Enthusiasm Page 15

  I heard very little of what my teachers said that day. I lived in reverie. Mr. Klamp said, “Julie, snap out of it” twice, then gave up on me. Ms. Nettleton asked me to read aloud, and I did, but I have no idea what scene I read, even though it was from Pride and Prejudice; I didn’t hear a word I was saying. Instead, I relived the night before. How much of it I had slept through! How much I had wasted! What did it mean?

  On the way to Forefield, my heart beat harder than it had since the first day of rehearsals. My eyes found Parr as soon as I arrived. He stood in the back but faced the doors, as if he were waiting for me. He looked right at me and smiled. I met his eyes as long as I could, then looked down, blushing. The intensity was too much for me.

  The theater was buzzing, as if in sympathy with my heart. A group of actors greeted us excitedly. “Have you guys heard?” said Emma. “Do you know about the disaster?”

  “What disaster?” said Ashleigh.

  “The sets. Mr. Hatchek got fired. The sets aren’t even half done, and nobody can find his plans,” said Ravi.

  “Why’d he get fired?” I asked.

  Chris was lounging a little apart, as if he considered himself above the conversation, but I noticed he still managed to hear what we were saying. “An unspeakable scandal,” he said nonchalantly, with, however, a trace of satisfaction.

  “What are you talking about? What does that mean?”

  “Nobody knows,” he answered. “Except the administration, presumably. Everybody’s speculating. The second formers think he embezzled the art supply fund, and that’s why you can’t ever find any charcoal.”

  “Whatever it is, there’s no art for the fourth form until they find a new teacher,” said Ravi.

  “But what about the sets? Opening night’s practically next week,” cried Ashleigh.

  “We’ll have to go minimalist,” said Ravi. “Empty stage, no curtain, create the sets with sheer acting and the imagination of the audience.”

  “Or the new teacher could wrestle them into shape, if the school can find one,” said Parr, who was somehow standing at my elbow. How had he gotten there? My heart pounded at the sound of his voice. I leaned closer to him; I couldn’t help it. So much for easy restraint. Our arms touched.

  “Give it a rest, guys, okay?” said Dean Hanson, breaking into our circle. “There’s no unspeakable scandal. But we are looking for a new art teacher.”

  “So will we have new sets, or will we finish the old ones?” asked Emma.

  “That’s for the new teacher to decide, assuming we complete our search this week. Don’t count on it, though. It’s not easy to find someone qualified this late in the year.”

  “Jules—what about your mother?” said Ashleigh suddenly.

  “Who—Mom?” I asked, like an idiot.

  “Why not? She has an art degree, doesn’t she?”

  “That’s true. She has an MFA. She did a lot of teaching before she married my father.”

  “Is that so, Julie? Well, tell her to send me her resume. As soon as possible,” said the dean. “Now, shouldn’t we all get practicing?”

  That Saturday I went with Seth to a reading at the bookstore in town. I had agreed to go under the impression that other people from our magazine would be there, but the only one I saw was Ms. Nettleton. The author, a small, nervous person with a huge head and tiny hands, read a chapter from a novel in which the narrator’s mother, dying of cancer, recalls in detail her passionate love affair with a wounded soldier in the French Resistance during World War II. Seth listened with rapt interest, leaning slightly toward me in his folding chair. Did he think the reading would put me in the mood?

  As the story rambled from the narrator’s mother’s bedroom into a description of the French countryside, my mind began to wander to recent events in my own bedroom, and then to the stage at Forefield. I realized with a start that I’d left my copy of my Insomnia script, with all my notes in it, on top of the piano where Ned had been using it to rehearse. I had promised to go over Ned’s newest changes with Ashleigh—and unless Ned had remembered them and written them down on his script after rehearsal, I had the only copy.

  Could I get Seth to drive me to Forefield and pick it up? But what if we ran into someone I knew? No, I would just have to apologize to Ashleigh and wait until next week.

  After the reading, I made Seth drop me off at the Lius’ instead of at my father’s, so Dad and Amy wouldn’t have a chance to invite him to dinner again.

  “Hot date?” asked Samantha as he drove away.

  I made a face. “No, thank God. A book reading, and Ms. Nettleton was there.”

  “You could let him know you don’t like him, you know.”

  “I know. But he’s a decent guy, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re going to be mad when you see who you just missed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You had a visitor. Ask your father.”

  Dad looked up when I came in. “Was that Seth’s car? Why didn’t you invite him in?”

  “He had to get back.”

  “Too bad, he could have stayed to dinner. Oh, before I forget, a friend of yours came by looking for you. Grant, or something like that? I told him you were out with your boyfriend, so he gave me this for you. He said you left it at school.” Dad handed me my script.

  My first impulse was to e-mail Parr and deny everything. But what would I say? “Dad’s wrong, Seth isn’t my boyfriend, it’s you I like, but so does Ashleigh and therefore my lips are forever sealed”? I had to content myself with kicking the fluffy pillows Amy had made for my new bed and tearing the flier from the reading into a thousand pieces.

  My mother quit her job at the Nick-Nack Barn and started at Forefield two days later. She went whistling around the house, mostly songs from the play. I was glad to see her happy again.

  Because there was so little time left before Insomnia opened, she scrapped Mr. Hatchek’s elaborate designs and replaced them with simple colored backdrops—slate gray and white for the lab, institutional yellow for the classroom, leaf green for the magical forest. She worked with the fourth-form painting squad as well as Mark, the lighting designer, and his team of techies to create an atmosphere of enchantment using colored scrims—screens that could look opaque or transparent, depending on how the light hit them. I may be biased, but I thought her designs were much more effective than Mr. Hatchek’s fussy backdrops.

  And I wasn’t the only one who approved. Everyone in the production liked Mom, especially little Alcott Fish, who developed a crush on her that made him turn pink and squeak whenever she was nearby. Ashleigh and I laughed about it privately, but we were careful never to let him see that we’d noticed.

  There was one disadvantage to having Mom around, though: no more hanging out with the guys while we waited to be picked up. Mom drove us home as soon as rehearsal ended. I hardly ever got a chance to talk to Parr, and never in private. Not that he seemed eager to talk to me now.

  In a whirl of impersonal activity, I watched what I feared might be my last precious hours in his company drain away.

  That Tuesday, my stepmother arrived a little earlier than usual to pick me up. She and my mother exchanged words of chilly politeness.

  “What was Helen doing there?” asked Amy as we drove away. “Didn’t she remember it was Tuesday?”

  I explained that Mom had a job at Forefield.

  “How nice. I was wondering when she was going to get around to getting a real job. I hope she’s planning to tell your father soon. I think their settlement requires her to inform him within sixty days of any change in income,” said Amy.

  “Of course she is. This is only her third day working there. Has she ever tried to cheat you out of anything that’s yours?”

  “Hmp,” said the Irresistible.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  After dinner, my father cleared his throat. “Julie, now that you have a boyfriend, there�
��s something Amy and I have to talk to you about,” he said. “I know Seth is a trustworthy, reliable young man, and I hope that we’ve taught you some responsibility over the years. And of course, you’re still very young; if we’ve done our jobs right, it will be a long time before you need to use this knowledge. However, I feel that it’s my duty as a physician and a parent—that is, our duty as parents—” (here he gave Amy a saccharine smile, which she returned) “—to make sure you understand—,” etc., etc., etc.

  It was—can you believe it?—the Birth Control Talk.

  The fourth one, chronologically speaking: Mom had given me the Talk a few years before, when I first got my period; and it had been repeated two consecutive years in Health and Hygiene, the second time with props, including a banana. Mom kept a you’d-better-not-need-these-but-just-in-case-you-do box of condoms in what I thought of as the Embarrassing Corner of the bathroom, updating them when they passed their expiration dates. (I checked.)

  Hearing Seth’s name coupled with the subject of the Talk made it doubly disgusting. I begged the floor to open and swallow me, as I had done so often during this distressful year. However, it had never yet obeyed. Why should it start now?

  In no time at all, the day of the dress rehearsal arrived. I woke hours early and couldn’t get back to sleep. Just one more day, and I would be singing in public.

  I felt a horrible foreboding, but I dismissed it as stage fright. I slipped on my lucky thumb ring.

  The first hint that something really was wrong came in homeroom. Yolanda sat in uncharacteristic silence, brushing tears away with her tapered fingers.

  “Landa,” I said hesitantly (since she seemed almost quiet enough to be Yvette), “what’s the matter?”

  She gave a little yelp and began to cry audibly.

  I patted her back. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Mom caught Yvette being me.”

  This was serious indeed. In the Gerard household, masquerading as one’s sister was a grounding offense.

  “Oh, no! How long are you down for this time?”

  “Two whole weeks—both of us! We’ll miss the play!”

  Yvette confirmed the news at lunchtime. “I told you we should have switched the nail polish too,” she said bitterly.

  Yolanda started crying again. “Mom never noticed before,” she gulped.

  “That’s ’cause you never wore green before.”

  What would Benjo do? I shuddered to think, but there was no warning him. Forefield boys were forbidden to use cell phones, except during certain evening and weekend hours.

  Ashleigh broke the news as soon as we arrived. It took Benjo a while to understand, since he hadn’t even known about Yvette’s existence, much less her role in his production. As the news sank in, his face grew taut. I watched him pull himself together. He stood up straighter.

  “Is there anything we can do to convince Yolanda’s parents to change their minds?” he asked.

  “Maybe if Ms. Wilson or the dean or somebody goes and talks to them?” said Ashleigh.

  “Maybe my mom,” I suggested. “She’s friendly with Mrs. Gerard.”

  Benjo sent a second former to find the adults in question.

  “Well, there’s nothing else we can do about it today,” he said. “Julie, you’ll have to take over Tanya for now.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “You play Tanya. You know the part, don’t you? You helped them rehearse. I thought you understood—you’re the understudy.”

  “But my part—who’ll play Headmistress Lytle?”

  “Ned can do it.”

  “Uh, Benjo?” said Ashleigh. “Ned’s a guy. He’s a bass.”

  “Well, I know that. He’ll have to be Headmaster Lytle. One thing’s for sure, he knows the part. He’d better—he wrote it. Okay, guys, help me get the cast together so I can make the announcement.”

  Hard as this may be to believe, it wasn’t until Parr said, “So Julia’s going to be Tanya?” that I realized what my new part meant.

  Chapter 20

  My Fifth Kiss ~ Mom to the rescue again ~ Midwinter Insomnia ~ Conservatory flowers ~ Ting is such Sweet Sorrow.

  I dreamed about kissing Parr. Asleep in my bed, awake in my bed, in that limbo between waking and sleeping that’s known as tenth-grade European history, I dreamed about it. But I never dreamed that our first kiss would take place onstage, in front of the entire production of Midwinter Insomnia, including my mother.

  Although this was the dress rehearsal, there was clearly no way to make the twins’ Tanya costume fit me. The clothes I had put on that morning—jeans and a sweater over a long-sleeved, scoop-necked T-shirt—would have to do.

  I stood in Tanya’s position, twirling my thumb ring on my upstage hand and looking out over a sea of furrowed brows. Concern shone from every eye in the audience, which included everyone in the production not actually onstage. I watched them worry: Would I remember my lines? Would my voice carry? Would I ruin the production they all had worked so hard on?

  Gratifyingly, though, after a few minutes the brows began to clear. I was indeed going to remember the lines, my watchers decided one by one. My acting might not be as nuanced as the twins’, my singing voice nowhere near as strong, but at least I wasn’t going to totally flub it. My mother smiled encouragement at me. Part of me began to relax.

  At the same time, though, the rest of me—the better part—began to clench up. For as I stormed at Parr, ordered Alcott Fish around, fell under the spell of the tainted drinking fountain, and fawned over Kevin Rodriguez in his Butthead costume, I knew that the moment I had so often dreamed of was about to arrive, in the most humiliating form imaginable. I would be kissing Parr—Parr, who had been avoiding talking to me, even looking at me—and I’d be doing it in front of an audience. My throat went dry. My voice dropped to a whisper, and Benjo had to say, “Speak up, Julie! Let’s take it again from ‘Do you admit you were a jerk?’ ”

  Then there was no postponing it. As Owen, Parr admitted the error of his ways. As Tanya, I forgave him. He drew me close—and kissed me.

  Was it like kissing Zach? Only the way the merry-go-round is like the Cyclone at Astroland. Only the way sliding down the hill behind the elementary school on your mother’s roasting pan is like skiing down Mont Blanc.

  I was glad I had kissed Zach. Because of that experience, I didn’t flub the kiss onstage any more than I flubbed my lines. I met Parr’s lips head-on, without slipping or crashing, and the outside world went dim.

  When it was over—rather quickly, I think, because I didn’t hear any hooting from the audience, and they must have hooted if the kiss had really lasted as long as it seemed to me—I looked up at Parr. His eyes were opaque, abandoned. He looked as overthrown as I felt. Upstage, out of sight of the crowd, he crushed my left hand in his right. I heard a crack and felt my onyx ring snap in two and fall from my thumb.

  We stood that way for only an instant; then Alcott Fish entered downstage right, Parr spoke his next line, and the rehearsal swept on to its finale. I spoke and sang mechanically, weak as a kitten.

  Afterward, the entire cast and crew gathered around to congratulate me. I was their heroine. I had saved the day, and could now be counted on to save tomorrow too. I looked around for Parr, but it was too public to ask him anything or to tell him anything.

  “Come on, girls, get your coats,” said Mom. “We’d better get going if I’m going to have time to tackle Marie Gerard before bedtime.”

  And that was it. Parr and I parted without a word or a touch. Until tomorrow, that is—and tomorrow’s kiss.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Mom’s mission was successful. Mrs. Gerard agreed to extend the twins’ sentence a week in exchange for their limited release over the next two days.

  “How did you do it?” I asked.

  “I explained the situation. Marie’s a reasonable person,” she said.

  I gave her a doubtful look. Reasonable or not, Mrs. Gerard had never before re
versed a punishment, to my knowledge anyway.

  “Oh, all right. I threw myself on her charity. I told her that I was on trial for a job at the school, and that if I managed to get the girls back in the play, it would impress the dean and maybe land me the job.”

  “Very clever, Mom! That’s worthy of Samantha Liu!”

  “Yes, and it has the advantage of being true.”

  With no clear prospect of another kiss from Parr, then, I dwelled on today’s. What did it mean? I had watched Parr kiss one twin or another dozens of times apiece, but this kiss seemed different. I had never before seen that look in his eyes—drowned, burning, transformed. Even though he’d hardly spoken to me since my father’s horrible remark about Seth, he’d kissed me as if he meant it. I thought it must mean something.

  I thought it must mean he liked me.

  But Ashleigh! Ashleigh. Even if he did like me, that didn’t release me from my obligation to my best friend. As long as she liked him, my hands were tied.

  Had Ashleigh noticed anything strange? Apparently not. “You were wow, Jules!” she cried, bursting through the front door after dinner. “I told you you could do it! Did your mom get Mrs. Gerard to relent? She did? Really? Too bad! I mean, crisp for Yv and Yo, of course, but too bad for you, you were so incredible as Tanya! And Ned was great too. I don’t see why he didn’t want a part in the first place, he has a loudly crisp voice. I loved you in your scenes with Kevin, you were both so, so funny, and you were great with Parr too. You’re a natural. Next time you’ll get a bigger part. No question! You just needed the practice. I bet you could even get into a Byz production now, if it wasn’t such a popularity contest with Michelle Jeffries and all those people.” Et cetera. Evidently the struggle going on within me had made no impression on my friend.