Authors: Lisa Graff
“
It’ll be
fine,
” Kansas told her, reaching over to open Samson’s cage for her. “There’s still one more act before us, so will you just calm down already?”
Francine nodded as she cradled Samson in her arms, stroking his fur. But her hands were still shaking.
“We’ll be
fine,
” Kansas told her again. He turned to the stage to watch the ventriloquist act.
“Why did the turtle cross the road?” Carl was asking his dummy, Buddy.
“To get to the Shell station!” Buddy replied.
The curtain closed, and Carl and Buddy scuttled off the stage. “Good luck,” Carl muttered to Kansas and Francine as he passed them. “It’s
scary
out there.”
Francine’s hands began to shake even faster.
The talent show’s MC, a fifth-grader named Violet Montebank, raced onto the stage to announce the next act. Kansas rocked on his feet. Just one more act to sit through and then he and Francine would be up.
“And now,” Violet cried from the stage. Her face was yellow from the spotlight. “Please put your hands together for our next big talent, fourth-grader Brendan King and his stupefying magic act!”
Kansas turned to look at Francine. “Huh?” he said.
“It couldn’t be …,” she began.
But it was. Just at that moment, Brendan King walked on from the wing across the stage. He was wearing a black cape and a tall magician’s cap. He waved at the cheering audience.
“Huh?” Kansas said again.
“Thanks, everyone!” Brendan said to the crowd. “And now please welcome my assistant, Andre!”
“What?” Kansas said as Andre appeared on stage too. He waved as well.
“I don’t understand,” Francine whispered to him as Brendan and Andre began the magic act. “Why would Brendan dare us to win the talent show if he was going to be in it himself?”
Kansas shook his head. It didn’t make any sense at all. Until, suddenly, it did. “Brendan wants to be the news anchor!” he cried, turning to Francine. Behind him, the stage manager gave Kansas a stern
shush
ing. “That day at lunch,” he went on, lowering his voice. Francine leaned in close to hear him. “Brendan said, ‘Whoever wins the talent show gets to be news anchor,’ remember?” Francine nodded. “
And we all agreed on it. He was trying to trick us. He thought we’d go out there and look like morons, and he could pull off some cool magic act and win everything.”
Francine shook her head. “It was him all along,” she said, “tricking us. You know it was his idea to give you that underwear dare? He stole those underwear from you in PE.”
Kansas squinted an eye at her. “Those weren’t mine,” he told her. “He probably just took a pair of his own underwear and wrote my name on them.” Francine slapped her forehead. “He’s probably the one who IM’d me too, I bet, about wearing Ginny’s tutu. I can’t
believe
that all this time we never even …”
Francine let out a huge sigh. “We might as well give up now,” she said, snuggling Samson to her chest. “He’s probably been working on this act forever. We’ll never win.”
“Yeah,” Kansas agreed. They were
sunk
.
“Hey, guys?” Kansas felt a tap on his shoulder. It was the stage manager, his hand over his headset. “Have you guys been
watching
this magic act?” he asked them. Kansas and Francine shook their heads. “It is seriously terrible. Look.”
So Kansas and Francine watched.
On stage, Andre was holding Brendan’s magician’s hat brim up. “
Abracadabra!
” Brendan shouted, waving his wand toward the hat. “Assistant, please hand me the rabbit.”
Kansas was pretty sure that was the part where Andre was supposed to produce a rabbit out of the hat, but that’s not what Andre did. Instead, he tilted the hat to look inside it. “I can’t find it,” he told Brendan.
The audience let out a tittering of giggles, which Brendan did not seem too pleased about. “Assistant,
please,
” he ordered. “The rabbit.”
“It’s not in here,” Andre told him. “I found your trick thumb, though, you want that?” The audience roared.
By the time Brendan’s magic act ended, there was no doubt in Kansas’s mind that it was the worst performance he’d ever seen in his life. Even Francine looked relieved. There was no way that Brendan would win the talent show.
On the other hand, Kansas thought, as the main curtains closed and the stage manager helped them wheel their act on stage, it meant that he and Francine were now the only hope that the Media Club had.
“
And now,” Violet Montebank announced on the other side of the curtain. Behind it, Kansas and Francine raced to make last-minute adjustments to their contraption. Everything had to be
just so,
or it wouldn’t work. “For something a little more …
unusual.
Please give a round of applause to Francine Halata and Kansas Bloom!”
The audience applauded, and the curtain opened. Kansas could feel the lights on his face, bright and warm. It was kind of a nice feeling.
“Hello,” Kansas said to the audience. He made his voice loud and clear, so that everyone could hear him. It was hard to make out faces in the audience, but he could see the judges clearly enough—five of them, sitting in the front row. There were two teachers, two fifth-graders he’d never met, and … Mrs. Weinmore. Kansas gulped.
“Um, anyway,” he went on, “I bet you’re wondering what we’re doing with all this.” Kansas pointed behind him, at the giant machine he and Francine and Mr. Muñoz had spent the whole week creating. If you didn’t know what it was, it would just look like a mess of strange objects and ramps and pulleys, nailed to an enormous wooden
structure on wheels. But it was quite a bit more than that. Kansas turned to Francine, waiting for her to do her part of the talking.
But Francine was frozen, still as a statue, except for her shaking hands. She was staring into the spotlight. And she wasn’t saying a word.
“Um, Francine?” he whispered, tugging on her sleeve. “It’s your turn.”
Francine finally snapped to her senses. “Hey, Kansas,” she said, going over the lines that they’d rehearsed. Her hands were still shaky, but Kansas could tell she was doing her best not to sound nervous. “I sure feel like some milk.” She showed the audience the cup she was holding, a large clear plastic one. “But the milk carton is way up there.” She pointed, all the way to the top corner of the wooden structure, where a single carton of milk sat by itself on a wooden platform. “I can’t reach it. Can you get it for me?”
“Sure I can,” Kansas said. He turned to the audience. “Are you ready?” The audience murmured and nodded. Kansas wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see his mother and Ginny in the audience, next to the Muñozes. When
Ginny waved, he knew it was them. “I
said,
” he repeated, “are you
READY
?”
At that, the audience let out a resounding
“Yes!”
Kansas took two objects out of his pocket—a pair of boys’ underwear, and a pink pencil with a cherry eraser. “Well, then,” he told the audience, “I guess it’s time to get Francine some milk.” And, just as they had practiced, Kansas stuck the eraser end of the pencil inside the briefs and used them like a slingshot to shoot the pencil
up up up
into the wooden structure.
It was a good thing Kansas had spent so much time playing basketball. His aim was perfect. The pencil hit its mark exactly,
zing
ing right into the broken camera from Media Club.
The camera was screwed into the wooden structure with a hinge, and when the pencil hit the camera, it tilted downward, just enough to knock into a small piece of wood.
The piece of wood had been fashioned into a boat—with a fuzzy photograph for a sail, attached by a mast made of a permanent marker. And when the camera knocked into it, the boat fell off its perch and landed—
plop!
—in a plastic tub filled with water.
The boat floated across the tub, and when it got to the very end, it smashed sail-first into a second pair of underwear, this one hanging from the wall by a hook.
A crumpled ball of pink paper dropped out of the underwear and fell about a foot and a half, where it landed—
kerplop!
—on the head of Francine’s guinea pig.
Down on the stage, Kansas could hear Francine sucking in her breath, waiting for Samson to pull off his part of the act. But he did it perfectly, just as he had in rehearsal. As soon as the paper ball landed on him, Samson climbed
up up up
a tiny ladder to a bowl of guinea pig treats, where he began to eat.
The bowl of guinea pig treats was sitting next to Kansas’s basketball on a tilty platform, and when Samson ate, the platform shifted, pitching the basketball down a curvy ramp. It rolled around and around and around, until it knocked into …
… a bottle of green hair dye, which fell off its perch, parachuting down with the help of the sparkly white tutu it was attached to.
The bottle of dye knocked into a CD case that was standing up on its end. That CD knocked into another one, and
that knocked into another, and down they all went like dominoes, until the last one crashed into three colored golf balls.
Each of the balls cascaded down a small track, zooming this way and that, at last landing—
plop! plop! plop!
—in an enormous pile of ketchup packets.
The balls landed with such force that one of the ketchup packets flew up and landed—
plonk!
—in an open jar of mustard.
The jar of mustard was attached to a pulley. And when the ketchup flew in, the jar yanked down on its string …
… and yanked up on the bag of jumbo marshmallows on the other end. Those marshmallows had been sitting on top of one of the legs of a blue swively chair, and when their weight was lifted, the chair began to roll down a slight incline to knock against Miss Sparks’s red dippy bird.
The dippy bird, having been pushed just two inches to the right, jerked its head toward an old metal desk fan, and pushed the button to set it on High.
The fan blew air
up up up,
seven, eight, nine feet in the sky, until it reached
the pages of Francine’s father’s sketchbook, sitting open on a perch near the top of the platform. The pages fluttered for a moment, then snapped closed, pushing out the tennis ball that had been snuggled inside.
The tennis ball rolled down a small ramp, until it reached the platform where Samson had just finished eating his guinea pig treats.
Samson getting nudged in the butt with the tennis ball was his signal to move again. He crawled up a second ramp to another tilty platform, where there was an open granola bar waiting for him to munch on.
When Samson snagged the granola bar from the platform, the platform tipped, sending a bouquet of flowers smashing into the nearby unicycle.
The unicycle was hung by its seat in such a way that it could
roll roll roll
down another short platform. And attached to the bottom of its wheel was an upside-down hammer. Glued to that hammer was a plastic spoon, whose handle had been sharpened just enough so that, as it rolled along with the unicycle, it could—
SPLAT!
Ram right through the side of the milk carton.
The milk poured out of the carton, down like a streaming white waterfall to where Francine stood, waiting to catch it with her plastic cup.
When the glass was completely filled up, Francine took an enormous gulp, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and smiled.
“See?” Kansas said to the audience. “I told you I could do it. Wasn’t that a piece of cake?”
The audience went wild.
29.
An empty plastic cup
Technically, there were still four more acts to go before the talent show was over and the judges announced the winner, but as far as the members of the Media Club were concerned, there wasn’t any doubt about who would win. Natalie, Emma, Alicia, and Luis rushed backstage as soon as Francine and Kansas had finished their act, squealing and hugging and shrieking. They made so much noise, in fact, that the stage manager forced them all outside until they could “cool their jets.” So there they stood, huddled up together in the teachers’ parking lot, pounding their toes against the pavement for warmth and making as much noise as they liked.
Brendan and Andre were outside too, but they weren’t
doing any hugging and shrieking. They were mostly sulking over by the garbage cans, whispering to each other and shooting the rest of the group angry looks. With his black cape, Francine thought, Brendan looked rather like a supervillain.
“You did it!” Natalie squealed. “You guys totally did it, I
know
you did. There wasn’t anything as good as that crazy machine. Did you
see
Samson when he grabbed that granola bar? Everyone
loved
it. We’ll get the money for sure!”
“Ooh, don’t say that yet,” Emma warned, her hands balled up inside the sleeves of her sweater. Her breath came out in puffs as she spoke. “What if it doesn’t come true now ’cause you just said that? Better knock on mud.”
“What?” Luis asked.
“She means knock on wood,” Alicia explained.
“Yeah,” Emma replied. “Wood. Right.”
Francine twisted the empty plastic cup from their talent show act in her hands, watching the tiny trail of milk curl around the bottom. As cold as she was, she was pretty sure she had never felt happier.
“
So,” Luis said, “I guess if you guys really do win the talent show, then you’ll
both
be news anchors, right?” Francine looked at Kansas, and Kansas looked at her, but neither of them said anything. “Because you’re tied?” Luis went on. “Nine to nine, I think.”
“That would be
awesome,
” Emma said, “both you guys doing the announcements.”
“Yeah,” Alicia agreed. “I heard you guys were really funny last week.”
As the rest of the group jabbered on and on about how great Media Club would be with Kansas and Francine as co-anchors, Francine stayed silent. So this was it, she thought. After all her hard work, she’d be stuck next to Kansas Bloom after all.
Well, it could have been worse. Maybe, with Kansas next to her, she’d be able to get over her stage fright. Maybe, one day, she’d actually feel as comfortable in front of the camera as she did behind it.