Puppet Wrangler by Vicki Grant Read Free Book Online Page A

long time. Bitsie sat flicking his mecs. I cracked my knuckles. After a while it made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was so obvious we were both just trying to bug each other.
    Bitsie snorted too. I knew he was thinking exactly the same thing. He gave his eye mec a major yank and his eyeballs started bouncing around in his head like bingo markers. It was hilarious.
    He may not be real. And he’s definitely irritating.
    But right then I knew he was my friend.

13

HE GROWS ON YOU.
    We just goofed around for another hour or two. Bitsie even let me try puppeteering. It meant sticking my hand up his bum, but it was still a lot of fun.
    Bitsie checked the time and made sure the night watchman wouldn’t be around for a while. Then he hooked everything up for me. The camera. The sound. The lights. Everything. (For a puppet, he’s pretty smart.) We crawled under the set and he put Jimmy’s sweatband 11 around my forehead. It had this little tiny microphone attached to it. And I mean “tiny,” like halfway between a Tic-Tac and a jelly bean. Sort of like a Cherry Nib but black and not as fat. I guess you could say it was more like a Licorice Nib but rounded at the end.
    Anyway, you get the idea.
    Bitsie taped a script on the wall in front of me, then turned on one of the televisions—though, of course, when I called it a television he made this big deal about it being a “monitor.” A Mon-I-Tor, as in “you idiot.” He was shaking his head and snorting as if I’d called it a donut or a bicycle or something. It sure looked like a TV to me. How was I to know it only played back what the camera was recording? I thought the puppeteers were under there watching Seinfeld or something when they weren’t busy.
    I’m not even going to tell you what Bitsie said to that. He a had good laugh at my expense, then finally pulled himself together enough to explain that the puppeteers watch the monitor so they can see what their puppets are doing.
    Bitsie attached these two metal rods to his hands and climbed up onto the set. I stayed underneath and put my right hand over my head, through the set and up his bum.
    He suddenly started screaming like he was in terrible pain.
    I yanked my arm out as fast as I could. I didn’t know what I’d done.
    Nothing of course.
    Bitsie was just doing that to bug me. He couldn’t feel a thing. I mean, he’s a puppet after all! I was sort of embarrassed I even fell for it. How stupid was that?
    When he finally stopped laughing enough that he could stand up, I tried again. I put my right hand up his body and into his head. My fingers were on the top part of his mouth and my thumb was on the bottom. That made him talk in a funny voice, sort of the way you do when the dentist has her hand in your mouth. He told me to take the cord that was hanging out of his insides with my left hand. There was this little springy thing at the end of it that looked exactly like the gizmo Dad has on his camera. The one he uses to snap family pictures when he wants to be in the photo too.
    You know, that long cord thing. Sort of like a TV remote for picture-taking except it’s attached to the camera.
    Maybe you don’t. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know exactly what it looked like. It was just the thing that made Bitsie’s eyes move. His eye mec.
    Depending how you squeezed it, you could make his eyes blink or move side to side or up and down. My left hand is pretty klutzy for starters, so I was already thinking I’d never be able to do this. Then Bitsie made me hold the rods that move his arms with my left hand too.
    According to Bitsie, “all I had to do” now was read the lines on the script stuck to the wall, move his mouth in time to the words and make him wave goodbye to his “friends at home.” It was “easy.” I just had to watch Bitsie on the monitor. I could see everything I was doing as I