I worked for ten seconds setting up chairs before I said, “You let us mispronounce your name the whole first class. Everyone was calling you ‘Mrs. Wāked, Mrs. Wāked!’”
She just kept on setting up chairs. But her face had like six layers of smiles.
“Why?” I pressed.
She set the last chair in place and looked at me straight on. “When I corrected you children on day two, it ‘waked’ you all up, now, didn’t it?”
I laughed. I guess it had.
“Class starts in one minute!” she announced to everyone. “Please to be finding your seats, pupils!”
“Mrs. Waked, may I go first today?” I asked. “I like to be the opening act of a show.”
“Well. Far be it from me to curtail your enthusiasm. But I was hoping you’d go last, Sal.”
“Why?”
She got close to me, squatted a little, and pulled up the sleeves of her black velvet dress. Nothing in her left hand, nothing in her right hand, and then: plop! A huge egg fell out of her dress and hit the floor like a cannonball.
She trapped it between her boots before it rolled away, then scooped it up and handed it to me. “I wanted to save the best for last. I adore magic!”
The egg was solid and heavy as all get-out. How in the name of pants had she been able to set up the chairs with this huge, heavy egg under her dress the whole time? And had she hidden the egg there just waiting for me to ask her the right question?
That was a great trick, and I told her so.
“That’s nothing. You will do better,” she replied. And on cue, the bell for class sounded.
Also on cue, Gabi entered the room. She was rolling in a computer and a projector on a stand. Chief custodian Mr. Milagros followed her in. He was pushing a hospital gurney that held a weird-looking helmet resting on the pillow.
“I’m not late, am I?” asked Gabi.
“Right on time, m’lady,” said Mrs. Waked. “¡Hola, Mr. Milagros!”
“Bueno,” he said.
Gabi jogged her computer and projector up the ramp stage left and parked it there. Mr. Milagros rolled the gurney upstage center so it wouldn’t be in the way of the performers who went before Gabi.
“Now, find seats, everyone. Hurry, hurry!” Mrs. Waked said. “This is my favorite class of the whole year. Show-and-tell!”
On the first day of class, Mrs. Waked had told us, “All of you are geniuses. Culeco only admits the best. Therefore, as your teacher, I have three jobs. One, to help you do your best work. Two, to help you do your best work more often. Three, to get out of the way while you do your best work. Three is my favorite, because it’s like I am getting paid to sit around and watch great artists perform. It is the epitome of decadence and laziness. You will help me be lazy, won’t you, dear children?”
We promised we would. And today, we were proving it.
The musicians rocked. I mean, they absolutely shredded—and if you’ve never seen someone shred on the xylophone, kid, you’re missing out. The tragic soliloquies made it hard to breathe. On the lighter side, the funny acts cracked us up, especially ventriloquist girl. That puppet had me believing she really was stupid!
Widelene’s bo-staff routine was even better than the preview I’d seen. I seriously didn’t know you could move a bo staff all around your body that fast. She was better than Darth Maul. She was like Darth Blender. Every time she yelled “Kiai!” everybody in the audience slid back in their chairs an inch. For her big finish, she did a 720 in the air and broke her stick over her knee. I think the whole class passed out for three seconds after that.
Once everyone recovered, Widelene got a standing O. She was definitely going to be tough to beat.
Even beret boy was better than I thought he’d be. He was still nervous when he got in front of the class, so I wasn’t expecting much. “As an introduction to my work,” he said, futzing with his laptop and the projector he was connecting to it, “I’m showing you today the trailer for a feature-length documentary-slash-philosophical-meditation on a topic that has defined me. It’s called Splitting the Adam. It’s about my relationship to wedgies.”
I had never seen so many wedgies in a row. How he’d captured them on film was beyond me. Frame after frame showed poor Adam getting every single kind of underwear torture that evil schoolchildren had ever invented. All your old favorites were there—the Atomic, the Melvin, the Forklift, the Hammer Throw, and the Old Glory, which left Adam hanging by his undies from the school flagpole as the camera sadly panned away. But the trailer also featured a few I’d never heard of: the Perseus, where the bully rips the underwear all the way off and holds up the ripped briefs like the head of Medusa; the Tighty-Whitey Crotch Canoe, where two people work together to wedgie and melvin you at the same time (can I get an OUCH from the audience?); and—in the name of all that is holy, why?—the Double-Dutch, where the two people crotch-canoeing you swing your underwear like a jump rope and take you on a magic wedgie ride.
I think the whole class clenched their butt cheeks through the entire trailer. But we all knew quality when we saw it. Applause was muted but sincere.
Two performances to go: me, and the person who was going before me: Gabi.
As Gabi ran up to the stage, I noticed that she had changed T-shirts for her performance. This one was forest green, and the quote on it read “THERE IS NO GOD HIGHER THAN TRUTH.”—MAHATMA GANDHI. She’d changed her barrettes, too. Instead of Shaolin monks, her head was now filled with what looked like huge eyeballs inside magnifying glasses.
Unlike Adam, Gabi stood at the lip of the stage like someone who’d never had stage fright in her entire life. “Hi, everyone!” she began cheerily. “We’ve seen some terrific performances today, haven’t we?”
The crowd whooped and cheered. Clearly, Gabi had a lot of friends in the audience. That shouldn’t have surprised me—obviously, she’d had enough friends to get elected student council president. But I admit, I was caught a little off guard.
“Music, theater, dance,” she went on, “and every single one a great work of art. But I am here to switch things up a little. Instead of performing a work of art, I am going to demonstrate a work of cutting-edge science!”
Gabi signaled Mrs. Waked, who did something on her phone. Music started: the kind of happy-silly-spanky pop you’d expect to hear at the beginning of a cartoon for six-year-olds. Gabi jogged over to the cart with the projector and computer, rolled it to downstage center, plugged it in, and fired up both machines. The same big blank wall on which we’d cringed through Splitting the Adam now showed what kind of looked like a live heart monitor at the hospital. You know: A black background with a green blippy dot that jumps every time your heart beats? Only the green dot wasn’t blipping at all right now. It was just hanging out in the center of the screen while, at the bottom, a digital readout of the current time scrolled by.
At the top of the screen, in blocky capital letters, were the words LIE DETECTOR! Just below the title were the words TRUE and PANTS ON FIRE! Each word had an empty black box next to it.
Gabi went upstage to grab the gurney and drag it over to downstage left. Once she’d set its brake, she faced her audience again and, smiling saber-toothily, said, “Until recently, lie detectors were pretty terrible. Polygraph tests were so unreliable, they were almost never usable as evidence in a court of law. The problem was that old polygraphs measured things like your heart rate and how sweaty you got. But a lot of people can lie without breaking a sweat. To make lie detection actually work, you have to go to the source of where lies come from: the brain.”
Gabi picked up the weird helmet sitting on the gurney’s pillow and slipped it over her head. It must have been wirelessly connected to the computer, because the green dot on the wall jumped up and down, leaving a trail of glowing scribbles behind it. “When you’re telling the truth, you’re using your memory, and this helmet knows it. For example: ‘I had cereal and milk for breakfast today.’”
Next to the word TRUE on t
he screen, a green checkmark filled the box, and a ding! dinged.
Gabi strolled the stage with her hands behind her back. “If, on the other hand, you decide to lie, you have to use your imagination, and this helmet can detect that you’re using the creative parts of your brain. For instance, ‘I had hippopotamus burgers for breakfast.’”
Next to the words PANTS ON FIRE! the box filled with a red X and a buzzer went blatt!
Gabi sat down on the stage, took off the helmet, and let her feet dangle off the edge. “We’re all here to study acting. If you want to be a great actor, you have to convince the audience that you’re telling the truth. So my question to you, fellow classmates, is this: Can you defeat a lie detector that can read your mind?”
She shot to her feet and bent toward us, leering. “I will need a volunteer. Bwa-ha-ha.”
So guess how many people volunteered to have Gabi read their brains and expose their lies to the whole world.
The answer—you’re not going to believe this—is everybody. Well, everybody but me.
I mean, kids were waving their hands in the air, jumping out of their seats, yelling, “Pick me, pick me!” While I sat on my hands, everyone else in class was dying to have Gabi lie-detect them. Even Mrs. Waked had her hand up.
But Gabi’s eyes were locked on just one person.
“Salvador Vidón! Thanks so much for volunteering. Let’s give him a round of applause, folks!”
I’D DONE SOME reading about lie detectors. Magicians are obsessed with beating them. They’d come up with all sorts of tricks to fool them: bite your tongue, put a tack in your shoe, overreact to the easy questions, etc. But all the lie detectors I’d researched were the old-school kind. I didn’t know a thing about Gabi’s brain reader.
But what choice did I have? If I refused to be her guinea pig, everyone would assume I had something to hide. The brujo rumors about me would spread through school faster than lice.
So I bounded up to the stage, looking like a happy, stupid dupe who thinks having all his secrets exposed is the most fun thing in the world. I waved at the audience and, as they applauded, thought fast about how to confound the lie detector.
It took me only a few seconds to come up with three possible scenarios regarding the machine:
1. It really worked. If I didn’t tell the truth, everyone would know.
2. It was fake, and Gabi was just having fun. It was just a comedy act disguised as science. And if I didn’t play along, I’d look like a bad sport.
3. It was fake, but Gabi was going to pretend it was real. She was going to try to fool me into talking to her, because I had refused to talk to her before.
Whichever of the three was right, the audience couldn’t know for sure. Some people would believe it was real no matter what, and some people wouldn’t no matter what. But all of them would be watching me, and judging me based on how I reacted.
In other words, the only real lie detector onstage, the only one people would really trust, was me.
Now I knew what to do. For I am a showman.
Gabi looked at the audience as she welcomed me onstage. “Thank you so much for being my victim—I mean, volunteer, Sal. I wasn’t sure you would. I couldn’t help but notice that you were the only person in the entire class who didn’t raise his hand. Why is that, Sal?”
Man. Right out of the gate, and she was going for the jugular.
All right, Gabi, wanna play rough? Let’s go. “Because we both knew you were going to call on me,” I replied, more to the audience than to her.
“Oh? And why is that, Sal?”
“Because I made a fool of you earlier today, in front of Principal Torres. And that made you angry.”
The audience oohed.
“I wasn’t angry,” she replied, and whether she flipped her hair because she felt irritated or because she thought it’d be funnier to look irritated, I couldn’t tell.
So I pressed her. “You don’t like to be fooled, do you, Gabi? You’re dying to know how I do my tricks.”
The audience oohed even more oohily.
I had to hand it to Gabi—she laughed, took my jabs in stride, and kept the show going. “So you’re up here to tell me and the whole class how you pulled off your tricks? Isn’t that, like, against the magician’s code?”
“I am going to answer your questions,” I replied. Then, stroking my chin, I added, “We’ll see if your machine can sort truth from magic.”
“This is great!” said Mrs. Waked over the applause. “Did you two plan this?”
“Music, Mrs. Waked!” said Gabi, giving her the hand signal repeatedly. It was the only sign she was losing her patience.
“Oh, right! Sorry, Gabi. Got caught up in the act!”
The same goofy music as before started to play through the speakers. Gabi whooshed over to me and made some dramatic hand gestures that meant she wanted me to lie down on the gurney. I did. Then, twirling like a ballerina the whole time, she made her way back to the helmet on the floor and picked it up. She did a mini interpretive dance with it, lifting it in the air as if it were Ye Olde Magic Helmet That the Prophecies Hath Foretold. Then she bounded over to me, half dancer, half clown. She raised my head with one hand, slipped the helmet on me, then gently guided my head back onto the pillow. Spinning again, she came to a stop downstage center, right next to the projector, exactly when the music ended.
I looked at the monitor. The green dot had started scribbling my brain waves on the screen.
“You’re live, Sal,” Gabi said, facing the audience. “Everything you say will be judged by the lie detector. Are you ready?”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
Because, see, a question can’t be true or false. I wanted to find out if I could fool the machine with tricky wording.
The machine didn’t respond.
“Please don’t answer questions with questions, Sal,” said Gabi, all smiles. “Are you ready?”
“Let’s do it.” Which is also not a true/false reply.
The machine, again, did nothing.
“Also, please actually answer the questions I ask you, Sal,” Gabi said sweetly.
“Yeah, Sal,” came a dude’s voice from the audience.
“Stop trying to beat the machine,” said a girl’s.
Mrs. Waked prompted, “Yes-and…”
We actors are never supposed to say “no.” We’re supposed to build on whatever we’re given.
Which, of course, Gabi knew. She was counting on the fact that I had to go along with her, no matter what. “Now, are you ready?” asked Gabi, smug as a sandwich.
I said, “No.”
The green checkmark appeared with a ding! next to TRUE.
“Perfect!” said Gabi. “First question: Is your name Salvador Vidón?”
“Partially,” I replied. Ding! went the truth.
“Will you please state your full name?”
“No. If you had the middle names Alberto Dorado—which mean golden elf-boy, by the way—you wouldn’t share them, either!” Then, as if I hadn’t meant to say all of that, I slapped my hand over my mouth.
Ding!
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” said everybody.
“Thank you for your honesty!” said Gabi, finally deciding to laugh along. “Next question: What color is the sky?”
I grabbed my chin. “Ooh. That’s a tough one. It’s blue a lot of the time, unless it’s covered in clouds, which can be white or gray or almost black. But in the morning, or when the sun’s setting, the sky can be yellow or orange or purple.” The dot on the screen was jumping around like butter in a hot pan, scribbling all over the place. “And one time, just as the sun disappeared behind the sea, I could swear the sky turned a glorious green for, like, two seconds. I’ve never seen a green flash again, but I would like to. It looked like a sunset on a strange alien world. It was so beautiful.”
“Very fine,” said Mrs. Waked, tearing up and patting her chest. “Absolutely poetical, Sal.”
Meanwhile,
everyone watched to see what the machine would say. The green dot slowed and slowed until it returned to normal. The power indicator light on the computer showed the hard drive working hard to try to process my answer.
Finally, a blatt! sounded and a red X appeared next to PANTS ON FIRE!
“How is that false?” said Mrs. Waked. “It was inspired!”
Gabi nodded and shrugged, as if to say Welp! “He used his imagination. You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you, Sal?”
“Yes, I am,” I replied.
Blatt! went the buzzer, and a red X indicated that my statement had set my PANTS ON FIRE! That got the biggest laugh so far.
“All right,” Gabi said to the audience, rubbing her hands. “Here’s the main event, the question I’ve been dying to ask you. How did you, Salvador Alberto Dorado Vidón, get a chicken into Yasmany Robles’s locker earlier today?”
“Oh yes!” said Mrs. Waked, clapping. “That’s been all the gossip in the teachers’ lounge today. I cannot wait to hear your answer, Sal.”
I smiled. Well, here goes everything, I thought. “I ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and borrowed a chicken from another universe.”
The computer didn’t have to think at all this time. Ding! it sang, and a check instantly filled the box next to TRUE.
“Wut?” asked Gabi.
I was in the mood to be helpful. “I said, I RIPPED A HOLE IN THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM AND BORROWED A CHICKEN FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE.”
Check-ding!
The audience tittered the way you do when you don’t quite know how to react. People started whispering and murmuring to each other. Gabi, grumbling to herself, went over to the computer and started fiddling with it. “This isn’t possible,” she said loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Oh, but it is,” I said, rising from the gurney and walking farther downstage with the same slow toe-first step I’d used back when I played Puck in a children’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, speaking directly to the audience. “For we are not alone in the universe, my friends!” Ding! “There are countless other universes above and beneath our own, like pages in a book.” Ding! “And it is my gift—and my curse—to see these other worlds”—Ding!—“and, if the circumstances require, to take the things I need and bring them here.” Ding! “So when the Robles boy threatened me, and no one came to my aid in my hour of need—and yes, I see people in this room who were there, watching as Yasmany meant to beat me up, and you said or did nothing, for shame!” Ding! “In desperation, I searched the multiverse for a means of escape.” Ding! “And then, I saw it—oh, that dear, delicious miracle that tastes so good with buffalo wing sauce.” Ding! Ding! Ding! “I reached through the veil between universes”—Ding!—“and stole a chicken from another place and time”—Ding!—“and stuck it in Yasmany Robles’s locker”—Ding!—“and was saved.”
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe Page 5
