Made glorious, p.10
Made Glorious, page 10
It’s strange to see him after school, strange to see him without his usual cohort of aquatic Bosworth Princes. And he’s not here with a study group or with his parents.
Which means someone invited him.
Rory looks at Ethan. There’s a pay phone in the foyer, and Ethan usually keeps a quarter or two in his kilt pocket.
Hopefully Ethan thinks it was worth the twenty-five cents to inform Brad of his current whereabouts, Rory thinks, because the arrival of the jock has shifted the air. It’s as if Brad has a shield around him to keep him from mixing with the drama kids — or is it the drama kids who put up those walls, who refuse to let anyone not born and bred for the stage into their inner circles?
“Hi, Rory.” Brad acknowledges her with decorum; Rory wants to shout at him, Don’t you dare; don’t act like we have anything more in common than this person in lavender suspenders sitting next to me. But she offers up a tight smile in return.
Brad turns his attention back to Ethan now that he’s offered his polite gesture. “How was rehearsal?” The familiarity drives Rory bonkers — “rehearsal,” that word in Brad’s mouth, as if Brad has any idea. As if swimming back and forth in those little chlorinated lines could give him any point of reference for someone like Ethan, someone brilliant, someone larger than the very stage he stands on every afternoon.
“Brutal,” Ethan responds.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Brad says, shaking his head. “I couldn’t memorize all that stuff. I couldn’t get up on the stage in front of an audience.”
Yes, we know, Rory longs to say. But instead she is silent while Ethan carries on his conversation with Brad. It’s less flirtatious than she dreaded, but she can still tell that Ethan’s trying to show off for Brad a little, here with his people. Thankfully Cole is on the other end of the tables, or else he’d be fighting Ethan for the spotlight. But Ethan can be the big diva here, delivering to Brad the perfect jokes, the perfect references, the perfect amount of cool, pushing his hair away from his forehead to fully expose those brooding eyes, those eyes that can say a million things without Ethan’s ever opening his mouth — and that’s why rehearsal is brutal, Brad. Because Pam is going to squeeze every last bit of juice out of Ethan every time he’s under those lights, and he’s got a lot to squeeze.
“Do you want to split a Happy Jack breakfast?” Brad asks. “My treat.”
Ethan shrugs. “Sure, I can eat.”
When the hot chocolate arrives, Ethan slides both cups over to Rory without a word. “You can have it all,” he says, as if it’s a mercy. As if he hasn’t just pushed away three years of Ruby’s tradition, leaving Rory’s cup full of hot chocolate but empty of other things.
The onions on Brad’s omelet stink. Ethan offers Rory a bite of his waffle, but she shakes her head. She doesn’t take a sip of the hot chocolate, either, letting the whipped cream dissolve into the mugs.
Then she pays for the hot chocolate herself, in quarters, and leaves with the techies, snagging a ride home from Cynthia, whose mom’s Toyota Sienna is covered in bumper stickers from the local Right to Life chapter.
Ethan does wave goodbye, but his focus is on Brad, Brad and the final sticky dregs of the maple syrup, to be swirled around on the plate, to be mopped up by pinky fingers, to be licked away.
WITHIN THE FIRST MONTH OF HER SOPHOMORE YEAR AT Bosworth, Rory scraped up the twenty-five dollars due to the financial office, and then she was officially a member of the Princely Players. A dues-paying member got access to an enormous number of perks, including special group discounts and carpools to live performances (sometimes downtown at the ritzy Capitol Theater, sometimes across the county to see another high school’s play — the high school that Pam swore was not their competitor, though she couldn’t ever speak about them without adding in a little jab about how they didn’t deserve their success). Princely Players also voted on certain things, like the corporate partners for their fundraisers, the themes for their monthly improv nights, the design of their matching sweatshirts for when they went to state.
And, of course, there were the parties.
Four of them a year, and supposedly they were exceptional. At least that’s what everyone told Rory, as if she needed more of a reason to join the Princely Players. These parties were truly for members only, and so to protect against any grifters trying to sneak in without paying their fair share, the Halloween bash came with a secret password, which Rory was meant to whisper to the doorkeeper when she arrived.
She was on the excited side of nervous the night of her first Princely Players party. She’d auditioned for the fall production of And Then There Were None; despite Pam’s very clear rules about not casting sophomores, she still expected sophomores to audition.
“Consider it a chance to practice the auditioning process,” Pam coached the Drama I class as the sign-up sheet was passed around. “You can rehearse your monologue a hundred times at home, but you should take every opportunity to perform it onstage, under the lights, in front of an audience. Thicken your skin.”
Rory had walked past the cast list when it was posted, trying her best to glance at it nonchalantly, and even though she knew her name wouldn’t be there, she couldn’t help but nurse the tiny glimmer of hope in her chest with a sharp breath —
And then, deflation. No sophomores on the list, as promised.
But exclusion from the fall production did not mean exclusion from all Princely Players activities, and Rory had now spent the better part of two months observing Pam’s department. If she was going to pay her dues, as Pam had requested, Rory knew she’d have to understand how the cogs of this universe ran. How it ticked, how it spun, how it was fueled.
It was a costume party. Of course it was, being a gathering for drama kids, and Rory was relieved to see other Princely Players showing up in gaudy ensembles. But she couldn’t help retaining a smidgen of self-consciousness as she approached the double doors of the Elizabethan.
Black streamers dangled along the threshold — not mere crepe paper but strips of fabric, alternating velveteen and satin, and strands of beads and clear crystals for texture. Music trumpeted nice and loud into the hallway.
“You have no power over me,” said the doorkeeper, a slender senior in a tawny catsuit, complete with golden cat-eye contacts.
Rory hesitated. Was this part of the script for entry? The password she was supposed to give didn’t really fit with this line —
“Your costume.” The cat gestured with her stuffed tail. “It’s great.”
Rory had waited till the last minute to decide on a costume. Her mother had been incredibly supportive — too supportive, Rory had thought a few times — and offered help putting together a getup for a vampire, a witch, an astronaut, but while Rory knew she didn’t want to dress up as something so simple (so childish), she also didn’t really know what she did want.
The party was Saturday, which meant Rory’s mom had the long shift at the ER, which meant Rory was left alone all morning and afternoon to flip through her closet and brood.
There wasn’t time to go buy a costume (there wasn’t money for a new costume regardless). So Rory, following a whim, went into the garage and tore through the storage bins until she found a dress she hadn’t thought about in years. It had once belonged to her mother, but Rory knew her mother wouldn’t mind if she wore it — did it even count as a wedding dress if you never actually got married in it?
The dress had big poufy sleeves, a huge skirt with scalloped layers and a silhouette like a cupcake, and a corseted bodice stitched with iridescent butterfly sequins. Rory paired it with a homemade masquerade mask, which she cleverly whipped up with a paper plate, some gold acrylic paint, and glitter confetti left over from a ninth-grade English project on The Great Gatsby.
The whole walk over, she’d bunched the gown’s unwieldy skirt in her hands like she was carting clouds beneath her jacket, dodging the mud puddles that had lingered in potholes since last week’s thunderstorm.
She’d wagered only a few people would know who she was — Sarah from the movie Labyrinth, one of the few VHS tapes Rory’s grandmother owned and therefore a staple of Rory’s childhood. But Rory sensed she’d earn a certain respectability from choosing to represent an obscure favorite rather than succumbing to something trendy, something generic, something safe.
“Oh. Thanks.” A triumphant pride surged within Rory, and she stepped toward the streamers.
The door-keeping cat moved to block her. “Wait! I need your password.”
“Pygmalion,” Rory said, breathless. Her mother’s old dress was tight around her middle. But she belonged here. She’d paid to belong here.
Which meant she fit right in at Bosworth.
“The party’s at the auditorium?” her mother had said with a crinkled nose when Rory showed her the invitation. “Don’t you guys spend enough time in there?”
Leave it to a naive parent to underestimate the Princely Players’ ability to transform the Elizabethan — even when it was merely for one of their own functions.
Maybe especially when it was for one of their own functions.
A drama kid is not only drawn to the possibility of standing on a stage to drink up the attention of an audience. A drama kid, at their heart, is a maximalist, a connoisseur of history’s finer things, a gold-sniffing fiend with a love — no, a need — for everything — their aesthetics, their environment, their emotions — to be coiffed in the most sensationalized ham imaginable.
So a Halloween party, as imagined by the Princely Players, was a splendid blend of the gilded, the gothic, and the ghastly.
The great Phantom of the Opera–style chandelier had been lowered and now hung with black strips of funerary crepe fabric and fat red rosettes. Sets and props from past productions were arranged in tableaux throughout the auditorium — the Wicked Witch of the West’s creepy tower and crystal ball, several eerily twisted trees from Into the Woods, coffins both upright and tauntingly horizontal from various vampiric shows and Agatha Christie plays.
On the stage was a spook alley to wander through, making excellent use of last year’s flats for West Side Story — tall buildings made eerily crooked, with crackled windows, cobwebs and fog machines, wind-tossed shingles.
Exquisite tables were set up in the orchestra with a spread catered by Embers, a local restaurant with a reputation for the ornate and refined: pewter goblets of warm, blood-like borscht, root vegetables roasted with herbs and cut into coin-sized skulls, breadsticks baked into crosses, mummified Brie, eyeball panna cotta, and other gothic sundries both savory and sweet.
“Oh, my god, you look amazing!” A senior, the one who had just landed the part of Vera Claythorne, paused in the aisle to compliment Rory, batting one of the bulbous sleeves in affection. She herself was dressed as a red Crayola crayon, a costume that had Rory bewildered — was the senior trying to be ironic? Trying to make a statement about Halloween costumes being juvenile? Trying to genuinely party as her favorite preschool coloring implement?
At the very least, Rory was buoyed by the interaction. Her costume was doing the work for her — giving the older, wiser seniors a reason to speak to her, filtering out anyone who did not know their ’80s fantasy cinema, and, by the look of all the unremarkable black capes and striped pirate trousers in the vicinity, making her stand out.
The proceedings themselves were loosey-goosey. There was the food table, the drink table, every row of the Elizabethan, where you could mingle and chat with your fellow thespians, either seated in the red velvet seats or hovering, punch in hand, the energy of a high schooler making you shift and twitch and pace. Onstage, there was a sing-along, a playlist of songs from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Little Shop of Horrors, and Sweeney Todd scrolling on the projector — if you know anything about drama kids, you know that all you have to do to make them happy is give them something to perform, even if there’s no one in the audience except one another.
Rory made the rounds, lagging behind the acquaintances she’d made in Drama I, laughing at jokes, singing “Jack’s Lament.” Eventually she found herself alone at the food table, eyeing the desserts but grabbing a bloodred apple instead. She pushed her masquerade mask onto her forehead while she refilled her punch, and found someone smiling at her. A tall boy, one of the sophomores who was in the other Drama I session. He wore a scarlet pirate’s coat trimmed in gold embroidery, a black romper with a skeleton’s rib cage printed on the chest, a Wilma Flintstone–esque pearl necklace, a leather three-corner hat, and fishnets with stilettos.
“Oh, dammit!” he said. “I was this close to coming as Jareth!”
“Instead you are . . .” Rory inspected his costume in sections, then all together, but couldn’t puzzle it out.
“The best of Tim Curry.” The boy spread his arms wide, spinning so Rory could see the full effect. “See, I couldn’t decide, so I took pieces from all my favorite roles he’s done. Long John Silver, Frank-N-Furter, and —”
“Hexxus!” Rory couldn’t contain her delight, grinning as she looked upon this Princely Player, who was now loading up his plate with green olives from the relish tray. “You must have had all the same tapes my grandma did.”
“Nope,” he said, “no tapes. We were lucky to have a television. So I had to study the TV Guide, sneak on the TV when my parents were busy. I saw most things in pieces. I still haven’t sat down and watched Cabaret all the way through beginning to end.”
“Wow.” Rory was about to inquire about his parents — why so conservative? And what flavor was their television aversion — religious, political, New Age? But instead the boy took her remark as commentary on his olive consumption.
“No one else ever eats them,” he justified. “They just sit there and get all wrinkly in the beet juice.”
“You did pay your twenty-five dollars to be here,” Rory said. “You might as well get your money’s worth.” But she reached over to his plate, in a gesture far bolder than she ever would have imagined herself capable of, and took one of his olives for herself.
He grinned, eyes puckish with mischief.
He was Ethan Yorke, recently moved to Bosworth from Oregon. He was not a scholarship kid, Rory surmised after not one but three clues about Ethan’s parents: his father worked part-time for a nonprofit, his mother recently spent a summer writing a novel alone at their family lake house, and both of them seemed to have strained relationships with their own parents, the kind of tenuous strings that would never be cut because they were attached at the purse.
“They never let us have video games or soda because they’re hippies,” Ethan explained with a roll of his eyes. “And meat is forever being taken in and out of our diet, depending on what master cleanse Mom’s recently done at what celebrity spa.”
His grandparents were wealthy, and so were his parents, he told Rory, and he used that exact word. Most of the rich kids at Bosworth tiptoed around it as if it instantly devalued them, opting for euphemisms. “We’re comfortable.” “I’ll be out of town that weekend; we’re going to Sicily for my cousin’s wedding.” “My mother made some calls.”
Money talks; wealth whispers.
Even Ethan, speaking so obviously of his prosperity, did so with a tinge of guilt, perhaps a bit of shame. “I do have a regular job,” he assured Rory, as if she were marking tallies against him. “At the library. My parents want me to save up and buy my own car, rather than just giving me one for my birthday.”
Still, he refused to let Rory pat him on the back for this.
“It’s actually ridiculous. It’s like they want me to play the part of a normal middle-class teenager for some nonsense principle. We all know that I could make one phone call to my grandfather and he’d buy me whatever car I wanted. And I could flunk out of every class at Bosworth and my parents would still be able to buy me a diploma. They want me to try on poorness like it’s a costume — Sorry. It’s a sore subject for me right now.”
He chugged his punch, scrunching the paper cup in his fist when it was empty; Rory watched his Adam’s apple pump up and down as he swallowed. Her chest fluttered with newly rooted respect for this Tim Curry worshipper as she said, “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll never mistake you for normal.”
Just then, Pam clapped her hands. The music softened, then died. One by one, the Princely Players filed into the first three rows of seats in front of the stage, where Pam stood, dressed as a member of a Greek chorus in white toga, gold laurel leaves, and tragedy mask, eerily blank.
“Gather in, Players. Gather in.” Pam dropped the pitch of her voice, deep and low as reeds in a pond. Rory scooted into the third row, taking the spot next to Ethan. Her dress poofed up so high around her, she offered to trade him seats so she could lean her mushroom of chiffon and tulle out into the aisle, but he said “Nah” and fluffed up the skirt into a pillow, which he lay his head on.
Rory could feel him through the fabric. She could feel the weight of his head on her shoulder.
The lights in the Elizabethan quieted until there was only a soft circle of blurry illumination on Pam. She removed her mask, waiting for the auditorium to silence itself completely. Beneath, her face was streaked with white chalk.
“All theatres are haunted,” Pam began. “Theatres that are hundreds of years old. Theatres that were built yesterday. Theatres that have since crumbled into stone and dust. Every theatre is haunted because every theatre is a portal.”
Rory settled lower into her seat, aware of Ethan breathing, listening, blinking.
“These curtains are a doorway. A doorway into other worlds.” Pam slowly made her way to stage left, where the red velvet curtain was tucked behind the proscenium, put away for the night. “Every character who has ever lived and breathed on this stage must float past these curtains and into the actor who is playing them — you think Antigone is fictional? Macbeth? Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde? No. Every one of those is a spirit. Every one of them must come through the portal. You don’t believe me? Look. There. You see?”
