Dreidels on the Brain (10 page)

The other thing that happened was she became a radical. She ran for student council, and made speeches about all the things she wanted to change at Bixby, like abolishing the dress code and having better food in the cafeteria. She won the election, no problem. She's the most popular girl at Bixby—and every boy has a crush on her.

You're probably wondering how someone as pretty and popular as Amy O'Shea would end up spending time with a dork like me.

Here's what happened: One day last spring I went in after school to see Mr. Winters, my sixth-grade English teacher. Amy was there too, cleaning the chalkboard.

I was there to show him a card trick I'd just made up. It started like every other card trick.

“Okay, Mr. Winters, pick a card.” He did. “Now, don't show it to me. Just put it back in the deck, and shuffle it.”

This was all pretty much standard. Then the routine kicked in.

“Now, the problem with being a magician,” I said, “is that no one trusts you. Like, you just picked a card from this deck, but you probably think it's already hidden somewhere, or up my sleeve. Am I right?”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” he said.

“So I'd like you to check. Just look through the cards—don't show me—and make sure your card is there.”

He looked, then looked again. “Hold on,” he said, then frowned. “It's not here. Where did it go?”

“What will you give me if I tell you?”

“What do you want?”

“To change my grade on the spelling test. From a C+ to an A.”

I'm pretty smart, but spelling is one thing I cannot do. I can learn all the rules, like “
i
before
e
except after
c,
or when sounding like
a
as in
neighbor
or
weigh
.” The problem is that sometimes the rules don't work, with words like
weird,
which is a weird word. In those cases, you're just supposed to memorize the way it goes, but my mind always mixes up the letters.

“Joel, I can't change your grade,” Mr. Winters said.

“All right, then. Trick's over.” I gathered up the cards and turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” he finally said, leaning in close. “All right. Where's my card?”

“Hmmmmmm,” I said. “You don't trust me, so how do I know I can trust
you,
and that you'll actually change my grade? Change it first—then I'll tell you.”

He sighed, then opened the grade book. There was his card—the seven of spades. He smiled and gave me an A+.

As I walked out of the classroom, quite pleased with myself, Amy followed.

“You put the card in the grade book before you did the trick,” she said. “It was while he was stacking up the textbooks, wasn't it?”

I didn't say anything. “Then you made him choose it,” she went on. “Only it was another seven of spades. You had it on the bottom of the deck. Then, when he put it back, you hid it in your hand—and while he looked through the cards, you slipped it into the back pocket of your pants.” She pointed. “Which is where it is now. Right?”

Normally I hate getting caught in a trick. But she was amazing. I took the card from my back pocket.

“But don't worry. He has no idea how you did it. He also didn't notice that the card he picked had a blue
back—and the back of the one in his grade book was red.”

Right again. I had borrowed a seven of spades from another deck. Next thing I knew I ended up walking with her all the way from Bixby School to the stable where Daisy, her horse, lives. That's right, she actually has a horse, who she cares for every day after school. Don't get the idea she's rich, any more than I am. She just loves horses so much that she worked every weekend—mowing lawns, babysitting, and cleaning out garages—to buy one. Horses are expensive to keep—and they eat
a lot
. That's why Amy was cleaning the chalkboard. The janitor's supposed to do it, but he never does, so Mr. Winters pays her to do it each day with a lunch bag filled with Quaker Oats, which she gives to Daisy. She loves that horse—and all animals.

“We shouldn't eat animals,” she said. “They have feelings. That's why I'm a vegetarian. In fact, I'm circulating a petition to get the cafeteria to offer a vegetarian choice for lunch. Better than that gross stuff they call ‘Farmstyle Stew,' whatever it is. Will you sign it?”

I nodded. She was right: The stew was disgusting. Nodding was all I
could
do, because I couldn't speak, too astounded that I was actually
walking
with Amy O'Shea.

She had lots of big opinions. She hated the fact that girls weren't allowed to wear pants at school: “Don't you think it's unfair? Boys get to wear pants, and there are all kinds of
things you just can't do wearing a dress, like run and climb. All because of Mrs. Gabbler, who thinks we should be ‘ladylike.' Who wants to be ‘ladylike'? Not me. I want to be free! And patches. Why can't we wear patches on our clothes? What are we supposed to do when they wear out, throw them away?”

But her biggest feelings were about the war in Vietnam. “America shouldn't even be there,” she said. “Nixon should end the war and bring the soldiers back. Then Tommy could come home.” That's her older brother. He's nineteen and in the Army, somewhere in Vietnam. She loves him and is really worried about him. Talking about him seemed to upset her, so she changed the subject, asking me about magic and how long I'd been doing it.

That's the one thing I can always talk about, and when I told her about the birthday parties I did on weekends, her eyes lit up.

“You get paid? How much?”

“Fifteen dollars a show,” I said proudly.

“That's pretty good,” she said. “But I bet you could charge more if you had an assistant. It would be more professional.” She thought for a minute, then said, “You could charge twenty-five dollars.”

She was right. Having an assistant puts a magician into a whole different league, like Mister Mystery, who has the
lovely Linda Lee. He makes her float in the air and cuts her in half and everything.

“Let's say you pay your assistant one-third of what you make—that's eight dollars and thirty-three cents. That leaves you sixteen dollars and sixty-seven cents, which is more than you're making now, and you would do a much better show.”

And, just like that, I had an assistant, who happened to be the most popular and smartest and prettiest girl in all of Bixby School. The next week she came over to my house to practice. I thought it would take a long time to teach her the tricks—how to set them up, what to bring out and when. But she got everything the first time.

A couple weeks later we did a show at the Temple City Library, where Mrs. Molatsky works, and this guy from the
Temple City Times
wrote an article about it—on the front page! Suddenly everyone was calling for birthday parties and Cub Scout meetings, and we were charging twenty-five dollars, just like Amy said, sometimes thirty, and, once even forty! My mom was driving us to shows almost every weekend, sometimes to two shows on the same weekend! I make sure to pay Amy right after each show, so she can buy food for Daisy. The rest pays for my magic lessons, and whatever's left over goes to my family, though I don't want her to know that.

At Amy's suggestion, I had business cards printed up
at Quik-Copy. They're really cool, fluorescent red with a top hat on them, and the name “Joel Edwin.” It had been Mister Mystery's idea to use my first and middle name as a stage name, instead of my last name. “That way,” he said, “your audience will laugh at your jokes instead of, well, you know . . .”

Everything was going great until one afternoon, the middle of the summer, after a show at the Rosemead Library. Amy and I had packed up my magic suitcase and were just hanging out with Herrmann—she's my rabbit—waiting for my mom to come pick us up, when all of a sudden I realized that I liked her. Really liked her. Like,
liked her
liked her
.
Like, I didn't know what to do about it. Suddenly, I had a secret—and I sure couldn't tell her.

Amy's really smart, and beautiful, and talented, but nobody's perfect. As observant as she is, she misses some things that are really obvious. For example, she has somehow failed to realize what a total dork I am. And I don't want to push it because we've got a good thing going. If she knew I
liked
her, that would be the end of that. So I've managed not to say anything. With us, it's strictly business, and always outside of school. In school, we don't talk, which is why it was so weird—wierd?—that she had come up to me in Home Ec.

“Look, Joel, I need to talk to you about Sunday.” She
seemed really upset. “I can't come . . . I'm really sorry.”

“Uh. Okay,” I said. “No problem. I'll be fine.”

That was an outright lie. This was really bad news. Sunday's magic show was supposed to be our biggest yet! If there was ever a time I'd need an assistant, it would be on Sunday.

“I'm really sorry. It's just that . . . I'll be in San Bernardino. With my father.”

“Your father?”

She nodded, and I could see she was on the verge of tears. “He and my mom separated. He moved out two months ago.”

“I'm sorry—”

“I guess it's better. They're not fighting so much. But now he lives in San Bernardino, and I spend one weekend a month with him. He and my mom had to switch around the schedule, so now this is his weekend—he's picking me up Friday after school, and will bring me back on Sunday night. And that's why I can't come.” She wiped her eyes. “Will you explain to Herrmann why I'm not there? And don't let her drink too much water before the show.”

I didn't know what to say, so I just looked at my egg, which was a gloppy mess.

“But I'm still planning on coming with you to Mister Mystery tomorrow after school. My mom will drive me there from
the stable, and if you want, she can give you a ride home.”

“Hey, everybody!” called out Arnold Pomeroy. “Look at Joel's egg! Guess the yolk's on him!”

Mrs. Hernandez came over, muttered something about boys in Home Economics, and gave me another egg.

“Try again,” she said.
“Gently
.
”

Another one of Mr. Culpepper's funny sayings is “Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

That may be so, but it doesn't always work. Now I've got two huge things coming up—the assembly on Monday, which I don't even want to
think
about, and Sunday's show, which I've been thinking about for weeks.

This afternoon I spread out all my magic tricks on the floor of the den—my bedroom—to decide which ones I could do without an assistant. I sat on the floor beside Herrmann's cage and looked over my list.

“Well, Herrmann,” I said, “looks like it's you and me on Sunday. Amy can't come.”

Herrmann looked a little sad, but she's a rabbit, and always looks a little sad.

“The problem is that all the best tricks are the ones with Amy—and you. But, don't worry, I still plan to bring you. We'll make it work.”

The first trick to go was the arm guillotine. It's a cool one,
you've probably seen it before—it looks like you're going to slice off someone's arm, but in the end they don't get hurt, even though the guillotine blade
does
go right through a carrot. When I do it with Amy, we have a whole comedy routine, and she feeds the carrot to Herrmann. I suppose I could do the trick with a volunteer from the audience, but there's always a chance that they'll freak out. And even if
they
don't, my grandmother
definitely
will.

I'd better tell you about my grandmother. It's another one of those antonym things. Imagine a grandmother who is soft and nice, baking cookies, sending birthday gifts, and saying things like, “Well, isn't that lovely?”

My grandma Anna is not like that. At least, not now. When I was a kid, she would babysit for us and sing Yiddish songs. I had no idea what they meant, but they were sweet. She also used to tell me funny things she had learned in English class when she came to America, like a poem that began “If wishes were fishes . . .” But her accent was so thick that it came out “Eef veeshes vere feeshes.”

“Then what?” I would say. “What if wishes were fishes?”

She would shrug, then say, “Eef eefs and ands vere pots and pans . . .”

I never did figure out how the poem went, but I liked it. And I liked her. She would have our family over for dinner and make the best blintzes, these Jewish
sweet-cheese-filled pancakes. Every time she saw me she'd say how much I looked like my father when he was young, call me
bubala,
then pinch my right cheek. It drove me crazy. Why always the right one? I think it made my face lopsided.