Made glorious, p.15
Made Glorious, page 15
But Annie looks past all of them. She locks eyes with Rory.
Few people know what Annie’s tell is. Her chin doesn’t quiver; her eyes don’t water.
Rory knows exactly what to watch for. First, Annie gets very, very quiet. Then her cheeks go blotchy, the color of wine.
Then Annie is moments away from spilling over.
Thus summoned, Rory goes to the drinking fountain, where she stands next to Annie, waiting, waiting for the deluge.
“My parents are in there talking to Pam,” Annie says, unprompted, both cheeks dappled pink. Her voice trembles, nothing like her usual confident tone. “I can’t believe it — Rory, you know I’d never do anything like this. It’s a mistake. A misunderstanding.”
“I know,” Rory soothes.
“I didn’t even want those pills,” Annie goes on. “They made me feel so loopy, so I stopped taking them. Tylenol was enough for the pain — but I didn’t sell them! I would never —”
Overcome, Annie presses one hand over her forehead, her eyes, her whole face scrunching up into a cringing sob. The police officers in the hallway peer at her, suspicious.
“Then how . . . ?” Rory needs only start this line of questioning, and Annie bursts into an impassioned plea that she’s clearly delivered more than once today.
“I don’t know! I kept my pills in my backpack. They gave me permission to — the office, the principal, my parents. Just in case my leg acts up. Someone must have stolen them — and I must have thrown away an empty bottle, and someone fished it out of the trash. This has to be a joke, right? A mean joke, but they’re not seriously thinking I’ve been selling drugs?”
Rory’s stomach lurches. Annie’s holding on to both of her shoulders — holding on to this plane of reality, holding on to anything that will assure her she is not alone — and the fear and dismay in Annie’s eyes are lantern bright.
Not even the night of the car accident has Rory seen her like this.
“And now they’re saying I can’t stay in the play. I can’t be in it anymore, Rory. I — I don’t know what to do.” Annie cries, and Rory lets Annie wrap her in a hug.
The size difference between the two of them is comedic, she knows — a real Jack Sprat and his wife situation, stout and lean, but this reminds Rory of how it used to be. Reaching for each other. Her weight, Annie’s weight, the weight of whatever they were carrying — it didn’t matter.
“Rory, I don’t know what to do,” Annie repeats.
“It’s okay,” Rory says. She pats and she shushes. She’ll say it as many times as Annie needs to hear it. “It’s okay.”
“After all this work, Rory. All this work, and now the investigation? It’s too much.” Annie doesn’t move as she speaks; Rory feels the buzz of Annie’s words resonate in her own chest.
Too much. Yes.
First the shattering of her leg, the shattering of her basketball legacy. The shattering of her dreams. Then the auditions, the callbacks, the way Pam’s put her through the wringer, making Annie prove at every turn, every rehearsal, that she deserved to be here — making Annie re-audition for Joetta every chance she got.
And now all of that gone, all that swallowed pride, regurgitated in one humiliating fell swoop.
“Maybe it’s for the best.” Annie suddenly sniffles and arches up to standing, wiping her eyes on the back of her sleeve. “I couldn’t handle the schedule anyway. And I still don’t know the lines perfectly, and I don’t really have the range for ‘Somewhere in Between.’ Maybe if I focus on physical therapy, and I see if Coach can recommend a summer league . . .”
Only a few months ago, Rory was standing in Annie’s room when Annie snapped at her for pointing out the silver linings. Now it’s Annie who can’t blink away from the shine of the glass half full.
“Of course,” Rory responds. “And they’re going to get to the bottom of this whole investigation. We all know you’re not dealing. It’ll be over soon. Just cooperate with them and answer their questions. And then you can get back to the court.”
“Annie?” Mr. and Mrs. Neville stand in the doorway of Hardy, both of them white cheeked, looking tired. “Ms. Hanson wants to speak with all of us.”
Annie nods, but her face breaks into despair again. “I’m so sorry,” she whimpers to Rory. “After you worked so hard to get me to auditions — I’m letting you down.”
Rory tries to make her own expression the very epitome of strength and faith. “Of course you’re not letting me down, Neville. You could never let me down. Whatever happens in there, we’ll figure it out.”
“What about the show?” Annie’s throat bobs as if it has a mind of its own.
Rory’s smile is calm. “The show must go on.”
OH, DON’T LOOK SO SCANDALIZED. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING too sinister, and I’ll prove it.
First of all, Travis Hastings has been playing too close to the cliff’s edge for years. True, he generally leans more herbal in his choice of mind-altering substances, but I know for a fact that many of his cohorts, those greasy future mechanics who congregate in parks and under bleachers, occasionally worship in the church of stronger drugs, scarier drugs. It was only a matter of time before Travis was offered something more pharmaceutical, before he took it, before he loved it, before he decided to make his locker a one-stop shop for all of Bosworth’s deadiest, beatiest burnouts. All I did here was speed up the clock a bit. Projected into the future. Perhaps we could have helped Travis, steered him away from the cold terrain of his destiny, but he didn’t want any more favors from us, remember?
And Annie, well . . . It’s a shame, yes, to see her like that. It takes a lot to make Annie Neville so upset that she can’t advocate for herself, but she cried herself raw today and barely had the energy to scrape up a decent alibi. But you heard her yourself, I know you did — we’ve now put her back on a path toward basketball, the one thing in life that brings her unadulterated joy.
Good Knight! Sweet Lady was always only going to be a tale she spun, a funny little speed bump she hit on the way to her career playing ball professionally. She didn’t need it, not really. If she needed it, she would have been there on set day. She would have shown up on time for yesterday’s rehearsal — yes, even though those dates were oddly missing from her planner and her play schedule. If she really needed this musical, she would have channeled the rehearsal schedule somehow, and sensed that we had all gathered without her. She would have found a way to learn her lines — if she really needed Joetta, she would have carved those lines into her heart.
As for the investigation, it will be nothing more than a blip on Annie’s records, if it shows up there at all. Who knows if Travis and Annie will have conflicting stories? Who knows if he’ll get busted and Annie’s shiny, dimply, honor-student-and-star-athlete disposition will scrub her name off the reports, squeaky-clean? Who knows if they’ll both catch a fine and a scolding from a judge for this? Slaps on the wrist for both of them, and then they’ll move on.
Some of us cannot move on. Some of us need this play, need Joetta. Some of us deserve it. Some of us have paid our dues, and it’s nearly time to cash out.
It’s a clockwork system. It’s all been set up at Bosworth long before I ever put my hands on it — so I can keep cranking and winding and oiling the cogs, and never once have to feel guilty for it. Never once should I feel guilty for chasing after what I want, what was promised to me.
And so I feel no guilt when I walk home after school today and spot Travis and his parents saying goodbye to the police officers in their driveway.
No guilt as I see Travis’s face, beyond stunned, soft, like he’s ten years old again.
No guilt as I see the local bishop pull up, shake hands with Travis’s parents, set a comforting hand on Travis’s shoulder, guiding them inside to work out the necessities of a spiritual road back to God’s light.
He won’t mention our arrangements. My fatness protects me there — Travis will prefer to stand alone in sin rather than admit he’d let someone like me touch him.
The bishop and the Hastingses will be the only ones touching him now. It’ll be Travis on his knees now, night and day, and he won’t be let out of their sight until they’re satisfied with the purification of his countenance — or until he’s had enough of this bullshit and hits the road.
No guilt. No shock.
Only justice.
But what about the play? you are no doubt wondering. Having your lead actor drop out of a musical three weeks before opening night should be a disaster. It should cause a crater of worry in Shandie’s gut and a flutter of injustice in the hearts of every member of the cast and crew. It should add a new loop to whatever ungodly knot of emotions are tangled in Pam during the lead-up to the production run, though she’ll never let anyone bear witness to her struggles.
But I tell you again, this is not any ordinary production. This is a clock. And not only will the show withstand this kind of disaster; I have been counting on it.
A planned, purposeful disaster.
I designed it this way.
Annie was always supposed to leave the production before hell week. Travis is an unfortunate casualty, but I expect I’ll always look back on him with fondness, the way a clockmaker might look at her wrench or pliers with gratitude. A tool. An appreciated one.
And at tomorrow’s rehearsal, the cast and crew are supposed to have the energy of freshly decapitated chickens. Shandie is supposed to look sweaty and overcooked, the weight of her binder pressing her into a hunch. And Pam is supposed to be strangely collected, and she is supposed to give a comforting speech about how Annie is now getting the help she needs, and we can be grateful for that.
And then she’ll announce that Joetta will be recast, and that rehearsal should proceed as normally as possible.
She’ll ask me to stand in and deliver Joetta’s lines.
And the clock will tick, tick, onward. Everything moving toward its end.
SHAKESPEARE WAS A LOOPHOLE.
Every year, Pam took her drama department to the state Shakespeare festival, a fall theater festival held on the golden-leafed campus of Pam’s beloved, well-respected undergraduate alma mater. For a week straight, there were lectures, workshops, banquets, museum exhibitions, and, of course, professional productions in every possible interpretation. There were straightforward plays in classic Elizabethan, performed in the wooden replica of the Globe Theatre; there were retooled versions of The Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus, scripted and styled à la ’90s teen movie Clueless; there were extremely inaccessible variations on Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Henry V happening with a lot of pantomime in black box theaters.
Any way you could slice Shakespeare, it was served here on a cafeteria tray for the partaking.
And then there was the competition.
Participating high schools brought their best-directed scenes, monologues, and recitations, and these were performed and rated and judged. Bosworth always brought home new cups and ribbons for the award display near the school’s front office.
The Shakespeare competitions were not bound by the same expectations as the other Princely Player productions back home. If you wanted to compete in the Shakespeare festival, all you had to do was sign up.
No auditions. No cast list.
The cost of entry was the source material itself — Shakespeare is easy enough to read, decent to memorize, and incredibly difficult to understand, interpret, and perform. Lesser schools brought half a dozen monologues from Hamlet and the Romeo and Juliet death scene; Pam’s standards for Bosworth’s entries were impossibly high.
To embarrass yourself with a subpar production at the Shakespeare competition was to shut yourself out of Pam’s good graces forever — but Rory, like many other sophomores anxious to prove themselves, signed up to compete with a monologue, overjoyed at the prospect of stepping into the spotlight.
Permission slips were gathered, trip fees were paid, this year’s official BOSWORTH SHAKESPEARE CO. sweatshirts were passed around and donned — Rory thought she finally understood, when she put her own sweatshirt on, why sports teams insist on matching uniforms.
They were united in these sweatshirts. A squad for the love of the Bard.
They took a charter bus to the university, checked in to their shabby-but-clean hotel rooms. From the moment they stepped onto campus, Rory’s unspoken objective was to accompany Ethan. Whatever workshops he wanted to attend, Rory had been interested in all along. Whatever lectures he sat through, Rory had been eyeing since the moment they got their program schedules. Stuck to his side like a pasty barnacle, she was his unofficial plus-one for the opening ceremonies, the early-morning continental cook-your-own-waffles breakfast in their hotel lobby, the stage makeup tutorial, where she used liquid latex and a square of wire mesh to turn Ethan into a convincing burn victim.
“Come on,” Ethan would say, standing outside the hotel room Rory shared with three other sophomores. “Let’s go find Andrew and those guys and get Frosties.”
“We have Gender in the Comedies first,” Ethan would say on the shuttle to the campus, wisps of his hair rebelling from their haphazard bun at the nape of his neck. “Then should we do War Monologues or History of Gesture Acting?”
Let’s. We.
Rory had never known it was possible to fall in love with such small words.
Wednesday came — the first day of competitions. Ethan performed first, leading a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in a role, Bottom, that fit him so well, so like a glove, that it seemed William Shakespeare must have written it specifically for him to play hundreds of years later). Rory watched his first heat from the front row, laughing with the rest of the crowd at Ethan’s ass-headed antics, and was unsurprised when his scene scored the highest points. His troupe would move on to the next round.
“Did you see Phillips?” (Phillips: the department head of Liberty Prep’s theater program and Pam’s closest thing to a living rival.) “He was pissed!” Ethan let his triumph ring out without shame; he and the other actors in his scene were so giddy, Rory felt a little like a moldy toadstool as she slunk beside Ethan and his ethereal, fairy-like exuberance.
“Yeah, well, Caesar, act three, scene one? It’s been done,” one of the other boys said.
“Staler than croutons,” Ethan agreed. “I’ve seen at least three other schools bring it for this week.”
“Says the guy who brought A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” Rory piped in.
The boys went silent, anticipating a spat, but the smirk on Rory’s lips was meant to challenge, not insult. Ethan closed his eyes and straightened, as if an invisible hand were petting the downy fur of his Bottom-as-donkey ears.
“Now, now! Any cliché becomes fresh again if you inject it with a bit of pizzazz.” He punctuated this last word by framing his face with twinkling fingers, and Rory followed the troupe out of the auditorium, a warm dollop in her center.
Most of Rory and Ethan’s conversations followed a formula: she lobbed him a bit of brass; he turned it into gold.
Plus any chance to preen Ethan — whether Rory paid him the compliment directly or whether he stroked his own ego — was gladly offered, gladly received.
It was Ethan who first pointed out, with audible turmoil, that since he’d progressed to the next round of performances, he wouldn’t be able to watch Rory compete with her monologue.
“It’s fine,” she assured him. “I’d feel weird if you were watching anyway.”
“Break a leg!” he called as his troupe dragged him away to find an energy drink before their next heat, leaving Rory with over two hours to kill until her own performance.
Rory tagged along with a few Princely Players, hovering just inside their sight line so they’d spot her and invite her to join them. But eventually they splintered, off to their own devices, and Rory was alone again.
Monologues were competing in groups of ten, rotating every forty-five minutes. Each performer was given three minutes to dazzle the judges, and at the end of the round, one lucky actor would move on to the next group.
With little else to do, Rory slouched to the location of her monologue performance early, tucking herself into a corner. A new round was about to start. The classroom-turned-auditorium fizzed with anticipatory whispers. High school students from all around the state sipped hot lemon water, double-checked teeth for lipstick or lunch residue, recited their lines without sound.
A body sank into the chair next to Rory’s. It was another Princely Player Rory recognized as a sophomore. The girl with the thick wheat-colored hair and the statuesque frame nodded curtly and said, “Hi. Rory, right?”
Rory didn’t confirm and didn’t ask after her name, either. No need to play games — she was Rory and the other girl was Annie. They knew of each other even though they’d rarely exchanged words prior to this.
“Are you in this round?” Annie skimmed Rory’s street clothes with the same expression a mother might use to peruse a bedroom that a child supposedly cleaned. She herself was in costume but covered her ensemble in a long black peacoat.
“Next round,” Rory answered. She didn’t mean to sound as curt as she did, but she’d just recalled that Annie played basketball. She didn’t stay after school to help Pam in the Elizabethan; she ran drills in the sweaty gymnasium. And Rory felt she had very little to say to someone who did sports.
Interesting that Annie would even come to the Shakespeare festival, Rory mused. It seemed like quite the commitment for someone only half invested in the drama department. Annie split her time and her heart between the stage and a burnt-orange rubber ball; Rory couldn’t imagine filling the open slots in her schedule with anything but theater.
Annie shuffled through a stack of dog-eared pages — her festival schedule, her map of the university campus, a printed copy of her monologue, all marked up with notes. She inhaled and let the air whoosh out her mouth, and Rory couldn’t help herself.
“Nervous?” she asked.
