For Paige, Weston, and Rand May you always embrace your unique gifts Also by Jennifer Brown Life on Mars How Lunchbox Jones Saved Me from Robots, Traitors, and Missy the Cruel Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster CONTENTS Trick #1: The Pantyhose Pull Trick #2: The Dance Ditch Trick #3: A Teacher Appears Trick #4: The Hidden Granny Trick Trick #5: Loaded Levitation Trick #6: Poof! Popularity! Trick #7: The Friend Force Trick #8: Sleight of Sister Trick #9: The Mutiny Manifestation Trick #10: The Web of Textbook Trick #11: Camp Confusion Trick #12: Dealing Detention Trick #13: The Party Pinch Trick #14: I Shall Now Put on These Shackles Trick #15: The Cannonball Crimp Trick #16: I Shall Now Hatch This Plan Trick #17: The Abandonment Angle Trick #18: The Prairieball Pass Trick #19: The Racing Bouquet Wand Trick #20: Pick a Dress, Any Dress Trick #21: The Embarrassment Effect Trick #22: The Time Machine Proposal Trick #23: The Smelly Earplug Trick #24: An Explosive Illusion Trick #25: The Stink Bomb Trick #26: Ta-da! A Teacher Appears! Trick #27: The Plan Patter Trick #28: A Riveting Quick Change Trick #29: The Friendship Flourish Trick #30: The Roosevelt Run Trick #31: The Big Reveal The Finale Trick Acknowledgments TRICK #1 THE PANTYHOSE PULL I used to hate bow ties. That was before the pantyhose. Mom insisted that they weren’t pantyhose. She called them “stockings” and said that all the men in colonial times wore them. But we were standing in the ladies’ underwear section at the store when she said it, and she pulled the stockings off a shelf marked “Pantyhose” while we were surrounded by a bunch of old ladies all wearing pantyhose, and the plastic package had a picture of a woman wearing pantyhose right on the front. So, yeah. Pantyhose. The problem with pantyhose was they were impossible to get on. If I didn’t pull hard enough, they fell down. If I pulled too hard, they ripped. And they were hot and itchy, and I wasn’t sure Philadelphus Philadelphia even wore them. It was impossible to find a picture of Philadelphus Philadelphia anywhere. I was still wrestling with my so-called stockings when Chip Mason came into my room. “Good day to you, Thomas Fallgrout!” he said, taking off his tricornered hat and bending low at the waist in a bow. “I bring glad tidings from Newburyport, Massachusetts.” Chip was my across-the-street neighbor, and my friend, too, even though he was weird and kind of annoying sometimes and I pretty much never understood what he was saying—especially when he was wearing his King’s English socks. Chip had socks for every occasion. And I don’t just mean Santa socks for Christmas and candy-corn socks for Halloween—Chip had socks for everything from movie night to geological studies. Today, for the most part, Chip was dressed like me: coat, ruffled shirt, hat, pantyhose, shoes that made noise when you walked. Only his pantyhose weren’t sagging around his ankles and didn’t have holes in them. “Who are you supposed to be?” I asked, giving mine another tug. “John Pearson, of course,” he said, bringing his heels together with a snap and saluting me. “Soldier?” “No, sir.” “Then why are you saluting me?” He lowered his hand and clasped it behind his back with the other one. “I don’t know. Seemed the right thing to do.” “Okay. So who was Pierce Johnson?” “I don’t know, who?” I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know! You’re the one who decided to be him, not me!” “My dear lad,” Chip said, “the way you’ve worded your declaration makes it sound as if I might have chosen to represent you for our assignment—which, of course, I could not do, as you are not a colonial figure of any sort. I believe your sentence structure would be clearer if you’d said something along the lines of I didn’t dress as Pierce Johnson; you did. I have found that rewording things in my head a few times before saying them aloud helps to avoid confusion.” I opened my mouth to tell him how he could avoid the confusion of me putting him in a headlock, but he held up his hand to stop me. “However. Given the context of our sentences previous, I imagine you meant to ask who ‘John Pearson’ was, for that is whose style of dress I’m meant to emulate. ‘Pierce Johnson’ is just some random gentleman who I’m sure is nice enough, but who is not a member of colonial society—although, without proper research, I cannot definitively make the claim that there were no Pierce Johnsons in colonial America. But going off the assumption that I am correct, and Pierce Johnson did not, indeed, exist in colonial society, he would not be appropriate for our assignment.” Our assignment. For Facts After the Fact class, otherwise known as History in a normal school. But Pennybaker School for the Uniquely Gifted was definitely not normal, and we didn’t get normal assignments. The current non-normal assignment, called Act After the Fact, was to research and pretend to be a real-life but unknown colonial American citizen for one month. One month of hot, itchy leg-stranglers. Chip paced across my room, his hand tucked into his lapel. “It was quite the difficult decision, paring down the vast field of unsung heroes,” he said. “Should I go for a humanitarian? A brave battlefield commander? A doctor? A scholar? There were just so many citizens to choose from.” There were? It had taken me three days to find a single one. That was the problem with unknown people—they were unknown. Then again, I wasn’t Chip Mason. He was probably wearing his unknown colonial American citizen socks at the time. “In the end, though,” he said, “I chose inventor John Pearson.” “What did he invent?” I asked. “Pearson’s Pilot Bread!” he proclaimed proudly. “Huh?” “Sea biscuits?” he tried. “I think your research might be wrong, Chip. Seabiscuit was a horse. Nobody invented a horse.” “Not true. The Greeks very much invented a horse when they wished to invade Troy.” I blinked. “Wait—this assignment is about Greece? And who is Troy?” More important question: Did Ancient Greek guys wear pantyhose? Chip chose to ignore my questions. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it referred to as hardtack.” “What? The Greek horse?” “No, not the—” He sighed and adjusted his proud posture again.
