I tossed the sponge onto the counter and wiped my hands on my jeans.

“I have to go dig out some sports equipment from my attic.”

“Sports? No one said anything about sports. This deal’s getting worse by the second.”

“I’ll explain later.”

I approached Grandma Dershowitz to crank up her hearing aid and say good-bye, but was distracted by the slurping noise of the final suds being sucked down the drain. I cradled my hands to my chest, wondering how I had made such a stupid mistake as plunging them into a sink with a drain the perfect size for an extending tentacle.

15.

Because Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line was an outdoor production, the auditions were held on a knoll just to the side of Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field, where the football team was packing in an extra weekend practice beneath the jumbotron installers. Two doomed lines of would-be headliners, girls and boys, paired off to read for RoJu’s title roles while Mrs. Leach, the drama coach of the exhausted hair, frowsy hairbands, and floppy sweaters, took notes.

Opposite of where the team was scrimmaging, at the north end of the field, Dad rode his industrial lawn mower around the end zone. The thing had cost a bundle when he’d bought it five years before, but I had to hand it to him—it had already paid for itself. The monstrosity was twice as big as a regular mower and painted a garish gold. The back wheels had been lifted from a defunct monster truck called the Destruckshunator and the huge, eight-wheeled mowing deck stuck out like the wings of a 747. The sixteen-inch discharge chute shot out grass with machine-gun force. Seriously: I’d stood too close before and been bruised by the flying grass.

Thankfully, Dad hadn’t noticed me when I’d arrived for the auditions. In his goggles, work gloves, steel-toed safety boots, allergy mask, and hair net, he looked like a frantic alien nerd piloting a gigantic moon rover, hell-bent on destroying our grassy planet one blade at a time.

I’d been last in line, but now it was one o’clock and I was just one actor away. Studying the pages in my sweaty hands was difficult; Tub had yet to show and I kept visualizing him arriving with Sergeant Gulager, who would haul me off to the nuthouse for my own safety. Just as distracting was the current Romeo’s butchering of the Bard.

“It is my soul that calls upon my name?” Shakespeare’s unfamiliar rhythms had the kid doubting the most fundamental precepts of English. “How silver-sweet sound? Lovers’ tongues by night? Like softest music? To attending ears?”

“Romeo!” his Juliet responded. An easy line, for sure.

“My…niece? Nice? Nessie?”

“Niesse,” Mrs. Leach said for the thirtieth time that day. “It means young hawk.”