Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

by Jennifer Brown

  Some more smearing and swiping, and a whole lot of foghorny talking, and Dottie stepped back, revealing Chip and I to ourselves in the mirror. He was a puckering clown. I was an angry one with lines between my eyebrows. She surveyed us, beaming.

  “Well, if you two don’t look just about perfect. Let me find you some clothes. It’s bull night tonight. Rodeo clowns must know how to distract a bull, of course. But don’t worry, we won’t make you go out there by yourselves on your first night. We’ll have JoJo go with you. Here.” She tossed two outfits at us and brushed off her hands. Neither Chip nor I had spoken a word since she took hold of us. “You two change, and I’m going to round up JoJo for ya.”

  She left. Chip and I both sat on our benches, stunned.

  “What just happened?” I asked.

  “I think we enrolled in clown school,” Chip said. Then to himself, “Oddly, not the first time for me.”

  Harvey appeared in a black-and-white-checkered three-piece suit, red wig in place. One pocket of his jacket was stuffed with deflated balloons. He actually looked pretty good.

  “You’re a clown?” I asked. “Why were you acting so shifty about it? I mean, why the hoodie and looking over your shoulder and carrying your wig in a bag and everything?”

  He concentrated on the toes of his huge black shoes, shuffling them in the dirt and kicking little clouds of dust into the air. “Because it’s embarrassing enough to be the balloon-animal guy,” he said. “I didn’t want Buckley or Colton finding out that I was a clown, too. They already tease me as it is.”

  Helen Heirmauser wouldn’t have allowed that, I caught myself thinking, and then thought, How on earth would you know, Thomas? You never met the woman!

  “But I’m really, really good at clowning,” Harvey said. “It’s my gift. And I like it. And I want to keep doing it. Maybe forever. I’m just not ready for everyone to know about it.” He glanced up. “Are you going to tell?”

  I shook my head. “I’m a magician, so I think I totally get it,” I said. I pointed to Chip with my thumb. “And he sings into pizza, so you’re safe there.”

  Harvey let out a relieved breath. “Thanks.”

  Dottie came back, roaring something about the ring being ready to go and Billy the Bull looking especially ornery tonight. I felt cold all the way to my toes.

  “You two ready to feel the spotlight?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said, at the same time that Chip furiously nodded and cried, “Absolutely!”

  She laughed. “You’ll love it. Come on.”

  Dottie pulled us out of our chairs and led us into what I guessed was a bull-riding ring. There were hoof imprints all over the ground. And a very large stain, which, no matter what it was, I planned to avoid at all costs.

  “The clown’s job is to distract the bull so it doesn’t hurt the rider,” Dottie explained. “And to be funny in the process. Watch me.” She raced around the ring, making exaggerated scared faces and holding on to her wig, dodging an imaginary bull. Finally, she jumped over the ring wall and popped up just on the outside. “See? Now you try.”

  I would like to say that Chip and I reluctantly moped around the ring, or possibly that we ran and kept running until we made our escape through a back door, but the truth was it was kind of fun spinning through the ring, making faces, whooping and hollering, doing somersaults, and stopping to shake our hips.

  “Very good,” Dottie yelled when we were finished. She squawked a horn a few times for applause. “Not bad at all for first-timers. Come on out here and watch what it’s like with a real bull. Here comes JoJo now.”

  A skinny clown in raggedy clothes came sauntering into the ring from the other side. He took off his top hat, which had holes in it, and bowed to the audience. We cheered. Soon there was a clanking noise and a moo, and the next thing we knew, a real, live, actual bull was galloping into the ring.

  JoJo sprang into action, taunting the bull until it rushed him, and then scraping away just in the nick of time. After a few misses, the bull had had enough. It lowered its head and charged. JoJo tossed his hat into the air and sprinted for the barrel in the center of the ring. He jumped in just as the bull dipped its head and smashed into it with its horns. The barrel rolled. The bull smashed into it again, and with a hollow clop it rolled again, coming closer to us. The bull kept after it, rolling and rolling the barrel until I started to get afraid that it would roll right through the wall. But then the bull seemed to get bored and lumbered away, sniffing the ground for something to eat.

  We applauded JoJo, who popped up out of the barrel, took a deep bow, and ran over to us.

  I squinted, turning my head to one side. “Chip,” I said, elbowing his side, “is there something about JoJo that looks familiar to you?”

  Chip squinted and turned his head to one side, too. “Yeah,” he said. “But I can’t quite put my finger on it. Is it the way he walks?”

  “No, it’s more like the way he stands still.” And then JoJo made right for us, and within just a few steps, I saw it. The gray curly hair tufting out from under his wig. The slender legs with the toes that pointed just slightly in. The victorious smile I knew so well.

  “That’s not JoJo,” I cried, pointing. “That’s my grandma Jo!”

  TRICK #30

  THERE’S A COIN IN YOUR EAR

  Grandma Jo made me promise not to tell Mom that she was a rodeo clown. I made her promise not to tell Mom that Chip and I had biked all the way across town.

  “Yeah, what’s the deal with that?” Grandma Jo asked. “Since when are you interested in clowning? If you ask me, you’re a little too serious for it. You’re more like your grandpa. A natural magician. Magicians can be serious, and it only makes their show more interesting. Serious clowns, though, are kind of a drag.”

  We were strolling through Walmart, lazily pushing a cart while we looked at irons and shower curtains and big plastic tubs and all kinds of things we didn’t need. Mom was grocery shopping, but she made me promise not to let Grandma Jo out of my sight.

  “I don’t want to be a clown,” I said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with clowning. It was kind of fun. And you’re really good at it.”

  Grandma Jo looked pleased with herself. “Yeah, I suppose I am, aren’t I?” She picked up a saucepan, examined it, and put it back on the shelf. “So, what were you doing there if you weren’t interested in clowning?”

  “You promise not to tell Mom or Dad?”

  “We’ve already been through this. I promised. I’ll keep my word.”

  “Chip and I thought that Harvey Hinkle was the one who stole the statue from my school. We were trying to steal it back.”

  “Harvey Hinkle, huh? And you rode your bicycle all the way across town and put on a clown costume to prove it.” Grandma Jo stopped and leaned over the cart handle so she could study me. “You really didn’t do it, did you?” she asked. “You didn’t steal the statue.” A declaration, not a question.

  I shook my head, and out of nowhere, tears sprang into my eyes. I blinked rapidly to make them go away. “I’ve been trying to tell everyone that.”

  Grandma Jo chewed the side of her lip. “Well, then, you should prove it.”

  “I’ve been trying to,” I said. We began walking again, and I was thankful for it, because looking Grandma Jo in the face was making me want to cry. The last place a dude wants to get caught crying is at the store with his grandma. “But every lead I follow is a bad one. I don’t know what to do next.”

  Grandma Jo picked up a purple Styrofoam jack-o-lantern and tossed it into the cart. It still seemed a little early for Halloween stuff, but Grandma Jo liked to be ahead of the game. She also liked to buy strange stuff just to hear Mom squawk. She liked to do a lot of things just to make Mom squawk. Sometimes I thought maybe a Making Mom Squawk Adventure was what Grandma Jo did when she wasn’t busy with any real adventures. “Seems to me you’ve just been looking in the wrong places,” she said.

  “But I don’t know wh
ere else to look. Even Chip has been wrong, and I don’t think that happens very often.” I tossed a bag of candy corn into the cart, because Grandma Jo could get away with it, and later, when I smuggled the bag into my room, she wouldn’t get all yelly at me about sugar and my teeth and yak-yak-yak. “Where should I look?”

  She stopped again and bent to gaze right into my eyes. A toddler was screaming in the cart next to us. “At the other hand,” she said.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re a magician, Thomas. You know all about the other hand. Here, make this disappear.” She handed me a small candle.

  I looked around nervously. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to make things disappear in a store,” I said.

  “Just do it.” She closed my palm around the candle. “I’ll bail you out.”

  I sighed and positioned the candle in the palm of my hand. I reached over with my other hand, and with a flourish of my fingers, grabbed air to make it look like I was grabbing the candle, but kept the candle in the original hand. When I dramatically showed Grandma Jo my empty “grabbing” hand, I shoved the candle in my front pocket with the other. “Gone,” I said, spreading my fingers and showing her my palms.

  She reached over and tapped my pocket. “I was married to a magician for forty years. I know it’s all about making people look … at the other … hand.” She opened her hand dramatically just as I had done. I still had no idea what she meant. Maybe she’d chased one too many bulls or landed on her head in the skate park or something.

  I pulled the candle out of my pocket and put it back on the shelf. We started moving again.

  “So you think I’m a pretty good rodeo clown, huh?” Grandma Jo asked as we turned down the lightbulb aisle.

  “Really good,” I said. “That bull didn’t stand a chance.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “But I’m thinking of taking up rock climbing instead. Do not tell your mother.”

  I wouldn’t dream of it.

  My parents always made me go to the basement when I wanted to try out a new trick using Grandpa Rudy’s chemicals. They figured there were tons of ways for chemistry magic to go wrong, especially when you’re using recordings from two decades ago, and if I was going to mess up, at least I would only mess up the concrete floor and some old boxes full of Christmas ornaments. And there was a rule: if I messed up in a smelly way, I had to leave my clothes in the basement and hope that I wouldn’t run into Grandma Jo or Erma or one of Erma’s girly friends while I ran to my bedroom for new clothes. I was determined to never have a smelly mistake.

  I needed some time alone to sort through everything. Grandma Jo was right. I was looking for the head in the wrong places. But I still didn’t understand what she meant by looking at the other hand and how that would lead me to the bust.

  In the meantime, I had something called phenolphthalein to mess with.

  I smoothed out Grandpa Rudy’s notes and set them on the floor next to my trunk. I pulled out the three plastic cups he’d left in there, along with some little vials marked NaOH and HCl and one marked (C3H3NaO2)n. One of these days I would learn how to say the names of these chemicals out loud; they made me feel like a mad scientist with all kinds of power in my hands.

  According to Grandpa Rudy, if I mixed these things just right, I could turn water pink, then back to clear, and then make it disappear altogether. The big wow moment.

  So far I had yet to get it right.

  But I was in no hurry to do anything else, so I tried over and over again, the words “Look at the other hand” swirling around in the plastic cups with the liquid. What did she mean?

  I poured the phenolphthalein into some water and started over. And that was when it hit me.

  Quickly, I dug through the trunk until I found Grandpa Rudy’s lucky fifty-cent piece—the one he used to wow Erma and me with by pulling it out of our ears. I palmed it, using my thumb to hold it in place. Using my other hand, I grabbed air over my palm, manipulating my fingers so that it looked like I grabbed the coin. Meanwhile, my other hand, still holding the coin, casually dangled at my side.

  When Grandpa Rudy would do this trick for Erma and me, we would be so busy looking at the grabbing hand—sometimes even yanking on it and turning it over to see where the fifty-cent piece had gone—we totally didn’t even see what the other hand was doing. And that was the hand that was tricking us. We were seeing the magic, not the trick. But at the same time, it was so obvious. Everyone who ever saw a sleight-of-hand trick knew that the “disappeared” object was simply hidden … by the hand nobody was looking at.

  I did the trick again.

  Look at the other hand.

  And again.

  Look at the other hand.

  I repeated the trick over and over, Grandma Jo’s voice morphing into Grandpa Rudy’s. “The thing about magic is, people will see what they want to see,” he always said. “So you have to make them want to see magic.”

  I dropped the fifty-cent piece and let it roll, staring at a Grandpa Rudy who wasn’t really there. “Make them look away from the trick,” I said aloud.

  Then, forgetting all about the pink and clear and disappearing chemicals, I raced upstairs to find Erma.

  I knew who stole Helen Heirmauser’s head.

  TRICK #31

  A HAT FULL OF EVIDENCE

  “Are you sure?” Erma kept asking. She was sitting cross-legged on her overly ruffled and overly pink and overly everything bed, picking at the whiskers of her favorite stuffed kitty, which she’d named Kitty. She also had a walrus named Wallyrus and a parrot named Bird. Erma was not all that creative.

  “I’m positive,” I kept saying, trying not to touch anything, for fear that I would be covered with sparkles for the rest of my life.

  “Tell me again.”

  I paced across her pink throw rug, back and forth, laying out points by tapping my finger in my palm. “He knew the exact weight and measurements of the statue. He knew about the darker spot on the pedestal, even though I didn’t tell him, and he led me to the exact spot where the pedestal was, and he doesn’t even go to that school. He was the one who wanted to break in and confront Byron. He was the one who was eating cheese curls in the back of the vending-machine van. He was the one who wasted two whole nights by taking us to rodeo clown school.” I stopped pacing and faced her. “Erma, don’t you see? Chip Mason is the other hand. He was making me look away from the trick.”

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “You mean, what are we going to do?”

  TRICK #32

  ABRACONFESSION!

  Chip Mason was not an easy guy to spy on. Mostly because Chip Mason was always around. Every time Erma and I tried to get close to his house, he would bound out the front door, practicing cartwheels or reciting poetry or flopping face-first into the grass to get a bug’s-eye view of grasshopperland. We ended up having to act like we were coming over to see what he was doing, even though all we could think about was how he was letting me be blamed for something he did.

  But we needed proof, so we kept trying.

  “How about I distract him while you look in his window?” Erma asked one day. “Maybe the statue is just sitting out somewhere.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I don’t know. I could pretend I have a crush.”

  We both watched as Chip Mason had a conversation about former president Taft with a Popsicle.

  “I’m not sure he knows what a crush is,” I said.

  “No, probably not.”

  “You could fall off your bike and get hurt,” I proposed.

  Erma slugged me in the side. “That’s a terrible suggestion. I’m not getting hurt for your stupid head statue.”

  “You shouldn’t let anybody hear you say that,” I said. “Or everyone’s going to think you stole it.”

  “Not for long,” Erma said, and before I could argue, she skipped over to Chip. “Can I have a bite, Chippy Wippy?”


  Chippy Wippy? I fought the urge to barf. Chip refused, looking as confused and grossed out as I was feeling. I almost felt sorry for him, but … well. He was a thief and a terrible friend. And a liar. He deserved to be Ermafied.

  Louis XIV: Eradication by Ermafication. Crushed by an Erma crush.

  She giggled, loud and long. “You’re so cute, Chippy Wippy. Tell me that story about the pizza opera again.”

  Okay, maybe I had to give Erma some credit. Because that was a really long, really boring story. Nobody in their right mind wanted to hear it. And Chippy Wippy loved to tell it.

  He bit off a hunk of his Popsicle and chewed—another sign that I shouldn’t have trusted him; who bites a Popsicle?—and then started talking. Erma leaned into his shoulder, as if she were captivated by his every word, providing me with cover. I slithered through the hedges and across the street, through Chip’s weeping willow tree, and to the first window I found.

  A laundry room. A really messy laundry room. Clothes and hangers and bottles of detergent everywhere, piles of blankets, and panty hose hanging from the top of the door. But no statue.

  I stole around the side of the house, most of the windows way too high for me to see through. I let myself through a gate and into the backyard. Old Huck Mason used to have a dog. A scruffy white one that barked a lot and licked your fingers through the fence if you let him. But that dog was gone for a long time now, and all that was in the backyard were a couple of trees and a wooden porch. There were three windows visible from the porch. I climbed the steps as quietly as I could and peered through the first one. Just curtains I couldn’t see through. The second one looked at the back of a cabinet. I cupped my hands and looked through the third. Then jumped and ducked.