“I just wish I could have helped you,” I said.
“Oliver,” Dad said. He almost never calls me Oliver. “You help me every day. Do you know what I keep in my room here?”
“Your clothes?” I guessed. Maybe Dad didn’t feel like getting all blubbery and so he was trying to change the subject.
“Yes, my clothes, but something more important,” Dad said.
“Hmm,” I mused. “Probably your toothbrush?”
“Oh my God, Oliver.” Louisa spoke up. “He’s talking about something sentimental.”
“I have all of Louisa’s letters,” Dad said.
“I didn’t know Louisa wrote you letters,” I said.
“I used to,” Louisa said. “But not in the past month.”
Dad made a little hand motion, like, Let’s not worry about that right now. “And, Oliver, I have the story you wrote about me in the second grade.”
I knew exactly what story Dad was talking about. He used to keep it on display in his apartment like it was a real book. It was called “My Awesome Dad Is Awesome,” which I realize now is a pretty bad title for a story. But it was fun to write. I used to kind of like writing, back when I could write about my dad without a bunch of complicated feelings. Now it’s just easier to copy Brain’s writing.
“Anyway,” Dad continued, “I read those letters and that story every day. I don’t need Tito the Bonecrusher to know you’d never quit trying to help me. I have never doubted that.”
“Oh,” I said.
“That’s kind of cheesy,” Louisa said. “But I guess it’s nice.”
The prison-guard lady looked at the clock and then at us, and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. That was the sign that she was going to kick us out any minute.
“It’s almost time to go!” I said to Dad. My heart started beating fast for some reason. The room felt kind of airless.
“I know, Oliver.” Dad’s voice was quiet. “It’s going to be okay. It won’t exactly be fine, but it will be okay. You can come back down here for another visit next month, when school’s out. And we can talk on the phone.”
I nodded.
Then Louisa actually put her arm around me, which was weird and surprising. I felt like I could breathe a little bit better. But my head was still buzzing.
“I know,” I said. “Okay.”
“You’re the bravest kids I know,” Dad said.
The buzzing got stronger, but I didn’t push the feelings down.
The prison guard looked at the clock again. Dad told us to take care of each other. We told Dad we loved him. Then Louisa and I went back to Uncle Victor in the waiting area, and we left FCI South Florida.
23
A REGULAR OLD SATURDAY
I’d thought the next weekend would be totally normal—maybe even boring—because it started with a regular old Saturday morning. Louisa was at home, working on her speech (well, her half speech) for graduation. The good news was that Louisa had been named valedictorian, but the less-good news (to Louisa, at least) was that Mitzy Calhoun had, too. They were co-valedictorians, and the principal thought it would be “a fun twist on tradition” if they collaborated on the valedictorian speech.
Meanwhile, I was at Brain’s house, stretched out on the couch in her rec room, like most other Saturdays when we weren’t starring in commercials or planning to sneak into hotels. The only difference was that Sharon was hanging out with Brain and me again. We had just finished working on our weekend homework when Brain’s phone lit up with a call from Popcorn.
“Can you answer it?” Brain asked me. She was teaching Sharon how to play Coyote Willis: The Video Game.
“Oliver!” Popcorn said when I answered Brain’s phone. He sounded out of breath, like he had been doing jumping jacks or something. “Can you and Brain and Sharon come over to my house? Right now?”
“We’re at Brain’s house,” I told him. “Can you just come over here?”
Popcorn said he really needed us to come to his house. “I have a … a thank-you gift for you all. For trying to help me meet Tito.”
I glanced at Sharon as she watched Brain play Coyote Willis. “Um, okay. I guess we’ll be there in a little bit.”
“Great! See you soon!” Popcorn said, then hung up.
Brain and Sharon finished their round of the game, and then I played a quick round that ended with Coyote Willis getting captured by the counterfeiters. We turned off the TV, put on our shoes, and walked down the street and up the block to Popcorn’s house.
Sharon, Brain, and I climbed the steps to Popcorn’s porch. I rang the doorbell.
A large man in a green-and-red mask opened the door.
“No way,” Brain said. “No WAY.”
There was no way it was the real Tito, even though he sure looked just like the Tito we had seen at the gala and in all his movies.
“You must be Paul’s friends,” the man in the mask said. “Please come in.”
It was him. IT WAS TITO. There was no question once we heard his voice. Probably because we had heard it in hours and hours of movies that we had watched and rewatched.
Brain and I were frozen in place.
“Oh my,” Brain said. “You’re Tito the Bonecrusher.”
I’m not proud of this, but I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.
The only one of us to move was Sharon, who curtsied. “I’m Sharon Francesca Dunston,” Sharon said primly. “Pleased to meet you. You have a lovely mask.” Then she extended her hand to Tito, who had to bend down to shake it.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Tito said, then repeated, “Do please come in.”
Sharon, Brain, and I followed him into the house. I couldn’t stop staring at Tito the Bonecrusher. He had looked big and tall when I saw him from far away at the gala, but up close, in Popcorn’s house, he was the most massive dude I had ever seen in my life.
Popcorn and his dad were sitting on the couch, and Popcorn was smiling with his whole face.
“Hi, guys!” he said. “Tito wanted to meet you!”
We stood in Popcorn’s living room, gawking at Tito the Bonecrusher. I can’t imagine that he was very impressed with us so far.
“Please, have a seat,” Popcorn’s dad said.
All three of us piled into a huge armchair across from the couch where Popcorn and his dad were sitting. Tito the Bonecrusher grabbed a cookie from a plate on the coffee table and sat down next to Popcorn. There was a long pause.
“I can’t believe this! I was just being you,” I blurted. “I mean, I was playing you. I mean, I was playing Coyote Willis. I mean … never mind.” My big moment with Tito the Bonecrusher was not going well.
“We’re fans of your work, Mr. Bonecrusher,” Sharon piped up before I could say anything else. “Yours, too, Mr. Robards,” she added.
“Well, I’m a big fan of you three!” Tito said. “And of F.T.’s, too.” He gestured at Mr. Robards. “I just read the first few chapters of his new novel, and I think it’s coming together well. It reminds me of one of my movies…”
Popcorn’s dad smiled in a pained way.
“So you really do wear the mask all the time,” I said. “Not just in the ring and in your movies and when you know you’re being photographed.”
“Pretty much always,” he said.
“Some people think the mask is silly, but…,” I started to say, then stopped, afraid Tito would think the word silly was a rude thing to say.
But Tito just nodded a tiny amount, like he wanted me to keep talking.
“But my dad said it gives you strength,” I finished. “He—”
“I told him about how we got into the gala!” Popcorn interrupted. It was probably the first time he’d ever interrupted someone in his life. He was beaming. “And how we got kicked out!”
“I heard Paul calling to me as I was leaving the ballroom,” Tito explained. “By the time I realized what he was saying, it was too late. The security guards had already taken you away. I made sur
e to check the guest list so that I could follow up with my number one fan, but there was no one named Paul Robards on it.”
“I had to give them aliases,” Sharon informed Tito.
Brain was intrigued. “So how did you find Popcorn?”
“My dad!” Popcorn declared, reaching out and patting his dad on the shoulder. “Once I got home and he saw how disappointed I was, he said he thought I should finally meet Tito.”
“I read several articles on the surprising benefits of having larger-than-life heroes in childhood,” Mr. Robards began to explain. “And they all said—”
“You had a brilliant plan to meet me!” Tito interrupted cheerfully. “It sounded like the plot of one of my movies.”
“A lot of it was Brain’s idea,” I acknowledged.
“I helped,” Sharon said.
I almost added that the whole plan started because we were trying to save my dad, but I didn’t. I decided to ask an important question instead. “I need to know something,” I said.
“Yes?” Tito looked at me like he was really interested in what I had to say. It was the same look he gives The Germ when The Germ gives him crucial information in movies.
“Well,” I began, “if a person was in a federal prison, like maybe someone’s dad, would there be any way to rescue him?”
“Oh,” Tito said. He looked at Popcorn’s father, and then he looked back at me.
I waited for him to answer. It’s weird—the whole time I was trying to meet Tito, I really wanted him to say there was a way for me to rescue Dad. But now that I’d missed the chance to help him, I really wanted Tito to say no.
“You know,” Tito began, “I’m thinking through all the ideas for how to rescue someone from a federal prison.”
“Okay,” I said. My heart was beating kind of fast.
“I don’t think there is a way that would work. I don’t think you can safely rescue someone from a federal prison. Those facilities are very, very secure.”
“Yeah, they are,” I agreed.
That was all I needed to know about rescuing someone.
After that, we had a million questions about Tito’s career. I asked about some of his Arena México stuff. He was impressed that I knew about matches from before I was born.
“I don’t know as much as my sister, Louisa, does,” I said. “She knows EVERYthing about you.”
“Well, tell her to come over!” Tito said.
I called Louisa and told her to come over to Popcorn’s house. She said no, and started complaining about me interrupting her speechwriting.
“Put her on speakerphone,” Tito said.
Big surprise, when I hit the speaker button, Louisa was still complaining.
“I’ve only got, like, fifty words so far, and Mitzy said she has three thousand, and I only have another hour—”
“Louisa,” Tito said, interrupting her, “this is Tito the Bonecrusher.”
“Huh?” Louisa said.
Tito was speaking in the ultimate action-star voice. “This is important, Louisa, so listen carefully. We are eating cookies and there aren’t many left. Meet us at Paul’s house. Bring the notes for your speech along if you must.”
The line went silent.
“I guess she hung up,” Brain said.
A few years before, a phone call from Tito, or even his appearance at a gala, would have been the most exciting thing Louisa could imagine. Maybe Louisa really didn’t care about wrestling anymore at all, even if she wasn’t quite as mad at Dad as she had been before.
There was an awkward silence.
“Would you like another cookie?” Popcorn asked Tito politely.
Just then Louisa came bursting through the door without even knocking. She was breathing hard, like she’d been running. We all turned and stared.
“I decided to come over and say hey,” she said, trying to sound casual.
We talked to Tito for a long time. He let us ask a LOT of questions. Well, not really questions, mostly us saying things like “Remember when you wrestled John Rancid in SummerSmash? That was so cool,” and “Remember when Lance Knightfox rescued his uncle from Senator Corruptron? That was awesome.”
Tito told us behind-the-scenes information about everything we brought up, and it was fascinating. For example, none of us knew that he had improvised the line “Looks like you just lost the election … forever” when he blasts Senator Corruptron into outer space at the end of the Time Crusher 2: Out of Time.
“Do you have any plans for a movie after Sabertooth?” Brain asked.
Tito had just finished filming Sabertooth, which was about a zoo security guard named Kurt Sabertooth who has to protect a rare, valuable tiger from a gang of animal thieves. There’s been a lot of buzz about Sabertooth on the internet because it’s Tito’s first movie with talking animals. We explained all of this to Popcorn’s dad, who was not familiar with Tito’s complete body of work.
“Well,” Tito began, then lowered his voice. “I just signed on for my next project, but it hasn’t been made public yet. Can you keep a big secret?”
“Yes!” Brain, Popcorn, and I all hollered.
“I am very discreet,” Sharon said.
Even Popcorn’s dad looked interested.
Tito smiled. “It’s about a man who travels through time to stop some terrible pirates, by any means necessary. Until he learns something that changes everything.”
We were silent.
“One of the pirates…” He paused.
We leaned forward.
“… is his great-great-great-grandfather.”
“Whoa,” Popcorn said. “What’s it called?”
“Captain Dangerbeard,” Tito said. “The script isn’t done yet, but the posters are going to say, ‘Cross me, hearties, and hope to die.’” He said it in this AMAZING pirate voice.
We clapped.
“We’re scheduled to start filming in Florida in a couple of months,” Tito added.
“Hey!” Brain cried. “That’s where Oliver’s dad—” She looked at Louisa and me all panicky.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Yeah, he lives in Florida. He … He’s serving time, actually.”
“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” Tito said. “That must be hard.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” I said.
“It sucks,” Louisa added.
“Definitely,” Tito agreed.
Nobody said anything for a minute.
Finally, Tito said that he and Popcorn’s dad needed to talk about some stuff. Maybe they were going to trade writing advice. They went to Popcorn’s kitchen, leaving the five of us in the living room.
“Whoa,” Brain said. “We were totally just hanging out with Tito the Bonecrusher.”
“Yeah,” Louisa said as she got up from where she was sitting on the floor. “I bet Mitzy Calhoun’s never met anyone that famous.”
“She hasn’t,” Popcorn assured her.
Louisa walked to the front door and put one hand on the knob. Then she turned around and half waved with the other hand.
“See you at home!” I called.
“I have to go to work,” she replied. “But maybe I’ll bring you some Fluff Cream after work.”
Wow.
“What should we do now?” I asked after the door closed behind Louisa.
Sharon climbed out of the armchair and moved to the couch, where she sat primly next to Popcorn. “We could just talk,” she suggested.
We talked about school, about what we were planning to do for the summer, and about whether the Wrath of Blanky legends were true. Then we talked about how amazing it was that Tito had said our plan sounded like the plot of one of his movies.
Sharon asked me about visiting my dad. I said I’d only talk about it if she wouldn’t make sad faces or say anything depressing, and Sharon said she would try. I told her that Louisa and I were going to visit Dad next month.
“What if you’re in Florida at the same time as Tito? Maybe you’ll see him!” Popcorn exclaimed. “May
be you can be in the movie!”
“Hmm,” Brain said. “Maybe we can all be in the movie.”
“It’s in Flo-ri-da,” Sharon reminded Brain. “We can’t go to Florida. Our parents would never let us.”
“I know that,” Brain said. “But I have an idea.” She grabbed a piece of paper from Popcorn’s end table and began writing, ignoring the rest of us. That was typical Brain, to just start scribbling all her thoughts until they were out of her head.
“What are you doing?” Sharon jumped up from the couch. “We can’t go to Florida to be in a movie, Brain! My parents won’t even let me go to the mall by myself!” She tried to peer at Brain’s paper, which just made Brain hunch over it more.
“Jeez, be patient, Sharon,” I said. That was just like Sharon to start asking questions before a person had a second to think. “Let’s just see what the plan is.”
“Fine,” Sharon said. She stopped craning her neck over Brain’s paper, but she still looked nervous as she sat back on the couch next to Popcorn.
“It’s gonna be a good plan,” Popcorn reassured Sharon.
“It is,” I agreed. Even if our plans didn’t work out perfectly, at least they were interesting. They made it feel like we were really doing stuff, rather than waiting around for stuff to happen to us.
Brain scribbled some more, then threw down her pencil. “I’ve worked it all out,” she declared. “We need all the signature moves for this one, plus two thousand dollars. And one of us has to learn how to drive.”
“Sounds good,” Popcorn said.
“What the heck are the signature moves?” Sharon asked.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “We’ll teach you.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grace Kendall, thank you for your editing brilliance, for making me a better writer, and for dancing with Charlie outside your office. And importantly, thank you for cookies.
Thank you to everyone at FSG who devoted their time, talent, and energy to bringing Tito to readers—thank you to Joy Peskin, Andrew Arnold, Aimee Fleck, Nicholas Henderson, Elizabeth Lee, Kelsey Marrujo, Jennifer Sale, Lindsay Wagner, and Janet Renard.
Tito the Bonecrusher Page 14