Applewhites Coast to Coast Page 12

  “And they will be boring,” Melody shot back, “and they will lose.”

  “I refuse to believe,” said Zedediah, his arms crossed, “that a program dedicated to education will penalize us for attempting to be educational.”

  “But we’ve got the next video update already!” cried Melody. “Hal 2.0! The makeover and everything; you should see the footage I got in town—”

  Zedediah was already shaking his head. “I see no educational value in that whatsoever. It will not be submitted in this school’s name.”

  E.D. finally spoke up. “Grandpa—” she started, but he cut her off.

  “This discussion is over.” Jake looked from her to Zedediah to Melody, and back. If anybody was going to say anything else, it was cut off by the phone ringing.

  “It’s Jeremy,” said Randolph, and he put the phone on speaker.

  “I’m sorry!” Jeremy said the very first thing. “I’m just so sorry!” His voice was shaky, almost as if he’d been crying, Jake thought. “I tried. I really, really tried! And besides, they promised. I couldn’t have known . . .” And then, it was obvious he had broken down.

  “Jeremy, dear,” Lucille said, “what couldn’t you have known?”

  There was the sound of snuffling and nose-blowing. Then Jeremy spoke again. “The Rutherfords brought in this producer from a TV network, and they said he was only there for the TV show at the end of the competition! He’s the one who started posting the videos online the minute they came in, and he’s the one who started calling everything ‘challenges.’ He changed the whole feel of the Expedition. The whole point of it!”

  “This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been concerned about all along,” began Zedediah, but Jeremy started talking again and he fell quiet.

  “They’re shortening the Expedition!” Jeremy moaned. “The producer says if we have the winner two weeks sooner, it’ll be better for ratings! ‘Stay away from the holidays,’ he says! Then yesterday—this is the worst!—he said the education experts who were supposed to judge everything, and write up reports about what every group sent in, and visit different groups along the way, cost too much to be worth it. They’re just going to use online voting and celebrity judges instead! I protested, of course! I stood up to him. To them. I did—I reminded them about art changing the world, about why they’d started the whole thing in the first place. I—” There was a sudden silence, a gulping sound, and then the nose-blowing again. “They fired me!” he wailed at last.

  “But the competition is still on?” Randolph asked.

  When Jeremy was able to speak again, he said it was. He said they should be getting their next challenge by e-mail the next day.

  It was a very bad end to the spa day that had begun so well. Zedediah and Sybil said they should just pull out of the Expedition now. Lucille disagreed. “It’s awfully hard on Jeremy, of course, but it would be a shame not to give the Rutherfords the benefit of the doubt. They do want to bring creativity to education, and we want that, too.”

  “To say nothing of the prize money,” Randolph said.

  “Keep your eye on the prize,” Melody muttered under her breath. Jake had a feeling she wasn’t just talking about Randolph. If there was one thing he knew about Melody it was that she had an absolute determination to finish this Expedition and get to California—and win!

  Jake suspected she’d been checking out what the other Expeditions were doing all along. It was her idea to send only the makeover video and ditch the rest of what Hal had filmed, he was sure of it. For that matter, it probably played a part in what she’d done with Hal to begin with. Did Melody organize his new look just because it would make a great video?

  After a considerable discussion, everybody finally agreed they should wait to see what explanation the Rutherfords offered the next day, and what the next challenge would be, before making any kind of decision about what they would do.

  The e-mail that arrived the next morning didn’t include any sort of explanation. It came from the same Rutherford Foundation e-mail address that Jeremy had been using, and wasn’t signed. If Jeremy hadn’t called to tell them the real story, they wouldn’t have known anything had changed at all. “I wonder . . . ,” Melody said, peering over Hal’s shoulder at his computer screen.

  “You wonder what?” Jake asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said.

  The only thing that really mattered, Jake thought, was that whoever would be sending them their instructions from now on, it wasn’t Jeremy. They were at the mercy of some television producer who had an agenda of his own.

  This time, the Rutherfords’ challenge had a catchy title: “Show, Don’t Tell: Education Through Artistic Performance.” They had a week and could do one performance multiple times, or multiple performances one time each. The subject area could be anything they liked and no destination had been provided.

  “Perfect!” Randolph said. “We’re going to Kansas City! I’ve directed there at the Missouri Studio Theater, so I have some useful contacts. And Simon Rathbone can fly out to meet us. It’s the perfect time and place to try out the idea I came up with in Memphis. I need to get to a copy center! The Pageant Wagon is about to come into its own!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Archaic, E.D. had titled the list of words her father had given her. It meant “no longer used in ordinary language.” She sat now in blessed solitary silence in Brunhilda, looking up substitute words for the archaic ones in Our American Cousin, which was the play Abraham Lincoln had been watching the night he was assassinated in 1865—and which was also the play her father had chosen for the first “staged reading” in the Pageant Wagon.

  The idea he had come up with in Memphis was to do plays people mostly didn’t get to see in regular theaters, with actors carrying scripts so they didn’t have to memorize lines and wouldn’t need a lot of rehearsal. No big sets, no fancy costumes, just the characters and the words. They would do basic staging, like entrances and exits, and perform on the Pageant Wagon stage.

  Randolph had chosen this play because it had “historical significance,” so it fit the education part of the Expedition. It was a ridiculous sort of romantic comedy, and at the time of the Civil War it was the most popular play in America.

  Simon Rathbone had come out to play the main funny character—a goofy old guy named Lord Dundreary—but most of the actors at MOST (the logo that was painted in huge letters across the front of the Missouri Studio Theater) were already doing another show, so Randolph’s plan to cast them hadn’t worked. That meant Jake and Melody and even Hal (who had surprised everybody by volunteering to act) were in it.

  As she started to search for the first word on the list—syllabub—Brunhilda’s door was jerked open. Destiny, his nearly grown-out Mohawk tousled, his face red and wet with tears, stormed up the steps. He rubbed at his face with one hand, leaving dirt trails on his cheeks.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I hate little kids!” he said. “They’re mean and stupid and I’m never going to play with them ever again. I don’t gots to play with them if I don’t want to!”

  Destiny loved people, she thought. “You’re a little kid,” she pointed out. “And you’re not mean and stupid!”

  “Yeah, well, the ones with the mommy who runs the theater are! Nobody can make me play with them ever again! Not Daddy, not Mommy, not nobody!”

  Not good, E.D. thought. The adults had all assumed that the presence of two kids—a four-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy—would be good for him. It was supposed to be a chance for Destiny to spend quality time with his peers. Because the children’s mother, besides being the co–artistic director of the theater, had also agreed to play a small part in the play, Cordelia had been charged with keeping an eye on the three of them while the mother was rehearsing. Of course, E.D. thought, Cordelia had also been charged with designing the backdrops for the reading. That probably meant the children had been left pretty much on their own to amuse themselve
s.

  “What happened?”

  Destiny’s hands were balled into fists and his eyes flashed with a kind of fire she had never seen in them before. “That boy wouldn’t let me build with his Legos and then the girl kicked me and hit me and called me names. After that the boy stole my markers and wouldn’t give them back.”

  E.D. sighed. She had always been afraid Destiny would grow up uneducated, thanks to a family who didn’t believe in forcing kids to learn what they didn’t want to learn. How had she missed the fact that growing up homeschooled as the littlest kid in the Applewhite family could be sort of like being raised by wolves? Destiny was entirely unsocialized to his own kind. She would talk to her parents about this later. Meantime, it would probably be a good idea to keep Destiny here with her right now, no matter how much of a distraction he would be to her work.

  “Go wash your face,” she told him, “and then come back here. I need your help.”

  Destiny’s face immediately brightened. “Do you gots something I can draw?” Then his eyes flashed again. “’Cept I don’t gots my markers anymore!”

  She showed him the legal pad with her list of words. “I need your help with words this time.”

  “I don’t do words,” Destiny said.

  “You talk!” she told him.

  He grinned. “That’s right! I talk real good.” With that, he went happily down the narrow aisle and into the bathroom to wash his face.

  When he came back, she showed him her list. “See this word? You tell me its letters one at a time and I’ll type them so the online dictionary can look it up for us.” Destiny knew the alphabet and could write his own name, but it was about time somebody started teaching him to read, she thought. This was as good a time as any.

  Destiny looked at the word on her list. “D,” he said, “and R and A and U and G and H and T.”

  She typed draught in and clicked enter. “There,” she told him, “it’s pronounced draft and it has a bunch of different meanings. There’s a scene in the play that’s funny because they’re all using the same word to mean different things.”

  Destiny looked from the screen to her list of words, frowning. “If it’s draft, how come there’s a G in it? G’s sound is guh! Like for goose. There’s no guh sound in draft!”

  “When the G is followed by H it can sound like F,” she told him. “Like in tough or cough.”

  “So how come they don’t spell ’em with F? F! Like in fox!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So does G-H always sound like F?”

  E.D. considered the question. Through, though, thought. She shook her head. “Never mind.” Somebody else could teach Destiny to read, she decided. “Just give me the letters for the next word.” As he read off the letters for sockdologizing, she typed them in. “No matches found,” the screen said. She sighed.

  When she’d done what she could, E.D. left Destiny playing with the computer and went over to the theater, where the actors were rehearsing. She listened for a while, glad to hear that the play, in spite of being so old, was really funny in some places, and when Randolph called for a break she went over to Jake. He was clutching the black binder with his script in it to his chest and looking vaguely traumatized. “Would you be willing to hang out with Destiny for part of your break?” she asked him. “I have to meet with Dad, but it won’t take long. Whatever we do, we can’t just leave him alone with those two kids everybody wanted him to play with.”

  “What happened?” Jake asked.

  “Remember when that little kid in the Clayton library bit him? This time Destiny got beat up by a four-year-old girl and the boy stole his markers. He’s decided he hates little kids.”

  Just then the mother of the offending children came into the room, leading her daughter, her son tagging along behind. Both of the girl’s arms were covered with what looked like brilliantly colored tattoos, and there were two jaggedy streaks of purple on one cheek. The mother looked around the room for a moment and then came over to E.D. “I need to know if those markers Caleb took from your brother were permanent ones.”

  “Doesn’t Caleb still have them?” E.D. asked.

  “He says he threw them in the Dumpster.”

  The woman did not seem particularly angry, E.D. was pleased to see. “Destiny doesn’t have any permanent markers anymore. He can’t really be trusted with them.”

  “So I see. I just wanted to know what I would need to get the purple off her cheek.”

  “I like dese ones,” the little girl said, showing her arms. “He did ’em good. But I didn’t want a possum on my face!”

  “I gather she let him know that pretty forcefully. Emma isn’t a particularly compliant child.”

  E.D. nodded. “Destiny said she kicked him and hit him and called him names.”

  “Sounds about right,” the woman said. “I’ve taught her to stick up for herself.”

  “He stomped on my Lego truck and broke it all to pieces, and then knocked me down,” Caleb piped up from behind his mother. “So I grabbed up all his markers and wouldn’t let him have ’em again. He went away crying, and I climbed up that ladder on the big garbage thing and threw them in!”

  This was not quite the story Destiny had told, E.D. thought. “I’m sorry about this,” she said to the mother. “The color on her cheek should wash right off, though.”

  “No problem,” the woman said. “There’s bound to be a little rough and tumble with kids this age. But it would be good if we could make sure there’s an adult around to step in if necessary.”

  E.D. nodded. “I’ll make sure somebody keeps an eye on them when you’re rehearsing.”

  The woman smiled. “Great. I’m sure it will work out fine. Come on, you two. Let’s go find some soap.”

  “Destiny’s in Brunhilda,” E.D. told Jake.

  “I’ll get him and Winston and we’ll go for a walk,” Jake said, throwing his script on a chair. As he walked away, he looked almost cheerful.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jake stood in the cramped “backstage” of the Pageant Wagon and peeked out through the curtains. There were probably forty people already gathered on folding chairs and cushions in the parking lot of the theater, even though the show wasn’t to start for another twenty minutes. Brunhilda was parked along the street to shelter them from the noise of passing traffic, and little jars had been hung on strings all around the lot with tiny electric candles in them. It was lovely and magical, especially considering it was a parking lot.

  The stage looked terrific. Cordelia had disappeared with Archie to a hardware store and returned with dozens of roll-down window blinds. Then, in a daylong frenzy involving lots of skinny brushes and different shades of gray paint, she had painted them all to look like giant pencil sketches. Doorways, archways, windows, and furniture were all intricately detailed and beautiful to look at, but they looked temporary, like someone had just jotted a quick drawing of them. Destiny had been assigned to E.D.’s stage crew, and they were both wearing all black clothing and the headsets that Destiny called “walkie-talkers.” Between scenes they would run out and pull down the right set of blinds to make it look like the actors were in a different room. E.D. was over in a corner, bent over a giant binder with a pack of six different colors of highlighter next to her. Her new hairdo was messed up by the headset, and the little bit of makeup she had started wearing was smudged, but Jake thought she looked entirely happy.

  Jake, on the other hand, felt awful. He had a knot in his stomach and his hands were sweaty. This wasn’t the excited nervousness that he got before his performance in musicals. Doom, he thought. I have a feeling of doom.

  Rehearsals had gone well for everybody else. Every time Melody read her lines, Randolph would look at her in a kind of distracted amazement, nod at her, and move on to the next scene. Simon Rathbone was cracking everybody up. On the first day of rehearsal, several of Simon’s script pages had fallen out of his binder and scattered all over the floor. When he crawled around ga
thering them up, still in character as the ridiculous Lord Dundreary, muttering to himself and reading bits of the wrong lines off the wrong pages, the cast had laughed so hard they had to take a break. He had, of course, built it into the performance—he had extra pages in his binder just so he could drop them and pretend it was an accident. Even Hal, playing the villain, was doing amazingly well.

  Jake had not been doing well. For one thing, the character of Asa Trenchard was at least ten years older than he was. For another, he was supposed to be a big, rough, outdoorsy New Englander. Randolph even had him wearing a Daniel Boone cap with a raccoon tail.

  Then there were his lines. They were supposed to be funny. He was supposed to make them funny. Simon Rathbone managed it easily. But Jake didn’t know how to do it. When you sang a song, he thought, you learned the notes and you sang them. Easy. But how did you make words funny? Especially when your lines were already goofy a hundred and fifty years ago. His first line was “Wal, darn me, if you ain’t the consarnedest old shoat I ever did see.” Even when he used the substitute word E.D. had given him for shoat—piggy—he sounded like Yosemite Sam, the guy with a big mustache and pistols from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

  “Simpler, Jake,” Randolph kept saying. “Don’t feel like you have to do anything with it. Just let the lines do the work.” So Jake would try it again. And it was flat and boring, and nobody laughed. “A bit more spark,” Randolph would say. “Really announce your presence. It’s a big entrance for a big character!”

  And Jake would do his next line big and loud: “I’m Asa Trenchard, born in Vermont, suckled on the banks of Muddy Creek, about the tallest gunner, the slickest dancer, and generally the loudest critter in the state!” and it would sound like Yosemite Sam again. Around the rehearsal room, he could see everybody’s polite smiles get more and more strained. This happened again and again, in every scene they rehearsed, and each time Randolph would work with him for a while and then he’d tug at his hair and say something like “Yes, well, keep working on it, I’m sure you’ll get there. Moving on!”