Made glorious, p.28
Made Glorious, page 28
All heads turn to Pam — Pam, fearless leader, orchestrator, director.
“Oh, Rory,” Pam says. “What are we going to do with you now?”
I do not wait for orders. I do not wait for the next scene to be set.
I run, dashing through the curtains. This is against all the rules. I’m still in my costume. I’ve still got my microphone, taped to my neck and cheek.
I leap into the orchestra pit, pushing past the row of flautists and the boy with the tuba, and then I’m running up the aisle.
People are streaming back from intermission, Red Vines in hand, and they’re ready to sit through the back half of the show and be dazzled. Do they think this is part of some weird intermission performance piece? A little play within a play, a teaser?
I don’t know; I’m moving too quickly to tell.
“Rory!” someone calls. Is it my mother? Could be. Is it Miss Keating, who’s walking dangerously close to my mother now, bridging the gap? Could be.
Is it Mr. Richmond, the counselor, hurrying in like he’s been called at the last minute?
How much do they all know?
It doesn’t matter now.
This is Pam’s world. Pam’s system. Pam’s justice.
I thought I could infiltrate, but it’s time to leave. I’ll outrun them all.
Time to hide.
I head straight to the library tower. My legs burn as I take the stairs two at a time; my microphone makes a strange feedback noise, grating to my ears. I yank it off my face, tug it up through the top of my gown, and it shuts up at last.
In the tower, I climb out the window. I’ve dreamed of touching my feet onto the roof for years now. JANITOR ACCESS ONLY. NO STUDENTS, says the sign, but I don’t care. I was never really a student; I was only ever a pathetic cog in a machine that would never serve me.
It’s snowing now, gently. It sprinkles the top of my head, crystal ice dampening my scrunched, leaf-strewn Joetta hair.
The brisk air feels medicinal. It’s good to be up this high, to look out at the expanse of the campus, the city. At last I feel as large as Bosworth promised I would feel — but I had to climb to this height myself.
A pair of footprints ink the white beside me. I track them. I’m not alone.
Standing near the roof’s ledge, hands folded patiently across his front like he’s been waiting hours for me to arrive, is Ethan, in the snow.
Exterior. The roof of a prep school, night. The sky is hazy, with little visibility. Snow falls, erasing the horizon and masking all ambient sounds.
ETHAN stands, hair dripping. No coat, no shoes. Theater kids are always running around barefoot.
RORY: It’s snowing.
She is dangerously tense for such a slippery surface. Her hands she must consciously keep from balling into fists. Her legs slightly bent, to spring away, to escape.
ETHAN: Rory, I — I can’t believe you would do this. I’m a little scared. I feel like I don’t even know you — what else are you capable of, if you already had this in you?
I close my eyes, but it does not clear the image of Ethan’s face, the confusion in his brow, the hurt on his bottom lip, the shock in his eyes. The same face a baby makes when it is shouted at for the first time — a shattering of innocence, a new world of possibility and pain.
And I did that to him —
No, no, you did it for him. For both of you.
RORY: I did it for us. For you — to prop you up. To give you a hell of a show to go out on. I knew there’d be people in the crowd — scholarship reps, talent scouts. I wanted to give you the exact kind of actor you love to perform against —
ETHAN: I like acting with all sorts of people. The whole point is to be dynamic, to respond to different — No, this is bullshit. (He rakes his hand through his hair; the frozen water sparkles as it flies away from him.) This wasn’t about me, Rory. Even I know that’s a lie.
It didn’t feel like a lie when I said it. Can I no longer rely on my senses to distinguish truth from untruth? Or do I simply inherently believe everything that comes out of my mouth?
ETHAN: You cheated and you — you set Annie up! You broke her leg. God, you could have killed her. Your best friend, and you could have killed her, and for what? Why did you do it? For some lead? For some applause?
RORY: It was never about applause!
It was senior year! You didn’t want to miss your last opportunity to —
You were just tired of being invisible, and so you —
You always knew you had a star performance inside of you, and so —
“It was never about that!”
I reach inside me, reach for that wonderful dark place that always gives me the right lines, but it’s dancing out of my reach —
Transformation.
“I just wanted to be something else!” The words pour out from my soul’s very chambers, and the shame of this confession turns my nose to water, my eyes to burning orifices, my insides to hurricanes. “Can you blame me? Look at me! I hate everything about myself —”
RORY cuts off, overcome by the swelling of emotion. She hunches over, her hands catching her face, and sobs, wailing like a mourning bird.
“You can’t be surprised that I would want to be someone else,” I say. “Even for one night.”
It feels true. It hangs there, a cloud of breath between us.
Ethan listens. But he shakes his head.
“No, I don’t think that’s true, Rory. I don’t think you hate yourself. I think you’re actually in love with yourself. You think you’re smarter than all of us, and you know what? That’s probably true. But that’s not the only measure of a person. You can use whatever metric you want. You can always find a way to come up short . . . or to tower over someone else.”
And everything feels like a cut-down when you’re used to coming out ahead.
“What did you say?” Ethan asks.
I shiver, but it’s not from the cold. Snow has a particular smell, but all I sense is the bitterness of my mouth.
“There weren’t enough parts to go around.” I hear myself say it this time, feel the words resonate in my chest as I loose them in Ethan’s direction like arrows. “So I did what I had to do.”
Now Ethan stares at me with genuine fear, which sharpens my irritation. He’s not trapped on the roof with a wild beast. He’s not facing off with a serial killer.
It’s Rory. The same Rory he picks up for school on chilly mornings, the same Rory he clung to when he broke up with Aiden, with Carlos, with Brad . . .
“I could hear her,” I attempt to explain. “Joetta. She spoke to me. I can feel her, sense her. It’s like she chose me —”
“Being the lead just means you’re the lead,” Ethan counters. “What you’re talking about is either another lie or some sort of possession. Are you saying you were possessed, Rory?”
Possession.
Something else, making itself at home inside of me.
No — not something else.
Possessed by my ambition. Possessed by myself.
“So.” Ethan swallows, his glorious Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “You had a plan for everyone. Blackmail. Did you have something for me?”
RORY: No. Of course not.
Junior year, baseball dugout.
RORY: I didn’t have anything, I swear.
Junior year, baseball dugout. Assistant Coach Hunter —
Don’t you dare, I whisper, and cannot tell if I am speaking out loud or not. Don’t you think it.
Assistant Coach Hunter in the dugout. It was only supposed to be one time —
And then a flood of evidence, evidence that’s gathered in the back of my mind for so long.
Don’t think it. To think it means —
It means you’re more conniving than you ever thought you were. It means Ethan is right, and it was never about Joetta.
It was always your own desires, pushing past everything else around you, floating to the top.
It means you’re not some undiscovered genius, some acting prodigy channeling the spirit of a great leading role.
It means you’re just as selfish as they think you are.
You already knew all this. You knew, all along, that you were only ever listening to yourself.
Did you know, dear reader? Or were you holding out for my redemption?
What are you going to do now?
You should run.
My kingdom for a horse.
You’re still on the roof. You walk right past him. He reaches for you — does he think you’re going to jump? Come on, you’ve got more sense than that.
That’s no way to escape.
You move right past Ethan and find the service ladder. The snow touches you, your forehead. As you climb down, you can see them, gathered at the tower window. There’s Miss Keating, concern on her face, and a few others — you’ll never know if they’re motivated to be here by true compassion or by morbid curiosity, and you suppose it doesn’t matter.
Either way, they’ll tell the story. I was there, they’ll say. I was there, and I saw it.
They’ll say you nearly slipped climbing down the ladder, but your feet are steady in your Joetta boots. They’ll say you staggered through the courtyard, as if drunk, or inebriated with your emotions, but you are clearheaded, calm. Reverent, even, as you cross into the parking lot.
What of this story will you remember? Were they chasing you? Were they calling your name? Impossible to remember, and irrelevant nonetheless.
You do remember finding Pam’s keys, stashed in the pocket of your gown.
TELL ME, READER: COULD I HAVE EVER BEEN THE HERO IN this situation? If we view the last semester as a war of some sort, and the theater as our battlefields, is there a way in which I could have emerged from this night a luminary? A champion, a savior, a star?
Or was I doomed to be the villain? Is it the pathway that makes a wretch, or the person walking it?
Have I been poisoned by the idea that I am owed something? I didn’t expect the world to simply hand me my desires, after all; I was willing to fight for them, and I did. Arrow and blade, hand over foot, for every inch of it.
Just like Bosworth taught us. Just like Pam taught us.
The world is what you make of it.
If you really want something, Pam taught us, there are a thousand ways to convince others to offer it to you. Hint, cajole, gesture. Build yourself a stage. Get the audience to look right where you want them to. Everyone else is a character to be blocked, a performer to be directed.
I was Bosworth’s greatest pupil, then, their legacy. I made the world in my favor — and I don’t know how to stop.
But I was wrong to think they’d ever see me as a world-maker. Even as I walked through the same hallways as the rest of them, sat in the same classrooms as the rest of them, graduated with the same diploma. We were never going to be the same. Never.
Snow drifts down. I can hear them shouting.
Do you know how to cause a car wreck without actually killing anyone? I do.
Pam’s Honda starts nice and easy for me.
There will be rumors that I drove toward the people who are chasing me, but that’s not true. I swerve to miss them, as I swerve to miss all things.
There will be rumors about tonight, but remember this, and you can decide for yourself if it’s true or not:
Villain or hero, I only hoped to play a part.
Exterior. The parking lot of Bosworth Academy.
A car has been driven into a pole. Snow falls, sprinkling everything with a soft blanket. Sirens blare. People are running to inspect the car, to open the door.
The car is smoking, the hood completely frazzled.
Windshield is cracked. Airbag deployed.
Spring snow, spiraling down. A second winter.
Covering the wreckage.
Making a world.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2024 by Lindsay Eagar
Epigraph copyright © 1958 from Thoughts on Machiavelli by Leo Strauss
Cover illustration copyright © 2024 by Deena So’Oteh
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2024
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2023944663
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
www.candlewick.com
Lindsay Eagar, Made Glorious
