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  DEDICATION

  For

  Amy Berkower

  Joanna Cotler

  Karen Hesse

  and

  Karin Leuthy

  for their

  wise words

  good counsel

  and friendship

  SCENES

  Dedication

  The Cast

  Boy Wonder

  What They Call Him

  The Attic

  Home

  The Genius

  Tapping

  Tryouts

  Practice

  Leaping

  Then and Now

  Pietro and Nunzio

  Improvising

  Papa’s Script

  Obsessed

  The Shoes

  The Relatives

  Papa

  The Bird

  The Abysmal Cast

  Many Papas

  Goals

  Chores

  Discussions

  The Microscope

  Chili Bear

  The Relatives Return

  Crash, Smash, Crumple

  Splat

  Agony

  The Album

  Rosaria

  The Old Crone

  Worries

  Rehearsals

  Jitters

  The Play

  The News

  Finale: What We Did Today

  Mr. Beeber’s Play: Rumpopo’s Porch

  Excerpt from The Boy on the Porch

  1

  2

  3

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Also By Sharon Creech

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE CAST

  LEO’S FAMILY

  Leonardo. . . . . . .

  Sardine and fog boy, 12

  Contento. . . . . . .

  Leo’s moody older sister, 15

  Pietro . . . . . . . . .

  Leo’s younger brother, the athlete, 11

  Nunzio. . . . . . . .

  Leo’s youngest brother, the singer, 8

  Mom. . . . . . . . . .

  (Mariana) Frazzled mother

  Papa . . . . . . . . . .

  (Giorgio) Frazzled father

  AT SCHOOL

  Ruby. . . . . . . . . .

  Leo’s friend; also the donkey

  Mr. Beeber . . . . .

  The drama teacher

  Melanie. . . . . . . .

  Dreadful girl

  Orlando . . . . . .

  A boy who always gets the lead

  THE RELATIVES

  Grandparents . .

  Grandma and Grandpa Navy, who always wear navy blue

  The Aunties . . .

  Pouty Angela, perfect Maddalena, nosy Carmella, and invisible Rosaria

  The Uncles. . . . .

  Peacemaker Guido, quiet Paolo, and traveling Carlo

  The Cousins . . .

  Annoying Tina and Joey

  The Curtain Opens . . .

  BOY WONDER

  From his perch in the maple tree, Leo hears a cry of distress, a high-pitched yelping. He scans the neighborhood, and there, midway down the block, he sees the old woman lying on the sidewalk. Leo leaps from the tree and races down the street.

  “Call the rescue squad!” he orders a neighbor peering from her window.

  Leo reaches the old woman, takes her pulse. It’s weak, fading. “Stand back,” he tells the gathering neighbors as he works at reviving the woman.

  The woman’s eyelids flutter. By the time the wail of the rescue squad car is heard, she is breathing normally, color returning to her cheeks.

  “You saved her life,” the rescue crew tells Leo. “You saved her life!”

  “Hey, sardine! Fog boy! What the heck are you doing? Mom is looking all over for you.”

  Leo blinks and looks around.

  “Did you hear me, sardine? You’re going to be in big trouble—”

  Leo turns. Trouble? Maybe someone needs him. He dashes for home. Maybe he will get there just in time.

  WHAT THEY CALL HIM

  His name is Leonardo, and his friends call him Leo, but his family calls him sardine. This is because once, several years ago, when the relatives were over, shouting and laughing and shaking their fists, Leo got squashed in a corner and cried, and when they asked him why he was crying, he said, “I’m just a little sardine, squashed in a tin.”

  “A sardine?” his brother Pietro said. “A sardine?”

  And everyone laughed and took up the chant: “Leo’s a sardine! Leo’s a sardine!” Leo’s youngest brother, Nunzio, lisps. He calls Leo thardine.

  It is not a good idea to call yourself a sardine in a family like Leo’s, who will not let you forget it.

  When they are not calling him a sardine, they sometimes call him fog boy. “Hey, fog boy!” his older sister Contento calls. “Earth to fog boy—” Some of his teachers even call him fog boy. “Fog boy! Wake up! Get with the program!”

  Once, the drama teacher called him the dreamer, adding that it was not a bad thing to be a dreamer, that all the great writers and artists and musicians were dreamers. Leo wished his teacher would tell his family that.

  THE ATTIC

  It is raining, pouring, the wind beating against the house. Pietro and Nunzio are fighting, Contento is whining, and Leo flees to the attic. The rain pelts the window, seeping in around the edges, dripping in thin streams down the wall. Leo pokes through the dusty boxes, an explorer on the verge of an important discovery.

  Leo unearths a box with his father’s name, GIORGIO, on it. Inside the box, near the top, he finds a small blue leather-bound book with yellowing pages containing his father’s handwriting in small script, brown ink. On the title page: The Autobiography of Giorgio, Age of Thirteen. Leo flips to the middle, where he reads these words, “When I am happy, I tap-dance.”

  Tap-dance? His father? Leo tries to imagine his father so full of happiness that he tap-danced. This is not an easy thing to imagine, as Papa does not seem very happy lately. Leo closes the book, slips it into his pocket, rummages in the box, pushing aside yearbooks and photographs and letters. Near the bottom, wrapped in tissue paper, he discovers a pair of tap shoes, scuffed, wrinkled, and cracked on the sides.

  On the bare wooden floor in the dusty attic, Leo taps. Tappety, tap, scuffle, tappety, tap. He slides across the floor, whirl, tappety, tap, kick.

  Leo is on national television, tapping up a storm. The studio audience has risen to its feet, and they are applauding wildly. The microphone picks up the host’s voice: “Have you ever seen anything like it? Have you ever seen so much talent in such a young performer?”

  Leo taps like mad, spins, leaps over a chair.

  “What is going on up there? Stop that noise! Stop it, you hear me?” Papa bolts up the stairs. “Sounds like stampeding buffalo!”

  “It’s just me,” Leo says. “I was just—”

  “What are you doing? Where did you get those shoes?” Papa spies the opened box. “You’ve been in my things?”

  “I was just—”

  “Don’t you go through my things. Those are my things, what little of my own that I have in this zoo-house.”

  “But were these really yours?” Leo asks. “Did you really tap-dance?”

  Papa scowls at the floor. “Take them off. Put them back.”

  The rain lashes against the window, and the wind rattles the frame as Leo takes off the shoes, rewraps them in the tissue paper, and returns them to the box. His father kicks the box into a corner and stomps downstairs, pulling Leo behind him. Papa doesn’t know that Leo has his little blue book in his pocket, and Leo is not about to tell him.

  As he descends the steps, Leo hears the crowd noise fading, “Brav
o! Bravo, Leo!” He pauses on the steps to bow.

  “Hey, sardine-o!” Pietro shouts. “Your turn to clean the bathroom!”

  HOME

  Leo, Contento, Pietro, Nunzio, and their mother are in the kitchen, a small room with faded green and white wallpaper. Leo’s mother is flinging papers on the floor. “Bills, bills, bills!” she says. Her eyes roam the room.

  “Nunzio-bunzio,” she says, “what’s with the fidgeting? Set the table.”

  Contento, who is fifteen and the oldest, says, “There’s no lettuce. You’re expecting me to make a salad without lettuce?”

  Mom peers in the refrigerator. “Aye yie yie!”

  Thwomp! The noise diverts her attention. “Pietro? You dropped the meatballs? And you’re putting them back in the bowl?”

  Pietro shrugs. “It was the sardine’s fault.”

  “Was not,” Leo says.

  “Stupido, stupido!” their mother says.

  Nunzio, little Nunzio, echoes his mother. “Thupido, thupido!”

  Mom slaps a wooden spoon on the counter. Thwack! “Might as well cart me away to the asylum right now.”

  It is all noise and confusion, and Leo feels invisible and wants to press the stop button and rewind.

  Leo sees Papa coming up the walk, pulling at his tie, yanking it as if it is strangling him.

  “Papa’s home,” Leo announces.

  Leo’s mother raises her hands toward the ceiling, as if she is beckoning help from above. “Aye yie yie! Clean up this mess. You know how your father hates a mess!”

  Papa slogs in through the door, pouchy bags under his eyes, a mustard stain on his shirt. He glances at the meatballs on the floor, the sauce splattered on the stove and countertops. “A man should have to come home to this?” He turns, stomps back outside, slamming the door behind him. Wham!

  His wife calls after him. “And who makes you so lucky, that you get to leave? Do I get to leave? No!”

  “You want to leave?” Leo asks.

  Mom says, “Yes! Look at you, all of you, a band of noisy goats!”

  Goats. Sardine. Fog boy.

  Leo sits at the table in the nook at one end of the kitchen and presses a piece of peeling wallpaper against the wall. The lights have dimmed, and he hears music, a rousing march.

  “So how was school today?” his mother asks.

  Leo says, “I’m trying out for the school play!”

  Contento says, “I’m on the soccer team!”

  Pietro says, “I’m on the football team!”

  Nunzio says, “I’m in the choir!”

  And their mother says, “What amazing children I have been blessed with!” and their father beams down on all of them and says, “Sí, sí, amazing children.” He turns to Leo. “And you, most especially!” he says. “An actor! Think of it!”

  Pietro elbows Leo. “Hey! Fog boy! Sardine! Wake up! Did you hear me? Pass the meatballs!”

  THE GENIUS

  Alone in the room Leo shares with his brothers, he opens his father’s blue leather-bound book, his Autobiography, Age of Thirteen, and stares at the photographs pasted there: one of his father at age two (according to the notation below the picture), sitting on a porch, arms raised high, as if he is reaching for the sky; and one of his father at twelve, in shorts, barefoot, sitting on porch steps, smiling. The boy does not look like his father, but he seems vaguely familiar.

  When Leo hears stomping on the stairs, he slides the book under his pillow, pulls a novel from a stack on the floor, and pretends to read. Contento clomps into the room in a rage, kicking his bed.

  “Sardine! Where is Pietro?” she fumes. “I am going to kill him! Kill, kill, kill him!”

  “Why?”

  “A thousand reasons! That little creep.”

  “But what did he—”

  “A thousand things! That donkey!”

  “But—”

  Contento is steaming. “Is that all you can say? But? But? But? Why? Why? Why? And are you reading again? Do you ever take your nose out of a book? You’re going to turn into a little blind mole.”

  Leo’s brothers and sister vaporize into the ether, leaving Leo an only child, a beloved only child, whose parents dote on him.

  “You are our genius!” his father says. “Look at this,” Papa says to Leo’s mother. “He’s written a whole novel! One thousand pages!”

  “I know!” his mother says. “And it’s brilliant! The characters are so vivid—”

  “And the plot mesmerizing!” his father adds.

  The telephone rings. It’s the Today show.

  “Oh, please, Leo, please will you appear on our show tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Leo says. “Happy to oblige.”

  “We’ll send a limousine to pick you up. . . .”

  TAPPING

  Where is everyone? Out scurrying around, the way they do: Mom running errands (“Aye yie yie!” she says. “My life is slave and errand girl!”), Contento at soccer practice, Pietro at football practice, Nunzio with the choir, Papa at work.

  So here is Leo. Home. Alone. That rarely happens. Alone!

  Leo is a spy, an investigator, roaming from room to room, touching things he’s not allowed to touch (Papa’s cigars, Mom’s pearls, Contento’s magazines, Pietro’s comic books, Nunzio’s wooden horses), king of the house, all by himself. In the kitchen, he climbs onto the counter and reaches the top shelf, pulls down the tin of brownies, hidden so no one will eat them. Leo eats twelve.

  Round and round the house he goes, up and down the stairs. King!

  Up into the attic, pawing through the box with GIORGIO scrawled on the side. Snares the tap shoes.

  Tappety, tap! Whirl, leap, bow, slide. What a feeling—full of taps, completely free, able to do anything!

  TRYOUTS

  Leo studies the script for the class play, Rumpopo’s Porch, written by the drama teacher, Mr. Beeber. It’s a short play about a poor old man, Rumpopo, living alone in the woods. Rumpopo fears his life is over and no one cares about him, but then two abandoned children arrive, and when Rumpopo tells them stories, the three of them create a magical world with golden palaces and emerald tables. Everything is transformed: the old man, the children, the tumbledown house. Leo loves this play.

  There are other characters, too: villagers, an old crone, a dog, and even a talking donkey. The people speak in a funny, old-fashioned way. They say “aye,” and “kind sir,” and other phrases that make Leo laugh. Leo studies the part of Rumpopo, who seems to be the star of the play. Students can try out for roles in the play, or they can choose to be on the set construction team. Leo hopes he will get a role.

  On his way to tryouts, Leo is nervous, fidgety, uneasy. He’s been in only three plays before, when he was five, eight, and ten. In the first play, he was a tree. His bark fell off. In the second play, he was an angel. His wings fell off. In the third play, he was a bystander, and he had his first and only line: “Is he hurt?” Leo had practiced that line a thousand, thousand times, but when the time came, what he said onstage was, “Is he glurt?”

  Glurt? Glurt? It wasn’t even a word. People sniggered on the stage and in the audience. Glurt! Leo wanted to die, wanted to take back his glurt and deliver his line the way he had rehearsed it, but already the play was moving on, and there was nothing to do but witness his terrible glurt swirling in the air, and to hear his brothers chant “Glurt, glurt, glurt!” all the way home in the car.

  So, there he is at the tryouts for Rumpopo’s Porch, hoping to read for—and get—the part of Rumpopo. He will say, as Rumpopo, “Aye, my bones ache,” and “My life is empty,” and then he will tell about the emerald table, and on like that, with such feeling he will say his lines, yes, he will.

  When Leo is asked to read the part of Rumpopo, he does so, flawlessly and with emotion. The room is silent. Mr. Beeber is in awe of his talent.

  The cast list is posted, and there is Leo’s name next to the part of Rumpopo. A star is born!

  The telephone rings. “Le
o? Please can you come on 60 Minutes? We want to do a special about your amazing acting—”

  “Leo? Leo?”

  It is two hours into the tryouts, and the director, Mr. Beeber, is tired of keeping everyone in order, tired of hearing students stumble through the script. Wearily, he motions for Leo and six others to do a scene with the old crone and the villagers.

  “Leo? Did you hear me? Read the part of the old crone, please.”

  Leo does not want to be an old crone. He does not even know what an old crone is. But he wants Mr. Beeber to hear him speak dramatically, and so he reads his one line, “Ah, yes, the wicked children,” and he tries to make the word wicked sound extremely wicked. Leo hopes that Mr. Beeber will sense that he is made for the part of Rumpopo, and that when Mr. Beeber finalizes the cast, he will make this wise choice.

  And so, with great hopes, he seeks out the cast list posted outside the drama room the next day. Dreadful Melanie Morton, she of the golden hair and freckled nose, has the part of Lucia, the second-biggest role. Orlando, who played the lead in last year’s play, has the part of Rumpopo. Leo reads all the way down the cast list. There at the bottom, he sees his name, next to old crone.

  The bad news: he is a nobody, an unknown, and an old crone, to boot.

  The good news: at least he is not the talking donkey. That part goes to his friend Ruby.

  The really bad news he learns later: the old crone is an old woman.

  “Not to worry!” Mr. Beeber tells Leo when he protests that he is a boy and should not have to play the part of an old woman. “In Shakespeare’s time, boys played all the women’s roles.”

  “This is not Shakespeare’s time,” Leo mumbles.