“Sorry I’m just getting here. How did it go?” he asked. “Darned venue.”
What’s a venue? I wondered.
“Location for an event such as a wedding,” Mike said. “A hotel or a country club, for example.”
I nodded, and… wait a sec. I hadn’t asked that question out loud, had I?
“Let me get those,” Fig said. He took the last two chairs, carried them backstage, came back.
“Planning a wedding must be quite a challenge,” Mike said.
“The planning’s okay. It’s the people that make ya nuts,” Fig said.
Mike spoke another line from the play. “ ‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty… and yet man delights me not.’ ”
Fig nodded. “Got that right. And women are no picnic, either. Look, if you’re okay here, I got a few more calls to make. I’ll come back around to lock up.”
“Of course. We’ll see you next time.” Mike saluted the departing coach, then slid the green-glowing iPad thing from his coat pocket, swiped at the screen, stared at it. “I have another question for you, Noah. The schedule says something about a parent meeting next week.”
“A lot of the parents volunteer,” I said, “like, to make costumes or work on the set. So I guess it’s to organize all that.”
Mike frowned. “Hmmm. Organizing parents is not what I signed up for. And besides, I have my own, uh… methods for realizing the set and the costumes. Do you think the parents will mind if we cancel? Or possibly Coach Newton can channel their efforts in another direction.”
I shrugged. “Mine won’t mind. They’re pretty busy. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course, Noah.”
“Why didn’t you cast me as Hamlet?” There. I had said it.
Mike took a breath. “Yes, well. I thought we might come around to that. Your audition showed…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he looked up. “ ‘Methinks I scent the morning air.’ ”
“Act one,” I said automatically, “right? But my audition…?”
Only I didn’t find out about my audition.
Because the next instant Mike vanished.
This time wasn’t like when he was on the bench and I looked away and looked back and he was gone. This time I was looking right at him… and then I was looking at nothing.
From behind me in the auditorium a door creaked open and my dad said, “Noah? Time to go, buddy. Who were you talking to?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
(SCENE: Dining room, early evening the same day. NOAH, DAD, and MOM are eating dinner.)
DAD: Noah? Earth to Noah. Would you like more soup?
NOAH (blinks): Wh-what? Soup?
MOM: Honey, you’ve been acting strange ever since you got home from school.
DAD: And you were white as a ghost when I picked you up.
NOAH (widens eyes) White as…?
MOM (leans over, puts palm on NOAH’s forehead, speaks to DAD): He doesn’t have a fever.
NOAH (shakes hand away): I’m fine. Sorry. Thinking is all.
DAD: Would you care to enlighten us as to what you’re thinking about?
NOAH: Uh… the play? Hamlet. It’s really violent.
MOM: Is it? I thought you were doing that No-Trauma nonsense Mrs. Winklebottom favors. Happily ever after, the end.
NOAH: We were, but… (stares for a second, blinks, focuses) but now our scripts have Shakespeare’s own words, and the plot’s different, too.
MOM: Oh good. I don’t like dumbed-down versions for kids.
DAD: Where did that No-Trauma business come from in the first place? I wonder.
MOM (wags thumbs at herself): I know. I heard all about it at Sal’s.
DAD: So tell.
MOM: Once upon a time—
NOAH: Mom.
MOM: It’s a story! Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Mrs. Winklebottom was a sixth-grade teacher herself, only then she was Miss something-or-other, and she organized and directed the first Sixth-Grade Play, which was Richard III—
DAD: Shakespeare wrote that one too.
MOM: —about a killer king, and if anything, it’s even bloodier than Hamlet. So the performance happens, and everyone’s in awe of the kids for handling the language and poetry and so forth and Miss Whatever is basking in glory until the next day when—instead of roses and a hearty thank-you—she gets a note from John Winklebottom—
DAD: The plot thickens!
MOM: —who’s the chairman of the school board, and he tells her sixth graders are too young for blood and evil, she’s corrupting them, and what if they got the idea it’s okay to question authority, like for example kings and school board chairpersons and teachers and principals? And, oh, by the way, if she wants to keep teaching, she better not put on any more plays like Richard III. (She takes a breath, spoons up soup.)
DAD: He threatened her?
MOM: Basically. And I guess she needed the job because she came around to his point of view about delicate sixth graders, and not only that—
NOAH: Wait a sec. His name was Winklebottom? And hers wasn’t Winklebottom at the time, so does that mean—
MOM (nods): Somehow or another, Mr. Winklebottom, who was not only the chairman of the school board, but he also owned the sawmill down by the lake, convinced her to use No-Trauma Drama scripts in the future, and eventually he also convinced her to marry him.
DAD: Maybe she convinced him.
MOM (shrugs): Maybe she did.
NOAH: I never knew Mrs. Winklebottom used to be a teacher. And I never heard of any Mr. Winklebottom.
MOM: Like I said, a long time ago. After she got married, she quit teaching. Eventually, Mr. Winklebottom died, and they renamed the school, and she got the sawmill and the money, some of which she donated for the Sixth-Grade Play, which was stuck with No-Trauma Drama forevermore.
NOAH (staunchly): I’m in sixth grade, and I’m old enough for blood and evil.
DAD: Is that a good thing?
MOM: Dumbed-down literature confuses kids. They get to my classes at the college and think they know the stories, but they don’t.
DAD: Anyway, it’s a tempest in a teapot.
NOAH: Teapot… what?
MOM: It means make a big deal out of something that’s trivial. (She looks at DAD.) And I’d like to know what you mean by that, dear. Shakespeare’s trivial? Kids are trivial?
DAD: Now, don’t get all riled—
MOM: I teach English!
DAD: I realize that. But you have to admit that in the end, knowing Shakespeare doesn’t count for much in today’s world. Science, math, engineering—those are the disciplines we need to tackle the climate emergency, clean up the planet, make a world that future generations can inhabit.
MOM (staring incredulously at DAD): And I wonder what we have that’s worth saving if not culture, which includes the arts, which includes theater, which includes Shakespeare the way he wrote it, not the way Mrs. Winklebottom wants it to be.
NOAH (looking from one to the other, anxious): Are you guys gonna get divorced?
MOM: Maybe.
DAD: No.
MOM: Apologies, Noah. I did not mean that. We are not getting divorced.
NOAH: Other people’s parents get divorced. Like Eddie Muir’s. Like Dad’s.
DAD: Reasonable people can disagree without getting divorced.
MOM: Or, in your dad’s case, unreasonable people.
* * *
So my dad and mom were mad at each other, which wasn’t great, but when I went to bed it wasn’t No. 1 on my mind, either.
No. 1 on my mind was freaking out because right around four hours earlier, Mike, our new director, had disappeared in front of my very eyes!
I had put off freaking out because my parents would’ve worried if they thought I’d gone bonkers (like Ophelia). So I had acted normal right through dinner and homework and a couple of games of ShredSauce (Clive crushed me; I may have been distracted), after which I said good
night, brushed my teeth, put on pajamas, closed my door, turned out the light, and threw myself facedown on the pillow.
How had Mike done it? Why had he done it? What possibility made disappearing possible?
I thought of Star Trek and time travel and mirrors in magic shows. I thought of Harry Potter and the other wizards who could apparate. I wondered if there was something wrong with my eyes. I remembered something called mass hypnosis and wondered if Mike had ever even been in Plattsfield at all, if someone had hypnotized us to believe he had.
I even thought, so, okay, Mike disappeared, but shouldn’t his clothes have stuck around?
In the famous soliloquy, Hamlet says the trouble with dying is that it might be like sleeping and you might have nightmares. That night, though, sleep came to my rescue, and if I had bad dreams, I forgot them.
Mom woke me as usual; as usual I put off getting up. But by that time my brain had stopped spinning; I knew I wasn’t crazy.
My eyes are fine. Except for Clive, I am the most normal kid I know. And therefore Mike really did disappear. And the script swap? And answering a question I had asked only in my head?
Maybe those were clues to a mystery.
And mysteries I know about. When I was a kid—not that long ago—I read every single detective story starring Nate the Great.
So I made a decision. I wouldn’t tell anybody what I’d seen… not seen… stopped seeing. Not until I understood it. Bad enough I didn’t get cast as Hamlet. I didn’t need to get teased, another humiliation. Plus, I didn’t actually want to make trouble for Mike, because what if I did and Fig had to direct the play? What if we had to go back to the old, boring script?
That would be disaster! (As Brianna would say.)
Whatever happened, the show must go on.
I took a breath, opened my eyes, spoke to my Star Wars poster: “Help me, Obi-Wan.” Then I rolled out of bed, ready to face another day of sixth grade.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tuesday, Rehearsal Week Two, 38 Days till Performance
At lunch, most of us drama geeks sit at the same table. I mean, not Fuli because she never sits with us, and not Diego because nobody knows where he goes at lunch, and not Eddie Muir because he sits with the jocks.
But everyone else.
The caf serves meals in a two-week rotation, and that day was lasagna, which is actually one of the caf’s better recipes even though the orange sauce, which turns your tongue and teeth orange too, is probably radioactive, according to Clive who heard it from Gillian.
Everybody wanted to talk about the mysterious script swap, of course, but it turned out there wasn’t that much to say except “That sure was mysterious,” so then the conversation shifted to Hamlet, the play itself.
Brianna said, “I don’t understand even one single word, and I’ll never learn the lines, and we’re all going to look like fools in front of our families and everyone in the whole town and my relatives from Poughkeepsie.”
Emma said, “My parents say that my character, Polonius, is the very wisest one.”
Madeline said, “No, Emma, he’s not. Shakespeare calls him a ‘foolish prating knave.’ ”
Brianna said, “That’s exactly what I’m worried about! What even is ‘prating’?”
“And like, ‘knave,’ too, right?” Lila asked.
Before anyone could answer, Emma told Madeline she’d better take that back about Polonius, and Madeline said, “Who better take what back?” and Mia said, “On the other hand, if the shoe fits,” and Emma wanted to know why everybody was ganging up on her, and Marley said nobody was ganging up on her, and Clive shook his head and said, “Another episode of Lunchtime Drama.”
“Brought to you by today’s cafeteria special: radioactive lasagna,” I added.
“The only lasagna that glows in the dark,” said Clive.
And everybody laughed, and nobody got up and stomped away leaving half their lunch behind, or burst into tears, like happens sometimes—especially, TBH, the girls.
What is with girls anyway?
Mostly I don’t know or care. I am happy to be a skinny dude with slightly stick-out ears and freckles and reddish hair, a dude girls don’t care about—a dude who doesn’t care about them, either, I mean—except the way I care about and respect all my fellow humans, of course, even if I don’t go to church or temple.
Then again, sometimes I get curious about who’s in and who’s out and how come, and when I do, I ask Clive.
Clive notices stuff, like say if Marley and Brianna—who are usually best friends—aren’t speaking, or say Emma and Mia, who most of the time hate each other, have formed an alliance against Sarah, who is the prettiest girl in the class and wears a bra and sometimes even makeup.
Why does Clive notice? Because, courtesy of Gillian, he’s seen all six seasons of Gossip Girl.
After we got distracted from Polonius, the conversation shifted to, “Do you like Mike?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I mean, even though he made the tragic choice to cast Fuli instead of me as Hamlet, he seems like a good guy. And he knows a lot.”
“I don’t like him,” Emma said, which did not actually surprise me.
“Oh no, Emma—do you think he’s an escaped convict?” Brianna asked.
Emma narrowed her eyes. “Maybe. Probably. My parents think someone should look into his background.”
“Sounds like a job for D. Avventura,” Marley said.
Everybody laughed… except me. I said, “Who?”
“That guy on PicPoc. Come on, Noah, even you must’ve seen the PW PicPoc,” Mia said.
I had a choice here: A) admit to being ignorant, or B) pretend I knew something I didn’t know. Reasoning that ignorance was what everybody expected from me anyway, I chose A. “Nope.”
“Oh, my man.” Clive looked at me and shook his head sorrowfully.
Maybe I should’ve gone with B?
“I’ll explain,” said Emma, and she gave me that bright smile again, which I guess was better than rolling her eyes, but at the same time kind of weirded me out. “PW is Plattsfield-Winklebottom, of course, and PicPoc is that app where you make short movies? Except you’re not supposed to be on it unless you’re at least thirteen, so whoever D. Avventura really is, I think he must be breaking the rules!”
“Uh-huh,” I said, worried everyone was looking at me.
“And this D. Avventura person has been making a whole bunch of these short movie things about our school, and calling them PW PicPocs, only no one knows who he is, or she is, or they are, I mean, for that matter.”
“And they’re funny,” Marley said. “The PW PicPocs, that is.”
“They’re kind of mean,” Brianna said. “Some of them.”
“But like everybody watches them?” Lila said. “Because you kind of can’t wait to see what D. Avventura will do next? You know?”
“But I don’t get it,” I said. “What are they about?”
“Many subjects,” Mia said. “There was one about chess, only the king had Mr. Long’s face—you know, the principal? And there was one about lacrosse where the whole team got pummeled with sticks. What else?”
“The one about the canoe was cool,” Sarah said. “The boat flipped and all you could see was bubbles.”
“So scary!” said Brianna.
The bell rang. We gathered up our trays and backpacks and jackets. To get to the main classroom building from the caf, you have to go outside. About half the people actually put their jackets on and zipped them up. The rest of us clutched our jackets and got ready to dash.
Next to me by the door, Madeline tugged my sleeve. “Don’t feel bad, Noah. I never heard of PW PicPocs either.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There was no rehearsal that day, and after school, I asked myself a question: What would Nate the Great do?
I was home. Clive’s mom had dropped me off. My own mom’s last class was at two, and she wouldn’t be home till around four thirty, so just a normal Tues
day except for my personally assigned homework, which was to solve the case of the mysterious disappearing director.
I grabbed a box of Cheez-Its, a glass of milk, and an apple, went downstairs to the family room/basement where my family’s hulking dinosaur of a computer sleeps on a hulking dinosaur of a desk.
When Nate the Great solves a mystery, he buttons up his raincoat, pulls down his Sherlock Holmes–style hat, and pounds the pavement in search of clues. He also eats a lot of pancakes.
I didn’t have the coat or the hat or the pancakes.
But I did have something Nate didn’t: the Internet.
I sat myself on the desk chair, swiveled one fast rotation for luck, tapped the power key. A few seconds passed, like the machine had to yawn and stretch to wake up. During those seconds I thought about the most logical way to search, the best question to ask. Then I typed, “What does it mean if the person you’re talking to disappears?”
People disappearing can’t be that usual, but I got a zillion results. The first three were ads—romance advice, a paranormal investigator, a horror movie on Netflix. After that came the Wikipedia entry on “paranormal phenomena,” which I clicked on and learned that in Jamaica they call ghosts duppies.
Interesting but not helpful.
Usually the second page of search results is useless, but I went there anyway, and at the top was this: How to Tell if the Entity You’re Talking to Is a Ghost.
Somewhere, Nate the Great smiled.
The website was normal-looking except for a picture up in the corner, a logo I guess, of a cartoon ghost wearing an old-fashioned businessman’s hat, the same kind Mike wears. One other thing: The background—the wallpaper, they call it—was the same brown plaid pattern as Mike’s coat.
Weird coincidence, huh?
I read fast through the words—“grateful acknowledgment… Society of Ghostly Investigations… public service… spirit of health or goblin damned…”
I stopped and read the last part over. The idea was the site would help you decide if you were facing a good ghost or a bad ghost, but I knew that goblin line. Hamlet, Act I.
I thought of that movie, whatzitcalled that starts with a P, where the TV sucks in the little girl. Should I unplug the computer and run?
Noah McNichol and the Backstage Ghost Page 5