Made glorious, p.2
Made Glorious, page 2
Pam perched on the edge of the stage and took up the roster.
With each name she called, she glanced at the student and studied their face, as if preparing to describe it to a sketch artist later. Rory imagined a file in Pam’s head, every student’s features and overall aura being paired with potential roles.
“Aaron’s brother?” Pam said. “And you’re Lorraine’s sister, yes?” She nodded knowingly when the students confirmed. “I’ll keep an eye on you, then.” Everyone chuckled.
Those without older siblings strained their necks, hoping Pam would spare an eye for them as well.
“All right. That’s done.” Finished with the formalities, Pam put the roster and her other paperwork aside and scanned the batch of new arrivals, kicking out her legs like a playful babysitter. “Congratulations to all of you. You’ve chosen to be part of the most highly regarded high school theatre department in the state.”
She listed some of Bosworth Academy’s greatest achievements — all of them accomplished under her reign as department head, drama teacher, and director. Lest anyone here think they’d get away with subpar effort. Lest anyone here think they could offer anything but their deepest, their most hallowed, their full selves.
“Let’s get it out of the way,” Pam said. “I don’t cast sophomores.”
It struck like a gunshot. Everyone was silent, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did.
“Sophomores get ensemble,” she said. “Juniors get minor roles. Seniors get leads. It’s nothing to do with your talent. Nothing to do with your age or your lack of experience.” She was ready for rebuttals, ready with counterarguments for anyone ready to fight.
“We do three shows a year here: a fall play, a winter revue, and a spring musical. On average, sixty students audition for each show, and even something like Les Mis only has nine or ten leads. Do the math.”
Rory kept her eyes on the teacher, stilling everything within herself to keep from broadcasting her surprise. In her periphery, she noted the others similarly clenched.
“You’ve got three years with me. Three years for me to mold you. We’ll work like dogs in this room. You’ll grow to despise me for a while — that’s normal. You’ll repeat lines so many times, the words will lose their meaning, turn to mush in your mouth. You’ll howl at each other. You’ll quit, some of you. It simply won’t be worth it to you, this daily breakdown. That’s fine. You don’t belong here, then, because I require the best. Not the best you have to offer, but the best, the best in the world — so you will spend the next three years squeezing the best out of yourself for me. And after all that work, all that dedication, you’ll be a senior, and you’ll see that it was all worth it.
“Imagine if you were a senior. You’ve studied with me for three years, you’ve put in countless hours and long nights, forgoing school dances and dates and parties. And then in strolls a sophomore, snatching a lead right from under you? No. You’ll stay. You’ll work. You’ll pay your dues. And then, when you’re a senior, it’ll be your time to shine.”
HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED HOW BOORISH AND EMBARRASSINGLY poetic people become at the tail end of winter?
Months of darkness, and we’ve made it out the other side!
At last, spring is winking at us!
What a long, cold winter we’ve had!
That’s what people will say today when they see the sun peering through the clouds and turning the snow into streams for the leaf-choked gutters, lighting upon patches of dried-out grass, reminding everyone that there are living things underneath all that cold. Such a long, dark winter, they’ll intone, and sigh and stretch as if their bones have thawed.
My apologies. You see, even I cannot resist dipping into my storehouse of words to paint you a glossy account of our carryings-on. I cannot promise you I won’t further humiliate myself with such earnest expressions, that my own inner poet won’t unleash itself to run free and wild and hump all over our narrative.
But I can promise you honesty. At all costs, in all its ugliness, in all its power. That’s what I can promise.
And so I begin by telling you the truth: it’s only January. Sunshine before April is a fool’s hope.
We still have plenty of winter ahead of us.
I walk on this bright and gloriously frigid morning along a crumbling sidewalk until my path forces me to step into the road. My new Christmas boots are far too thin against the muddy slush. My mother bought them for fashion, not for function. I’d wager my wet toes will be numb until lunch. Still, the cold registers in my internal landscape as mere inconvenience.
Down shines the watery light, birds calling out songs for the false spring. Even I was bamboozled by the clearness of the sky this morning — I skipped my usual down-coat bundling and swore a sweater would be enough for the walk to Bosworth Academy.
It’s a neat 3.4 miles from my front stoop to the school’s flagpole, and since my mother takes the early shift in the emergency room hours before even the custodians arrive at Bosworth, my morning commute by foot has made me intimately familiar with every house and yard in my neighborhood.
Here, the curbs are lined with out-of-commission cars leaking their bodily fluids onto the pockmarked street, which could be a clear HOA violation if we were the type of neighborhood to have an HOA.
Here, there are Christmas wreaths still hanging on doors, and at least two porches bear the rotting rinds of pumpkins, collapsed under the weight of old snow.
Branches tangling electric wires, duct tape on satellite dishes.
Chain-link, not picket.
A deep breath chills my lungs, but I exhale, invigorated. I am not usually so jaunty, especially this early in the day, but this morning begins a new semester.
The last of my high school career.
Were it not for the brown sluice glazing and slicking the road, I would almost be tempted to add a skip to my step.
Truthfully, I have always eyed the cliff of my final semester the way a cat eyes water. Any other student might view the transition out of the high school experience as a liberation, but I’ve been gaping at the threat of our looming graduation since the tenth grade.
I simply didn’t want to leave. It was absurdly fortunate that they’d let me in at all.
Me, blandly remarkable in the way that so many scholarship students are: white, female, flawless grades, decent extracurriculars.
There were important things missing from my application. Things that could not be listed on a form. Things that were vital nonetheless for a school like Bosworth —
I had no alumni to vouch for me. No legacy. No grandparents with deep pockets offering to fund a new science wing or pay for the math club’s letterman jackets. There was only my technical college–educated mother, and her pocket was too shallow to hold a ChapStick.
I did have pity on my side. The zip code on my application form was itself a sob story. There were likely dozens of applicants with their own evocative, dewy-eyed histories to extort — but evidently Bosworth had a Rory King–shaped slot in their roster, because they opened their doors to me like I was a soggy, sad little stray, and I scampered in.
And at the end of this final semester, I will no longer be welcome in their world.
Now that I inch ever closer to the chasm, the collective push to ship me off to a decent college has gone from fevered to frenzied. Bosworth graduates are ceremoniously plunked onto the prep-school-to-university conveyor belt, and the academy longs to prove I am no exception.
Every adult I know has roped me into the old college search —
Yellow folders swollen with paperwork. Requesting letters of recommendation from teachers, requesting that they translate their verbal praise and positive parent-teacher conference feedback into black and white, double-spaced twelve-point font, trifolded into an addressed-and-stamped envelope, sent away to serve as oracle.
Waiting. Eternally waiting, a game of waiting.
College is expensive. Even applying to college is expensive. There is little talk about the burdens of such an expense, and there is little talk addressing the realities of whether I merit all this fuss and faxing and funding. College is for people who wish to make something of themselves, is it not? So then it seems fitting that only people who are valuable raw materials would turn out to be anything valuable after college.
It is exhausting to reconvince myself of my worthiness every day.
In previous years, whenever someone aimed me toward that conveyor belt, heading for the refiner’s fire of graduation and college and all that lay beyond it, I vibrated with a sickening fear — fear that I would go too far, and then they’d find out. Find out that I am and always have been nothing more than a useless glob of flaccid clay.
But I do not feel that fear anymore.
Not today. Today that fear has retired, and I can reflect upon it with the kind of nostalgia that only a seventeen-year-old possesses. I box up this fear and place it on a shelf in the back of my mind, where I keep all the childish things I’ve outgrown. For today I draw a line in the sand, as one does a thousand times in these adolescent years, and I hop over my mark. I’m rather looking forward to it now — the cliff, the edge, the final rattle of my precious, most innocent years. All this time, I’ve dreaded this last-semester plummet, but now I see what it truly is. Like an asteroid emerging from its galactic hiding place, I see my trajectory now, and I can see that I’ve been hurtling along my path all along, bright and steady and true.
A cliff is worrisome; a flight path is a path. A bridge from one point to another. A means to an end.
Oh, we are going to have some fun, you and I. Keep turning pages, dearest. Keep tracking my words like ants marching you toward a divine picnic of discourse. Ants, asteroids — things are already in motion.
One mile has lapsed. If I keep up my pace, I’ll arrive with five minutes until the tardy bell.
I pass a dog. Hitched to its zip line behind its house, it nonetheless charges at me, snarling, teeth bared, black tongue unfurling against the chicken wire of its makeshift fence.
An unkempt creature, some breed of matted white goblin rat with the rage of a cop despite being the very kickable size of a football. No doubt it was procured as a way to delight the children of a struggling family, in hopes that a pet could make up for finer things; now the pitiful pup has been relegated to the yard, the children’s excitement and love dulled not long after the first dozen walks, and it takes its anger and resentment out on any passerby. Now stale shitbombs litter the yard, abandoned much like the barking rat that laid them. Not even a living thing can stave off the lure of a video game forever.
Or perhaps I am the sole purpose of its yipping; perhaps my hulking form in the world sets off the dog’s baser instincts and it goes wild, hoping to scare me away. Perhaps it sniffed out my hulking ambitions.
As I put distance between myself and the hateful dog, I sidle past a pair of elementary-aged children. They sidestep me, making for the balding grass to give me dominion over the sidewalk, and I take it as a simple demonstration of natural hierarchies, the supremacy of my age over theirs, but then I hear it:
“Lardo.” One of them mutters it; both laugh. I arch around to peek at them, and when our eyes meet, they scurry away, as if I might run after them, barking in retaliation until my zip line catches.
Yes, I’m primed for comments like this. Lardo, a classic — though I wonder if either of these modern younglings would be able to tell me what lard is, how it is used, or why it’s an apt word to describe me. Lard seems to belong to an older time, a lost era of milk bottles and patchwork quilts and respecting your elders. And yet lard, as an appellative, is timeless, isn’t it?
Fatty, pig, heifer, wide load, and other more creative variations on the form — I’ve heard them all. I’ve thought them myself, too, in case you wonder what I do with my silences.
None of it matters. Let them mock my body, my heft, let them sprinkle insults beneath me like dog shit, let them believe that I do not fit, could not fit, could not belong. Let them think that I am only what I have always been.
I’ll have them all rooting for me in the end.
You too. You’ll be cheering me on, aching for me to get what I so desperately deserve.
And it begins today.
Today, I’m going to —
A SHABBY AND TECHNICALLY SILVER CHEVY CELEBRITY pulls up to the curb next to Rory, nearly scraping its dented bumper against a garbage can.
“Hey! Get in!” Ethan Yorke, wrists draped over the steering wheel, has to shout his greeting, since the windows in his cheap dream car do not go back up once they’ve been rolled down. “It’s freezing and I need coffee.”
Rory, deciding not to point out the controversial sunshine, obediently trudges around the car’s rear.
Ethan reaches across the passenger seat, sweeping papers and trash onto the floor, and opens the door from the inside.
Rory tucks herself into the front seat, which is still pushed all the way forward to accommodate her diminutive height — she’d wager she was the only other person to ride in Ethan’s chariot all winter break.
“Why didn’t you call?” Ethan scolds as he spins the car down the street.
Rory rubs her hands together in front of the one working vent. “I thought you’d be with Brad.”
Ethan Yorke has taken to wearing his long black hair slicked straight back so it curls as it tickles the collar of his peacoat. The combat boots he wore even in the summer. The kilts he wears even in the winter. The eyeliner is a newer experiment, something that he kept after the Holiday Glitter Gingerbread Revue. He continues wearing it because it makes the male student body at Bosworth decidedly uncomfortable, and not necessarily because of what it does to his already piercing eyes — though that would be reason enough.
Today’s cheery blue tartan is paired with a kitschy (read: ugly, but on purpose) Fair Isle sweater, likely dug out of some thrift shop’s mothballed collection for less than the price of a junior bacon cheeseburger.
“Brad’s got early-morning swims,” Ethan says. “And rehearsals will start soon. So I guess it was nice knowing him.” He always dreams big, dreams of dating beyond his own extracurricular’s pool of options, but the athletes and the student council and the social sciences clubs and the hunters and farmers and the performing arts kids all live on separate planets.
He and varsity swimmer Brad have been one group project away from finally kissing, but now the portal between the worlds will close.
“Anyway, I’d still give you a ride, even if I had Brad with me.” Ethan undercuts his chastising statement by plunking a lime-green CD into his Discman and cranking the volume on the haunted stereo. He gestures for Rory to pinch the cable to the tape deck just so to work against the short in the cord, and then out blasts the morning anthem.
Ethan sings his Jonathan Larson loudly, unabashedly, proud of his sharp tenor voice, and when he glances at Rory, raises his eyebrows, she’s galvanized. She gives in to his spell, singing — so softly, but she does sing.
(I never said I couldn’t sing.)
After driving through Cool Beans, where Ethan pays for two drip coffees and an orange roll, the car slows to a creep as they idle to get into Bosworth’s parking lot. With only four hundred parking spaces and far more than four hundred students with their own sets of wheels, the parking lot becomes a battlefield each morning, and the slightest distraction could cost you a decent spot. If you don’t snag a spot in the lot, you have to park on the other side of the school, behind the tennis courts, and then you have to hike like a goatherd to get to class on time.
But today, Rory and Ethan are brimming with patience.
They can wait as long as they need to; they can crawl past every parking spot, a car already nestled within its lines; they can hoof it from the tennis courts and endure a dreaded tardy staining their records, because today is the day.
The one they’ve been waiting for.
Ethan switches albums, skipping through the tracks of his musical hodgepodge until “Sweet Transvestite” blares through the speakers. He matches Tim Curry’s sultry tone, beat for beat, as if there’s an audience hidden under the hood.
Rory says, reading his mind, “She’ll never pick it. They’d never let her.”
“Whatever. Pam does what she wants,” Ethan points out, and it’s 90 percent of the truth. Bosworth’s theater department has a larger budget than their football team.
“The church ladies would lose their shit.” Unfortunately for Pam and any other teacher hoping to push the envelope in the name of academic evolution, Bosworth Academy has far too many pearl-clutchers on its board. Requiring high school productions of Shakespeare to remove the bawdy parts is one of their beatitudes. Expanding the mind is how the devil gets in.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing, though?” Ethan pines. “I’d be Frank-N-Furter, Cole could be Eddie, one of the Owens could be Brad . . . Who would be Janet?”
Rory stops singing, holds her breath instead. Tim Curry moans on the CD while they ponder.
Oh, my. So many options, my stars. What an embarrassment of options, truly.
“Clarissa, I guess,” Ethan determines, sans enthusiasm.
“Too showy.” Rory gazes out her window; just outside the parking lot, an angry man in his sensible sedan breaks into a full tantrum, stuck in the Bosworth lineup near a traffic light. Rory’s mouth turns up in a wry smile. There are plenty of side streets one could take to avoid the clusterfuck, if one isn’t too entitled to believe he deserves a straight-shot, unimpeded route to work. Hopefully he learns his lesson. Then again, Rory’s betting he’ll wake up tomorrow, drive this way again, and believe he’s got the stuff to beat this traffic, to really show it who’s boss.
Some people are fond of wearing chips on their shoulders.
“Our last show.” Ethan sighs, and Rory is all ready to get nice and sappy with him, but then he says, “Too bad about Annie. She’s going to miss it.”
