“Hey Johnny Thyme,” Boris said, “you got a dollar on you?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t a lie. As it turned out, I didn’t have a dollar on me. I had spent my extra money buying one of the pretzels the PTA ladies were selling in the cafeteria after lunch. But I was glad I didn’t have a dollar, because I didn’t want to give it to him.

  “All I find I keep,” Boris said.

  He stuck his hands in the front pockets of my jeans. With his hands like that, it would have been so easy to punch him or slam my elbow against his head. It was tempting, but I didn’t. I was scared. I didn’t want to get into a fight and risk losing my job as Ricky Corvette’s stuntman. Boris hadn’t actually threatened me, but the threat was implied.

  When he didn’t find anything in my front pockets, Boris checked my back pockets. I could smell his cigarette breath as he reached around me.

  “Lucky you weren’t lying, Thyme,” he said when my back pockets proved to be empty too. “It’s not nice to lie.”

  “It’s not nice to steal money either,” I mumbled under my breath.

  “What did you say?”

  I looked around. The hallway was empty. Nobody was going to bail me out if I got into a fight.

  “Nothing.”

  “Thyme,” Bonner said, sticking his face next to mine, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to bring me a dollar. On Monday. Bring it to school first thing in the morning. I’ll meet you at the front of the school. Understand?”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “I’m low on cash.”

  “So am I.”

  “That’s too bad, Thyme. Just bring me a dollar.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “If you don’t,” Bonner said, making a fist, “I’m gonna beat the crap out of you.”

  As Bonner walked away from me, I suddenly realized my heart was racing. I hadn’t noticed it while he was shaking me down, but now that he was gone, my chest was pounding. I never should have given him that first dollar, I thought. It didn’t get rid of him. It only showed him I was weak. Now I’d never get rid of him.

  As I walked home from school cursing myself for being so stupid, I couldn’t help but think about Ricky Corvette. How come this sort of thing never happened to him, I wondered? Why is it that some kids lead a charmed life where everything always goes right?

  I read Ricky’s whole story in People magazine. When he was just a baby, his mother brought him to a modeling agency. He gurgled and cooed and laughed on cue. The camera loved him. By the time he was three, his picture had been on the package of every diaper, rattle, and stuffed animal in Toys “R” Us.

  When he was five, Ricky beat out about a thousand other kids and landed the role of the adorable little boy with the cute voice on Out of This World. It was a dippy sitcom about a wacky family who move into the Mir space station after the astronauts move out. It was an instant hit, and suddenly everybody in America knew Ricky’s name. The show ran for four years.

  Apparently, Ricky’s folks had trouble handling his success. His dad was a construction worker, and he didn’t like the fact that his eight-year-old son made ten times more money than he did. He walked out on the family one day and didn’t come back.

  A year later, he had the nerve to sue Ricky and Ricky’s mom. He claimed that he had supported the family during the years Ricky was growing up, so he was entitled to part of Ricky’s future earnings—millions of dollars. The story was all over the tabloids. It was the first time a parent ever sued his own kid. Ricky’s dad actually won the case, giving new meaning to the term child support.

  Getting dragged through the courts made people feel sorry for Ricky. That made him more popular than ever and gave him more publicity. So he made more millions, and his dad wanted even more money. It was a real mess.

  Come to think of it, Ricky Corvette’s life wasn’t so charmed after all.

  Anyway, when Out of This World went off the air, Ricky made the jump to movies. He’s a terrible actor, but he was in the right place at the right time, as usual. Skate Fever hit the theaters just as skate-boarding and in-line skating were getting hot. All across America—and around the world—kids were trading in their balls, pucks, and racquets for Rollerblades, snowboards, mountain bikes, and other tools of the new “extreme sports.”

  Everybody in my school went to see Skate Fever, some of them over and over again. The movie made hundreds of millions of dollars. Ricky Corvette became a movie star. I was dying to tell everybody that it was me up there on the screen, not Ricky. But my contract, of course, prohibited telling anybody.

  I did all of Ricky’s stunts in Skate Fever II, Skate Fever III, and Nightmare in L.A. Roland directed them all. They were awful movies, but they were all hits. As Ricky became a Hollywood heavyweight, Roland was getting a reputation as the hot new director in town.

  In those first few movies, Ricky had to do a lot of acting. But it didn’t take long for the movie studio to figure out that audiences weren’t coming to Ricky Corvette movies to see him act. They were coming to see Ricky jump off high objects, fly through the air, get himself into impossible predicaments and find a way out of them. All the stuff that I was actually doing in his place.

  Every Ricky Corvette movie got more and more action oriented. By the time we made New York Nightmare, Ricky was hardly doing any acting at all.

  So that’s why I didn’t spend my weekend worrying about Boris Bonner. I spent it risking my life at the top of the PsychoClone, the biggest and baddest roller coaster in the world.

  We were filming a new action flick called Great Adventure. Here’s the plot, if you can stomach it: The teenage daughter of the president of the United States invites her whole class to an amusement park for the day to celebrate the end of school. Some escaped prisoners who had been hiding out for a week in the haunted mansion find out the president’s daughter is coming. They decide it would be the perfect opportunity to kidnap her. They do, threatening to kill her unless the president allows them to leave the country.

  The girl finally gets rescued by a kid working in a cotton candy booth. He captures all the convicts and locks them up in the Ferris wheel cars until the police arrive to take them back to jail. The movie ends with the president pinning the Medal of Honor on the cotton candy vendor, who then plants a kiss on the “First Daughter.”

  Pretty sappy, huh?

  The president’s daughter was being played by the beautiful Augusta Wind. The cotton candy vendor was the one and only Ricky Corvette.

  The climax of the film was the roller coaster scene. Roland and I worked all day on it. This was no run-of-the-mill dive-off-a-building gag. The script called for me to leap off a moving coaster.

  It wouldn’t be so tough on most roller coasters, but PsychoClone was no ordinary coaster. There was a sign at the bottom that said:

  PERSONS ARE NOT ALLOWED ON THIS RIDE IF THEY ARE PREGNANT, SUFFER FROM A HEART CONDITION, MOTION SICKNESS, BACK PROBLEMS…OR HAVE A BRAIN IN THEIR HEAD.

  Roland and I went over every inch of the track. The coaster starts with an eighty-foot lifthill, which immediately drops you into a 360-degree loop, followed by a boomerang, a corkscrew, and seven inversions. The top speed reaches seventy-two miles per hour at one point. At the top of one of the loops, there are three Gs pulling on your body.

  If the riders haven’t lost their lunch by that point, they still have to make it through six turning vertical dives, a 53-degree, 115-foot drop, and a two-story spiral. Then the whole sequence is repeated—backward!

  It’s tough enough to ride the PsychoClone when you’re strapped into your seat, holding on for dear life. I would have to do it while a guy was trying to strangle me from behind with piano wire.

  “It’s going to be a piece of cake, Mr. Hangtime,” Roland announced into his bullhorn. “I’ll meet you at McDonald’s.”

  I climbed down from the top and hopped into the first car. The actor playing the convict trying to kill me got into the seat behind me. He had a dummy next to him. A bunch of teenage extras—non-actors who fill out a crowd—climbed into the rest of the seats.

  “Roll cameras!” bellowed Roland, and the coaster eased up the first incline. Roland had cameras positioned all over the track so he could shoot the action from many different angles.

  We were halfway up the hill when the guy behind me—as instructed—slipped the wire over my head and around my neck. I reached up to protect my throat, and we struggled like that through the 360-degree loop.

  While we were spinning through the boomerang, I managed to get the wire off my head. We wrestled with each other as the coaster shot through the corkscrew. In the middle of one of the inversions, I grabbed hold of the guy and threw him overboard to his death.

  Actually, I grabbed hold of the dummy and threw that overboard, while the actor ducked below his seat. With all the screaming and the scenery flying by, the audience, hopefully, wouldn’t notice.

  My character appeared to think everything was fine, but during the vertical dive, another bad guy in the back car pulled out a gun and started shooting at me. Blanks, of course. I leaned forward and ducked my head. The bad guy fired off six shots. They ricocheted off the coaster. His seventh shot was a click. He was out of bullets.

  The coaster slowly started climbing the last 115-foot lifthill. While leaning forward, I grabbed a prop umbrella, which had been placed at my feet. As the bad guy reloaded his gun, I popped open the umbrella and stepped up on my seat.

  The coaster was at the crest of the hill now, about to shoot down the drop. Just as the bad guy was about to pull his trigger again, I jumped off the coaster, holding the umbrella. The coaster slid down the drop and I floated gently down.

  It was difficult to control the umbrella, which had been specially designed to work like a parachute. When I hit the air bag placed on the ground alongside the ride, I twisted my right ankle and felt a sharp pain shoot up my leg. Right away I knew it was a bad sprain.

  “Cut!” Roland screamed. “Awesome! Johnny, you are the man!”

  As I hobbled off, I got a nice round of applause from the crew.

  Meanwhile, Ricky Corvette was at home, probably lying around his pool and working on his tan. Roland would shoot some close-ups of his face later, but today Ricky wasn’t even needed on the set.

  Augusta Wind was, though. When we finished shooting the coaster scene, a limousine pulled up, and Augusta got out with her mother and her hair stylist. I was in a lot of pain, but like everyone else on the set I watched Augusta’s every move. It was impossible to take your eyes off her.

  Augusta didn’t say a word to anybody, but her mom started jawing with Roland. She was upset because she had gone over the script and saw that Augusta only had a few lines to say in the whole movie. Roland promised to give her more, and that seemed to satisfy Augusta’s mother.

  Roland led Augusta to a coaster car that had been taken off the tracks and put on blocks. She stepped into it, followed by an actor holding a knife in his hand. A big fan was turned on to blow Augusta’s hair around.

  For the next half hour, Roland filmed Augusta screaming her head off while the guy held the knife to her throat. For somebody who hardly ever spoke, she sure could scream.

  Finally, Roland yelled “Cut!” He would shoot the background scenes separately and put them together to make it look as though Augusta was on the coaster with the rest of us.

  Her work done for the day, Augusta stepped out of the coaster and followed her mother into the waiting limousine. As usual, she didn’t say a word to anybody.

  My ankle was throbbing, and I should have left the set to care for it, but I couldn’t stop staring at Augusta. What does a girl that beautiful think about, I wondered? Does she think at all? Can anyone that beautiful have any problems in her life?

  I couldn’t be sure, and maybe it was just wishful thinking, but as Augusta rolled up the window in her limousine, I thought for a moment that she might have smiled at me.

  10

  MIXED UP

  Mom put ice on my ankle when we got home. That made the swelling go down, but she insisted on taking me to the doctor. He didn’t put me in a cast or anything, but he had me fitted with a plastic brace to keep my ankle from moving. He gave me a pair of crutches and instructed me to use them for a week, even if the ankle felt fine.

  When I got to school on Monday morning, Boris Bonner was waiting on the front steps. In all the excitement over the roller coaster stunt, I had forgotten that Bonner told me to bring in a dollar to school or he was going to beat me up.

  Bonner took one look at me hobbling up the steps on crutches and broke into hysterical laughter. Some of the other kids turned to see what was so funny.

  “Wimp!” he screamed gleefully. “Loser! Thyme, I can’t believe you would lower yourself to faking an injury so I wouldn’t beat you up!”

  “I’m not faking an injury,” I said, struggling up the steps. “I sprained my ankle.”

  “How?” Bonner asked gleefully. “You don’t take gym. You don’t play sports. You don’t do anything!”

  “I…tripped on my steps,” I said.

  “You are so pathetic, Thyme!” Bonner chortled. “You’re not a man, you’re a wimp.”

  As I hobbled past the line of laughing kids, for the first time in three years, I thought about giving up stunting. If I quit doing stunts, I would be like any other kid. I could take gym. I could go to dances. I could ride escalators. I could do anything I wanted. That included hauling off and socking a jerk like Boris Bonner if he gave me any trouble. And Mom would be thrilled if I quit.

  For the time being, though, doing stunts was the one thing that allowed me to get away from my problems. The only time I could ever forget about people like Boris Bonner was when I was on a movie set, jumping off a building or doing some other crazy stunt.

  I was all mixed up.

  11

  BLOWING STUFF UP

  “Let’s blow something up today!” Roland exclaimed as he walked around the set, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “Anybody else in the mood to blow something up?”

  Everybody agreed that blowing something up would be a terrific idea. The guys on movie crews always love blowing stuff up. This business must attract pyromaniacs. Personally, I think explosions are pretty cool, but I’d rather see them in the movies than in person.

  My ankle had healed quickly. We were gathered at Buckeye Municipal Airport near Phoenix, Arizona. They had closed down part of the airport for the day so we could shoot this scene for Great Adventure. Roland had waited for a clear day with very little wind.

  There were two planes on the ground, a new blue Cessna 150 and a red two-seater Jenny from the World War I era. The Jenny is a biplane, which means it has two sets of wings, one below the cockpit and the other above it. The cockpit is open to the wind.

  Roland and the crew were going over camera angles, safety precautions, and a million other details when Mom drove up in the old Ford Maverick she should have traded in years ago. Behind the Maverick was our horse trailer. As soon as I saw Squirt inside, I relaxed a little.

  Squirt was a beautiful golden palomino that used to belong to my dad. I sort of grew up with him. When Dad died, Mom wanted to sell Squirt or give him away. It’s expensive to feed and take care of a horse, and Mom told me we needed to save every penny we had.

  I begged her not to get rid of Squirt, and she could see how much he meant to me. She agreed to let me keep him after one of the first stunts I did called for me to ride a horse. Squirt turned out to be a fine actor and stunt horse, so the studio paid Mom to use him in the film. He had been my stunt horse a number of times since then, so we could afford to keep him.

  As she got out of the car, Mom had a worried expression on her face. It’s the same expression she always has when I’m about to do a stunt. I said hi and backed Squirt out of the trailer. Roland came over to greet Mom with his usual enthusiasm.

  “Meredith!” Roland bubbled. “How is it possible that you become more lovely with each passing day?”

  “Roland, I need to talk to you,” Mom said, ignoring his compliment and waving the script before him. “This scene makes no sense at all. The story is about the relationship between the president’s daughter and this kid. The horse and plane stunt has nothing to do with anything. It doesn’t move the story forward at all. It’s totally superfluous.”

  “Superfluous” is one of Mom’s favorite words. It means unnecessary. Mom reads all my scripts, and whenever she gets to one of my stunt scenes, she always says it’s superfluous.

  Roland took the script from Mom and looked it over for a few seconds. Then he pinched the pages between both hands, tore the script in half, and threw the pages up in the air. They scattered down the runway.

  “Meredith,” he said, wrapping an arm around Mom, “I’m perfectly aware that the horse and plane stunt doesn’t move the story forward. I know that it’s superfluous. And I don’t give a flying fondue! The whole movie is superfluous!”

  “So why do you have to shoot it?” Mom asked.

  “Simple,” Roland explained. “Moviegoers don’t care about the relationship between two kids. They want to see somebody fall out of a plane and land on a horse. They want to see the plane explode in a huge fireball.”

  “That can’t be true,” Mom protested. “People have more brains than that.”

  “Sadly, it is true. You see, Meredith, people don’t need to come to their local cineplex to see relationships. They can see relationships around their kitchen table every night. I want to give them something they can’t see at home. Something they can’t experience watching TV. Something they’ve never seen anywhere. I want to amaze people. I want to hear the audience say, ‘How in the world did they do that?’”

  “Then why don’t you just make a movie with no dialogue at all?” Mom blustered. “Just wall-to-wall stunts from start to finish.”