54

JUST LIKE ON
THE HEALTH CHANNEL.

There was just one more thing to do. Operate on Bitsie.

I thought it was going to be easy. I just had to take out his mecs and put them in the old puppet double. Bitsie’d seen it done a million times so he was going to walk me through it. He would have done it himself, of course, but those four-fingered foam hands of his weren’t really suited to surgery.

The problem was I’d stepped on his head. Remember? I wasn’t thinking about his mecs then. I was just thinking about getting him out that window. So all those little rods and springs that a normal puppet needs to move his eyes and flutter his eyelids were completely banged up. Ruined. Useless.

I admit it. I had a little cry about that. I was so tired by then. I just couldn’t face one more thing.

Bitsie didn’t hug me this time, but he did scamper off to the staff lounge and bring me some food. Somebody’s lunch from 1995 by the looks of it, but I ate it anyway. You know that story about the Canadian doctor who let something go bad by mistake and then realized he’d discovered this amazing new medicine. It was like that. Maybe there’s something in really, really old spaghetti that gives you superhuman energy. Or maybe I just needed a break. Or maybe it just seemed really stupid to give up now.

I don’t know. But I scraped the fuzzy green stuff off and ate the spaghetti and suddenly I felt like I could do anything.

I got out Zola’s toolbox. I saved what I could of Bitsie’s mecs and found some rods and springs and screws in an old workshop. Anything I was still missing I scavenged from Ram. I knew he wasn’t in Monday’s show so I could fix him later. Bitsie and I crawled under the beach house set, where we wouldn’t have to worry about the security guard finding us, and got to work.

By about two in the morning, we had the mecs in and the old double working about as well as Bitsie on a bad day. One eye didn’t always close and the other one tended to wander off to the right, but he could have passed.

I could have got some sleep then, but I didn’t. After everything Bitsie and I had put Zola and Kathleen through, we owed them a working puppet.

By quarter after six, that old double could do the Macarena better than Bitsie. Bitsie wasn’t one hundred percent pleased with that, but I was proud of myself.

I went to the washroom to tidy up. That’s when I realized that I still had those stupid braids on my head. I took them off and looked in the mirror. It was funny. My face hadn’t changed, but I barely recognized myself. I had to say, “So this is me” a couple of times before it felt right.

But then it did feel right. It was a nice feeling, knowing who you are—for a while at least.