The Magic Trap

by Jacqueline Davies

  Jessie clapped madly, and Evan’s dad nodded his head in approval.

  “That is a great trick,” he said. “You performed it really well.”

  Evan knew he was supposed to act very casual. Magicians never lose their cool. But he couldn’t help smiling. It had taken him two days to learn how to rest his hand on the box, release the secret latch with his pinkie finger, and lift the silk scarf, all in one fluid motion—as if he were doing nothing at all. He was glad his dad was seeing him perform the trick now instead of yesterday, when he’d looked clumsy and anybody could have guessed the trick.

  “But . . .” His dad leaned forward. “I thought you wanted to make something disappear as your final trick.”

  “Yeah,” said Evan, reaching into the box and taking Professor Hoffmann out. He liked to give the rabbit a piece of carrot every time he did the trick correctly. “But it’s way harder to make a rabbit disappear than it is to make him appear.”

  “Yeah, I bet. That’s what makes it such a great trick, right?”

  “He’s pooping!” shrieked Jessie, pointing at Professor Hoffmann.

  “Oh, Jessie, stop making such a big deal,” said Evan. “So he poops! He’s a rabbit, for Pete’s sake!”

  “I wish he didn’t!”

  “Yeah, well, he’d be dead if he didn’t, so that wouldn’t be so great.”

  “A dead rabbit. That would definitely spoil the show, huh?” said their dad, laughing. But Evan didn’t think it was so funny. “Hey, put the rabbit down and come see what I’ve got in the back of the car.”

  Evan put Professor Hoffmann in his large cardboard box and then he and Jessie followed their dad out to the driveway. It was starting to rain. Big, sloppy, hot drops fell from the murky gray sky, and Evan thought of Mrs. Overton’s warning “to keep a weather eye out.”

  “What is it?” asked Jessie as the three of them pulled a long cardboard box from the back seat of the Subaru. Evan had the sudden thought that it was the size and shape of a coffin. There were five or six different labels on the box, some of them written in an alphabet Evan didn’t know.

  Evan pointed to one of the labels. “What kind of writing is that?”

  His dad glanced at it, then back over his shoulder as he maneuvered the box up the front steps. “Devanagari, probably. At least that’s what I’m guessing, since the box came from India.”

  “You know people in India?”

  “I know people all over the world,” said his dad, grunting as he pushed open the front door.

  When they got the box in the kitchen, their dad carefully sliced it open with the Swiss army knife he kept in his pocket. With each slice of the knife, another side of the cardboard box fell away until they could finally see what lay inside: a rectangular wicker basket about the size of a small bathtub.

  “What is it?” asked Jessie impatiently.

  “Do you know?” he asked, looking at Evan.

  “Wow,” said Evan. “I’ve seen a picture of one of these. In Professor Hoffmann’s book!”

  Their dad looked at him strangely. “The rabbit has a book?”

  “No! Different Professor Hoffmann,” said Evan.

  Evan ran his hands over the top of the basket. “It’s got a fake bottom. You flip it over—” He grabbed hold of the top of the basket and turned it on its side, but the bottom stayed where it was.

  “It’s broken!” said Jessie, pointing at the opening.

  “No!” said Evan. “That’s the secret. That’s how you make the person disappear, because then you unhook this other side—” He reached inside and ran his hand along the top edge of the box until he found a small metal latch and unhooked it. The side of the box fell open and covered up the missing ­bottom.

  Jessie frowned. “I don’t get it. I want to see the picture.” She ran to get the book.

  “Look,” Evan said. “Step One, the assistant lies down in the basket. Step Two, the magician closes the lid so the audience can’t see. Step Three, the magician tilts the basket forward and the false bottom falls out, so the assistant is still lying there on the ground. But at the same time, the secret flap—which looks just like the false bottom—falls into place and covers up the assistant.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Jessie. Evan could tell it bugged her that she couldn’t figure out the trick.

  “Here. Give me a second to set it up, and I’ll show you.” Evan and his dad lifted the rectangular basket onto the kitchen counter, and Evan positioned Jessie on the other side of the room so that she was looking at the basket straight on. “First you open the lid on top, and then you have a person get inside.” He grabbed a bunch of bananas from the fruit basket and said, “Just say this is a person.”

  “Bananas!” shouted Jessie.

  “Yeah, bananas, but in the trick, it will be a person. Then you close the lid and flip the box on its side.” Evan turned the box over so that it was resting on its side. “Then you open the lid, and look—” The box was empty. “Ta-da! No bananas!”

  “How’d you do that?” demanded Jessie.

  “I told you. It’s a fake bottom. The person’s hidden behind the box, but the audience can’t see that.”

  “You’re pretty good, Evan,” said their dad. “Now, if you ask me, that would be a great finishing trick for your show.”

  “Make me disappear! Make me disappear!” shouted Jessie.

  “Where’d you even get this thing?” asked Evan. He couldn’t believe his dad had found something like this. And gone to all the trouble to get it.

  “I just made some phone calls,” he said. “I knew what I was looking for. I’ve seen that trick a dozen times in Mumbai. So I called a friend or two. Actually . . .” He scratched his chin. “Six.”

  “So that’s who you were talking to on the phone all this time? All those phone calls were for this?”

  “Some of them. What do you think?”

  The smile on Evan’s face was so wide he thought his face might split in two. “You’re the best!” he said, and rushed at his father, wrapping his arms around him.

  His dad hugged him tight and kissed the top of his head. “Let’s take it out on the porch, and you and Jessie can practice. You’ve only got—what?—four more days until the show, right?”

  Together, they carried the basket out to the porch and set it up under the proscenium arch. Evan couldn’t believe how real it all looked. Just like a professional magician’s stage.

  His father stood on the grass where the audience would be and looked carefully at the stage. “There’s just one problem,” he said slowly. “When I saw the trick performed, the person really did disappear. There was a trapdoor in the floor of the stage, so once you flipped the basket back up, the person slipped away and then reappeared at the back of the audience. It was amazing.” He nodded his head thoughtfully. “Yeah. I think you should do that.”

  “Make a trapdoor?” asked Evan.

  “But . . .” said Jessie. “We’d have to cut a hole in the porch.”

  Their dad nodded his head. “That’s what I think we should do. To really sell the trick.”

  “Mom would kill us!” said Evan.

  “Why? The whole porch needs to be replaced anyway. Look at it!” He walked up to the edge of the porch and started pulling on one of the rotting floorboards. “Honestly, it’s a miracle your mom hasn’t been hauled into court yet.”

  “Stop that!” said Jessie. Her eyes were wide as she watched her dad pull apart the porch, and she was jumping nervously from one foot to the other.

  “You know what?” said their dad. “I’m going to make some calls and line up a carpenter to put on a new porch. That way, we’ll have all the repair work scheduled before your mom even gets home. It’ll be like a present we give her! A terrific surprise. She’ll love it.” As gracefully as a cat, he leaped onto the porch and walked into the kitchen, leaving Evan and Jessie staring at each other silently.

  “Evan?” Jessie sounded scared.

  “What? Don’t look
at me! He’s the grownup.” Evan knew in his heart that his mom wouldn’t like any of this, but—a trapdoor! How cool was that? “Besides, we’ll end up with a new porch.”

  “I don’t want a new porch!” Evan knew that Jessie didn’t like change of any kind. She liked things to stay the same.

  “Well, we’re getting one, so get used to it. Like Mom says, ‘Adapt and evolve,’ Jess.”

  Their dad opened the sliding door to the kitchen and stuck his head out. He had his cell phone to his ear, and he was grinning. “Hey, look. When your mom calls tomorrow, don’t tell her about the new porch. I want it to be a surprise, okay?” Before ­either Evan or Jessie could answer, his attention returned to the phone. “Yes. I want to get an estimate . . .” He disappeared back inside the house, closing the door behind him.

  “What are we gonna do, Evan?” asked Jessie.

  Evan looked at the Indian basket. “Practice. A lot.”

  Chapter 11

  Heckling

  heckling (v) calling out insults or rude comments from the audience in order to disrupt a performance

  By noon on Thursday, Jessie had already counted thirty-six kids who said they were coming to the magic show on Monday. She’d handed out The 4-O Forum in the morning, and right away students—some of them even fifth-graders!—had asked about tickets. Maybe we should have charged more, thought Jessie. She was excited about the money—thirty-six dollars—but she was also starting to get that hard-to-breathe, thumping-heart feeling that sometimes ran through her like a freight train.

  Here it was—Thursday afternoon—and they still hadn’t practiced the disappearing trick even once. They’d spent all yesterday afternoon cutting the hole in the porch. It was a big deal; they had to avoid the thick boards that ran underneath the floorboards, because that’s what held the whole porch up. If they accidentally cut through one of those, the porch might collapse.

  “That would be a showstopper!” their dad had joked, but Jessie didn’t laugh.

  First they’d cut in one spot, but then they decided to put the trapdoor in a different spot, and by the time it got dark and they had to stop, they hadn’t finished even one hole.

  When Jessie got home from school, the hole still wasn’t finished, even though their dad had promised he would work on it while they were at school. Instead, Evan was sawing away at the floorboards using the old hacksaw. His hair stuck to his forehead in big, sweaty clumps, and his hands were bright red from gripping the saw so hard.

  “It’s not done yet?” asked Jessie.

  “What does it look like?” snapped Evan. “You think it’s so easy, you try it.”

  “I’m not allowed to,” said Jessie. “Neither are you. Where’s Dad?”

  “In there.” Evan waved at the house. “On the phone. Again.”

  “Maybe he’s getting you another basket. Or another rabbit,” said Jessie. She didn’t like it when Evan seemed angry.

  “No. It’s all work stuff. Very important work stuff.” What did it mean when Evan talked like that? Jessie couldn’t remember. Her mom had explained it to her, but now she wasn’t sure. It was one of those confusing things where people said one thing but meant another. She wished her mom were here to explain it to her.

  “I get to talk to Mom first today, remember?”

  “She’s not calling. She texted Dad and said she was trapped in a meeting and couldn’t get away. She’ll call tomorrow.”

  “But I want to talk to her today! I want to tell her about the newspaper and how many kids are coming to the show.” Jessie knew she was whining, and she knew she should stop. People really do not like whining. This had been explained to her many times by both her mom and Evan, though Jessie could never really understand why. What made whining worse than regular talking?

  Evan stopped sawing and looked off into the woods behind their house. “Yeah, me too,” he said in a soft voice. He tapped the blade of the saw against the wooden floor. Then he tossed the saw onto the porch and said, “C’mon, let’s go inside and have a snack. Dad bought ice cream. Three flavors!”

  Jessie was still trying to decide between chocolate chip and peppermint stick when their dad wandered into the kitchen, talking on his cell phone. He leaned against the jamb of the sliding glass door and stared out into the backyard. “So you’re saying there’s movement? And you’re sure?” There was a long pause while the person on the other end of the line talked. Jessie could hear the murmuring of a voice, but she couldn’t make out any of the words. She decided to take a scoop of both kinds of ice cream. Mom wasn’t here to tell her not to. Her dad kept talking. “And you can’t get anyone to talk? Anyone?” The voice on the other end of the phone made its humming noise, and then her dad said, “Okay. I’ll figure something out.” Then he hung up the phone and stuffed it into his back pocket.

  No one said anything for a minute. Jessie wanted to talk, but she had that sudden feeling of danger that she couldn’t identify. Something inside said keep quiet, even though she couldn’t figure out why.

  “What’s going on out there?” asked her dad, pointing to the half-cut hole in the porch floor.

  Evan shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s not an attitude that will get you very far in life,” said their dad. He went outside, and in a moment Jessie could hear the sound of the saw rasping against the rotten wood.

  “Why don’t you go help him, Evan?” asked Jessie, noticing that Evan’s bowl of ice cream was empty.

  “He doesn’t need me,” said Evan. “There’s only one saw.” Even so, he wandered outside a moment later, and when Jessie finished eating her ice cream, she walked out to the porch and saw that the hole was complete.

  “Now we just have to cover it so no one can see it’s there,” said their dad. “Go grab that little area rug from your mom’s office. It’s the perfect size.”

  Evan and Jessie looked at each other. There were a lot of rules in the Treski house, but the number one rule was: no taking anything from Mom’s office.

  “Oh, c’mon,” said their dad. “It’s not like it’s some Persian rug. I bought that thing from Home Depot about ten years ago. Go get it!”

  “Can we practice now?” Jessie asked on the stairs as they lugged the small rug down. She wanted to be sure she could do the disappearing trick perfectly. There was no way she was going to mess up in front of thirty-six kids from school. Including fifth-graders!

  “Yeah,” said Evan. “But it’s pretty easy. I mean, all you have to do is lie still in the basket and then jump through the hole when I say the magic words. There’s not much to it.”

  When they had the rug positioned over the hole, Evan told Jessie to stand to one side of the basket. Their dad jumped off the porch and stood where the audience would be.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Evan said in his stage voice. “For my final illusion of the day, I will perform the Amazing Disappearing Trick!”

  “Yeah, right!” shouted their father obnoxiously. “You couldn’t make an ice cube disappear in a ­microwave!”

  “What?” said Evan, looking confused. He stared at their dad.

  “I’m heckling you,” said their dad. “You have to be prepared in case you have some rude person in the audience who starts shouting things during your show.”

  “They’re my friends. They’re not going to be jerks,” said Evan.

  “You never know. It’s important. If you want to be the best, you have to know how to handle yourself in any situation. It’s like the military. They run every drill they can think of so that the soldiers are ready for anything in combat.” He put his hands to his mouth and shouted out, “You call that a rabbit? I’ve seen potatoes with more energy!”

  “Dad! Cut it out!”

  Their dad shook his head. “You kids have to get tough. You’re too soft living here in the suburbs. C’mon. You’re Treskis. You have to learn how to handle the rough stuff.”

  Jessie had no idea why her dad was saying all these mean things to Evan. Wh
y would anyone do that? Why were people mean on purpose? It didn’t make any sense to her. But she knew she wanted it to stop.

  “Be kind and do your work!” she barked. That was the classroom motto in 4-O. Their teacher, Mrs. Overton, had hung that motto over the door so that they would remember it at all times. Jessie thought it was pretty good advice. “And let us do our work!” She wasn’t sure if she was being kind at that moment, because she was yelling, but sometimes strong words were the only ones that worked.

  “Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” said their dad. “Tough! Way to go, Jessie. You could be in the army!”

  Jessie smiled and jumped up and down once, waving. This was almost as good as getting applause from an audience.

  Evan kicked the basket. “Can we do this thing already?” He scowled at her. “Ladies and gentlemen. And now, for my final illusion, I will perform the Amazing Disappearing Trick. Behold! A basket with four strong sides.” Evan knocked on each side to show that the basket was solid. “And now, I lift the lid and ask my assistant to step inside.” He motioned for Jessie to step into the basket. It was like getting into the bathtub. Jessie didn’t much like taking baths, but she wasn’t afraid of them.

  “And now, my assistant will lie down.”

  Jessie immediately lay down.

  “And I will close the lid.”

  The lid came down on top of her, blocking out the sky, the trees, the light. All of a sudden Jessie felt as if a hand were pressing on her chest, squeezing all the air out. She kicked with both legs against the lid, and it popped back open.