seemed like she was saying it to me. Did she think I stole the head? But why would I?