Noah McNichol and the Backstage Ghost

by Martha Freeman

  If only there’d been dumplings from Himalaya, it would’ve been perfect.

  Sampling it all kept me so busy I forgot about asking Eddie why he’d been late to the performance.

  Until I remembered. Snow, right?

  “No, not snow,” said Eddie between bites. He was standing next to Clive on the other side of the punch bowl. “Only my unreliable parents. They got mixed up about which one was supposed to drive me. I was freaking out till I got a text that said my understudy could go on as the ghost. I just had to make it in time for Guildenstern.”

  “We don’t have understudies,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought. But someone went on for me,” Eddie said.

  “So”—I tried to put it together, looked at Clive—“we still don’t know who played the ghost?”

  “He was tall like Eddie,” Clive said, “and really convincing the way he glided around and… Oh.”

  “Oh,” I echoed as the obvious explanation came to me. “Because it wasn’t my dad, and it wasn’t Mia, and there’s only one other, uh… person I can think of who knows the part. Knew the part.”

  Diego was really stylin’ that day: bright pink beret, lime-green scarf. With advice from Emma, he’d spent the whole party snapping photos of the food, the views, everybody. Would the next immortal PW PicPoc be #CastParty? Now he said, “Heck yeah!” and looked around like he wanted to snap a picture of a ghost.

  But we all knew that was impossible.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  (SCENE: Living room of the McNichol household, early evening. Entryway is downstage left, stairs to second floor stage right. Center stage are a sofa and coffee table, both well worn and comfortable. NOAH and DAD are seated on the sofa, cozy in lamplight, looking at an old black leather scrapbook.)

  NOAH: So your dad used to read you “Father William” at bedtime, same as you used to read it to me.

  DAD (nods): One of my few memories of him—that is, the few memories besides what I saw in the paper when I was old enough to read. Clippings like these. (He points, flips pages.) Oh, one more memory.

  NOAH: What?

  DAD: The birthday when he gave me the poster, the signed one from Star Wars you have in your bedroom? Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. My father knew a lot of actors.

  NOAH: So your dad was almost never around, and you were mad at him for that.

  DAD: I got over it.

  (Beat, NOAH looks up at DAD, as in, Seriously, DAD?)

  DAD (smiles sheepishly): Or maybe I didn’t. My father—my biological father—was a big deal. I admired him and I envied him. Meanwhile, I was a lonely little boy left home with a nanny.

  NOAH (wide-eyed): That’s the saddest thing I ever heard!

  DAD: Oh, now. There are plenty of sadder things, and don’t get me wrong. For a long time all I wanted was to be like my dad. In high school, I was a drama geek too.

  NOAH: That’s why you know your Shakespeare.

  DAD (nods): And in college I directed a production of Macbeth. My parents had been divorced forever by that time. I hardly ever saw my father, but I invited him to opening night.

  NOAH: And?

  DAD (shrugs): He didn’t show.

  NOAH (winces): That’s terrible.

  DAD (nods, sighs): Yeah, it was. He sent a note the next day. He was on his third wife by that time. He said he was sorry and so on, promised to come next time. But there was no next time. I went a different direction. Happily, Bill McNichol had adopted me when he married my mom, so I no longer had the family name. It would have been awkward to be a physicist named Einstein.

  NOAH: Then Mike, your dad, died in 2014.

  DAD (nods): It was sudden. I hadn’t seen him in years. By then it shouldn’t have mattered. But it did. (He looks at NOAH.) You don’t remember. You were only a little guy. But it was a gloomy time for me. He was gone, and he’d never make it right.

  NOAH (eagerly): But, Dad—now he did. He went to all the trouble to come back as a ghost and fix things.

  DAD: Noah… there’s no such thing as—

  NOAH: Listen, Dad. Here is how it went down. I recited, “You are old, Father William,” and he heard me, and he came. This (he points to photo in the album) is Mike. All of us Sixth-Grade Players saw him. Physics doesn’t explain everything, Dad, or at least it doesn’t yet.

  DAD: “There are more things in heaven and earth?”

  NOAH: And Mike fixed a lot. You like theater again. I know a lot more about it than I used to. You told me the truth about your family. Mike even fixed Mrs. Winklebottom.

  DAD: What?

  NOAH: At the party yesterday, she said the show convinced her No-Trauma Drama is a mistake, that kids can handle real art. Miss Magnus is really happy about that.

  DAD: I thought you told me Miss Magnus would be on vacation for the performance?

  NOAH: In the end, she couldn’t stand to leave. She was just too curious. (He nods toward the book, flips pages.) Look at the shows Mike did, the awards he won!

  DAD (shrugs): You will note there are no awards in here for parenting.

  NOAH (shut down, hesitates): You know, Dad, Shakespeare has something to say about that too. Hamlet’s talking about his father. He was great, a legend, a king—but he wasn’t perfect.

  DAD: “He was a man. Take him for all in all.”

  NOAH and DAD (together): Act one.

  NOAH (flips to the last page in the book): Hey, look at this program. (He reads.) “The Plattsfield-Winklebottom Memorial Sixth-Grade Players present William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one night only, directed by Mike Einstein and Larry McNichol. Featuring Mike Einstein himself as the Ghost.”

  DAD (trying not to hyperventilate): My mother brought this album from Florida at Passover. Did you paste that program in there? But you couldn’t have known Eddie wouldn’t play the ghost, or that I—

  NOAH (shaking his head): I’m not the only funny guy in the family, Dad. Do you still think there’s no such thing as ghosts?

  DAD (looks up from scrapbook, looks at NOAH): I don’t know what to think.

  NOAH: He’s still here. (He looks around.) Maybe it’s true that our ghosts are always among us.

  DAD: Is that Shakespeare?

  NOAH: Nope, not this time. This time it is I, Noah McNichol.

  More from the Author

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  The Secret Cookie Club

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Helen Richardson

  Martha Freeman worked as a reporter and teacher before becoming a full-time writer of books for young readers, including the Edgar Award-nominated Zap!, Born Curious, The Secret Cookie Club series, Who Stole Halloween?, and Effie Starr Zook Has One More Question, which School Library Journal called “accessible and exciting” in a starred review. She also collaborated with NASA astronaut Mark Kelly on the Astrotwins books. Martha lives in Colorado. Learn more at MarthaFreeman.com.

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids

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  Paula Wiseman Books

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text © 2021 by Martha Freeman

  Jacket illustration © 2021 by Jez Tuya

  Jacket design by Krista Vossen © 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Freeman, Martha, 1956–author.

  Title: Noah McNichol and the backstage ghost / by Martha Freeman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2021] | “A Paula Wiseman Book.” | Audience: Ages 8–12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: After their director breaks her leg, the cast of a sixth-grade play is delighted with volunteer director Mike, but eleven-year-old Noah McNichol has reason to believe Mike is a ghost.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020030025 (print) | LCCN 2020030026 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781534462908 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534462953 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Theater—Fiction. | Ghosts—Fiction. | Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Fathers and sons—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.F87496 No 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.F87496 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030025

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030026