Weirdest Show on Earth

by Barry Hutchison

We both looked in the direction Evie had run off in. “I think you might have hurt her feelings,” Theo said.

  “Oh, you think so?” I said, then I shook my head. There was no point worrying about it now. “Come on, we’d better go and find Wayne.”

  We eventually found him up in the branches of a tree. It turns out that Wayne is less scared of heights than he is of big angry dogs trying to eat him.

  Not that Destructo would have actually eaten him, of course. He’d just have eaten the costume and left Wayne to run home in his pants.

  “Keep it away!” he howled. “That dog’s mental.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “He is a bit. I’ve got him now, though. You can come down.”

  “No chance!” Wayne spluttered. “I’m staying up here until it’s gone.”

  Theo leaned Wayne’s bike against the tree and hung the costume’s head over the handlebars. “I’ll just leave this here, then,” he said.

  “OK, just get the dog away!” Wayne wailed.

  “Come on, Destructo,” I said, tugging on the lead.

  Destructo fired another couple of barks in Wayne’s direction, then turned and began dragging me along the pavement.

  “Did we win?” Wayne shouted after us.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “You mean I did all this for nothing?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, we didn’t technically lose, either. They called the whole thing off and made us promise never to speak of it again.”

  Leaving Wayne to make his own way down, Theo and I headed for home. As we reached his front gate, I braced myself against a lamp post to stop Destructo dragging me on.

  “Look, Beaky, about the Evie thing,” Theo said. “I honestly didn’t mean it to go like that. You should have told me.”

  “Yeah. I know,” I said.

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “I do. As a friend. That’s why I didn’t want to embarrass her,” I said. I shot Theo a meaningful look. “And especially not on live television.”

  “Yeah. Sorry,” Theo said. He rummaged in his pocket, then held out the gobstopper bag. I took it without a word and stuck it in my trouser pocket.

  “Think she’s OK?” Theo asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try to talk to her tomorrow.”

  I looked along the street in the direction of my house. “But right now, I’d better go home and see what Mum and Dad have to say.”

  Theo smiled in sympathy. “It might not be too bad,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe they weren’t even watching.”

  “Bravo! Bravo! What a performance!” said Jodie, standing up and applauding as I shuffled in through the front door. “I mean … I have genuinely never seen anything quite like that on TV before. The nonsensical answers, Destructo chasing a boy in a dog suit and then, as if that wasn’t enough, everything blows up!”

  “Yeah, yeah. Shut up,” I said. “Did Mum and Dad see?”

  “See what?” asked Mum’s voice from the kitchen. She and Dad emerged, looking ashen-faced. “You trying to commit fraud? You making a fool of poor Evie Green on live television? Yes, Dylan. We saw. I mean … Destructo riding a bike? What were you thinking?”

  “I can explain,” I said, but Dad shook his head. For once, he looked almost as angry as Mum.

  “Not tonight, Dylan. We don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I think you should probably just go to bed.”

  “But—”

  “Bed,” said Mum. “Now.”

  Mum and Dad still weren’t up for talking about the TV disaster at breakfast the next morning. I ate in silence, then hid in my room until it was time to go to school.

  As I hurried through the school corridors, pretty much everyone was either a) staring at me, b) laughing at me, or c) both. I kept my eyes open for Evie but when I did finally spot her, Chloe blocked my path.

  “Aaaand where do you think you’re going?” Chloe demanded.

  “I want to talk to Evie,” I said. “I want to explain.”

  “Well, you can’t,” Chloe told me. “You’ve done enough damage. Also…”

  She thumped me on the arm with a surprising amount of force.

  “Ow!”

  “You totally had that coming,” Chloe said. She raised a carefully manicured finger and pointed it in my face. “Stay away from Evie. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  The bell rang before I could argue. I watched, glumly, as Chloe linked arms with Evie and led her away.

  Maybe it was for the best. I’d completely humiliated Evie on live television. Maybe I shouldn’t ever talk to her again.

  Of course, there was one big flaw in that plan. Tonight was the school play. I was going to have to stand up in the school hall and confess my undying love for her.

  Still, I thought, as I trudged off towards class. At least we haven’t sold many tickets.

  “A full house? What do you mean a full house?” I spluttered.

  Ms Brannan nodded excitedly. “I know! Isn’t it brilliant! We completely sold out after your and Evie’s TV thing yesterday,” she said. “Romeonulan and Julietraxis together before the nation – what better advertising could we have had?” She raised her eyebrows. “How did that go, by the way? I didn’t get to watch it.”

  “Terrible,” I said. “But this is even worse. How can it have sold out?”

  “Well … because people bought all the tickets,” said Ms Brannan slowly, in case she lost me somewhere. “We had four hundred tickets and now we have none.”

  “Four hundred people are coming?” I yelped.

  “Actually more like five hundred,” she said. “We had some set aside for parents and staff. It’ll be standing room only at the back!”

  I slumped down on to a chair that had been decorated to look like an alien throne. “This is bad,” I mumbled. “This is really bad.”

  “Don’t be a silly Dylly,” said Ms Brannan. “This is what we wanted. A big audience, all here to see you and…” She frowned and glanced around. “Where is Evie, by the way? Have you seen her?”

  “Seen her? Yes. Spoken to her? No,” I said.

  “I hope she gets here soon,” said Ms Brannan. “It’s less than an hour until curtain up, and we still have to rehearse the kiss.”

  I felt my mouth flop open. “Rehearse the what?” I croaked.

  “The kiss. I’ve decided we should end Scene Twelve with a kiss. It’ll be very romantic.”

  I put my head in both hands. “You can’t! No way! Uh-uh. Not on my watch! Have you lost your mind?”

  “Calm down, Dylan!” said Ms Brannan, taken aback. “It’s a stage kiss. Just a peck. It’ll bring the house down.” She winked. “Besides I heard there might be a real Romeonulan and Julietraxis romance going on between you two!”

  “You really didn’t watch the TV show, did you?” I groaned but before I could say any more, Ms Brannan pushed past me.

  “Wayne!” she gasped. “What on Earth happened to that costume?”

  Wayne had been tiptoeing across the stage, dragging the torn and filthy dog costume behind him. He froze when the teacher spotted him, then looked down at the outfit as if he hadn’t noticed he was holding it.

  “Huh. I don’t know, Miss,” he said. “I found it like this. It looks like it’s been damaged in some way. I wonder how that could have happened?”

  Ms Brannan waved a hand. “No time to worry about how, just take it to Chloe and see if she can do something with it. We can’t very well do the play without our Astrohound, can we?”

  Wayne’s face lit up. “Chloe? Brilliant!” Then he cleared his throat and reined in his delight. “I mean … right, I’ll go and see her now, Miss.”

  The next forty minutes passed very slowly. I wriggled into my ridiculous alien-Romeo costume, complete with its four fake arms. Theo turned up, switched on every single one of the lights, then came backstage. Even through the thick stage curtains I could hear the clattering of chairs that told me the hall was filling up.


  “Pretty big audience out there,” Theo said. “I think quite a lot of them saw you on telly.”

  I sighed. “This is going to be awful.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Theo admitted.

  “And there’s no sign of Evie,” I said. “What if she doesn’t turn up?”

  Theo looked past me. “Um…”

  “Uh. Hi.”

  I turned – in quite an undignified way, thanks to the costume – to find Evie standing behind me. “Evie! Hi!” I said, far too enthusiastically.

  Evie’s own enthusiasm was at the opposite end of the scale. Her face wasn’t really showing any emotion at all, although it was quite hard to tell with her purple face paint on. “Can I talk to you?”

  “What? Yes, of course!” I said.

  We both looked at Theo, who raised his eyebrows and smiled back at us.

  “We want you to go away,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Gotcha!” said Theo, sidling off.

  “Evie, about yesterday—” I began, but she cut me off.

  “No, don’t say anything,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and … obviously someone messed with the autocue thing and, well, I have to know. Was it a joke? Did you think it would be funny to embarrass me?”

  “What? No!” I told her. “I wasn’t joking.”

  “Right,” she breathed, and for a moment she looked relieved.

  “I was telling the truth,” I continued. “I really don’t want to be your boyfriend.”

  Evie’s face did that tissue-crumple thing.

  “No, I don’t mean it like that!” I said, but she cut me off again.

  “No, it’s fine. Please … don’t. Let’s just do the stupid play.”

  “Right. Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Maybe we can talk afterwards?”

  Evie shook her head and backed away. “No. Let’s not.”

  “But Evie!”

  She smiled but it wasn’t a real smile. It wasn’t even close. “Just leave it, Dylan, OK?”

  Dylan? She never called me Dylan. This was worse than I thought.

  Ms Brannan came up to me and we both watched Evie go. “I asked her about the kiss,” she said. “She didn’t seem keen.”

  “Really?” I said. “You don’t say.”

  We were fifteen minutes into Romeo and Juliet … But With Aliens and it was already worse than I’d feared. And believe me, I feared it was going to be terrible.

  Theo had been true to his word and turned the lights up to full power so whenever anyone stepped on stage they hissed like vampires in the sunlight. Duncan, who was making his theatrical debut playing “Fourth Purple Alien” fell off the cardboard spaceship and gave himself a nosebleed. Whenever I stepped out from the wings, most of my lines were drowned out by the kids in the audience laughing, jeering and singing “Who Let the Dogs Out” and Mr Lawson had to interrupt my second scene and come out on stage to shout at everyone to shut up.

  There were a few smaller problems, too. One of my arms fell off (a fake one, thankfully). And Duggie, the kid who was supposed to be wearing the alien dog costume, didn’t turn up, so Wayne had to do it instead.

  I suppose it could have been worse. Having learned his lesson yesterday, Theo was on the ball with my lines. He got all the cards in the right order and only one of them was upside down. Everyone else fumbled and mumbled through their lines, and Evie, who had been brilliant in rehearsals, looked like she’d rather be anywhere else.

  But it was all plodding along and there were only a few scenes left. I just had to read a dozen or so more lines, then I could go home, hide in the shed and never show my face in public again. It was a foolproof plan.

  “OK, Scene Twelve,” whispered Ms Brannan, shoving me on stage from the wings. “Go, go, go.”

  I stumbled out with a “Waargh!”, which amused the audience no end. Evie was already on stage, shielding her eyes from Theo’s retina-melting lighting. Theo himself stood in the wings across from me, the next card already in position.

  Someone wolf-whistled from the audience and a few of the older kids laughed. Mr Lawson half stood up from his seat, gave a loud Shhh then sat down again.

  With a quick sideways glance to the audience, Evie began to recite her lines.

  “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.

  It was the astrobird and not the starlark,

  That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear;

  Nightly she sings on yond smoogontonk tree.

  Believe me, love, it was the astrobird.”

  I stared at her. Like pretty much every line in the play, I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant. I know Ms Brannan had added some alien stuff to it but the whole thing might as well have been in Martian as far as I was concerned.

  Theo raised the card with my scripted response on it. I just had to read it. That was all. I just had to read that card and a few others, and it would all be over. Job done.

  And yet…

  “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day,” Evie began again, a bit louder in case I hadn’t heard her the first time.

  I glanced again at my cue card. I just had to read the stupid lines. Then the play would be finished and we could go home.

  And Evie would never let me talk to her ever again.

  She’d never let me tell her the whole truth.

  The audience’s chuckling fell away to silence. Theo gestured to the card he was holding. I looked from it to Evie, then out over the rest of the hall. That last one almost blinded me, thanks to Theo’s lights, but I did my best to ignore the glare as I stepped towards the edge of the stage.

  “Hi,” I said.

  A surprised murmuring went around the audience.

  “All right, Beaky?” called someone near the back, and there was another ripple of laughter.

  “No, not really,” I said. I cupped my hands over my eyes and looked along the front row until I saw Mum and Dad. I gave them a wave and said. “Sorry I told the TV people Destructo could ride a bike.”

  I raised my eyes to the rest of the hall. “He can’t, by the way. That was Wayne in a costume. He’s supposed to be wearing it in the next scene, but… Well, I don’t know if there’ll be a next scene.”

  There were still a few people laughing but it sounded a bit unsure and awkward now. I waited a few seconds until it faded away, then I took a deep breath.

  “My name is Dylan Malone and I cannot tell a lie,” I announced. “Don’t believe me? Let’s see… Here, how about this? If my big sister annoys me, I sneak into her room when she’s out and fart on her pillow.”

  “What!” screeched a voice from near the back of the hall.

  I smiled. “Hi, Jodie!”

  More laughter, but this time not at my expense.

  “I’m going to get you for this, Beaky!” Jodie shouted.

  “She won’t,” I said. “Because I’ve read her diary and know all her secrets.” I pointed to a boy in the audience. “She likes your legs, by the way, but thinks your face is a bit like a tomato.”

  I began counting things off on my fingers. “I regularly wear the same pants for weeks. I sometimes sing into a hairbrush and pretend I’m the lead singer of Queen. If you don’t know who they are, ask your dads. It was me who drew that picture of Mr Lawson dressed like Hitler on the bike sheds. Twice.”

  “I knew it!” Mr Lawson cried. “See me on Monday morning.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “I stick bogies under the desk in every class. I once wrote a letter to Santa asking him to turn me into the Incredible Hulk. I use my dad’s toothbrush to clean my dog’s teeth.”

  “You do what?” Dad yelped.

  “The point is, I can’t lie,” I said. “But I don’t always tell the whole truth, either, and sometimes that’s even worse.”

  Evie’s eyes widened in horror as I turned to her. “Beaky? What are you doing?” she hissed. “Can we just get on with the play?”

  “Evie, I know you’d never give me a chance to explain if
I didn’t do this now,” I said, feeling my cheeks sting red. “The truth is, I think you’re amazing. You’re funny, you’re smart, your eyebrows make you look like a cartoon…”

  Her eyebrows met in the middle and I felt the need to clarify. “In a good way, I mean. The truth is, I like you, Evie. I really like you.”

  You could have heard a pin drop. I could feel all eyes on me, burning even more intensely than the lights.

  “But it’s also true that I don’t want you to be my girlfriend.” I saw the hurt on her face and quickly explained. “But only because I don’t want anyone to be my girlfriend. Not yet, anyway. My life’s too complicated as it is. Between being shoved in a truth-telling machine, having a dog who tries to eat the TV all the time and, you know, having to put up with my parents…”

  “Oi!” protested Dad, but Mum quickly shushed him.

  “I’m just not ready for a girlfriend. Not yet,” I said. I took a deep breath. “But, well, when I am… Whenever that is, I’d really like it to be you.”

  A series of “oohs” and “awws” went around the audience, accompanied by the occasional sound of someone pretending to throw up. At least, I hope they were pretending.

  “So, uh, Evie,” I said. “Would you do me the honour of not being my girlfriend?”

  Evie was just staring at me with a mixture of horror and confusion. “I’m still at ‘cartoon eyebrows’,” she said, but then her purple-painted face broke into a smile. “OK, not-boyfriend,” she said. “It’s a deal.”

  From out in the audience, someone began to applaud, slow and steady, each clap echoing around the hall. I cupped my hands over my eyes and peered out to see an old woman with hair like a startled scarecrow giving me a standing ovation.