Frankie Sparks and the Talent Show Trick Read online

  “I didn’t,” he told her. “All of your brain is focused on keeping your hand still, and eventually your brain gets tired, and then it’s like it sends a little message to your hand—not on purpose, but just because it’s tired. And the muscles in your hand contract.”

  “Okay?”

  “Now imagine you were trying to keep your hand still while I tossed tennis balls at you.”

  “It probably wouldn’t go so well.”

  “Anxiety, being nervous, that’s like someone popping up and bouncing balls at you when you’re trying to concentrate. So your brain starts sending the twitch message over and over, and then your hand will start to shake.”

  “Huh,” Frankie said. Because it was interesting. But then her stomach dropped. “So it’s built into us?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Then it is hopeless,” Frankie said, and slumped over onto the counter. She found herself face-to-face with a fake thumb, and even that couldn’t cheer her up.

  “Maybe stopping the jitterbugs themselves is hopeless, but that doesn’t mean you and your assistant can’t find a solution. You just need to know what problem you’re solving.”

  Frankie lifted her head up. She knew that inventing started with identifying a problem. Her problem was that Maya’s hands shook. She thought she needed to stop the shaking, but Mr. Winklesmith was telling her that wasn’t possible. So what problem could she solve?

  She thought about this question while Mr. Winklesmith sucked on his lollipop.

  “If I can’t stop her shaking, then I need to find a way that she can do the tricks even if she is shaking?”

  “Precisely!” Mr. Winklesmith said, taking his lollipop out of his mouth and jutting it toward her face. “You need a work-around.”

  “Like what?”

  Mr. Winklesmith picked up a piece of paper. He folded the paper over and over and then took a pair of scissors out of a cup on the counter. As he spoke, he made small snips in the paper. “Once, when I was a little boy, I was helping my father bring in wood for our fire. My arms were small, and I could only carry one log at a time. By the time I got a load of logs in, all the heat from the fire had escaped out the back door. So my father built me a log carrier, and then I could bring in five logs at a time. The house stayed warm, and everyone was happy. Especially the cat.”

  He stopped cutting and unfolded the paper. A paper house popped up, with smoke seeming to puff out of the chimney.

  “Mr. Winklesmith, that is beautiful. But I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “If she’s dropping the cards, you need to find a way to help her hold on to them.” He wiggled his fingers.

  “But how can I do that?”

  “You need to give her a hand!” Mr. Winklesmith laughed at his own joke.

  “Mr. Winklesmith!”

  “Sorry, Frankie,” he giggled. “But that’s the best I can do.”

  Frankie frowned, and then Mr. Winklesmith reached into the glass case and pulled out a purple feather. “It’s on the house, Frankie.”

  Frankie’s eyes widened. She couldn’t believe Mr. Winklesmith was giving her an Incredible Feather. She could do all sorts of new tricks with it! But what good were new tricks if she still didn’t have her assistant by her side?

  “I’m sorry about your friend, Frankie, but you’ll figure it out,” he said. “You always do.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Card Game

  “IT’S TOO BAD YOU CAN’T be in the talent show,” Lila said to Maya the next morning. “Ms. Frost says that when we have rehearsal, we get to have pizza.”

  “With extra cheese!” Luke piped in.

  “Oh,” Maya said. “That sounds cool.”

  “I bet you would’ve been really good, too,” Lila said. “Do you have a costume? I bet you could wear something fun if you were a magician’s assistant. I would wear a mask over my eyes. Or a fancy hat. With feathers and glitter and everything. A black one or maybe purple.”

  Frankie had to admit that a black or purple mask with feathers and glitter sounded amazing, but she was too mad to give Lila a compliment. “Who says we aren’t doing the talent show?” Frankie asked.

  Lila looked at Frankie, then at Maya, then back at Frankie. “Your audition was kind of a disaster.”

  “Ms. Frost said we can be in the show,” Frankie told them. She had gone and spoken to Ms. Frost just like she’d promised Maya. Frankie had explained that Maya was a little nervous, but that they’d keep practicing and would have it under control. To her friends in her class, though, she said, “We just didn’t want to show you all our best tricks—right, Maya?”

  “Um . . . ,” Maya said.

  Frankie puffed out her chest. “I mean, maybe we have a few very small problems to work out, but we’ll get it. And our act will blow your mind.”

  “You’re really going to do the show?” Lila asked Maya.

  Maya looked over at Frankie. Her eyes were wide and she looked uncertain. Frankie gave her a nod. “I guess so,” Maya said.

  “We will be there,” Frankie said. “Don’t you worry!”

  She grabbed Maya by the hand and pulled her over to the hermit-crab tank, where their class pet, Lenny, poked his head out of his shell and regarded them with mild interest.

  “Did you solve it, Frankie?” Maya asked. “Did you come up with an idea to solve my problem?”

  “Not yet,” Frankie confessed. “I went to see Mr. Winklesmith, but I still don’t have my great idea yet.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I needed to find a way to help you hold the cards.”

  “That’s not exactly helpful.”

  “I know,” Frankie said.

  Ravi, who was sitting at a table nearby, leaned his chair back. They were supposed to keep four legs of the chair on the floor at all times, but Ravi was a perpetual leaner. “You know,” he said, “I get nervous sometimes too.”

  “You do?” Maya asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “At my first piano recital, I actually threw up—”

  “Ravi!” Frankie said. “That’s not helping.”

  Ravi shrugged and turned back to his worksheet.

  Maya, though, asked, “And then what happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I threw up in the trash can backstage, I put some gum in my mouth to make the taste go away—”

  “Ew!” Frankie said.

  “And then I went out and played. I figured if throwing up was the worst thing, then I could handle it.”

  “Throwing up is pretty awful,” Maya said.

  “It is,” Ravi agreed. “But I could handle it. Just like you. You had a really bad audition, but so what? You’re fine, right?”

  “I guess,” Maya said.

  “I think I see what you’re getting at,” Frankie said. “You were really scared that a bad thing would happen, and then a bad thing did happen, and it was bad, but you were okay.”

  “Yeah,” Ravi said. “Exactly. No matter what happens, Maya, you’re going to be okay. I know it’s hard, but that’s what I remind myself when I go onstage.”

  Before they could talk about it any more, the door opened and their kindergarten buddies streamed in. Violet ran to Frankie and wrapped her arms around Frankie’s waist. “Do you want to see a magic trick?” Violet asked.

  “You bet I do,” Frankie answered.

  Violet held up a wooden coin. “Do you think I can make this coin disappear?”

  “I do!” Frankie said.

  “Me too,” Maya agreed.

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘That’s impossible!’ ” Violet told them.

  “Oh,” Maya said. “Let’s try again.”

  Violet nodded. “Do you think I can make this coin disappear?”

  “No way!” Frankie said.

  “That’s impossible!” Maya said.

  Violet held the coin up in her hand and showed both sides. She carefully placed it in her palm, then curled her palm into a fi
st. “Abracadabra!” she said. When she opened her fist, the coin was gone.

  Of course Maya and Frankie knew how the trick worked, but they both clapped. “Amazing!” Frankie said.

  “I’ve been practicing for hours and hours,” Violet said.

  “Maybe she should be your assistant,” Maya said. Her smile faded into a frown.

  “Really?” Violet asked.

  Frankie shook her head. “Sorry, Violet. Maya is my one and only assistant. But you keep working on your tricks, and you’ll be a magician in no time.”

  “Girls,” Ms. Cupid said. “Let’s settle down.”

  Frankie took Violet over to the floor cushions while Maya went with Toby to read books. “Do you want to read a story?” Frankie asked.

  “I learned a new card game,” Violet told her. “I brought my card holder.” She waved the paper plate card holder at Frankie.

  “Hey,” Frankie said. “Let me see that.”

  Violet handed the card holder to Frankie. Frankie examined it closely. “Handle,” she mumbled, looking at the clothespins. “Good and strong. Easy to hold on to.” She turned it around. It was a really simple design. Two half circles made from paper plates were held together tightly so that the player could slide a card in and it wouldn’t fall out. The holder would be perfect for tricks where the cards needed to be fanned out. For the tricks where the deck needed to be stacked up, though, the holder wouldn’t work. The deck was too thick to fit.

  “Frankie?” Violet asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re talking like a robot. Did you turn into a robot?”

  “No, I—”

  “Because I think I could use a robot. Every unicorn princess from outer space could use a robot.”

  Frankie almost responded to that statement. She figured it was probably true that if there were unicorn princesses in outer space, they would have robots. But she was too focused on the card holder. The way it was designed wouldn’t work for Maya and their card tricks, but it was making her wheels turn. She could make her own special card holder, one just perfect for Maya the Magnificent.

  “Frankie?” Violet asked again.

  But she wasn’t going to simply copy Violet’s card holder. She was going to improve it.

  “Are you okay?” Violet asked her.

  “Yes,” Frankie said. “I’m better than okay. You just helped me come up with my next great invention—and saved the talent show.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Making the Hand

  FRANKIE’S IDEA ITCHED INSIDE HER all day. When school was out, she burst through the doors and raced down the stairs past her waiting mom.

  “It must be an invention day,” she heard her mom say to one of the dads.

  “Come on, Mom!” Frankie called over her shoulder. Her mom caught up with her, and Frankie immediately started talking. “It’s a hand, Mom! Mr. Winklesmith was right. I need to give her a hand. A hand that can hold the cards even when she shakes, so that she can still do the card tricks.”

  When they got home, Frankie took the front steps of their house two at a time and didn’t even stop in the kitchen for a snack. She went straight to her invention lab. The lab had been a closet, but she and her parents had cleaned it out to make her a work space. She had a small table and a pegboard full of tools. She had crates full of cardboard scraps, Lego bricks, wires, and more.

  She rolled out her stool and sat down. During quiet time at school she had made several sketches, and now she laid the crumpled pages on her desk. The card holder Violet used was just two half circles held together tightly enough that the cards stayed in, but loosely enough for Violet to pull the cards out when she needed to play them. That was fine for some tricks, but Maya needed to be able to hold the whole deck of cards too. She needed a thumb.

  Frankie looked at her supplies. Her design called for a handle and then something flat to hold the cards. She dug through her recycled-materials bin. She found lots of tubes: paper-towel tubes, toilet-paper tubes, wrapping-paper tubes. Any of those might work, but then what would she put the cards on? It needed to be flat and hard.

  She stood up and balanced on one foot. Balancing helped her to concentrate.

  A handle with a flat part. A handle with a flat part. She repeated the words over and over in her head.

  Then it came to her.

  But what she needed wasn’t in her invention lab. It was in the kitchen. She poked her head out of her lab. She could hear music coming from her mom’s office, which meant her mom was hard at work too. Good.

  Frankie walked softly in her sock feet into the kitchen. Next to the stove was a jar full of wooden spoons and whisks and other things her parents used while cooking. Right in the center she found what she needed: a spatula.

  She took it out of the jar. She wasn’t sure what her parents would think about her taking it. She figured that if she made the card holder, she could show it to them. And anyway, she had a lot of allowance saved up. She could buy them a new spatula. She was saving up to buy a robot that she could code, but sometimes inventors had invention emergencies. And this was definitely an emergency.

  Next, she opened up the junk drawer and pulled out an old deck of cards. She would test out the design with old cards to see if there were any problems. She didn’t want to ruin her magic deck.

  The hard part was figuring out how to keep the cards in place. She wanted a bar that would snap back on top of the cards like a swinging door snapping shut. She found a clothespin and put that on the spatula. It clipped well, but it wouldn’t open up enough to hold all the cards. Her first thought was that she could take the clothespin apart and put it back together, but that didn’t work.

  Back in her invention lab, she looked at her supplies. She balanced the cards on the spatula. It was a pretty narrow spatula, and the cards hung over the edge. “They need something to lean against,” she said. Sometimes when she invented, she talked to herself. She’d once heard it was something many geniuses did.

  She fished a scrap of cardboard out of the recycle bin. She placed it perpendicular to the spatula, the cardboard underneath the plastic. Using duct tape, she attached the two together. Now it looked like she had a T on the end of her spatula. She folded up one edge of the cardboard like a wall. The cardboard made a base for the cards. The cards could sit on the spatula, and the cardboard would keep them from sliding off in that direction.

  Next, she needed something to hold the cards down. The clothespin wouldn’t work, but what if she could make something that pinched like a clothespin? She found a Popsicle stick—from a fudge pop, her favorite—and a rubber band. She cut a slit through the wall part of the cardboard and slid the Popsicle stick through. The Popsicle stick went across the cards and stuck out on both sides. It held the cards down, but not tightly. That was where the rubber band came in. She wrapped the rubber band around the Popsicle stick where it stuck out of the cardboard wall. Then she tugged the rubber band down under the spatula and around to the other end of the stick. She looped the rubber band onto the other end of the Popsicle stick.

  It was perfect! The cardboard kept the cards where they were supposed to be on the spatula while the Popsicle stick and the rubber band worked together to hold the cards snug against the spatula. When she took part of the deck out, the rubber bands pulled the Popsicle stick down and held the remaining cards tightly. She could even swing the card holder around and the cards didn’t fall out.

  She put her new invention down on the table. It worked perfectly, but she was a little disappointed when she looked at it. It looked like a spatula with cardboard and a Popsicle stick attached to it. It didn’t look magical or special at all.

  She frowned. But then she thought about what Lila had said about fancy magician costumes. As much as Frankie hated to admit it, Lila was right. Magic was all about the show, the glitz, the sparkle. Luckily, Frankie had plenty of flair. She added ribbons to the end of the spatula and covered the handle in shimmery red fabric. “Ta-da!” she announced. “
I give you . . . the Great Card-ola! A new magic device that every self-respecting magician will want in her magic bag.”

  “Is that my spatula?”

  Frankie turned around. Her mother stood in the doorway.

  “It was the family spatula,” Frankie said. “Now it’s the Great Card-ola.”

  Her mom frowned. “Frankie,” she said. “You can’t just take the spatula.”

  “But look,” Frankie said. She showed her mom how the Card-ola worked. “See? When Maya’s onstage, she can still hold the cards, even if she shakes from nerves.”

  Her mom said, “You owe me a spatula.” But she was smiling a little, so Frankie figured she wasn’t in too much trouble. And anyway, she had saved the talent show. She could handle being in a little trouble for that.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Show

  FRANKIE GRINNED AT MAYA. MAYA tried to smile back, but she looked more like a bear showing her teeth.

  They were backstage. Ravi was onstage, finishing up his comedy routine. His jokes had actually been funny, and people were practically rolling in the aisles laughing.

  Maya’s lips were moving, but Frankie couldn’t hear what she was saying. Frankie leaned in closer.

  “I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine,” Maya whispered over and over.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Frankie asked.

  Maya didn’t answer at first. She sank farther back, as if she wanted to disappear into the curtain. But then she whispered, “Yes.”

  Frankie grinned. “Good,” she said.

  Onstage, Ravi told a joke that made the audience groan. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ve got one more for you. Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?” the audience called back.

  “Thank,” he said.

  “Thank who?” they replied.

  “Thank you!” he said, and the audience started clapping.

  When he had cleared the stage, Ms. Frost spoke into the microphone. “Up next we have the Great Francesca, Empress of Magic, and her marvelous assistant, Maya the Magnificent!”