I’d long been aware Houdini died years ago—from appendicitis, people said, spurred by a punch to the stomach—yet here he was, still eluding every trap possible. Including the grave.

By the film’s end, the art of escape became more than a tool to rein in my fears and reduce my nightmares.

It was an all-out obsession.

Chapter 21

Although viewed as an oddity by the other schoolgirls, my career aspirations flourished. Throughout the rest of junior high, I studied countless piles of Houdini’s publications, along with illusions from legends Howard Thurston and Maurice Raymond and loads of others. And naturally, I attended every pertinent show in the area I could afford: carnival acts, vaudeville shows, small-time varieties.

Then based on my notes and drawings, I’d create pseudo-reenactments at home, where Arie served as a—mostly willing—volunteer from my imaginary audience. Doubling as my assistant, on my cues of “Presto!” he’d slip in and out of my makeshift enclosures. This included vanishing inside them, as such tasks remained impossible for me. Meanwhile, my sleights with rings, ropes, and kerchiefs became an absolute breeze.

“The Fabulously Fantastical Fenna,” I called myself, sometimes swapping in “Fanciful” or “Fabled” depending on my mood. If not for its corniness, I’d have opted for “Fairylike” solely as a tribute. At a performance of The Nutcracker hosted by our local church, while Arie fought off yawns and Mrs. Jansen issued pinches to interrupt her husband’s snores, I became rapt with the Sugar Plum Fairy—her hand movements in particular. As if swaying underwater, they were practically hypnotic with a graceful calm I’d thereafter channel into my gestures in magic and illusion.

Still, not until the summer following my freshman year did I dare a public debut. The local junkyard wasn’t the most glamorous of settings, but it offered a mishmash of seats and a passable stage made of pallets. I advertised with flyers, which Hendrik Smit—the first boy I met in Amesboro—sweetly agreed to post in shop windows during his telegram rounds. Tickets were three cents each, effectively reducing Mrs. Jansen’s gripes about our “foolish wasting of time.”

By our third show, however, the amassing of threadbare kids and even whole families who’d come to watch from a distance caused us to reevaluate our price. Despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, scores of folks were still facing hardships. And so we changed our fee to “donations welcome.”

As expected, Mrs. Jansen fumed over each red cent that could have added to her son’s savings, which was mainly accrued from his shifts at the auto factory on nights and weekends. She was well aware, as we all were, of his hopes to attend college in Grand Rapids and become an engineer. In truth, given his struggling in mathematics senior year, the end goal did start to appear overambitious.