Double Dog Dare

  The backstage area was mostly deserted, just a couple of high school volunteers dressed in black, running around yelling into headsets. Francine looked at the clock on the wall—forty-four minutes until the show officially started. Butterflies were growing in her stomach again, just the way they had been when she co-anchored the news with Kansas. She tried to squelch them, kicking her legs under the table. How would she ever be a TV animal trainer if she had stage fright all the time? Next to her, Samson grunted from his cage.

  “You need help?”

  Francine looked up. There was Natalie, her backpack slung over one arm.

  “What are you doing here?” Francine asked. Which, she realized after the words came out of her mouth, was maybe not the nicest way she could have phrased things.

  Natalie shrugged. “Me and Alicia signed up to do refreshments in the lobby,” she said. “But I saw your mom, and she said you needed help back here.” Natalie looked around, as though noticing for the first time that there was nothing to set up.

  “It’s not here yet,” Francine explained.

  “Oh.” Natalie hoisted her backpack higher on her shoulder. “Um, I guess I should go back to the refreshments, then.”

  “Yeah,” Francine said. “Or, um.” She stuck a pointer finger in Samson’s cage and stroked his silky hair. “You could wait with me. If you want.”

  Natalie glanced over her shoulder, deciding. “Okay,” she said at last. She dropped her backpack on the table and climbed up to sit on the other side of Samson. “What’re you doing for the talent show anyway?” she asked Francine. “Did you teach Samson some more tricks?”

  Francine squinted at her. Natalie might know what her act was if she ever bothered to talk to her anymore. “It’s a surprise,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  They sat in silence.

  Francine checked the clock on the wall again. Forty-two minutes until the talent show.

  “Hey, Natalie?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yeah?” Natalie was hunched over Samson’s cage, petting him through the bars.

  “It’s just …” It had been three weeks since Thanks giving, and not once had Natalie even said so much as, “Hey, Francine, you seem a little down. Anything going on?” Hadn’t Natalie noticed that Francine had been upset lately? They’d been best friends since baby daycare. You’d think if you’d been friends with someone that long you’d be able to read her mind a little bit, to know what she was thinking. But maybe Natalie just didn’t care to know.

  “Nothing,” Francine said, shaking her head. “Sorry there’s nothing for you to help with. You can go back to refreshments if you want.”

  Natalie looked up from Samson’s cage. “I’m not really helping with refreshments,” she said.

  “You’re not?”

  “Well, Alicia is. I just came with her ’cause … I wanted to give you this.”

  Francine watched as Natalie unzipped her backpack and pulled something out. It was a chocolate pudding cup. “I thought you might want it,” she told Francine. “For good luck.” She had one for herself too. “Oh, and, um …” She dug in her backpack again, searching for something else. “Here.” She handed Francine a plastic spoon.

  A best friend, Francine realized then, wasn’t someone who could read your mind. A best friend was someone who remembered the plastic spoon.

  “Thanks,” Francine said softly. She peeled off the lid of the pudding cup, licking the underside. “Hey, Natalie?”

  Natalie was peeling her own cup. “Yeah?”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  And so Francine told Natalie all about her parents’ divorce, and her dad’s new apartment, and two sets of furniture, and two Christmases, and all of it. And Natalie sat there, listening and sometimes saying “whoa, that stinks!” and sometimes just nodding and sometimes offering Francine some extra pudding. And when Francine was all done talking and both of their pudding cups were scraped clean, Natalie said, “How come you didn’t tell me before?”

  And Francine just shrugged.

  “Well, anyway,” Natalie said. “It’ll be okay, I think. I can help you decorate your new room at your dad’s if you want.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I’m your best friend.”

  Francine smiled at that. But there was still one naggy question tugging at the back of her brain. “Did you vote for Kansas?”

  “What?”

  “When we tied for news anchor. Did you vote for him instead of me? You said you thought he was cute, so I thought maybe—”

  “No way!” Natalie said. “Just because he’s cute doesn’t mean I’d vote for him over you.”

  And Francine knew—the way you know something about someone you’ve been best friends with since baby daycare—that Natalie was telling the truth.

  “I wonder who did,” Francine said. “I got three votes. That’s you, me, and either Emma or Alicia. One of them had to have voted for Kansas.”

  “I guess,” Natalie said, but Francine could tell she wasn’t really thinking about it anymore. She was looking at something at the far end of the stage. “What the heck is that?” she asked.

  Francine followed Natalie’s gaze. There was Kansas, twenty-five minutes late, with Mr. Muñoz, and they were pushing an enormous object on wheels, covered by a large brown tarp. It was at least three times as tall as Kansas, and twice as long.

  “That,” Francine told Natalie as the two of them hopped off the table and crossed the stage to meet Kansas, “is our talent show act.”

  28.

  A CARTON OF MILK

  Kansas thought he’d be sweating bullets before his and Francine’s big act, but as it turned out, he was cool as a cucumber.

  Francine, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck.

  “What if we mess up?” she said, her hands shaking as she fumbled with the lock on Samson’s cage. Inside, Samson squeaked, eager to be let out. “What if I forget what I’m supposed to say? What if everyone laughs at us?” Kansas and Francine were waiting in the wings, watching Carl Schumacher finish up his ventriloquist act on stage. Carl was pretty funny, Kansas thought, but not good enough to win two hundred dollars.

  “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 t
alent 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 shushing. “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, zinging 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.