Made glorious, p.11
Made Glorious, page 11
The Princely Players followed Pam’s gesture to the curtains lining the stage, the curtains in the wings, the runners that hid the lights in the ceiling. All the curtains blew gently, as if someone had opened a door backstage to let in an autumn breeze.
But there was no open door. No autumn breeze. Just the curtains, moving, blowing.
Rory inhaled slowly, deliberately, aware that the Princely Players had been cast under a spell, Pam’s spell, and the last thing she wanted to do was break it. One nose whistle, one scuff of a shoe, one cough, could plummet this party into spooked giggles, and Rory did not want the catharsis. Not yet.
“How many spirits have passed through this very portal?” Pam looked around her, above her, as if expecting a spirit to answer. “How many spirits decided to stay, to linger in the wings rather than return to their own world after the production was over? How many spirits have come here tonight, summoned by our revelry, to find an actor to inhabit? How many spirits are watching you, waiting for the perfect moment to be embodied by you? How many spirits will you house?”
Next to Rory, Ethan reached up to scratch his cheek, then lay back down on the tuffet of her skirt, her shoulder.
Onstage, the curtains blew and blew.
“WRONG! AGAIN!”
In the fourth row of the Elizabethan, Pam perches on the edge of her seat, her arms resting on the back of the seat in front of her. You can’t see them, but her clogs are likely angled out in a wide stance, a duck’s stance.
Onstage, Annie weaves her hands through her blond ponytail and tugs, arching her back in annoyance. “Line!” she calls.
Shandie, the stage manager, reads from her binder, “‘You must have done something to deserve it.’”
“You must have done something to deserve it,” Annie repeats.
“Oh, come on. You don’t think they’d let a murderer sit atop the royal throne of Tillypoo?” says Ethan.
“Anything’s possible,” says Annie, and touches the hilt of her sword. She’s showy about it, because this is a stage production and every gesture has to be seen and understood to the very back row. But the very back row won’t be able to see the way Annie’s fingers stroke the hilt, twitching to pull out her weapon and make use of it. The back row won’t be able to see the gleam in her eyes, the way Annie’s Joetta hungers for a fight and also hungers for Thackery, Ethan’s foxy scoundrel posing as a prince. The heave of her chest. The curl of her mouth, a sheen of sweat there, the hot stage lights salting her upper lip.
But here, where I’m standing, just left of center stage, holding as still as a Greek column to fulfill my brilliant role as a guard, I can see it all.
“Wrong! Again!” Pam’s voice cuts through the scene. “The line is ‘Not likely, but not impossible.’”
There’s a rustle on the stage, the other actors in the scene grumbling, rubbing their necks, looking heavenward as if praying for Annie to be struck down. The stage manager, too, lets out a long-suffering sigh, peering at her wristwatch.
“Dammit!” Annie shouts. “I keep —”
“You were supposed to be off book this week,” Pam scolds as she unwraps a neglected sandwich from Quiznos, delivered over thirty minutes ago.
“I know!” Annie limps in a small, enraged circle. She bats at the wooden dummy sword belted to her waist; she’s been rehearsing with it at Pam’s insistence — so Annie could get used to its heft, its movements, because Pam sees Joetta as having a bond with her sword like it was a third leg, a familiar, an extension of her soul. “I’m sorry! I studied all weekend, I swear.”
When Annie gets frustrated with other people, she manages to stay calm, collected, communicating any breach of boundaries or unmet expectations with clarity. When Annie gets frustrated with herself, however, it’s a volatile scene. Her cheeks grow so red they border on purpling, her hair sticks to her forehead in angry perspiration, and her hands don’t know what to do with themselves — they wring, they ball, they clench.
Pam takes a long drag of her Diet Coke, then looks at the clock. She has parent-teacher conferences tonight and can’t afford to keep babying her lead. “Go get your script,” she instructs Annie. “We don’t have time for this.”
Ethan glances at me, then at his other scene partners. I glance at Shandie. We are all glancing, exchanging the same uncomfortable, graceless look. We are all the children who remembered to make their beds and brush their teeth and put on their shoes, and Annie’s getting spanked at the kitchen table.
Annie retrieves her script — in her backpack, right where she left it — and stomps back up the stage stairs. Binder in hand, Annie flips to the correct scene and reads her lines quietly, dispassionately. She’s going through the motions, her Joetta now sulky and resentful, and normally Pam would slam her for this, but Pam’s done. Done with Annie for tonight.
The scene ends, and Pam takes her sandwich and her Diet Coke out of the Elizabethan without a word, leaving Shandie to handle dismissal.
“Please, please, please go over your lines tonight,” the stage manager calls. “We need to be off book so we can really dig into the scenes and fine-tune them, and we can’t do that if you have your scripts in your hands.”
No need to address Annie directly. No one else flubbed their lines today like she did.
The props master takes Annie’s sword from her, to be stored until tomorrow’s rehearsal, and Annie fetches her backpack on plodding, dissatisfied feet.
I gather my own things from the wings and keep an eye on her, my heart panging in sympathy.
What a shame it would be, to spend all that time studying your script only for it to slip out of your head like wet noodles once you’re under the lights. What a mess, what a tragedy, really, especially for someone like Annie, who already struggles with rote memorization, and who truly did run lines for hours over the weekend, alone, with a parent, with a brother, and with a friend, someone dedicated to the production, someone willing to spend an entire Saturday and part of a Sunday prompting her, helping her rehearse.
What a shame to realize you learned the lines wrong —
Or, more accurately, that you learned the wrong lines.
All that time practicing, and Annie never checked to make sure her script was the right one.
It’s amazing what you can do these days with a bottle of Wite-Out, a pair of scissors, and access to the copier in the faculty room.
It’s amazing how easy it is to switch a script in and out of a binder —
“Shandie? Where’s Pam?”
A disruption.
Clarissa stands in the double doors at the back of the auditorium, her face distorted by the shadow of the tech booth, but her voice is everywhere, projecting from her diaphragm, every timbre of her rage detectable, exactly as the good teacher Pam Hanson taught us.
“Uh . . .” Shandie’s frozen.
We’re all frozen. We haven’t seen or heard from Clarissa since her magnificent exodus to her Mackenzie’s audition; if she did have actual friends at Bosworth, and not just colleagues in college application fodder, none of them reported any updates.
“Pam’s getting ready for conferences.” Shandie slips her big production binder, the fattest they make them, into her tote bag and straightens, squaring her shoulders as Clarissa moves down the aisle. “Can I help you with something?”
“Don’t patronize me. You’re not my fucking stage manager.” Clarissa scoots right past Shandie, then calls, “She’s in her office.”
“Right.” Clarissa’s mother is suddenly here, looming from the Elizabethan’s side door; Clarissa meets her there, and the two of them head into Euripides, charging down the hallway, tending to some urgent matter involving the head of the theater department.
I blink, shocked by Clarissa’s paranoid, almost violent intrusion into our rehearsal space; others still lingering in the auditorium, including Shandie, meet my glances with shrugs. Who knows what that’s about? we all say without speaking. Who knows what Clarissa’s up to this time?
And of course we all find out. One by one, feigning other reasons to walk past Hardy, we give in to our collective curiosity and eavesdrop on the radio show that is Clarissa and her mother, confronting Pam in her corner office, letting the cavernous classroom amplify all their accusations and demands through the open door and into the hallway.
“I’m telling you, she was set up!” Mrs. George keeps saying, and Pam keeps letting her, perhaps aware that the more this sentiment is repeated, the more Mrs. George sounds like a tinfoil hat–wearing conspiracy theorist, punching holes in her arguments with her own hysteria.
“I don’t understand what you’re suggesting,” Pam finally interjects. “Someone set up Clarissa to fail at her auditions?”
So she didn’t get into Mackenzie’s. Interesting.
“Clarissa didn’t even get to audition for Mackenzie’s because Mackenzie’s never sent her an invitation to audition!” Some shuffling of papers, and apparently the evidence is presented; meanwhile, Clarissa is uncharacteristically muted, reminding us all that you can be followed around by the spotlight at school, but at home, someone else might be the star of the show.
“They said they never sent this letter,” Mrs. George goes on. “We drove down there, got a hotel room, everything, and they had never even heard of us. It was humiliating!”
Ah. So the letter from Mackenzie’s wasn’t real. Very interesting.
Poor Clarissa was so undone by this chain of events — the exciting possibility of attending Mackenzie’s, the devastation of Mackenzie’s not even knowing her name, the return road trip of shame, and the realization that she had discarded Good Knight! Sweet Lady like a bag of dog shit — that Mrs. George withdrew her from Bosworth on temporary mental health leave. That’s why none of us have seen Clarissa peacocking through the cafeteria. That’s why none of us heard about Clarissa’s new adventures at Mackenzie’s.
And then came the really interesting part.
“I’m sorry, Clarissa. The show’s already been cast. We’ve been in rehearsals for over a month.” Pam addresses Clarissa directly, even though Clarissa’s mother is the one speaking.
“But surely it would be entirely appropriate to re-audition the principal roles, just in case,” Mrs. George pushes back, and we can all hear the PTA-mom, Christian-Coalition smile on her lips. “I mean, one of your most dedicated students was manipulated into missing the auditions —”
“You are welcome to join the show, Clarissa.” We hear Pam stir the ice in her empty Diet Coke. “This is a fun ensemble to be a part of.”
“Ensemble?” Clarissa spits out the word, already poisoned by the mere suggestion. “I don’t want to be in the ensemble. Ensemble is a waste of my time. I play leads.”
Pam is apologetic but won’t let the Georges strong-arm her into their warped reparations. Clarissa and her mother storm out of Bernhardt, and we in the hallways duck into the foyer, the choir room, the bathroom, the nook next to the backstage of the auditorium. Then we all go our separate ways and tuck the image of tearstained Clarissa, putting on sunglasses and a floppy hat like a celebrity heiress heading off to rehab, into the dark coils of our memories.
So Clarissa didn’t have an invitation to audition at Mackenzie’s after all. Interesting.
She and her mother drove all the way down there only to be stared at by their secretary. Interesting.
The letter they’d received in the mail looked official — the school letterhead on the top, the logo and mission statement on the bottom, the lines praising Clarissa’s performance reputation sounding very much like the kinds of praise Mackenzie’s teachers gave their own students. Interesting.
And Clarissa, who likely would have auditioned for and taken the big lead role of Joetta in Good Knight! Sweet Lady, would instead roll away in her mother’s Lexus, off to lick her wounds and finish high school through packets, the method most utilized by burnouts and dyslexics and other students who have to graduate by “alternative means.”
Don’t feel too sorry for Clarissa. She’s at her best when she is victimized, and the extra time away from school will let her solidify her tragic backstory before she starts college in the fall. She’ll stay away from the college theater department, claiming the flashbacks make her too devastated to even set foot in that part of campus, but she’ll find that the intensity of the narcissistic, cutthroat choir bitches suits her very well, and she’ll rise to the top and sing many solos and make lifelong friends there.
You could even say I did her a favor.
MISS KEATING DOESN’T BOTHER HIDING HER TELLS. NOT WITH ME.
If she nods, makes comments, or uses a pen to correct small errors on an assignment, it’s subpar. She doesn’t bother using her whole brain to assess subpar papers, and instead reads them shallowly, polishing what she can polish, because why waste precious energy on something unfixable?
This morning she says nothing while she reads my paper. I lean against the desk closest to hers and wait. It’s Miss Keating’s prep period, the pathetic stretch where she’s expected to cram a whole week’s worth of grading and lecture writing and curriculum slinging into forty minutes.
Much as with under-qualifying papers, Miss Keating doesn’t bother trying to make much use of this prep period; she’s resigned herself to a fate of after-hours paperwork and instead invites me to use her empty classroom as a place to catch up on my own homework as needed.
Today I am here to get her final thoughts on my essay, to make a big show of struggling (and triumphing) over my AP US History worksheets, and to put in face time, because after today I’ll be using these free periods of mine to help with some of the crew’s efforts for Good Knight! Sweet Lady: painting sandwich signs, basting together costumes with Cynthia — any little task or errand Pam needs completed. I’m here to show Miss Keating that she has no need to worry about me.
Miss Keating sets down my essay and stares at it, chewing a thumbnail. She waits until I look at her.
“It’s fantastic,” she tells me. “More than fantastic. It’s flawless. I can’t find one thing I’d change.”
I smile wide and tuck my hair behind one ear. “You think we can send it off?”
“Absolutely.” Miss Keating runs through the instructions for this particular scholarship application, and I inhale deeply, an invisible weight slipping off my shoulders.
“Now. You’ve got one more to write. Deadline’s this month.” Miss Keating slides a pamphlet to me, and I cannot help myself, I balk.
“The Ayn Rand Institute?”
“I know, I know.” She opens the pamphlet for me, sensing that my shock has disabled my faculties. “But look. You write one winning essay — one essay! — on any of her novels, and you get one thousand dollars. You can sneeze out an essay on Ayn Rand for a grand, can’t you?”
I peruse the novels listed, the topics proposed. We the Living . . . The Fountainhead . . . Atlas Shrugged . . . All three of them are in Bosworth’s library, and the essay is only required to be twenty-five hundred words long.
“You don’t have to agree with her,” Miss Keating continues. “You don’t have to like the books or Ayn Rand at all. But a thousand dollars would go a long way.”
“I don’t know if I’ll have time.” That’s as far as I get before Miss Keating’s jaw stiffens and her eyes darken.
“We had a plan, Rory. If you don’t follow the plan, then the plan stops working.” She folds the pamphlet and flops it on her desk. “You’re almost there. One more essay, and then you can relax and enjoy the end of senior year and wait for those scholarships to come rolling in. Don’t stop now.”
“I understand.” My pitch drops — not to intimidate, no, but to imitate. Pam’s voice is lower when she wants to preside, wants to control. So is the voice of every school secretary, every teacher, every mother I know. Even Miss Keating herself. Does she recognize it when she hears it?
Miss Keating clicks something on her computer, studies the screen, then turns the monitor so I can see it.
“Your grades are down,” she says. “You’re slipping in all your classes — except Drama III, I see.”
I’ve purposefully declined to mention the drama department, Good Knight! Sweet Lady, or Pam, but Miss Keating is a bloodhound, hot on the scent.
I can’t argue. It’s there, plain and harsh on the bright glow of her screen. I’m down half a letter in everything — a full letter grade in math — and yet I have half-formed tassels in my backpack that Cynthia needs me to finish for the grand ball scene at the beginning of act 2.
“It’s still weeks until the end of the term,” I say. “I’m only missing a few assignments. Nothing major.”
“It’s not like you to be missing anything” is Miss Keating’s counterpoint.
I suddenly feel exhausted. Depleted of my ability to negotiate with Miss Keating. I know I now look like the epitome of surly teenager — posture slumped, mouth turned down, eyes narrowed. I prepare for my scolding.
But Miss Keating isn’t one to scold. She never is. “I’m not going to debate this with you like you’re an adult,” she says, “because you are not an adult. I think you’re taking on too much with the musical, and your other responsibilities are suffering as a result.”
“It’s my last high school production. The last one. I’m just trying to be part of it. I’ll be able to get my grades up,” I say, and I mean it. I’m sharp enough. I’ve been at Bosworth long enough to play the teachers. I know their games.
“This isn’t an academic issue,” Miss Keating fires back. “I’m not worried about your grades; I’m worried about you. I’m worried you have too much on your plate. It’s an emotional and mental health issue. I won’t forget about last semester, as much as you want me to.”
“Last semester . . .” I pause, waiting for the right thing to say. But something’s stopped up inside of me. I have nothing. Nothing but the truth.
