Annie glanced at her and smiled. “Not really. I mean, physically I get nervous. Look.” She held up her hand, which trembled like she was an old lace maker. “But my brain’s completely in the game.”

  The doors closed, signaling that everyone should sit and simmer down. Rory peered sideways at Annie. The other girl did radiate an unflappable composure, but Rory was unconvinced. She watched for Annie’s tell — a stiff jaw, a slow blink, a moment of dissociation so powerful, it turned the whole Shakespeare festival into a regret.

  But Annie stared straight ahead, giving away nothing.

  The judge of the monologues welcomed everyone to this session, informing the group that he’d be calling for their performances in random order. Again, Rory glanced at Annie to see what the girl thought of this arrangement; again, Annie’s expression was one of amenability. Not quite pleasant, but just left of it.

  The first name was called. A sprite of a girl from West Delta walked to the front of the classroom. “I’m Ivy Sorenson, and I’ll be portraying Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing.”

  Ah. Act 3, scene 1. “What fire is in mine ears?” and so on. A familiar monologue at the festival, especially among this type of girl — pixie-esque, small of feature, named for an inanimate object, most likely to be described as “quirky” for their love of old-timey jazz and their collection of rubber ducks.

  A girl like Ivy could never play Lady Macbeth. Too doe-eyed. Too adorable.

  The next girl, another will-o’-the-wisp, recited Ophelia’s soliloquy, the “bells jangled, out of tune and harsh” from act 3, scene 1 of Hamlet. Another monologue for a small bell of a girl — it was a fair enough rendition. Rory, who had always loved this passage, gritted her teeth and wordlessly clapped at its conclusion.

  “So, what happens if someone brought the same monologue as you?” Annie leaned into Rory. Their height difference meant Annie’s whisper blew right into Rory’s ear. She smelled like powder-scented deodorant.

  Rory’s cheeks flared. “The judges get to compare and contrast your versions, I guess?”

  “Right.” Annie nodded to herself as if Rory had confirmed something she’d been suspecting. “The show must go on.”

  A boy went up and launched into King John.

  Annie, after a moment, asked, “What’s your monologue?”

  Prickles erupted all over Rory. “Cressida, act three, scene two.” For some reason Rory’s skin reacted as if she’d just revealed a secret to Annie — her body, nervous. Her brain, confused.

  “I love that one,” Annie said. “Did you ever — ?”

  Then Annie’s name was called.

  Annie Neville, sophomore, Bosworth Academy.

  Annie stood, stripped off her coat. Before she charged to the front of the classroom, she turned back toward Rory, and Rory, for the life of her, could not decipher the look Annie gave her.

  Coming from anyone else, it would have been smug, conspiratorial, a little show-offy. But Annie delivered to Rory a comportment of humble, almost worshipful fellowship. An expression of complete alliance, communion, from one performer to another.

  Team spirit.

  “Wish me luck,” Annie murmured, and sidestepped to the aisle.

  And then it was like Rory had known Annie for years — they weren’t so different, that expression from Annie had signaled. Not really. Not when they were both here, in the service of the theater, giving themselves over to this great art.

  Annie centered herself before the audience.

  “I’m Annie Neville,” she sang out, her voice as loud and as clear as a student body president’s. “I’ll be performing a monologue from Macbeth: act four, scene three.”

  The room was quiet. Rory understood why — there were several things happening here, and she tracked them all:

  Everyone was scrambling mentally, trying to recall exactly which monologue Annie was about to launch into. Lady Macbeth’s famous monologues were from acts 1 and 5, so was this Lady Macduff? The witches? How so?

  Also, now that Annie was before them, her presence was overwhelming, impossible to take in. She wore a men’s suit — pressed white shirt undone at the collar, a tie that had been loosened and left limp, as if she’d had a hard long day at the office and was exhausted from being so buttoned up. Her hair, slicked back into a high swinging ponytail, gleamed golden against the charcoal-gray suit jacket she slung over her shoulder with one hand. The creased pants were perfectly tailored to her long legs, and, although they were absolutely purchased in the men’s department — there was room in the crotch — they looked as if they had only ever been designed, sewn, and sold to be on Annie Neville’s body.

  Annie grounded herself, peering down at her shiny black dress shoes, and when she glanced back up, she was Malcolm.

  Not with a deep silly men’s voice, not by grabbing at her junk or doing anything that signaled “butch,” but because she spoke, and commanded the room to believe her.

  This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,

  Was once thought honest. You have loved him well.

  He hath not touch’d you yet.

  It was stunning. Perfect. It was hard to believe she spoke for three minutes; it went by so fast, so wrapped up was the whole room in her Malcolm’s dilemma — revealing to Macduff the depths of his sins: his greed, his lust, his lack of decent qualities, all of which would make him a terrible king . . . a confession that was, in the end, only a devious test for poor Macduff.

  Everyone would probably have been satisfied if they had simply closed the rest of the monologues right now, Rory calculated. Tally up Annie as the winner, listen to her recite the rest of the whole damn play. Her presence was that magnetic.

  Was Annie this magnetic on the basketball court? Rory wondered. Either way, it was glorious to behold — and a little intimidating.

  “Thank you, Miss Neville,” said the judge after the stunned applause. “I’m curious: What made you choose that monologue in particular?”

  Annie shrugged, released back into her own personality, and the contrast was startling — so that charisma was not just her natural presence: it was something she could switch on and off. Always wonderful — and a bit sneaky on the judge’s part — to ask the performer a slight question afterward. That way, the room was privy to the contrast between the performer and the performance.

  It was an actor’s craft that they’d witnessed, then, and pure talent. Not just someone who was good at memorizing and enunciating.

  Annie thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t love Macbeth,” she finally admitted. “I know it’s considered one of Shakespeare’s best, but it’s difficult to root for any of the characters. There are no heroes. Only the least of, like, ten evils. This monologue, though, when Malcolm is seeing how loyal Macduff is to Scotland . . . I can understand that. That loyalty. That allegiance to something larger than yourself — and that fury for anyone who would dare threaten it.”

  The judge thanked her again, and Annie sat down.

  In the years that followed, Rory would come to understand exactly what Annie meant in this moment.

  That allegiance. That conviction.

  It was the single greatest moment of Bosworth acting Rory had seen to that point — and when the round ended with Annie pronounced the winner, there was hardly a ripple of disappointment in the room. It smelled like fate — Annie was meant to go on, to win the next round and the next. She was meant to carry a trophy onto the bus home.

  “You’re next, right?” Annie double-checked with Rory. “Oh, damn! I wish I could stay,” Annie said as she peered at her watch and slid her peacoat back on again, “but I’ve got fifteen minutes to pee, race over to the other side of campus, and set up for my next round.”

  “That’s okay,” Rory assured her, and marveled at the change between them — she felt less reserved around Annie now. Even though she was not the only one who had witnessed Annie’s secret brilliance, Rory was the one Annie had chosen to sit by.

  Could that make Rory brilliant by proxy?

  Perhaps Annie hadn’t sat by Rory simply because they went to the same school. Perhaps Annie sat beside Rory because she’d seen something in her that she recognized. Something Annie wanted to be a part of.

  “Um, good job up there.” Even as Rory said it, she knew it was an understatement. Even the suit Annie wore deserved something bigger than “good job.”

  Annie grinned. “Hopefully I did Bosworth proud.”

  (The trophy from this particular festival that bears Annie Neville’s name as the Overall Best in Monologue still resides in the school’s glass display case and is dusted and shined once a year. Same with Annie’s basketball championship plaque and her MVP ribbon.)

  “I’ll see you later, okay? Break a leg! Let’s both make it to the finals — that’ll show Pam to put sophomores in her ensembles! You’d better hurry and go change.”

  Then Annie was gone, shuffling through the crowd of people she’d soundly spanked in the competition, and they were patting her on the back, congratulating her, like they could transfer her capabilities to themselves with one touch. Annie was, of course, the very model of a good sport, thanking them kindly without a whiff of self-deprecation — simply accepting that she had been the best in this round, and that was how it was.

  And that was how it would remain.

  For Rory did not move from her spot in the corner of the classroom. Not to change, not to find a quiet place to go over her lines.

  Not to rise from her seat when her name was called in the next round: “Rory King? From Bosworth Academy? Is Rory here?” She wrapped her ankles around her chair’s legs like vines.

  She did not move to run out of the room when the awkward silence continued and the judge stood and glanced around the room, looking at each person — boring his eyes into her as he considered whether or not she could be Rory, ultimately moving past her, perhaps deciding that this pudgy dumpling of a person in holey jeans and a sweaty Shakespeare sweatshirt couldn’t possibly be the girl who had signed up to be Cressida.

  Rory let her spot go. She did not perform the monologue she’d been practicing at home for weeks. She did not put on the sky-blue Grecian gown she’d begged her mother to help her procure, which was folded up in a silken wad at the bottom of her tote bag. She did not say the words, the lines she’d been aching to say out loud:

  Who shall be true to us,

  When we are so unsecret to ourselves?

  But though I loved you well, I wooed you not.

  Lines that felt like they had been written for her, to her, to come alive when she alone said them. Lines that felt like they belonged to her.

  Lines she hoped to say one day, to the right person, at the right moment. It’s far too embarrassing to spill the truth, but harder still to hold back the words.

  I am in love, and it is embarrassing to admit. I love you, and I try to keep it to myself, but it keeps spilling out of me. Forgive me my thoughts — they are inappropriate, too much, too impossible. You could never love me back, but I have to say it, because if I don’t, I will regret it —

  She did not say it. Instead she sat, arms folded around herself.

  Why perform when she had already seen the winning monologue?

  Why try when she was destined to fail?

  Rory watched every round of monologues until the classroom was surrendered to the afternoon lecturers. Then she grabbed her things and made her way to the shuttle. Back at the hotel, she turned on the TV and stared at it, waiting for Ethan’s jubilant return.

  At the end of the week, Rory sat beside Ethan during closing ceremonies. His troupe came in second place in their category. Annie sat on Rory’s other side, and when she was crowned winner of the monologues, Rory clapped with genuine pride. No resentment in her guts, no envy in her bones.

  Others came home from Shakespeare with laurels and tokens. Rory came home with a new friend.

  EVEN THE BEST-MADE CLOCKS REQUIRE A BIT OF GREASING now and then.

  At the next rehearsal, the cast and crew are no longer chittering, clucking out their latest theories and worries and rumors; they slump in the first three rows of the auditorium and are mostly quiet, staring up at the great ceiling of the Elizabethan as if the pathway back to joy is somewhere in the geometric designs of its glass.

  Rory takes her spot next to Ethan, who’s flopped into the fourth row, an act of rebellion or an act of nonchalance, who can say.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “’Sup” is his lethargic reply.

  “Gloomy in here, isn’t it?” Rory tugs the sleeves of her cardigan down so she can grip them in her palms.

  Ethan snorts. “The death of the show doesn’t exactly inspire the kicking up of heels.”

  “The show’s not dead.” Rory slouches down as far as her hips will let her, until her knees kiss the back of the chair in front of her.

  “Pam’s going to cancel,” Ethan says. “Guarantee it.”

  “Not a chance.” Rory speaks with her voice and also with her beating heart; she can feel the pump of each valve, each push of new blood through her system. “Pam’s too in love with this show to cancel it.”

  There’s too much at stake with this show to cancel it.

  Ethan is not moved by Rory’s gesture of optimism; he shrugs and fusses with a loose thread on the hem of his kilt until Pam emerges from backstage.

  Pam waits until the students silence themselves.

  “All right,” she says. “I’ll get right to it. Annie Neville will no longer be part of our production. I know there are plenty of rumors floating around, but I would ask you to stop spreading unverified information. It’s a very serious situation, and I assure you that the authorities are investigating it thoroughly. But that leaves us without a Joetta.”

  Rory’s lungs clench. She grips her sleeves so tight she can feel the pattern of the cheap acrylic yarn, count the loops and purls.

  “For today, I want to run through the second and third acts of the show. We have a few transitions to polish. I’ll announce the new casting for Joetta later this week, but for now . . .” Pam scans the rows of people.

  Rory sits up slowly, her breathing even.

  “Lizzie? Could you come read Joetta’s lines?”

  Lizzie Alder, a pixie-like girl from the ensemble who wandered over from chamber choir, nods and accepts a binder with the script from Shandie.

  It doesn’t mean anything. It’s one rehearsal.

  Stick to the plan.

  Pam claps her hands and asks everyone to get into their places for the top of act 2, then hisses open a Diet Coke and takes her place in the front row.

  “Adios,” Ethan tells Rory, and the two of them part in front of the stage, he on stage left, she on stage right with the rest of the ensemble.

  The stormy mood seems to have lifted. The cast begins the bustling, pre-rehearsal movement backstage, their hijinks, their various conversations that are dropped and picked up between scenes. Usually Rory ping-pongs back and forth in the wings, going from one group to the next, but today her feet bring her to the very edge of the curtain, the closest she can stand to the stage without catching the light.

  She’s watched this scene dozens of times.

  But she feels compelled to watch it again.

  Lizzie holds the binder in both hands; it makes her look ridiculously small, far too slight and delicate to take on the giant role of Joetta, who is a knight and a rapscallion and an athlete —

  “Louder, please, Joetta,” Pam commands, and Lizzie dials up her volume.

  Next to Ethan, she looks more like his little sister than his secret love and possible enemy — and surely plucky Joetta should have a boisterous, assured way of speaking?

  “Is this how they court women in Tillypoo? Seems more like hunting bunny rabbits,” Lizzie recites. Her nose has been in the binder this whole time, since she doesn’t know the lines, not by heart. But now she attempts to gesticulate Joetta’s bold claims, and again, Rory is less than charmed. It looks like a kitten swatting a paw —

  “She’s good,” someone whispers. Behind Rory, Sierra and another choir girl lean their heads out of the wings, spying on the scene.

  And Rory’s insides catch flame.

  Lizzie’s not good, but she could be.

  Pam’s visions for her musicals are always malleable things — and if Rory strains to listen, with the deepest part of her, she can sense the vision stretching to accommodate a new version of Joetta, someone who wields her power in her finesse, her subtlety —

  “But she’s a sophomore,” replies Preston, and it’s like someone’s doused the fire in Rory’s body with a bucket of cold water. Of course. Lizzie’s a sophomore.

  Pam doesn’t cast sophomores.

  “It’s three weeks to opening,” Sierra argues back. “It’s not exactly standard circumstances here. Pam might have to bend her precious rules.”

  The truth of this statement rings through Rory, aching her teeth.

  Pam might bend the rules.

  Lizzie Alder, no dues paid, not so much as a dime.

  And there she is, the only ensemble member holding the weight of the whole script in her hands, trading jabs with Ethan Yorke.

  No, Lizzie could have been randomly selected. Lizzie could have been the first person who caught Pam’s eye. Lizzie could have been an inoffensive, nonthreatening, unintimidating student to fill the space on the stage while Pam mulls over the actual, real possibilities for a permanent Joetta . . .

  Or Lizzie was chosen.

  Predetermined.

  And this rehearsal, then, is more than just a rehearsal; it’s an audition.

  A stealth audition.

  Lizzie lifts her chin just then, on the tail end of a line that sums up Joetta as a character, her pride, her valor, her vulnerability: “And perhaps a woman can do more than just dream. Perhaps she can pick up a sword and fight to make those dreams her own. Don’t assume anything about me ever again.”

  Maybe it’s only a trick of the lights, or the vision of memory, but Lizzie looks so much like Annie when Annie used to say that line. She sounds like Annie.

 

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