Applewhites Coast to Coast

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  But here he was, minutes before the first performance, and he hadn’t gotten there. He was the lead in the play and he was letting everybody down.

  Melody bounced up the Pageant Wagon stairs, holding her script binder. She, like all the women, was wearing just the hoops from a big vintage hoop skirt over her usual jeans and sneakers. That was Cordelia’s brilliant idea for the costumes. Each man had an antique-looking jacket over his regular clothes. “They’re just a sketch!” Cordelia announced proudly, “like the set!” Melody looked up now from her script and locked eyes with Jake.

  “Hey, kid,” she said breezily. “You look a little green around the gills. How are you doing?”

  Great, he wanted to say. Or ready to knock ’em dead. “I’m totally freaking out!” is what came out of his mouth.

  Melody gazed at him for a second and then laughed. Right in his face. It wasn’t a nice laugh. Then she looked him up and down, which reminded him he wasn’t even as tall as she was. “No wonder you’re freaking out,” she said. “It’s a comedy and you haven’t gotten a single laugh. Well, there always has to be a first time. Maybe it’ll be tonight!” And with that, she gathered up her hoops and slipped out the Pageant Wagon’s back door.

  “Thanks!” said Jake, as he watched her go. “Thanks a lot!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked a voice behind him. He spun around to see Simon Rathbone, his hair teased out to hilarious lengths, a scrawny tie knotted around his neck, putting the fake pages into his script so he could drop them later.

  “Nothing,” said Jake. “I’m fine.”

  Simon put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly. “It will all be all right in the end.”

  For a terrible moment, Jake thought he might burst into tears.

  Simon was wrong, Jake thought later as he sat alone in a booth in the back room of the restaurant they had gone to for their “opening night” party. It hadn’t been all right. It was every bit as bad as he had feared, and then some.

  Everyone else did fine. People in the audience were laughing and having a good time. There were even extra laughs when Destiny pulled down a shade with a window drawn on it instead of the one with a door, and E.D. chased him around to make him fix it. It happened again and became a “bit.” The third time they did it, Simon came out as Lord Dundreary and pretended to supervise. The audience loved it.

  But when Jake stepped onto the stage, from the first moment he opened his mouth he knew he was doing it wrong. He switched madly between Yosemite Sam and a barely audible whisper, like some kind of malfunctioning actor robot. It was a nightmare. The worst part was, nobody laughed. I mean, thought Jake furiously, they did until I beat it out of them. Asa Trenchard’s garbled, exaggerated version of Yankee English had gotten cautious, polite laughs at first, but the more Jake panicked the fewer there were until he felt as if everything he said was followed by a vast, roaring silence, with occasionally the sound of a car driving through it. And the worst thing, the worst thing of all, was that Archie had been filming every single humiliating moment!

  “It wasn’t that bad,” said Hal, coming over to Jake now with a plate full of chicken fingers.

  “It was worse than that bad,” said Jake. He noticed that Hal was glancing toward the next room, where the other cast members were babbling loudly over the jukebox music. “Go,” he said. “I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” Hal went.

  Yeah, well, Jake thought, he didn’t have to look so relieved.

  Melody twirled into the room as Hal was walking out, and even in his funk Jake noticed that she trailed her fingers along Hal’s arm lightly as they passed each other. Hal turned to watch her go, his eyes completely moony. Jake put his head in his hands.

  “We’re going to the desert next!” cried Melody happily, plopping down on the padded seat of the booth right next to Jake and slurping her soda through a straw. “The challenge e-mail just came in. We’re meeting up with another one of the Expedition groups—the one that’s in first place. We’re supposed to team up with them. Sure, team up. More like learn their secrets and get out in front!”

  Jake didn’t say anything. He couldn’t even think about the Expedition right now. Right now, he just wanted to go home. Maybe back to his lavender room at Wit’s End. Maybe all the way home to Rhode Island. I’ll just hide out in my parents’ basement, he thought bitterly. Until they get out of jail.

  Melody was looking at him with one eyebrow up. She bumped her shoulder into his and checked to see if he was smiling. He wasn’t, so she did it again.

  “Stop it,” he said, smiling in spite of himself and then hating himself for it.

  “Come on, it wasn’t that bad,” said Melody. “You’ve just got to loosen up. Play with it! Do what Simon does—make some of it up. If you just relax and have fun you could be really good in that part. And you’ve got four more chances!”

  Jake couldn’t believe his ears. Here was Melody, who told him he was pretty much a total failure right before he went onstage, telling him to relax. He gritted his teeth so hard they hurt.

  She got up and stretched, with a big yawn, then looked back down at him. “Jeez, kid,” she said quietly. “Where’s your fight?” Without looking back at him, she walked out of the room.

  Some while later, when the party was winding down and people were starting to leave, Simon, drink in hand, peered into the room. “Aha,” he said. “Mr. Semple.” Everybody’s coming to see the failure, Jake thought. It’s like I’m in a zoo. Simon pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat. He gazed down his long nose at Jake for a moment. “So. You had something of a rough go of it out there, yes?”

  Jake sighed. At least there was one person who wasn’t telling him it wasn’t so bad.

  “It happens,” said Simon. “To everyone. The man who made your role famous back in the day invented the saying, ‘There are no small parts, only small actors.’ You have a big part and you just need to let yourself grow into it.”

  “You lied to me,” Jake said. “Earlier.”

  “Did I?” asked Simon, raising his bushy eyebrows.

  “You said it would all be all right in the end. And it wasn’t. I stank.”

  Simon nodded solemnly. “You know the rest of that saying, don’t you? If it’s not all right”—he raised his glass to finish his drink—“it’s not the end.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The problem with the Pageant Wagon, E.D. thought, was what to do if it rained. Three nights into the planned five-performance run of Our American Cousin, a weather front had moved in and it had rained so hard that Hal had abandoned his rooftop tent and moved to a couch in the storage room at MOST. It went on raining, and the other two performances had to be canceled.

  Surprisingly enough, Jake was almost as upset by the cancellations as Randolph. Something had happened after that first night, in spite of the nasty review in the local paper that called Jake “the weak link” in an otherwise “stellar” event. By the second performance Jake had relaxed a little, and by the third, he’d actually added some funny bits of his own. E.D. had the distinct feeling that he’d been planning a couple more. Whatever they were, she was sorry he wouldn’t get to use them.

  Now, on their last full day in Kansas City, as the rain continued outside, the whole family was crowded into Brunhilda, where Zedediah had called a family meeting.

  They were so jammed together that E.D. had the uncomfortable feeling she was breathing oxygen that only moments ago had been in somebody else’s lungs.

  “It may be time to rethink our participation in this whole thing,” Zedediah said. “Now that Jeremy is no longer involved, it has become a media circus. The cart is leading the horse here—the Expedition, the spectacle of it, has become clearly more important than the education. All because some TV people say so! And these Rutherfords are listening to them!” He waved a folded newspaper in the air. “Even this review of Randolph’s production devoted half its space to the Expedition.”

  �
��It did say our stay here should rocket us to the top,” Randolph said.

  “Exactly! Nothing about the historical significance of the piece, nothing about the educational value—nothing about education at all!”

  E.D. thought about the video log (she preferred to call it a tutorial) she’d made about Lincoln, and the Civil War, which had just ended when he went to see that play, and about the assassination and what followed. She was really proud of her tutorial. They were in Missouri, so she’d started her research there, and found out that Missouri had declared itself a “free state” when it joined the Union and had a law against slavery in spite of there being a lot of slaves there. People had done raids across the border—between Missouri and Kansas!—killing one another and burning buildings. It was, she thought, the best educational piece they’d sent in yet. But when the standings came out, they were stuck in third place. She desperately wanted to know what the other groups were posting, but her grandfather insisted that they weren’t allowed to look.

  “And this new challenge,” Zedediah went on, “partnering with the Organic School, whatever the name means. It isn’t clear what—if anything—that group has in common with the Creative Academy. If they want partnership, why shouldn’t we choose who to partner with? Worse, we’re supposed to do this in a place called Saunders, New Mexico. I’ve checked out Saunders. It’ll take at least two full days to get there and when we do, it’s essentially in the middle of nowhere. It’s like they picked our destination entirely at random. The whole county has only two towns, three villages and—get this—three ghost towns!”

  “Ghost towns?” Destiny yelped. “They gots whole towns full of ghosts there? I don’t wanna go someplace full of dead people!”

  “They’re not towns full of ghosts,” E.D. assured Destiny. She had checked out Saunders, too. “They used to be towns, but they aren’t anymore. Just some old empty buildings. Some ruins.” It would actually be fun to explore a ghost town or two, she thought.

  “The whole county is just desert,” Zedediah said. “High desert—more than a mile above sea level—with nothing but sand and rocks, and snakes and lizards and scorpions.”

  “Scorpions?” Cordelia said. “And snakes?”

  “I’ve saved the worst for last,” Zedediah continued, with an expression like a storm cloud. “They’re cutting the whole thing short again. Now we’re to be in California by mid-October.” Murmurs spread through the group. “This was supposed to be a serious, self-directed mission to rethink American education. If there’s any rethinking to be done, it should be us rethinking whether to keep on with it.”

  “Of course we’re keeping on with it,” Randolph said. “It is providing publicity for my Pageant Wagon ‘Pencil Sketch Tour of America!’”

  “My name for it, pencil sketch,” Cordelia reminded him.

  “And the sooner it’s done,” Randolph pressed on, “the sooner we win! And the sooner we can begin our own work!”

  “Let me get this straight,” Archie said to his father, “you’re suggesting that we give up and quit?”

  “You told me quitters never win and winners never quit!” Destiny said.

  Zedediah shook his head. “There’s a difference between being a quitter and walking away from a bad idea that’s getting steadily worse.”

  “I say we take a vote,” Randolph said. “All in favor of continuing the Expedition raise your hand.”

  E.D., imagining going back to Wit’s End when they had managed to get only as far as Missouri, raised her hand immediately, as did Melody, Hal, Randolph, Sybil, Archie, and Lucille. Destiny crossed his arms and shook his head. “I’m scared of ghosts.”

  “There aren’t any ghosts!” Randolph said.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise!”

  “How about little kids? Does that Organic thingy have any little kids? ’Cause I’m not playing with little kids ever, ever, ever again!”

  “Raise your hand!” Randolph thundered. Destiny did. “Jake? Do you want to get over being a ‘weak link’ once and for all, or do you want to quit?”

  Jake raised his hand, and Cordelia did, too. “Just as long as they aren’t rattlesnakes,” she said.

  Zedediah sighed. “If the Creative Academy is going to continue this project, I suggest we call the Rutherfords and tell them we at least want to choose a different group to partner with.”

  E.D. happened to be looking at Melody just then—Melody, who had patted Jake’s hand reassuringly when Randolph had mentioned “weak link”—and saw her face blanch. “No!” Melody almost shouted. “Don’t do that!” Then she glanced around and said, “I mean, if we’re going to do this, we want to win. Their game, their rules, right? We don’t want to rock the boat.”

  Zedediah shrugged. “Suit yourselves. Meeting’s over.” He peered out the windshield. “And so, it would seem, is the rain.”

  Randolph checked his watch. “If the rain has stopped, maybe we can manage another performance tonight after all. Simon hasn’t flown home yet.”

  E.D. was going to miss Simon Rathbone when he left, she thought, but not half as much as Jake would. If this challenge was about life as education, she thought, Jake had probably learned more than anyone. Simon and Jake had hung out together a lot during the rain break, and he’d helped Jake a ton with his performance. Mentoring, that’s what it was. A really talented adult sharing his passion with a kid who had it, too. Not something she could get into a tutorial.

  When E.D. left Brunhilda to help get this evening’s performance back on schedule, she noticed her grandfather leaning against the back of the Pageant Wagon, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

  It turned out that the Organic School’s art buses (they had three) were someplace in South Dakota and it was going to take them a lot longer to get to Saunders, New Mexico, than the two days it was supposed to take the Applewhites. “No reason we can’t just be regular tourists for a while,” Lucille suggested. “We could stay here and explore Kansas City. There’s an arts district, and Crown Center—”

  But the others were ready to leave what had begun to seem a dreary, rainy place. Jake, in particular, wanted out of Missouri, so when Archie suggested they head into Kansas so they wouldn’t have such long traveling days, the family agreed to get back on the road and see what Kansas had to offer.

  E.D. found them a nice RV park in Hutchinson, close to the only tourist attraction in the area—an old salt mine that was also a museum. Destiny got especially excited about it because he either didn’t understand or refused to believe that there could be any kind of mine other than a gold mine.

  When they’d settled in the RV park, and the others had gone over to the rec room to watch a movie, E.D. closed herself into her parents’ bedroom in Brunhilda and made a video log tutorial of everything she’d learned online about the geographical history of Kansas, and why there was salt in the state to be mined at all. Amazingly enough it had been laid down 275 million years ago when there was a shallow sea where Kansas was now. She had also researched the use of salt, and how it got from a mine to people’s saltshakers. The rest of the family would probably say her tutorial was boring—but she found herself agreeing with her grandfather. This was an expedition of education—it had to have some education in it, right?

  At the same time, she saw Melody’s point. Her Art of Style video helped them move up in the standings. She just needed to find a way to make the educational stuff more story-like and appealing. What sort of story could she create around salt? Maybe they could get some really fun and interesting videos in the salt mine. It would help so much, she thought, if they knew what the other groups were doing. Zedediah had forbidden them from looking online. But E.D. was tempted. Very tempted. She looked over at the laptop. Maybe just a peek?

  The door to the bedroom banged open. “What’s up, Eddie?” asked Melody, flopping down onto the bunk next to her.

  “Don’t call me Eddie,” E.D. shot back. Then she leaned toward Melody and lowered her voice. “I’m t
hinking of going online and looking at the other groups.”

  “Oooh, naughty,” said Melody with a smile. “But don’t worry. I already did.”

  “You what?” E.D. realized she really should have known—there was no way Melody was going to not do something just because Zedediah said not to. “And?”

  Melody shrugged. “The old guy was right,” she said. “No point watching anybody else’s. You can’t compare any one to any other. They’re all really different, and not that great if you ask me. We’re doing fine. We’ll pick up in the standings. I just know we will.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me on this,” Melody said. “Between my gift for story and your gift for facts, we have it made.”

  E.D. nodded. She wanted to win as much as Melody, and she knew she was getting better at the educational video logs. She could do this, she thought. She could help them win. And then she could give herself an A+ for the Expedition after all.

  Chapter Twenty

  As they all waited to get into the elevator that would take them six hundred and fifty feet down (six hundred and fifty!) into the salt mine museum, Destiny kept asking Jake if this mine had gold. Jake assured him that there was so much stuff stored in this mine there was sure to be something even better than gold. “Good, then,” Destiny said. “At least I gets to wear a hard hat!”

  Everybody had to wear a hard hat, of course, and carry an emergency breathing device. Jake tried not to think about the sort of emergency that might force them to use such a device, or what good a hard hat would do if the roof of the mine collapsed.

  The elevator ride was very noisy and so absolutely, incredibly dark that Destiny grabbed hold of Jake’s hand with a little whimper and held on during what seemed like way more than the ninety seconds the guide had said it would take.