Nothing Up My Sleeve

by Diana Lopez

“I got outvoted,” Mr. Garza said, glancing at his wife and daughter. Ariel was reorganizing the DVD shelf.

  Mrs. Garza said, “Sorry, hon. Conjuring Cats has alliteration, and everyone knows that alliteration sells. That’s why you’re called Señor Surprise. Remember?”

  Mr. Garza just grumbled again.

  He held a ladder steady while Mrs. Garza climbed up to hang some posters. Meanwhile, Diamonds had her claw stuck in a curtain, and Spades had knocked over an arrangement of cups and balls. Then Diamonds got free, and she and Spades chased each other all over the store, running between Mr. Garza’s legs and knocking over more stuff.

  “Ariel!” Mr. Garza called. “Come and get these cats out of here!” Then, to the boys, he said, “Should have gotten dogs.”

  Ariel rushed over to shoo Spades away. Then she picked up Diamonds. The cat closed its eyes and purred.

  “Want to pet her?” Ariel asked Loop.

  “Nah,” he said.

  She wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Here.” She offered the cat. When he backed away, she turned to Dominic.

  “Maybe another time,” he said.

  The boys didn’t say anything else. They just headed to the Vault, leaving Ariel behind.

  Once they were alone, Dominic said, “She’s been trying to talk to me all month.”

  “Me too,” Loop replied. “But I don’t trust her for a minute.”

  “Maybe she feels bad. Maybe she’s sorry.”

  “Has she apologized?” Loop asked.

  Dominic shook his head.

  “Has she replaced your quarter shell?”

  Dominic shook his head again.

  “That’s right. And I’m still without a chop cup, and don’t forget about Z’s Svengali deck.” Loop took a quarter from his pocket and walked it across his fingers. “She wants us to drop our guard so she can fool us again.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Dominic asked.

  “Because that’s what Rubén’s doing,” Loop explained. “Ever since I found out he’s not my dad, he’s been supernice because he wants me to forget he lied.”

  Dominic said, “But it’s not like Rubén changed when you learned the truth. He’s always been nice.”

  “Yeah, but only because he feels guilty,” Loop answered.

  “I don’t think so,” Dominic said. “My dad’s nice to me, buys me stuff, too, and not out of guilt.”

  “Are you kidding? He is so guilty! Didn’t he divorce your mom, move to Corpus, and start another family?”

  Dominic thought a moment. “Okay, you’ve got a good point, but I don’t hold it against him. I guess I’m used to it.”

  Loop walked the quarter through his fingers again, then did a French drop, and repeated the whole process. “Well,” he said, “I’m not used to the idea of Rubén not being my true dad. This whole time he was just pretending.”

  Mr. Garza stepped into the room at the moment Loop finished his sentence. “Who’s pretending?” he asked.

  “My fake dad,” Loop answered.

  Mr. Garza raised an eyebrow, curious. So Loop told him the story of how he thought Rubén was his father and how the whole family, even his cousins, knew the truth—that Loop’s real dad was some loser. And how Rubén was now trying to buy Loop’s love by taking his side all the time and giving him a big allowance. But no way was Loop falling for that trick. “My real father might be a loser, but at least he’s not a fake like Rubén,” Loop said.

  Mr. Garza seemed to study Loop’s problem. “Hmm…,” he mumbled as he stared into the distance for a while. Then he said, “Do you know what a black sheep is?”

  Loop answered sarcastically because this was such a dumb question. “You mean, a sheep that is black instead of white?”

  “He means a symbolic black sheep,” Dominic said. “Like how you have a family, but there’s always one person who doesn’t fit in. You know, everybody likes pizza but one person eats liver instead?”

  “Whatever,” Loop said, unconvinced. “I don’t see what sheep—no matter what color they are—have to do with my family.”

  “Sit down, and I’ll show you.” Mr. Garza pointed to the table, so the boys sat down. Then he grabbed his sombrero and a deck of cards, and joined them. “Look,” he said, holding out his arms. “Nothing up my sleeve, right?”

  “You’re wearing a T-shirt,” Loop pointed out.

  “That’s how you know I’m not hiding anything.”

  He took off his Meathead baseball cap and left it on the table, upside down, so the cap looked like a bowl. Then Mr. Garza put on the sombrero so he could be Señor Surprise again. He took four cards and dropped the rest into the baseball cap. “This is about a red family,” he said, turning over the first three cards. They were all hearts. “And a black sheep,” he added, turning over the fourth card, the ace of spades.

  “Now, once upon a time, the red family told the black sheep, ‘You don’t belong.’” He dropped the ace into the cap. “But the black sheep wouldn’t stay away.” He pointed at the cards in his hand. Now there were three—two red and the ace of spades.

  “They pushed him away again.” Señor Surprise dropped the ace of spades in the cap and showed them the two remaining cards. Both were red. “But the black sheep wouldn’t stay away.” He pointed at his hand. Now he held one red card and the ace of spades.

  “The red family got really mad because they did not want that black sheep around.” He dropped the ace of spades in the cap and revealed the red card left in his hand. “But?” He let the question hang in the air as he slowly turned the card. When he showed the face again, it was no longer red—it was the ace of spades!

  “The black sheep,” Señor Surprise whispered, “would not stay away.”

  Loop and Dominic clapped.

  “How’d you do that?” Dominic asked. “Did you use false counts? Double lifts? Were you palming that card the whole time?”

  “If you really want to know, then study the Homing Card,” Señor Surprise said as he squared the deck. “Now back to work for me and back to work for you.”

  He took off the sombrero but left it on the table. Then he put on his baseball cap and returned to his desk.

  Loop had no idea why Mr. Garza had shown him that magic trick. As far as he could tell, it had nothing to do with his family. He flashed back to a time he had to draw a family tree in school. For an example, his teacher drew a flow chart and used dotted lines to add relatives who had married into the family or been adopted. Then she asked the students to draw their own flow charts. Dominic followed the instructions exactly, using dotted lines for his stepmom and sister and thick lines for his parents, while Z taped two pages together to make room for all his brothers and sisters. Loop did the assignment, too, but he drew an actual tree, a winter tree with sharp, pointy branches like knives in the sky. His mom was the trunk, and Rubén was a kite stuck in the branches. When his teacher asked him to explain, he said that sometimes families grabbed random people just like trees grabbed random kites.

  What he didn’t say was that he was waiting for a big gust of wind to blow that kite away.

  Oil and Water—

  a trick in which cards are mixed up and then magically separated into groups of black cards and red cards

  DOMINIC THOUGHT MR. GARZA’S Homing Card made total sense, but he could tell that Loop was still confused. “It’s a metaphor,” he said. “I can explain it if you want.”

  “No,” Loop said. “I get it.”

  Dominic didn’t believe him, but he let it go because he’d made a secret promise to stop giving answers all the time. He didn’t want to be called a know-it-all ever again.

  To change the subject, he said, “So what are you doing for the magic competition?”

  Loop cheered up immediately. Then he showed Dominic his Terror Blade as he described the routine, his voice getting louder at each step of his trick. “First…” he began, “and then… and then… and then… and finally a giant freak-o-rama!” Loop threw out his hand
s and made exploding sounds. Dominic’s eyes widened. His friend’s trick certainly had shock value. “I’m not even going to talk,” Loop went on. “It’s all about the visuals. If Ariel could win without patter, then so can I.” He took his rubber knife and pretended to stab his guts. Dominic desperately wanted to say that Japanese samurai once stabbed their guts to commit suicide in a ritual called hara-kiri, but then he remembered—Stop acting like a walking Wikipedia!

  Just then, Loop’s phone rang, and after a few minutes of “But I just got here” and “You promised to let me work on my magic,” he said, “Okay, but you owe me.”

  “You have to go home?” Dominic guessed as his friend pocketed the phone.

  Loop nodded. “My grandma’s waiting for me. She probably brought a new candle and wants me to pray.”

  “Maybe you can pray for good luck at the convention,” Dominic suggested.

  “I’m not supposed to be selfish.”

  “Then maybe you can pray for me to have good luck.”

  Loop laughed. “You got it. One good-luck prayer coming up.” He and Dominic fist-bumped, and Loop was off.

  So Dominic found himself alone. He spent the next thirty minutes thinking about his routine. He was going to perform a mentalism trick with a book as the central prop. It was called Lost: Fifty True Survival Stories. It wasn’t a trick book like the magic coloring book that instantly added color to its drawings and then made them disappear. No, his book was normal. You could get it from any Barnes & Noble, and with a small modification, turn it into something magic. He had already mastered the moves, but he was struggling with his patter. He could write all kinds of research reports, no problem, but this was hard. Thankfully, Z showed up, so Dominic decided to ask him for help.

  “Really?” Z said. “You want me to help you?”

  “Yeah. What’s so weird about that?”

  “I never help you,” Z said. “I’m the one who’s always confused, and you’re the one who always explains things.”

  “Well, this is different. I’ve got writer’s block. I’ve had it all summer. But every time you do a trick, you know exactly what to say.”

  Z straightened up and pointed at himself. “That’s because I’m an artist.”

  “And I’m a bookworm,” Dominic said as he held up his book of survival stories.

  Z rubbed his hands together. “Okay, so what are you going to do for the competition?”

  “I’m going to read someone’s mind.”

  Z closed his eyes a minute, and when he opened them, he had a blank face.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Dominic said. “You’re trying to block my telepathy.”

  “Oh, man! You’re really good. That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

  “Ha-ha,” Dominic said, deadpan. Then, “So you want to see my trick?”

  “Of course!”

  Dominic hesitated. He hadn’t shown his trick to anyone, including Mr. Garza, even though he was the one who’d taught it to him. “You want to see it, too?” he asked.

  Mr. Garza didn’t turn from the computer or pause typing when he answered. “I’ll watch it later. I’ve got some Internet orders to process.”

  “Quit stalling,” Z said to Dominic, “and show it already.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dominic replied, but he was feeling nervous. What was wrong with him? If he couldn’t show his trick to one of his best friends, then how was he going to show it to a room full of people? How was he going to show it to the judges?

  He took a deep breath to calm his nerves. Then he showed Z the book, a pencil, and a notepad, and he went through the motions of the routine. His technique was flawless, but there was one problem—a major problem. Z didn’t laugh at the jokes, and he seemed bored—even after the big revelation at the end!

  Dominic snapped his fingers as if to wake up his friend. “Are you still trying to block my telepathy? Because I totally proved that I could read your mind.”

  “I know. And it was really cool.” Z smiled, but it was the same smile Dominic got from his dad when he performed the Die-ception trick. He had bombed then, and he had totally bombed now.

  “You didn’t like my trick,” Dominic concluded. “I can tell.”

  “Yes, I did. It was…” Z struggled for the word. “Interesting.”

  “Really?”

  Z chuckled. “Yeah. As interesting as watching a green banana turn yellow.”

  “That’s cold,” Dominic said, but he was laughing in spite of himself.

  “Nah,” Z said. “I’m just picking on you. If you lived in my house, you’d hear stuff like that all the time. Like last week, I was Zero-G and yesterday, I was the zoo-maniac. That’s my brothers’ new thing—calling me z-words. They’ll probably call me a ‘zylophone’ next.”

  “But ‘xylophone’ starts with—” Dominic stopped himself. “Okay, back to the subject,” he said. “Give me your honest opinion about my trick.”

  Z paused. “I liked it, okay? It’s just… well…”

  “Tell me!” Dominic insisted. “Don’t hold back. I need the truth.”

  “Well… like I was saying… it was good, but you kinda lost me. The patter went over my head, and my mind started wandering. But it’s probably just me. My mind is always wandering.”

  Dominic slumped in his chair. “No, it’s not you,” he said. “My trick is boring, and I’m boring. I’m too much like my mom.”

  “What does that mean?” Z asked.

  “She’s all-work-no-play, and so am I.”

  “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Dominic answered. “It’s a good thing when you’re in school, but not when you’re trying to win a magic competition. Why can’t I be like my dad? He’s always the life of the party. But my mom? She never has any fun.”

  “Are you kidding?” Z said. “Your mom’s a lot of fun. She’s one of the most interesting people I know. She was a star athlete in high school, and then, before you were born, she and her friends used to go primitive camping. They would hike to the middle of nowhere and live off the land—no electricity or phones or toilet. Just nature. That’s insane! And your mom did it. She was so adventurous. She has all kinds of stories about her primitive camping days.”

  Dominic shook his head. Was he imagining things? How did Z know so much about his mom?

  “You’re making this up,” Dominic said.

  Z crossed his heart. “Am not.”

  “How can you possibly know all this?”

  “Because,” Z said, “I hung out at your place when you were in Corpus.”

  Dominic put the pieces together, and then he had an aha moment. “Are you the one who organized my house?”

  “Yup. Your mom paid me, and she introduced me to all your neighbors. She knows I need money for the convention. If you ask me, she’s the nicest lady on the planet. She always has snacks for me, too. I never get snacks at my house. So you see? Your mom’s not boring at all.”

  “I guess,” Dominic said. “But…” He needed a few seconds to process what he wanted to say. “Okay, so let’s say that my mom’s cool and my dad’s cool, but the way they ignore each other is totally uncool. They act like they have nothing in common, but how can that be true when they used to be married? And even if it is true, they still have me. Just once—like maybe on my birthday or something—I’d like to hang out with both my parents at the same time.”

  Z had nothing to say. He just held up his hands and shrugged.

  Then Mr. Garza interrupted. “Let me show you something.”

  The boys turned to him. Mr. Garza wasn’t processing orders anymore. He was actually facing them. He’d been listening to the whole conversation. If eavesdropping were an Olympic sport, he’d have a gold medal for sure.

  He headed to the table, donned his sombrero, and showed them his arms. “Nothing up my sleeve, right?”

  “That’s exactly what you said a little while ago,” Dominic pointed out. “Besides, you’re still wearing the sam
e T-shirt.”

  “Ah, yes. I do this on purpose, and that’s how you know. No sleeves, no secrets.”

  He shuffled a deck of cards. Then he took three black cards and three red ones. “This is oil,” he said, showing the black cards one by one, then placing them facedown to his right. “And this is water,” he said, showing the red cards and placing them facedown to his left. “Let’s see what happens when you try to mix oil and water.” He made a new pile, alternating cards from the black and red piles. “Just give it a few seconds,” he said as he snapped his fngers. “And you’ll see that the oil rises to the top.” When he turned the cards around, the black cards were on the top and the red cards were on the bottom. They were no longer alternating.

  “Maybe you don’t believe me, so let’s do it again—this time with the cards facing up.” He made a new pile, alternating red and black. Then he turned over the cards and squared the deck. “Give it a few seconds,” he repeated with a snap, “and the oil rises to the top.” He turned the cards. They weren’t mixed anymore.

  Now Señor Surprise took the remaining deck and started shuffling. “It doesn’t matter how much oil and water you have, or how much you stir the two ingredients.” He shuffled, cut the deck, and shuffled once more. “The oil will always rise to the top.” This time he did two ribbon spreads, and when he flipped them over, the top row was black while the bottom was red. “And that’s because,” he concluded, “oil and water do not mix.”

  Z shook his head in disbelief. “I must learn that trick,” he said. “That was awesome!”

  “No,” Señor Surprise said. “If you want to see an awesome rendition of the Oil and Water card trick, then watch Rene Lavand. He performs it with one hand and”—he added a dramatic tone—“No lo puedo hacer más lento.” Then he translated in a whisper, “I can’t do it any slower.”

  He let the boys think about this for a while before removing the sombrero and returning to his desk.

  “That’s it?” Z asked. “Aren’t you going to explain what it means?”

  “Dominic knows,” Mr. Garza answered.

  Dominic nodded. It was true. He knew exactly what Mr. Garza’s trick meant, and he knew exactly what he needed to do about his family.