Tricky Nick

by Nicholas J. Johnson

  I opened the book and began to read.

  I didn’t even notice that the strange feeling in my stomach had vanished as well.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic

  I read the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic all the way home, pushing my bike with one hand and holding the book in the other. It was dark and I had to duck from streetlight to streetlight to see the pages.

  Magic books are not usually the types of books you read from start to finish. You might pick one up to look for a particular trick, or maybe browse through the pages looking for an idea to catch your eye. Reading a whole magic book from start to finish is like eating one of everything off the menu at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic had me hooked from page one. How could it not with this opening?

  HONK!

  A garbage truck blew its horn at me as I stepped onto the road in front of it. I had my nose buried so deep in the book that I hadn’t been watching where I was going. Can you blame me? This was everything I had been looking for. The real secrets of magic. The Jumping Rubber Band, the Coin Up the Sleeve, the Appearing Business Card. All the tricks I already knew plus dozens I didn’t. It was all I could do not to lick my lips.

  When I got home, I put my bike away quietly and slid open my bedroom window. I threw the book through the window onto my bed and climbed in after it. The house was dark and still. Mum and Dad must have gone to bed with no idea I wasn’t in my room. The perfect crime.

  I kept reading the book under my covers, holding a torch in one hand and a crusty old deck of cards in the other. It was windy outside and every time the house squeaked or shifted I held my breath, thinking it might be Mr E and the Brotherhood of United Magicians coming to collect the stolen book. I thought about the coin that had seemed to shift and move in my hand by itself. But that was impossible; it must have been my imagination. Or maybe it was a trick coin. It was lost now, anyway, because I’d completely forgotten to pick it up after my encounter with Trixie.

  I was still reading the next morning, bringing the book to the breakfast table. Mum didn’t say anything. It must have been a librarian thing: a good librarian never interrupts someone when they’re reading.

  I took the book on the bus to school, my mind lost among the illusions and tricks.

  ‘What’s that?’ my friend Gary said, leaning over to peek at the book. Gary and I had been friends since kindergarten. He was tall with red hair and freckles. His parents were divorced which meant they bought him all sorts of cool stuff to try and win his love. Not that that was the reason I was friends with him. But it helped.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, trying to shove the book into my schoolbag.

  Of course, ‘nothing’ doesn’t really mean ‘nothing’, does it? When someone says ‘nothing’ it means ‘something’, usually something important and mysterious.

  ‘Let me see,’ Gary said, grabbing the book from my hands. ‘What does “A-Mat-Eeyore” mean?’ he said, sounding out the word and pronouncing it wrong. Gary wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

  ‘Amateur,’ I corrected him.

  ‘It means it sucks,’ Mitch Davies said from across the bus aisle. ‘Like how professional wrestling is awesome but amateur wrestling isn’t.’

  Mitch would have been our school bully if he had been smart enough to figure out that he could. He was twice the size of anyone in our year and, if you looked closely, even had the start of a moustache on his upper lip. However, he hadn’t seemed to notice his incredible size compared to everyone else and no one wanted to give him any reason to test his strength. So we usually did whatever he wanted.

  ‘Um, guys,’ said Jessica Yu behind him. ‘Amateur means you’re only allowed to do it on the weekends. My dad is an amateur drummer and my stepmother says he’s not allowed to play the drums during the week.’

  Actually, they were both wrong.

  Amateur is a French word that means ‘for the love of’. An amateur doesn’t do something for money or fame or power. They do it because they love it.

  And I was in love with the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic.

  The book was filled with pages and pages of magic secrets. Sleight-of-hand techniques with playing cards, balls and thimbles. Descriptions of props with weird names like Lota Bowl, Passe Passe Bottle and the Ching Ling Foo Water Can. Tips on costumes, staging, scripts and even choosing the best type of magic wand.

  ‘Show us a trick then,’ Mitch said, sliding across his seat and turning so that he was facing me. His giant legs filled the aisle like a couple of trees that had fallen over a road, blocking the traffic.

  ‘I’m not really ready to do any tricks yet . . .’

  ‘I said show us a trick,’ Mitch repeated, his jaw set in a way that made him look like a caveman from a comic strip. I looked down at his meaty wrist and the tiny watch that he was wearing. It was so tight that it seemed to be cutting into the flesh. There was no way I could try and steal that watch. I’d have to try something easier.

  ‘Um, I could do a card trick, but I don’t have any cards,’ I said, looking around.

  ‘ANYONE GOT ANY CARDS?’ Mitch shouted, standing up and addressing the bus.

  A tiny hand a few rows in front of us appeared. Lucas Handler, a boy who was two years younger than us and half Mitch’s size, held up a ratty deck of cards. The edges of the deck were brown and smooshed from years of shuffling. The corners were bent and the whole mess was held together with an old rubber band.

  ‘I don’t think it will work with those,’ I tried, but Mitch reached across two rows with one arm and grabbed them. He snapped off the rubber band and dropped them on the seat next to me.

  ‘I’ll try and do something,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to touch the cards. No sleight of hand or anything. Can you cut off about half the cards?’

  Mitch did, reaching over and picking up half the cards and putting them next to the other half on the seat.

  ‘Now place the bottom half on the top, but turn it sideways,’ I continued. Mitch did, placing the bottom half of the deck on top of the top half so it looked like a fat letter X.

  ‘Okay, so there’s no way I can know which card you cut to, right?’ I said.

  Mitch shrugged.

  ‘Pick up that half of the deck and look at the card in the middle. The one you cut to. Don’t let me see it!’

  He picked up the card from the middle, sneaking a look at it while also checking that I wasn’t peeking.

  ‘Now put it back in the middle and shuffle all the cards.’

  Mitch wasn’t the best shuffler. With his fat fingers it was less like shuffling and more like he was trying to make origami with a pair of sausage chopsticks. Eventually, he gave up.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  ‘You choose the . . . SEVEN OF HEARTS!’ I said.

  ‘Wrong! It was the Joker.’

  I opened my eyes, snatched the deck out of Mitch’s hands and threw it as hard as I could. It flew past Mitch’s head and hit the window behind him, sending playing cards showering over his head like confetti.

  Mitch’s expression turned to rage and he moved towards me. I pointed behind him. He turned to look and there, stuck to the window of the bus, was the Joker. Mitch let out a quiet ‘woah’ as he went to peel the card off the bus window.

  That’s when he discovered that the card was now stuck to the outside of the glass.

  It’s really going to annoy you if I don’t tell you how I did it, isn’t it?

  The secret?

  I am a duck.

  Have you ever noticed a duck gliding across a pond? It looks so relaxed, like it’s just hanging out, enjoying its day. But what you don’t see is that the duck has to paddle like crazy under the surface of the water. That’s what being a magician is: paddling like crazy under the surface.

 
According to the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic, you should hide playing cards and coins around every room you enter.

  Before I got on the bus, I did two things.

  Firstly, I asked Lucas Handler to mind the deck of cards I’d taken from our games cupboard at home. I told him to give it to anyone who asked for it and that, if he didn’t rat me out, I’d buy him a jam doughnut at lunch. I also made sure the Joker was on the top of that deck.

  Second, just before jumping on the bus, I stuck the other Joker from the deck to the outside of the window. I knew Mitch would never see it because he always leaned against the window with his feet on the seat. And no one else would see it on account of Mitch’s big fat head.

  Now all I needed to do was make sure that the card Mitch chose was the Joker. According to the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic, this is called ‘forcing a card’.

  I asked Mitch to cut the cards and then put the bottom of the deck on the top at a right angle, making a big cross shape.

  At this point I asked Mitch a question just to kill a little time so he would forget which was the top and which was the bottom. Then, when I asked him to ‘pick up that half of the deck and take out the card in the middle. The one you cut to,’ he assumed he was taking a random card from the middle of the deck but really he was taking the Joker that I had left on the top.

  Don’t worry if you find it confusing: that’s the point.

  You might not get it until you try it with a deck of cards yourself.

  All I had to do was take the cards from Mitch and throw them at the window and he’d see the Joker stuck to the outside.

  But what if no one asked about the book? Or asked to see a trick? Or what if someone saw the Joker stuck to the window before I was ready? No problem. I could just bail on the trick, get the deck back from Lucas and try again another day. At worst, it would cost me a jam doughnut.

  It looked like I was making it up as I went along, but in reality, I’d gone to a huge amount of effort to pull it off. I’d stuck the Joker to the window. I’d asked Lucas to hold my deck of cards. I’d made sure to read the book in full view so that someone would ask about it.

  All to do a little card trick.

  But that’s the big secret about being a magician. No one knows how much effort you’ve put into making the magic happen.

  You’re just a duck, floating on a pond, paddling like crazy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Another reason to be alarmed

  I was still reading the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic when my teacher, Mrs Dorbel, called on me in class. I had the book tucked under my desk on my lap and I’d flip the page every time she turned towards the blackboard.

  ‘I wonder, Nicholas, whether there is any possibility that you can tell us what the sun is made of?’

  Being a teacher sucks. Kids are rude to them, parents are mean to them and principals are bossy to them. Plus, they don’t get paid very much. Most of the time they just want to finish the lesson and go and have a nice cup of tea and read the paper.

  Mrs Dorbel was not one of those teachers.

  She was a jerk.

  ‘Huh?’ I said. I’d been listening closely enough to hear the question but my mind was a million miles away turning water into orange juice.

  ‘Unless “Huh” is some new element that I’m yet to hear about, I don’t think that is quite correct.’

  Mrs Dorbel had been teaching Year Five at my school since the beginning of time. She was so old and so mean we were pretty sure she was responsible for nagging the dinosaurs into extinction.

  She had a little wrinkled head that sat like a dried onion on top of her scrawny body. Behind her enormous pink glasses were two mean little eyes. Her nose was hooked like a vulture’s beak and her mouth was small and puckered like a drawstring bag.

  ‘Any idea?’ she said, her voice dripping with menace, a cruel smile slapped across her face. She was always happiest when she had us cornered. Teaching was a full-body contact sport to her. And she wanted to win.

  I opened my mouth to speak. My mind was blank. She could smell blood in the water.

  ‘Nicholas?’ she said again. She only called me Nicholas, instead of Nick, because that’s what it said on the seating chart that she’d glued to her desk at the start of the year. She didn’t even know our names half the time, relying on that stupid chart to remind her.

  Gary leaned over to help. He began to whisper, ‘She wants to know what the sun—’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mrs Dorbel spat, looking at her seating chart, ‘Gary. But why don’t we let Nicholas answer?’

  ‘What was the question again?’ I stuttered, my eyes flicking down to the encyclopedia in my lap. Mrs Dorbel was at my side in a second, grabbing the book and striding back to the front of the class, the book held above her head like a trophy.

  ‘Do you honestly think that you’re clever enough to pay attention in class and read a book at the same time?’ she scoffed, waving the encyclopedia in front of her. ‘Because your latest test results say otherwise.’

  Mrs Dorbel opened her desk drawer and tossed the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic inside before slamming it shut. That desk drawer was a black hole. Anything that disappeared into it was never seen again. Books, comics, love letters, toys, balls, food. It didn’t matter what it was. If Mrs Dorbel saw it, it went into that drawer.

  There were rumours that Mrs Dorbel was an actual witch. Word was that her coven had a bonfire at the end of the school year and burned everything she had confiscated as a sacrifice.

  ‘You know, I was warned about you just this morning, Nicholas. One of the newer teachers said I should keep an eye on you and, lo and behold, here we are.’

  I didn’t know which teacher she was talking about. Mr Buggit, the principal, didn’t like me very much after he’d busted me impersonating him in the playground. But he’d been the principal for ever so it couldn’t have been him.

  ‘I know the answer, Mrs Dorbel,’ said Jessica Yu, sitting up straight, her hand in the air.

  ‘I am sure you do,’ said Mrs Dorbel, not taking her eyes off me for a second. ‘But I am asking Nicholas. What is the sun made of?’

  ‘Light?’ I tried, my eyes flicking to her desk. How was I going to get the book back now? ‘Sunshine?’

  Mrs Dorbel stretched out her puckered lips into a thin, mean smile. That familiar feeling was back. My stomach churned and I felt all the hairs on my arms standing up. Someone must have left a window open because the paper on my desk started shifting and flapping. But I didn’t feel a cool breeze, I felt hot and dizzy. I held the papers down with my hand to stop them blowing away. I was feeling so light-headed that I thought I might blow away too.

  ‘No, Nicholas. If you’d been paying attention, you would know that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas: a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.’

  She was reading now, her beady little eyes flicking across the pages of the ancient textbook she was teaching us from. If I had that textbook I would have known the answer too. But, apparently books weren’t allowed in Mrs Dorbel’s class . . . unless you were Mrs Dorbel.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said a voice to my right. I turned to see the familiar, smiling face of Trixie. I almost didn’t recognise her dressed in our brown and yellow school uniform. I sat back in my chair in surprise, letting go of the papers on my desk. They began to drift away. Gary caught them as they fell and I quickly grabbed them from him, stuffing them into my desk.

  ‘I’m sorry . . . Trixie,’ Mrs Dorbel said, her eyes darting down to her seating chart to figure out the name of the girl she didn’t quite remember. ‘Do you have something to add?’

  Mrs Dorbel usually screwed up her face in annoyance or anger or disappointment or just because that’s what her face looked like. But when she looked at Trixie she screwed it up in confusion. With good r
eason, too, because Trixie definitely wasn’t in our class. The first time I’d laid eyes on her had been the previous night when we’d met at the Brotherhood of United Magicians. And now, here she was, talking back to Mrs Dorbel as though she’d been here all year.

  ‘The sun isn’t made of gas,’ she said, smiling sweetly at Mrs Dorbel. ‘It’s a perfect sphere of hot plasma.’

  ‘Well, er, be that as it may . . .’ Mrs Dorbel stammered, flicking through her book, desperately reading.

  Trixie continued. ‘It’s a common mistake. Plasma is similar to gas but is affected by magnetic fields in different ways.’

  ‘Well . . . yes . . . okay . . . ah, here!’ Mrs Dorbel had found what she was looking for. She read from the book. ‘The sun is made up of three-quarters hydrogen and one-quarter helium. Both gases.’

  She slammed the book closed triumphantly, so hard that it slid off the desk and onto the floor. Mrs Dorbel had to scramble to pick it up.

  ‘Sure, until you apply enough pressure or heat.’ Trixie shrugged. ‘Then the atoms break up into highly charged particles and it becomes plasma.’

  The class had no idea what this new girl was talking about but they knew when Mrs Dorbel was beaten. Jessica Yu giggled behind her hand and Mrs Dorbel threw her a dirty look to shut her up.

  ‘Young lady,’ Mrs Dorbel said, turning back to Trixie and holding her book up. ‘This textbook clearly states that the sun is made of gas. Are you saying that the textbook is wrong?’

  ‘Sure.’ Trixie shrugged again. ‘People make up all sorts of things and put them in books.’9

  ‘If I say that the sun is made of gas, then the sun is made of gas,’ Mrs Dorbel snipped. ‘There is no room for argument in science. These are the facts.’

  She threw the textbook down on the desk and turned towards the blackboard, where she began furiously rubbing out her lesson on the sun.