by Gary Paulsen
Then it was the very worst.
His life became a roaring agony of mistakes and disasters even more terrible than usual.
He forgot his rule about coming in the side door of school and was passed down the jock locker row again, end over end, and jammed into the trash container by the girls’ bathroom, which he decided was a very bad trash container to be jammed into, even worse than Mary Jo Callis’s locker.
Another day he went right in the front door of school without timing it, and several kids said hi to him, which startled him so much he mistakenly got caught in the stream of kids going to the downstairs row of lockers, and it took him fifteen minutes to get all the way around and back to his locker.
Which made him late for algebra.
Which made him get noticed.
Mr. Hankenton called him up to the front of the room to work out a problem on the board, up in front of all the kids, or as he thought of it, UP IN FRONT OF ALL THE KIDS, and Jacob was stunned, completely numb-stunned, to find that his feet carried him up there — like traitors — carried him against his will to the front and that his brain worked the problem correctly and his hands wrote the numbers and letters correctly, also against his will, and he watched in horror as his body and legs and brain all went against him and worked everything right and turned him — hating it — turned him to face the class while Mr. Hankenton complimented him. All he could think was how he hated his legs and brain and hands for getting him into such a predicament, and he tried to look over the class at the wall as he made his way back to the seat, tried to look over them and figure out how in the world he had come to know algebra. How could being in love and having a broken heart make him know algebra?
Misery.
Worse, far worse, in his funk he forgot to hide in back of the dumpster by the Reddi-Ralph before school one morning, walked right out in the open and started up the steps, and somebody waved at him, and he waved back.
He waved back.
He didn’t even know who waved, didn’t even know he waved back.
He was losing it.
It was possible that he had a broken heart.
MRS. Hilsak found him just before dress rehearsal. She nearly had to tackle him. He was in the back corner beneath the stage and thought it was Maria looking for him. He moved into the shadows to get away but she saw him and stopped him before he could make the door.
“Jacob, what’s the matter with you?” Mrs. Hilsak had to crouch beneath the stage.
He said nothing, looked to her side, ached.
“You just … disappear. We look for you but you just vanish. Can I help you?”
You could tell Maria I am dying inside, he thought — tell her that the alligator–pit bull of love has my heart. Tell her I am eating myself up. Tell her that I even waved at somebody and can now work algebra against my will.
He said nothing.
“Well. I just want to make sure you understand. We don’t use the fog machine until the first performance tomorrow night. Tonight during dress rehearsal you just pretend. All right?”
He sort of nodded and she left.
Pretend, he thought. It’s all pretend.
The dress rehearsal began perfectly.
The play went on above and he went on below, waiting. When he heard her death scream start he pretended to turn on the fog machine, opened the trap door and disappeared out the door before Maria could let herself down the hole. Just like all the other rehearsals.
He walked home in the dark where he went to his room in the basement and listened to music until his eyes closed and he slept.
He had a dream about Maria. She was walking down a street, and a bulldog jumped over a fence at her, and he rushed to save her and would have done all right, except that the bulldog turned into his sister, turned on him and dumped a bowl of Froot Loops on his head.
He awakened in a sweat, spitting imaginary Froot Loops out of his mouth, and sat awake in his darkened room listening to the posters falling because it was the second day and thought he couldn’t go on this way. Something would get him if he didn’t straighten out. Either the dog would rip him apart or the jocks would set him up for permanent housekeeping in a garbage can or his sister would bury him in Froot Loops or he would turn into a professional mathematician.
Something would get him.
He had to take charge of this thing. Get back to normal.
Tomorrow.
He closed his eyes. A poster fell. He turned the clock radio off and let sleep take him.
Have to straighten this out, he thought, the sleep coming down. Tomorrow. Straighten this out tomorrow.
IN.
That was it. That was the hard part. He stood by the Reddi-Ralph dumpster and studied the front of the school, waiting.
Timing was everything.
He had to catch that exact moment when it was right to enter, when he could slide in between groups of students and not be noticed.
Work carefully to his locker and then to English and get into his desk and sit, there but not there, the phantom student, the boy who owned the school.
It was simple, really. Nothing had changed. He’d had a bad week, but in the light of morning he knew it for what it was — a mistake. A dream. Another dream gone wrong. He couldn’t love Maria. Not really. No more than a snail could love a princess — there was physics involved. It was like making up be down. An impossibility. Geeks didn’t get to love Maria. And when he knew that he also knew that everything else would fall into place. Everything would be back to normal.
He had the play to do. But he could just run the fog machine for two nights, turn it on and get out and everything would be all right.
In.
Timing was everything.
He moved through the doors, down the hall, got his books, and was into the room.
Maria was there, in the front, and he felt her eyes on him, but he was in control now, tight control, and he looked past her, past everything, at the wall.
Mrs. Hilsak said nothing to him, went right into verbs, and he went back to thinking about normal things: how to get even with his sister. A way to get the posters to stick to the walls. How to get his sister’s diary and use it to negotiate…. Maybe he couldn’t have an upstairs room but perhaps if he worked it right he could at least hang his posters in her room and then just come up and look at them once in a while. If he had her diary he could work a deal like that, maybe even sit on her couch and look at them.
And he didn’t daydream either. Everything safe and sound. None of those fantasies or silly hopes. He had it now, knew where it was going.
At the end of class he was gone, clean and gone and into the ripple movement before anybody could talk to him. After that it was just getting through the day, one class to the next. He didn’t get called on once, not even in math, and until lunch he was sure he had it worked out right.
Then the glitches started. During lunch it came, the first indication that things weren’t going to stay normal, and that love had ruined his life forever.
It began in the cafeteria line. They were having pizza (only of course it wasn’t pizza but what they called pizza — the only pizza Jacob had ever seen that he could drink), and he never took the pizza. He wouldn’t make his sister eat the pizza. This time he was looking toward the front of the line where oddly enough Maria was standing, and he nodded, and the lady put the pizza on his tray.
Rocco was in charge of the cafeteria.
If it hit your tray, you ate it. That was Rocco’s rule. And if it hit your tray and you ate it, you ate it all. He watched everybody like a hawk and that meant Jacob of course had to eat the pizza.
Drink the pizza.
All of it.
Plus, on the pizza order they gave him a piece of bread that had been backed over by a garlic truck, and after he drank the pizza and ate the bread, Jacob had breath that could be cut into chunks.
He sat alone at the end of a long table, finished eating, and tried to hold his breath.
> Nothing helped. He could hold it for half a minute as he walked out and down the hall, but then he had to let it out, and it was worse when it came out in bursts. Kids around him almost dropped.
All because he had looked at Maria.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in a green haze, trying to hold his breath for an hour at a stretch, letting it blast out, getting sick from the smell. He felt his control slipping.
Classes changed. Crawled.
In the middle of the last class, social studies, he began to worry about the play.
It started slowly.
He thought first of the Munchkins. They were unpredictable. Little kids running around all over on top of the stage. If they got their positions wrong …
Then the worry grew. If one Munchkin was out of place, standing on the trapdoor, and Maria couldn’t get into the right place, and he pulled the lever … or what if the lever jammed and the trapdoor didn’t open or the fog machine didn’t work or …
By the end of the school day he was in a nervous froth. He went home to eat dinner and found to his horror that his mother had heard about the play. The news was dropped on him at the table like an anvil. They were having some kind of chunky yogurt casserole because it was supposed to be good for his sister’s complexion, and Jacob was trying to chew it, though he knew the smell had mixed with the garlic and pizza and made his breath glow in the dark, and his mother said:
“I hear you’re in a play tonight, Jacob. Is that right?”
“What?” His sister stopped with a spoonful halfway to her mouth. “You’re in a play? What play? The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”
“It’s The Wizard of Oz,” Jacob said, “and I’m not in it. I work on the sets, that’s all.”
“Still,” his mother said. “I think we should go. It’s your first time, your debut in the theater — I think we’ll come. I’ll call your father and tell him to hurry home.”
His father was working late.
“We’ll make a night of it, shall we?” His mother turned to his sister. “You can come too.”
“Mother.”
“I insist.”
“But really, Mother. The Wizard of Oz. All those geeky little people running around in this geeky little play about this geeky little girl from Kansas …”
Don’t come, Jacob thought. This night will be bad enough. Don’t come, please don’t come. He looked at his sister. I’ll give you money, he thought, if you don’t come.
“We’ll all come,” his mother said, a note of finality in her voice. “It’s the least we can do.”
Perfect, Jacob thought, eating another spoon of yogurt-pizza-garlic casserole. Everything according to plan. My life is right back to blowing up in my face.
Perfect.
AS disasters went for Jacob, this one started gently enough.
There was some initial madness before the play started, last minute running and thumping around on stage, Munchkins squealing and tearing back and forth, Mrs. Hilsak calling for order. None of this bothered Jacob. He had feathers in his stomach fluttering through the butterflies and the garlic-pizza-yogurt, but it wasn’t anything to do with what was happening on top of the stage.
At last he was facing the fog machine head on. It was time to use it, to get it ready to use, and he wasn’t sure if he knew how to work it correctly.
First he had to pour in the solution, which smelled like a thick-sweet mouthwash.
Then he read the instructions.
Before emitting fog, the machine had to be pumped up with the handle on the top until the right amount of pressure was registered on a dial. He worked the pump handle but the dial didn’t move. He pumped more, and still more without movement.
He began to sweat in the small place beneath the stage, though it wasn’t hot. Above he heard sudden silence as the play started.
He pumped harder. Still nothing showed on the dial.
Dorothy and Toto had their difficulty with the crotchety old lady on the bike — also played by Maria. She even made being ugly beautiful, Jacob thought, listening to her above him, pumping frantically at the handle.
Suddenly the needle on the pressure dial slammed to the right.
He stopped pumping.
I wonder, he thought, what happens when there is that much pressure? He looked for a way to let the pressure off without turning the fog machine on but there wasn’t a valve. The dial didn’t say how much pressure there was, only that it should be in the green area. It was well past the green and halfway around again.
Well, he thought. Well. Maybe that just means more fog.
So that was all right. The more fog that shot up out of the trapdoor when he opened it the better. The easier it would be for Maria to hide and lower herself. That was the logic he used but there was a nudge of worry in his brain. He chose to ignore it.
Up on top the cyclone hit and Dorothy awakened in the land of Oz and was meeting the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow. She sang “Over the Rainbow” then met the ugly witch.
Maria.
Oh my ugly witch, he thought — everything I ever wanted in a woman up on the the stage above me and I’m stuck with a fog machine that’s going to explode. So stupid. I’m so stupid. None of this would be happening if I weren’t so stupid.
Dorothy was captured in the castle. The ugly witch wanted the ruby slippers. Munchkins stomped around. Dorothy screamed. The Scarecrow and Lion and Woodsman saved her. Soon Dorothy would confront the Wicked Witch again.
It was coming now.
The ugly witch had to go.
It was time for the fog.
Timing was everything.
In one smooth motion he was supposed to turn on the fog machine and open the trap door. And he was ready.
Too ready.
His foot bumped against the leg of the fog machine and he tripped. As he started to fall forward his hand brushed the on-off switch on the fog machine and turned it on.
A full half a minute too soon.
There was a great, barfing “woof!” as the machine triggered. With a smell like an exploding mouthwash factory the throat of the fog machine began to blow out clouds, jets, rolling mountains of fog. It was thick, noxious, billowing. Jacob couldn’t see, couldn’t think. In two seconds the whole underside of the stage was filled, packed, and still the machine roared, fog pouring out. He had to get away.
He staggered, started to fall and grabbed overhead. His hand caught the bolt holding the trapdoor and it slid open.
The trapdoor dropped.
Fog blew up through the hole, exploded like a silent bomb, filled the stage. It was too much fog for the stage, too much for the theater, too much for the world, and panic took the Munchkins who were backstage and they began to run and scream. In seconds the fog and stampeding Munchkins had reached the audience and the panic infected them as well.
“It’s smoke!” someone yelled. “Fire!”
All order, sense, intelligence, left the audience. Like a mad herd of water buffalo they wheeled, bellowed, screamed, and went for the exits, over the seats, over each other, fighting to get through the rolling clouds of fog still belching out of the hole in the stage and filling the auditorium.
But worse, far worse, Maria had been standing near the trapdoor and a galloping Munchkin bumped the front of her legs, pushing her backward. She tipped and dropped like a stone down, down into the hole, into the fog.
She screamed.
My love, Jacob raged, slashing in the thickness — my love is being attacked. The fog machine is attacking my love. Have to kill it.
Blinded now, he leapt for the machine, hit it with his shoulder, and knocked it over.
It only made things worse. The machine seemed to double its efforts, and now the fog was so thick he couldn’t see his hands.
“Maria!” He screamed. “Where are you?”
“Here.” She coughed, gagged. “Here. By the machine, I think.”
He reached, missed, reached again, and found her sho
ulder near the floor where she had landed. Frantically he kneeled and wrapped his arm around her neck, as he would try to save a drowning person, and started crawling for where he thought the door should be. He was not thinking now, not thinking at all, but just clawing, pulling, trying to live, to save her.
“I was stupid,” he rattled, crawling, pulling her. “I was stupid and just wanted to talk to you and all this happened, just wanted to stop you and talk to you in the hall and I almost hung myself and then I flew into a mountain trying to test a fighter …”
“Guurrrk.” She choked, rasped. “Jacob …”
Screams came from the front of the auditorium. Vision was impossible. They were looking for the exits by feel.
“… right into a mountain, just splattered all over and just because I wanted to talk to you and didn’t dare, wanted to ask you for a date, ask you to go to a movie and didn’t dare … and then the jocks got me, the jocks for pete’s sake, got me and stuffed me in the garbage cans and I started to do math and all I wanted, all I wanted in the world was to take you to a movie …”
“Jacob.” She pulled his hand down. “It’s all right. Here’s the door. It’s all right.” They scrabbled through the door and closed it.
“… just wanted to take you to a movie and I didn’t dare ask you, didn’t dare do anything …”
“I’ll go.”
“… because I’m stupid and shy and next it will be physics…. You’ll what?”
“I said I’d go to the movie with you.”
“You will?” He stared at her, astonished. Not looking at her without looking at her, but actually looking at her. Right in the eyes.
She coughed the last of the fog out, nodded. “Sure. As a matter of fact I was going to ask you out if you didn’t ask me.”