“Hey,” Tub said. “You about to lay down some dope rhymes?”
“What?”
He indicated his braces. “Bling don’t impress me, J-Fresh.”
I looked down at my chest. While I’d been working on my second shoe, the medallion had slipped from under my shirt. I caught it in my fist.
“Yes! Look! This is proof, right here! One of them gave this to me.”
“Which one? King Kong? The Incredible Squid? Or Mr. Roboto?”
“Mr. Roboto,” I said, then shook my head in irritation. “You have to listen to me!”
He continued into the kitchen, so I followed, ignoring the cat surprises beneath my socks.
Grandma Dershowitz was a short, hunched woman with thick glasses strung upon a beaded chain and gray hair colored an unconvincing magenta. I had never seen her without her frilled, polka-dotted apron, and that day was no exception. She was baking cookies, which she was always doing, bowls and bowls of them that Tub devoured for no other reason than to clear the counters for the next wave. Tub reached for a blob of cookie dough and Grandma slapped his wrist.
“You’ll get worms.”
“That makes no sense, Grandma.”
“You want to help, wash some of those dishes.”
Tub shrugged his shoulders at me.
“I washed last time,” he said, nabbing the dishtowel.
I rolled my eyes and took up my usual station.
“Oh, Jim Sturges!” Grandma cried. “Welcome, welcome. There will be cookies for all.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Dershowitz.”
“It’s so nice to have a man around the house.”
“Grandma!” Tub raised his palms in disbelief. “What the heck? I’m a man.”
“Yes, but Jim is older.”
“By three weeks, Grandma!”
To say the least, we’d been through this before. I plunged my hands into the suds. With one hand I withdrew a dirty measuring glass. With the other, I withdrew a small head with pointy ears and fangs. It hissed at me and I almost screamed.
“In the sink, Tub?”
The cat jumped from the water and landed on the counter next to me, shaking suds from its body. It was Cat #23. Tub had long since given up trying to remember the names of the fifty or so felines that had come and gone, and had therefore instituted a streamlined numerical system. Somewhere in his room was a highly valuable laminated list of their actual names in case of emergency, but Tub hadn’t seen it in a while.
“Cats aren’t supposed to be hiding in sinks,” I said. “They hate water.”
Tub shrugged. “One in a million doesn’t. And we have a million.”
He shooed Cat #37 from where it was curled up asleep in the drying rack.
I snatched the sponge from the faucet and began scrubbing the measuring glass.
“If you don’t help me, I’m going to have to tell my dad.”
Tub glanced at his grandmother, who was facing the opposite counter. With the stealth of a secret agent, Tub tiptoed across the linoleum, extended an arm toward Grandma’s ear, and succeeded in cranking down her hearing aid. He relaxed and sighed, then returned to the sink with exasperated slowness.
“Fine, tell your dad. You two can bond over it. No hugging, though, since you’ll both be in straightjackets.”
I held the medallion away from my chest. Tub took it and leaned in to give it a hard look.
“Looks fake. That language even looks fake. What’s it supposed to be, Chinese?”
“No.” I girded myself for mockery. “It’s Troll.”
Tub let the medallion drop to my chest.
“It was nice knowing you, pal.”
“Tub!”
He threw down his towel.
“I’m serious, Jim. You need to put this crap away. You walk into school on Monday talking to me, or anyone else, about the city’s pesky troll problem, and you’re not exactly going to get a lot of people saying, ‘Gee, thanks for the warning.’ It’ll spread faster than mono. You think things are tough for us now? Jim, this will be the end. I’m sorry if you had a crazy nightmare. I really am. But I can’t let you ruin our lives.”
Cat #31 sidled up to his leg and he shook it off.
“Butterscotch chips make cookies extra special,” Grandma said from another time zone.
In frustration, I reached for another dirty dish and ended up pulling the plug on the sink. The water gurgled and the bubbles started sliding away. Not having to worry about Grandma overhearing, I cursed my best curse and leaned against the sink.
“All right,” I said. “I’ve got a proposal. Indulge me for one night. Just one night. You’ve still got that archery set, right?”
“Yeah, I got it, but—”
“And I know you have the nanny cam, right?”
“Well, sure. That thing wasn’t cheap. Grandma really thought she’d catch the babysitter stealing cookies. Didn’t have the heart to tell her it was me.”
“Okay, you find that stuff and bring it with you to the play tryouts at noon.”
“The play tryouts? Wait, Jim, no. I’m not doing any of this.”
“I’ll give you Dino-Mountain.”
That shut him up. Every kid dreams of unattainable gifts—expansive race-car sets, towering doll houses, futuristic clubhouses that cost more than your parent’s car—and one year I received exactly such a holy grail: Dino-Mountain, a plastic play set as high as my chest, complete with caves and tunnels from which one of ten different dino-troops could attack.
“I…” Tub started. The offer had caught him by surprise. “Come on. I’m too old for Dino-Mountain.” He did not sound entirely convinced of that.
“And a bag of sour worms. No, a case. A full case. Tub, that’s like eight bags.”
“Jim…”
“Anything you want. Just name it. It’s yours. I just want one night of help and then, tomorrow, I swear I’ll never mention it again.”
Tub looked at the floor, where Cat #40 and Cat #17 were swiping at each other’s tails. He knocked them aside with his ankle, though his heart was not in it. His cheeks were pink beneath the freckles. My offers had embarrassed him.
“A fiver,” he murmured. “Just a fiver. You know. For Steve.”
I reached out and gripped his shoulder.
“You got it, Tub. Noon at the school, okay?”
“Fine, whatever.”
I tossed the sponge onto the counter and wiped my hands on my jeans.
“I have to go dig out some sports equipment from my attic.”
“Sports? No one said anything about sports. This deal’s getting worse by the second.”
“I’ll explain later.”
I approached Grandma Dershowitz to crank up her hearing aid and say good-bye, but was distracted by the slurping noise of the final suds being sucked down the drain. I cradled my hands to my chest, wondering how I had made such a stupid mistake as plunging them into a sink with a drain the perfect size for an extending tentacle.
Because Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line was an outdoor production, the auditions were held on a knoll just to the side of Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field, where the football team was packing in an extra weekend practice beneath the jumbotron installers. Two doomed lines of would-be headliners, girls and boys, paired off to read for RoJu’s title roles while Mrs. Leach, the drama coach of the exhausted hair, frowsy hairbands, and floppy sweaters, took notes.
Opposite of where the team was scrimmaging, at the north end of the field, Dad rode his industrial lawn mower around the end zone. The thing had cost a bundle when he’d bought it five years before, but I had to hand it to him—it had already paid for itself. The monstrosity was twice as big as a regular mower and painted a garish gold. The back wheels had been lifted from a defunct monster truck called the Destruckshunator and the huge, eight-wheeled mowing deck stuck out like the wings of a 747. The sixteen-inch discharge chute shot out grass with machine-gun force. Seriously: I’d stood too close before and been bruised by the flying
grass.
Thankfully, Dad hadn’t noticed me when I’d arrived for the auditions. In his goggles, work gloves, steel-toed safety boots, allergy mask, and hair net, he looked like a frantic alien nerd piloting a gigantic moon rover, hell-bent on destroying our grassy planet one blade at a time.
I’d been last in line, but now it was one o’clock and I was just one actor away. Studying the pages in my sweaty hands was difficult; Tub had yet to show and I kept visualizing him arriving with Sergeant Gulager, who would haul me off to the nuthouse for my own safety. Just as distracting was the current Romeo’s butchering of the Bard.
“It is my soul that calls upon my name?” Shakespeare’s unfamiliar rhythms had the kid doubting the most fundamental precepts of English. “How silver-sweet sound? Lovers’ tongues by night? Like softest music? To attending ears?”
“Romeo!” his Juliet responded. An easy line, for sure.
“My…niece? Nice? Nessie?”
“Niesse,” Mrs. Leach said for the thirtieth time that day. “It means young hawk.”
A conflagration of footballs converging on the same target drew my attention to a rotund figure slumping through the end zone. It was Tub, on foot, as his previous nine bicycles had been stolen from school bicycle racks over the past nine years. He was carrying a duffel bag and grimacing against the half-dozen balls thumping down around him from shoulder-padded bullies. Only the last one struck him, on the shoulder.
“Enough monkey business, men!” Coach Lawrence hollered. “Though that was a real bull’s-eye, Jorgensen-Warner!”
Tub threw his duffel bag down beside a table. On it were the tattered scraps of the free donuts promised by the flyers. Tub lifted a thin sheet of deli paper spotted with powdered sugar with the same delicacy one might handle a war-torn American flag. He set it down, wobbled backward a few steps, and plopped down on the grass, grinding his jaw like he always did after a tightening. He looked to the grassy stage and gave me a morose nod.
“Sleep well upon thine eyes?” the boy continued. “Peace in thy…breast? Breast? Can I say that?”
Mrs. Leach rubbed at her eyes and the kid skulked away in surrender. She consulted her sign-up sheet while Dad’s mower droned on in the distance.
“Jim Sturges Jr.” She peered through her glasses at the makeshift stage. “We’re out of Juliets. Claire, can you read with Jim?”
My heart sunk. Of course Claire Fontaine was to get front-row seats to my degradation. I took a deep breath while she set aside her pink backpack, uncrossed her legs from the grass, and brushed off. It was no secret that Claire had Juliet locked. Sure, she read with impressive poise, and her swings between melancholy and ecstasy were convincing enough to have every boy pledging his nonexistent sword to her defense. But it was the authentic accent that sealed the deal. Next to that, everyone else sounded like the absolute worst: a regular high school kid.
Claire took her place next to me, knocked the mud from her boots, and gave me a kind, if brief, smile. The wind was doing wonderful, wild things to the hair outside of her beret.
“Act two, scene two, page two,” Mrs. Leach said. “Let’s do this.”
Tub gawped at me, the donut scandal forgotten. I cleared my throat, looked at the spinning letters upon the page, and dove in.
“Oh, are you going to leave me so unsatisfied?”
One line in and I was blushing.
“What satisfaction could you possibly have tonight?” Claire asked.
“I would be satisfied,” I said, “if we made each other true promises of love.”
No doubt these lines were masterpieces of meter and meaning, but for all the feeling coming out of my mouth, they might as well have been ingredients from a cereal box. Claire, of course, turned Juliet’s lines into things as natural as breath, one word as full as rainwater gathering on the tip of a petal, the next dry and windswept as the desert outside of town.
I looked at her in wonder and saw that she was reciting by heart and that her eyes were focused on the football field. There at the nearest corner was a helmetless Steve Jorgensen-Warner running drills. Just drills, and yet he executed them with supernatural grace, vaulting over lesser humans and grinning like he’d just as soon keep going until he conquered the world. Claire was rapt and I couldn’t blame her. That sort of movement was a kind of poetry, too.
“Oh, blessed, blessed night,” I whispered from a script I hadn’t realized that I’d memorized, too. “Because it’s dark out, I’m afraid all this is just a dream.”
Was it, in fact, a dream? I lowered my eyes and regarded the chewed, dirty fingernails holding my script, the scuffed shoes on my feet, and realized that these were the symbols of my pitiful little life: worn-out, insignificant, ready to be thrown beneath Dad’s industrial mower. With one hand I touched the medallion beneath my shirt, a different symbol entirely, and thought of that dark world beneath the surface. Which dream was preferable, the wild danger down there or the slow suffocation happening up here?
Mrs. Leach took her glasses by the frame, lips parted to demand an end to this pitiful farce. But my voice continued, louder now, my despair as real as anything Romeo could come up with.
“A thousand times the worse for me, to want your light! / A lover goes toward love as schoolboys from their books. / But love goes from love, like boys toward school with heavy looks.”
Mrs. Leach released her glasses.
Claire turned away from the football field and gave me a curious look.
“It is my soul that calls upon my name,” I continued. Until then, anguish was something I’d felt in my heart and head. Now it had a voice and I let it flow. “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears.”
Claire smiled with not just a corner of her lips but her whole mouth.
“I shall forget,” she said softly, “to have thee still stand there, remembering how I love thy company. Romeo!”
“Romeo, indeed,” Mrs. Leach said.
The drama coach was standing and clutching her hands to her bosom. Like any good teacher, she knew that keeping decorum was priority one. But her flashing eyes revealed that she was rapturous. I expanded my gaze. The other auditioners sat there with stunned looks upon their faces. Even Tub’s face was void of sarcasm. Two water boys on their way to the football field had paused with their bag of thermoses and were staring at us, enraptured. Mrs. Leach turned to a wardrobe parent, who was clapping her hands with tears in her eyes.
“Mrs. Dunton, take some measurements. I think our Romeo might just wake up this town of football fans.”
“Yes, I think so,” Mrs. Dunton replied. She tilted her head a little. “If we can make him taller, that is.”
The wardrobe lady approached, unspooling her measuring tape and running it from foot to inseam and waist to armpit, making disappointed tsks at every step. I had learned in math class just how much taller Claire was than me, but Claire herself didn’t seem to care. She crossed her arms over her frayed jacket and a dozen bracelets slid down her wrists. Her dark hair blew and caught on her lips, and she spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the gridiron warriors and the roaring mower.
“Very interesting, Mr. Sturges.”
“I’ll never figure out how that nut sack made a living writing,” Tub said.
“Flames,” I groaned. “I’m going to go down in big fiery flames of fire.”
“I’ll show Mr. Shakespeare a renaissance. A renaissance of my fist.”
“Nobody can say those sentences without sounding like a jerk. Right?”
“Generally you’re right,” Tub said. “It’s definitely an elite club of superstars who can wrap their tongues around that baroque bullcrap. Sir Lawrence Olivier, Sir Kenneth Branagh. We’d be remiss, of course, to leave out that legend of stage and screen, that matinee idol of the ages, Sir Jim Sturges Jr.”
Tub slapped me on the back. He had a big hand; I stumbled. I heard chuckles from the direction of the football field. I kept my head down and picked
up the pace. We were heading home, but the talk of the audition would not die. I looked at the RoJu script in my hand. Only forty-five pages, but it felt a whole lot heavier.
“How am I going to memorize all this?” I asked.
“Here’s a tip,” Tub said. “You forget a line, just shout ‘Saint B. Battle Beasts rule!’ and those morons in the stands will go crazy.” He winked at me. “That one’s a freebie. Next one costs.”
By now we were passing the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum, a lure too great for Tub not to bite at. He gave me his usual impish grin.
“Not today,” I pleaded. “I don’t have the required speed.”
“Speed? You? You’re not the one schlepping this bag, Sir Jim.”
What could I say to that? He was doing me a favor. So we made our way down the walkway, passing beneath a new vinyl banner. It didn’t make a lot of sense, though the heavy block letters were nonetheless imposing.
KILLAHEED
THE COMPLETE STRUCTURE
WESTERN HEMISPHERE DEBUT
It snapped in the breeze as if preparing to swoop down on bat wings.
Neither of us was encouraged by what we found inside. Carol was absent from the ticket booth. We peeked around the corner. No one was manning the coat check. We perked up our ears. There were sounds, dim vibrations of voices, but there was no telling from which direction they came. Tub shrugged, hitched up his duffel, and pushed his bulk through the turnstiles. I followed and we proceeded, more carefully than usual, up the stairs and beneath the bison. Tub didn’t touch the chin hairs this time.
The Sal K. Silverman Atrium looked no different from the outside. But when we pushed through the smoked-glass doors we were greeted by a hive of activity. Museum staff, everyone from Carol to docents to board members, were buzzing about with frowns, while men with hardhats and work gloves called back and forth to one another from behind packing crates and the seats of small forklifts. Tub and I were dumbstruck. When we approached not a single person paid us notice.
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