Nate the Great is not known for extreme bravery. Still, I couldn’t remember a time he actually ran away. Without pancakes, I took a fierce bite of apple, chewed hard, and went to the next screen, which showed the first question in one of those online quiz things: Did the entity in question disappear while you were talking to him, her, or it?
The options were to click yes or no, so of course I clicked yes.
Second question: Was the entity that disappeared wearing clothing long out of style?
Yes.
Were you looking directly at the entity when it disappeared?
Yes.
Did you experience associated evidence of supernatural phenomena?
I had to translate that one. In the end, I decided it meant, Did anything else weird happen? I clicked yes.
Please check all that apply:
Unexplained cold drafts of air
Spoken answer to a question never asked out loud
Replacement of the unpardonably inferior by the surpassingly superior, e.g. bowdlerized Shakespeare by real Shakespeare
Ridiculously pertinent Internet search results
Clanking chains, otherwise invisible faces reflected in mirror, predawn howling, animation of ordinarily inanimate objects (e.g., vases, tables, chairs).
These questions stopped me cold. Like literally. I felt a chill.
Help me, Nate the Great!
I tried to stay logical. Clive was about one thousand times better with technology than me. Had he done something to my computer? But he didn’t even know I was down here trying to solve the mystery. Maybe kids from the college?
But why would they care enough about this computer, or about me, to go to the trouble?
I didn’t know what was going on, and I was a little scared, but I was also annoyed. Someone was messing with me. Fine. I would mess with them back. So I checked the first four, which were all true, and then I checked the fifth one, which wasn’t.
Click the left arrow to return to previous screen and tell the truth. Or, to continue, click continue.
Oh yeah? Be that way. I clicked continue.
Look, do you want to know if he’s a ghost or not?
Now the Cheez-Its in my gut threatened rebellion. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, made myself calm down, clicked yes.
Congratulations! You are dealing with a bona fide spirit of health, aka a ghost, and not a goblin damned. Please treat him or her with the utmost deference, and don’t forget to have your lines memorized by Monday, April 13, when you go off-book.
Wait—did I even read that?
I couldn’t go back and check.
I barely had time to react because Pop! went the speakers and Fizz! came a hail of sparks, which filled the screen in rainbow colors before fading slowly to black. At last a single line of text appeared: We’re sorry, but the website you’re seeking is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later or, alternatively, forget all about it and move on with your life.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
(SCENE: Split stage, Noah’s bedroom on the left, Clive’s on the right, taking up a bit more than half the stage. Clive’s is more upscale than Noah’s, very Pottery Barn. Noah’s furniture seems to have been handed down after lots of love from the previous generation. In common: ski and snowboard posters on the walls. Noah lies against pillows on his bed with his phone to his ear. Clive, equipped with Bluetooth earbuds, sits in a recliner looking at a tablet.)
NOAH: You’re gonna think I’m crazy.
CLIVE (playing a game as he talks, distracted): Uh-huh, and that would be different from every day exactly how?
NOAH: Clive! I need you to stop playing Candy Crush and pay attention!
CLIVE (blinks, sits up): Candy Crush? I would never—
NOAH: Mike is a ghost! Don’t ask me how I know.
(CLIVE reacts slowly—shakes head, widens eyes, straightens back, scratches head, looks out window as if to say: Wha’?)
NOAH: Hello? Are you still there? What are you doing?
CLIVE (rises from chair, paces downstage): Playing Candy Crush. Oh—and wondering whether to call 911 this second or wait till morning.
NOAH: Don’t make fun of me, Clive. I wouldn’t’ve told you, but I had to tell somebody. It’s like the secret was busting out of me.
CLIVE (grins, singing):… somethin’ strange in the neighborhood… who ya gonna call?
NOAH: Not funny.
CLIVE: All right, all right. Let me get this straight. You’re talking about Mike the director Mike? Old dude? Wears a funky coat?
NOAH (exasperated): Yes, Clive! I mean, I can’t prove he’s a ghost. The website went all Rice Krispies on me. But I knew something was funny, which I didn’t tell you because I wanted to investigate first. So now I did and now you believe me. Don’t you?
CLIVE: Nope, Noah, I don’t. To borrow from the best, “These are but wild and whirling words.”
NOAH: You’re saying I’m crazy.
CLIVE: No offense, but it’s the most reasonable conclusion.
NOAH: Clive, Mike can disappear. And read minds, I think. And he has power over the Internet, too.
CLIVE (stops pacing, frowns, faces audience): Noah? Slow down a second, bro. Do you feel okay? Are your parents home?
NOAH: I can’t tell my parents, Clive. They’ll worry.
CLIVE: Yeah, they’ll worry. I’m worried!
NOAH (sits up angrily, collapses against pillows): Never mind. You’re right. No ghosts. I had a brain blip.
CLIVE (pivots, returns to recliner, sits down, still frowning): Good.
NOAH: One more question.
CLIVE (suspicious): Yeah?
NOAH: What if I get Mike to admit to us that he’s a ghost?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Wednesday, Rehearsal Week Two, 37 Days till Performance
In the No-Trauma Drama Hamlet, the last scene is a party that the Norwegian prince Fortinbras (played by me, Noah McNichol!) throws for the new king of Denmark, Hamlet.
Hamlet has become king because his uncle Claudius (Clive, the villain) realizes he messed up when he made himself king, so he takes off his crown with a flourish and gives it to Hamlet and bows.
Nobody’s mad. Everybody forgives everybody else. The ghost even comes back and apologizes for being un-chill and scary.
The moral of the story is: Don’t do anything big until you’ve taken your time and thought it over. And in case anyone in the audience has missed it, Ophelia speaks this speech:
Hamlet with a choice to make
Did dither and pontificate,
Was indecisive, noncommittal
(Just like Nero with his fiddle),
Busy with soliloquies
And really mean to his main squeeze,
But time moved forward—big surprise!
His thoughtful thinking had been wise.
In the end, he traded frown
For shiny scepter and gold crown.
After the first read-through, we Plattsfield-Winklebottom Sixth-Grade Players knew that in Shakespeare’s version, Ophelia (Madeline) was too dead to be speaking verses at the end. At the second read-through, we found out almost everything else was different too.
Like, instead of a party at the end, there’s a duel. And unlike Simba, Hamlet never gets to be king because Hamlet is dead, and so are Gertrude and Claudius and Laertes, and they’re lying all over the stage when Fortinbras comes in and says, more or less, “What the heck happened here?”
Fortinbras, not Ophelia, speaks the last line of the real Hamlet: “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.” He’s the prince from Norway (which is way bigger than Denmark—I checked) telling his guys to fire their guns as a salute to all the royal people who died, especially Hamlet.
When I walked into the auditorium that afternoon, I stared at Mike, looking for more evidence of his ghostliness. Maybe his body would shimmer uncontrollably. Maybe his edges would blur.
None of that happened. Or, as Shakespeare would’ve said, his “too too solid flesh�
� did not melt.
As for the Plattsfield-Winklebottom Memorial Sixth-Grade Players, they were settling in as usual in a circle of folding chairs on the stage, and none of them seemed to have realized Mike was a ghost—not even Clive, not even after I told him.
In fact, I must’ve really freaked Clive out because all day he’d been treating me the way a parental treats a kid with the flu, asking if I felt okay. Then in the caf (chicken noodle day), he offered to carry my tray.
As soon as I took the chair next to Clive, Emma came over and sat next to me, which made no sense. She played Polonius, remember, and none of my characters even had a scene with Polonius. But whatever. During the read-through, the play took all my attention. In the final scene, I dug in, inhabited the character of Fortinbras, spoke that last line with feeling.
Then the auditorium went quiet. Dead quiet. The ending was so sad—bodies all over the stage—I think the Plattsfield-Winklebottom Memorial Sixth-Grade Players were in shock.
Mia was the first to recover. She checked her stopwatch. “Take five minutes, everyone. And only five minutes. I believe Fuli’s mom came by with snacks.”
“Dumplings!” said Clive. In an instant, we were all on our feet.
The dumplings were delicious, of course, and disappeared in a trice—which is how Shakespeare would have said it if he’d ever been lucky enough to eat dumplings from Fuli’s family’s restaurant.
Soon Mike clapped his hands. “All right, players. If you’re sufficiently fortified, let’s reconvene, shall we? Now, how is everybody doing? Miss Howard? Are you disappointed you won’t be making that final speech?”
“It’s more fun to go crazy,” Madeline said.
“Good woman,” Mike said.
Emma tugged her hair. “Speaking for myself, I’m not sure I understand what makes this play so great. I mean, is there even a moral?”
Brianna said, “Life is short, and then you die?”
I don’t think Brianna meant it to be funny, but we all laughed, including Mike. “Very good, Miss Larkin. Who else thinks that’s the moral?”
“Heck yeah!” said Diego.
He had his phone out, and Mike said, “Alluring as that is, Mr. Arcati, would you mind putting it away?”
“Heck no!” Diego said, but he didn’t stick the phone in his pocket till after he’d snapped a quick picture.
Meanwhile, Mike had another question. “Does a story have to have a moral?”
“If it doesn’t, what’s the point?” Mia asked.
“Anyway, the moral’s not the same as in the first script, the one from Mrs. Winklebottom,” Fuli said. “It’s almost like the opposite. Hamlet thinks too much, and that’s why things go wrong.”
We were in a circle, remember, and Fuli gestured toward the center, and we all looked and we all gasped. For an instant the crumpled bodies of Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius seemed to lie before us. But then, like fog in sunshine, they disappeared, leaving us—me at least—a little shaky.
Mike said, “What fine imaginations you all have.”
Everybody says imagination is good, but all those bodies made me think Mrs. Winklebottom and the No-Trauma Drama people might’ve been right after all. Maybe the real Hamlet is too intense for sixth graders.
Mike was speaking again. I tried to pay attention. “The play is a tragedy, and tragedies happen in life as well as onstage. Consider that the artist’s job is to help us make sense of that, deal with that sad fact. In act five, Horatio warns Hamlet about the duel, which is a trap set by Claudius.”
Clive rubbed his hands together. “Bwaha-ha!” He just loved being evil.
Mike nodded. “Indeed. And what does Hamlet do, Mr. Desmond?”
“Uh… he decides to fight anyway,” Clive said. “He says, ‘I defy augury.’ ”
“Like, what even is augury?” Lila asked.
Mia said, “I looked it up. It means fate, something that’s gonna happen and you can’t control it.”
“Let me get this straight,” Brianna said. “Hamlet knows something terrible will happen if he does the duel, and then he goes and does it anyway, which means Hamlet is just plain dumb.”
Mike smiled. “You’re not the first to make that conclusion, Miss Larkin. But what about this? Elsewhere, Hamlet says a man is no better than a beast ‘if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed.’ ”
“Act four,” Madeline said quietly.
“I think here Shakespeare is suggesting that Hamlet is more than mere beast, that he is a hero, in fact,” Mike said. “And this is not because he succeeds in defying his fate; it is because he tries.”
“Kind of depressing,” Marley said. “Emma’s right.”
Mike looked sad himself but only for a moment. When he spoke, his usual expression returned—eyebrows raised and eyeballs aimed down along his nose, aka: too cool for school. “There’s something else about Hamlet I find interesting, a reason I think it’s a particularly good play for young people.”
“Does it make it less depressing?” Emma asked.
“You tell me,” Mike said. “Now, consider the plot. Over and over, the older generation spies on the young. Polonius is the worst. He sends Reynaldo to spy on Polonius’s own son, Laertes. Later he and Claudius spy on Hamlet and Ophelia. And later still, spying on Gertrude and Hamlet, he gets his comeuppance. He ‘find’st to be too busy is some danger,’ and dies.”
“ ‘Dead for a ducat, dead,’ ” Fuli spoke Hamlet’s line.
“But Claudius does not learn the lesson,” Mike went on. “Hamlet is a play about many things, but I believe an important one is the hopeless and nefarious way one generation tries to withhold power from the next.”
Like Shakespeare himself, Mike said stuff that was fancy and hard to understand. But now I got his point, which made me think of the story Mom had told at Family Dinner, how Mr. Winklebottom worried the real version of Richard III would encourage kids to question authority.
William Shakespeare: revolutionary!
Emma looked alarmed. “So he’s saying we shouldn’t listen to our parents?”
Mike’s eyes scanned our faces. “Who has parents that remind them of Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius?”
“Mine remind me of Polonius a little,” Emma said. “They like to give advice.”
“Ha ha—that makes your parents ‘foolish prating knaves’!” Diego said.
“Wait, like, I forget. A knave is a bad thing, right?” Lila said.
“You take that back!” Emma said.
“Lila?” Madeline said. “Or Diego?”
Mike raised a hand for quiet. “All worthy comments,” he said, “but we need to move on. To summarize, the story of Hamlet is sad, but the play is beautiful. And when an artist makes beauty out of tragedy, isn’t that inspiring? And isn’t inspiring the opposite of depressing?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Was the play inspiring or depressing?
Not even Emma had a response to that question. Not even Mia.
Maybe they were answering in their own heads. Maybe they were thinking about rides home.
“And now”—Mike slid the glowing green iPad thing from its place in his pocket and glanced down—“on to our next meeting, which is tomorrow. We’ll be blocking scenes one through five. Please get to work memorizing your parts. Long play. Short rehearsal time. As Miss Duffy would be only too happy to tell you, our schedule is all.”
The Plattsfield-Winklebottom Memorial Sixth-Grade Players rose from their chairs, shuffled on backpacks and coats, clumped offstage, departed into the cold and damp.
All except me and Clive. My dad was going to be late again, but it wasn’t because of a class this time. It was because I had asked him to be late.
I needed a chance to talk to Clive and Mike alone.
Folding chairs and putting them away was thirty seconds of work, and then there was an awkward moment. I looked at Mike. Clive looked at me. Mike looked back and forth between us. Finally, his eyes
came to rest on my face. “Out with it, Mr. McNichol,” he said. “ ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place.’ ”
It’s awkward, asking someone if they’re a ghost.
Ever since I’d decided I was going to do it, I’d been thinking about how not to make it an insult, if it was an insult. Was “Hey, so are you a ghost?” the same as saying, “Hey, so are you super old and dead and decayed?”
And now the moment was here, and I hadn’t come up with anything clever or polite.
“That courage line’s not from Hamlet, is it?” I stalled.
“Different Shakespeare play,” Mike said. “Macbeth. It has a ghost, too.”
“Are you one? A ghost, I mean. I hope you don’t mind me asking.”
There. Best I could do.
For a moment, Mike continued to look down his nose at me. As for Clive—what should I call the look on his face? Exasperated? Embarrassed? Scared?
Mike answered. “Yes,” then, “Boo.”
I turned to Clive. His expression had frozen. “Told you,” I said.
Clive swallowed hard, then mumbled, “ ‘Words, words, words.’ ”
“A hit, Mr. Desmond,” Mike said. “A very palpable hit.”
“I’m lost,” I said.
“Lines from Hamlet,” Mike said.
“Well, I knew that,” I said. “What I meant was—”
“Anyone can say they’re a ghost, use that word,” Clive said. “It doesn’t prove anything.”
“It doesn’t,” Mike agreed. “And, in fact, it doesn’t matter if you believe I’m a ghost or not. What matters is that you take my direction.”
Clive still seemed nervous, spooked—ha ha. But maybe a little less so. “Good deal, Mr.… uh?”
At that moment I realized something. Mike had never told us his last name.
“I had a full name in life,” Mike said. “In death, ‘Mike’ is enough.”
“See?” I said to Clive. “That proves he’s a ghost. He read my mind! I was wondering about his last name, and he told us.”
Mike smiled. “That wasn’t mind reading, Noah. That was regular human intuition. On the other hand, how about this?”
Noah McNichol and the Backstage Ghost Page 6