Made glorious, p.6
Made Glorious, page 6
She opens the fridge.
MOM: I made risotto. I even saved some for you — but you better act fast before I finish it.
MOM is eating standing up, hunched over the counter, in a matching set of maroon sweats. The house is freshly cleaned, a load of towels recently folded on the dining table. Catching up on neglected chores and babying a risotto — these are the kinds of things MOM does on her nights off.
RORY: I’m not hungry.
She leaves the kitchen and heads for the stairs.
MOM: Wait! It’s American Idol night. Don’t you want to — ?
RORY: We already saw this one.
She indicates the TV, where Ryan Seacrest stands before a crowd of starry-eyed hopefuls. In the next sixty minutes, some of them will be exhilarated when the judges say “yes.” Most of them will be rejected and never understand that they were only brought before the judges to be laughed at.
MOM: How can you tell?
RORY: It’s Atlanta. We already saw Atlanta. Look. There’s the guy dressed like Uncle Fester.
MOM: We could find something else to watch.
RORY: Mom, I don’t have time to sit around and watch TV, okay? I’ve got homework. And then I need to shower and get to bed because I have to be at school extra early tomorrow.
Without waiting for a response, RORY goes up the stairs. MOM waits until RORY’s bedroom door closes, then turns up the TV volume and scrapes the rest of the risotto into a Tupperware.
Scene 2
Interior. RORY’s bedroom. There are posters on the walls: Phantom of the Opera, Romeo + Juliet, Cabaret, Titanic. A collage of the pastel playbills from every Bosworth production she’s been a part of is taped around the mirror of her secondhand vanity. Her bedsheets are a faded pink floral pattern, soft and twisted, a tower of clean folded clothes on her pillow.
RORY enters her room, closes the door with force, and drops her backpack onto her bed, disrupting the stack of laundry. She flops into the chair at her vanity with a heaving sigh, then faces the mirror.
RORY: (addressing the audience directly)
I know. It’s a cliché to be so rude to your mom. If the producers of some new teen drama on the WB wanted to rip off stereotypical dialogue for when their snotty characters mouth off to their parents, they could just come sit in my living room. But I couldn’t help it. I walk into my home, and it’s like this energy flares up inside of me. Like I want to either bury myself in my bed and never come out or immediately turn around and run away, run as far away from this house as I can, and never come back. That flare inside me . . . it turns into anger whenever I see my mom. Whenever she tries to talk to me — and it’s not that she’s doing anything wrong. I know she’s just trying to be nice to me, nice to her daughter. Especially on her night off. I know she feels guilty because she works so much, and she always cooks me something fancy when she’s got an evening free. But it feels like a trap. The food, the TV, the clean laundry that just appears on my bed . . . Mom’s trying so hard to get me to spill my guts, to nose her way into my world, but she doesn’t know the first thing about me. Not really. Not anymore.
And she doesn’t want to know. Trust me. She’d regret it if she had any idea what I’m up to.
What I’m up against.
She takes a granola bar from her backpack and eats it.
She leaves to take a shower. When she comes back into her room, she pulls homework out of her backpack and spreads it across the desk but barely looks at it. Instead, her gaze goes out the window.
Scene 3
Interior. Living room.
MOM sits on the couch in front of the TV, patching a hole in her work shoe. RORY comes downstairs in a hoodie, wet hair slicked back into a ponytail.
RORY: Is it okay if I go print something at the Hastingses’? It’s due tomorrow.
MOM: (glances at the clock, which shows it’s 9:30)
Do you think they’ll be up?
RORY: Travis doesn’t go to sleep until late. And he said I could come by tonight. He’s expecting me.
MOM: Sure. Come right back, though, okay? It’s dark.
RORY: (slipping into her shoes)
Okay.
MOM: And next time, just email it to me. I don’t mind printing it out at work.
RORY: (smiling)
Thanks, Mom. I will next time.
RORY goes out the front door and crosses the frozen grass of their front yard to the house behind them, a house with every window ablaze.
THE HASTINGS FAMILY BELONGS TO THE SAME CHURCH boundaries as the Kings; Rory and Travis would attend the same public high school if they didn’t both get into Bosworth Academy. But though their homes share the sheddings of a willow tree and a property line, they may as well be miles apart. Travis’s house is on the very edge of a beautiful and ornate subdivision, constructed by a new, trendy builder, and it’s big enough to swallow the Kings’ house in one gulp. Big double garage, wraparound porch, multiple bathrooms, open-concept kitchen. One look at the Hastings place, and you understand why Travis belongs at the prep school — and as you take in the contrast between the Hastings house and the dumpy split-level next door with the sad, shriveled lawn, you might wonder why Rory, clearly bound for the cheaper prospects of a community college diploma, doesn’t just quit school now and chase after an assistant manager position at Foot Locker.
You can live in the same neighborhood and belong to completely different universes.
Instead of heading around to the Hastingses’ front door, Rory follows the darkness of their side yard, toeing the property line until she is deposited onto a sidewalk that leads into a neighborhood park.
Under the fragile glow of a singular street lamp, half a dozen boys are gathered, some on their bikes, some tucked near the bushes, hands in pockets, the standard pose for teenage boys who are generically up to no good. As soon as they spot Rory, they get louder, guffawing and shoving, reminding Rory of a pack of wolf cubs showing off their ferocity — not for her, not really. The peacocking is for each other.
When she is close, their voices hush, draw deeper, more deliberate. The skunk of cheap weed breezes past her, but she is more scandalized by how boys choose to dress in winter — T-shirts and jeans, shorts with sweatshirts, as if they could change the weather, defeat the cold just by withstanding it.
“Hey,” Rory says first.
Travis’s friends don’t go to the prep school. They are at the public high school until they inevitably drop out to take the GED. She isn’t there to make pleasantries, and she isn’t concerned about what they think of her. She assumes they talk about her, and they know why she’s here.
“Hey,” several parrot back. One of them whispers to another, who laughs, a gesture that Rory understands is not meant to hurt her or make her feel inferior, but rather to puff themselves up, demonstrate how tight-knit they are, how confident even in her presence.
Rory feels like a babysitter with a group of ten-year-olds.
“What’s up?” Travis Hastings, the shortest among the seniors here, is a quiet, nondescript boy with the requisite modish wave of hair swooping into his serious eyes. He is the only one in a jacket, one of those zip-up Volcom hoodies, which he pairs with jeans and beat-up skater shoes. He carries himself with an aloofness here, much different from the Travis Hastings that Rory sees in church, sitting with his younger brothers and sisters.
“I was wondering if I could use your computer tonight,” Rory says. “I need to type something up and print it out.”
Travis does that remarkably obnoxious thing that boys do, where they don’t answer you right away and instead steer right back into their prior conversation. “Did you guys see SNL?”
“No, we were driving back from my sister’s away game,” another boy answers. “Who hosted?”
Impatience zaps Rory like a mosquito. “Is that cool, or what?”
Travis regards her and shrugs. “Sure.” Stepping forward into the pool of light, he walks past her and keeps walking along the sidewalk, farther into the park.
“Good night, Romeo,” teases one of the boys. The group speeds off to find a new place where the shadows pool to continue their illicit smoking circle.
It isn’t hard to know where Travis Hastings will be on a Tuesday night. Like a good boy, he attends Scouts on Tuesday evenings, but he walks home and meets up with his friends. His parents probably think he just can’t get enough of that merit badge life, sneaking in more outdoor wilderness time, but really, the boys are sharing a single bottle of beer, or a nudie magazine, or a Grand Theft Auto smuggled in a Spyro case.
“Sorry to tear you away,” Rory says as she catches up to Travis.
He’s not walking faster because he’s embarrassed or unwilling to be seen next to her, but because he’s the kind of person who always walks at his own pace, and if someone wants to catch up with him and keep stride, that’s their business.
“Nah. Those guys are dumbasses.” Such is the way one speaks affectionately about one’s friends. “Fenton popped a boner in the locker room.”
Travis rehashes the story, which has no punch line, no point except to explain that someone else is below you on the humiliation ladder, and Rory listens, not because it’s entertaining but because Travis is filling the silence. It’s always like this — shallow, lifeless conversation. It’s best for both of them. This way, they don’t have to pretend they have anything in common except their addresses.
Rory used to babysit his younger siblings, and Travis used to mow Rory’s lawn in the summers, but other than that, there is no reason to act like this is more than what it is — a business transaction, essentially. A mutual exchange of goods and services.
Their path leads out of the park to a freeway overpass, and here, among the pigeon feathers and the faded graffiti, the two of them stop.
“It’s cold,” Travis notes after they’ve been standing here for a moment, kicking a pebble with his fat shoe.
“Not too bad.” Since Rory left her scarf in Pam’s car, she tugs her jacket up as high as it will go, but it barely scrapes the bottom of her chin. “At least there isn’t wind.”
Travis nods, then peeks at his cell phone, a dark purple brick of a thing he shares with his siblings. “My mom’s expecting me by nine thirty.”
They have twelve minutes, then, until he needs to be walking through the door, or else Mrs. Hastings will start calling. At ten cents a minute, calls from a worried mother could add up.
“No problem.” Rory lets Travis settle into the darkest part of the overpass, a little notch where the concrete is nice and smooth.
She stands as he paws at her, reaching for her chest. They are not even really making eye contact; instead she stares up at the ledges where the birds roost. Travis finds her breasts, finds her nipples, lets out a muted moan.
Her hands go to his pants, feeling that he is ready.
She checks beneath her for sharp rocks and broken glass, and then she kneels.
No kisses exchanged, before or after. Nothing more than this — Rory is a fast worker, efficient at this point. She knows exactly what Travis requires, and when they’re finished, he catches his breath and asks, “You’re good, right?”
Travis has only journeyed into Rory’s anatomy a handful of times, where he explored for a second, without much interest or curiosity, almost too respectfully, and when Rory didn’t give him any further instructions, he pulled his hand out of her pants and moved on to other things.
Yes, Rory is good.
“You don’t really like it, do you?” he asked her once, and before she could answer, he hurried and zipped up, since someone was approaching with a dog on a leash.
“I’m on my period” has become her standard defense for when he inquires — and when he does offer, it’s driven by a palpable guilt, and to Rory, that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about mutual pleasure; she gets her reciprocation in other ways. Call her old-fashioned, but she’s not going to have a boy finger her to ecstasy before she’s even been kissed.
And Travis is not for kissing.
When they get to the Hastings house, Travis scratches the back of his head and opens the door for her with reluctance, as if he wishes he hadn’t agreed to any of this. “Uh, you need the printer, you said?”
“Yeah, if it’s okay with your mom.”
“As long as you’re not here too late.”
He heads inside, letting the door close on her as if he were alone.
Rory pushes the door open and goes right into their living room, where their family computer is set up in a corner. The rest of the Hastingses are bustling upstairs — getting little sisters ready for bed, Mr. Hastings changing out of his post–church meeting shirt and tie.
“Mom?” Travis calls. “I’m home.”
“How was Scouts?” Mrs. Hastings sounds like she is wrestling an unwilling child out of the bathtub.
“Fine. Hey, Rory King’s here to use our printer — is that okay?”
Permission is granted with enthusiasm: “Of course! Hi, Rory. Make yourself at home. Let Travis know if you need any help, all right?”
Travis types in the password and leaves Rory to it, heading into the kitchen to make himself a second dinner. He offers Rory nothing.
Ignoring the bitter, resinous taste in the back of her throat, she pulls out a folded paper from her jeans and starts typing.
Minutes later, printed sheets in hand, she takes them back home, where she folds a letter into an envelope, stamps and addresses it, and runs it out to the mailbox before finally going to bed.
AUDITIONS FOR A HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL ARE . . . WELL, how can I put this delicately?
Sort of like a cruise ship lineup, or a dumpster dive. You’ll get talent the likes of which you’d never expect — glorious things, voices and performances that could only emerge from that teenage cocktail of ambition and bravado.
And you also get moments more embarrassing than American Idol B-roll footage.
The auditions for the spring musical will be no different.
Pam always sits a few rows from the front, near the center of the Elizabethan. The stage manager, Shandie, joins her, with one seat between them. The house lights stay dim, the stage lights bright, an attempt to make it seem a warm, inviting place. They are blinding, actually, so you cannot see out into the crowd — a mercy, I tend to think. No need for the hopefuls to look their judges in the eye while they bare their souls in the form of their best practiced sixteen bars of some Broadway standard.
“You’ll come in, hand Shandie your audition sheet, and head up onstage. You should have already run your music up to Jake in the booth. He’ll have it cued for you. As soon as you’re ready, introduce yourself and what you’ll be singing. Then take it away.” Pam’s instructions, simple enough, become a herculean task to remember when nerves scramble your brain, even for some of the seniors who have been auditioning for Pam for years now.
Audition slots are every seven minutes, which gives Pam and Shandie time to write their notes, recover, and prepare for the next entrant.
It seems like a grueling thing to sit through. I can’t imagine the emotional toll, witnessing the unraveling of all my students, trying not to die of secondhand embarrassment.
But Pam is a rock during auditions, a brick wall. She reveals nothing, not a twitch of a lip, a cocking of an eyebrow. You truly never know where in the pecking order you fall until the cast list is posted.
This week’s auditions bring all the usual suspects, and a few surprises — for instance, a dancer from the drill team stops by to dazzle the jury with a song and dance. She practices a kick-ball-change and twiddling jazz hands in the foyer. There’s a role in Good Knight! Sweet Lady that’s fit for a dancer — a jester who performs at the royal wedding — and this drill team darling clearly has her eye on it. Fair enough — none of the Princely Players could contort or chassé well enough to nail the role. It pays to have an odd skill — to know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or river dance. You never know what obscure talent might win you a part that you otherwise would never be considered for.
There are, of course, the beloveds, the Elizabethan regulars, the ones who have been charging toward this moment for literal years now — seniors, that pathetic bunch, all of our wings pinned by Pam the moment we stepped into her classroom as sophomores, and now we all expect, with an incendiary hope, that Pam will loose us and let us fly.
But Bosworth is not a fair arena. All that pamphlet bullshit about private schools rewarding merit — Pam writes her own rules here, and they are underscored by her own senses, her own ideas, tilted or no, about how the world should operate. “The real world isn’t fair, either,” she announced to a cluster of us last fall. “You see the same people getting leads over and over — maybe someone’s uncle is the producer of the traveling Broadway show, or maybe someone’s grandparents offer to donate the funds to fix the proscenium at the local community theater. Or maybe someone is just prettier, louder, and flashier than you are. There’s nothing fair about any of this — so don’t try for fairness. Don’t crave fairness. Crave justice instead. Justice is better than fairness. Justice will always be on your side eventually — it’s in everybody’s pockets.”
Pam knows how to think big and small at the same time. But she’s either missed a problem with her logic or she’s lying.
And Pam doesn’t miss a thing.
Those of us who finish our audition emerge from the auditorium flushed and perspiring, as if we’ve stepped off the battlefield — if not triumphant, then at least alive. Those of us clogging the hallway, who have yet to take our turn in the gauntlet, congratulate our peers on their survival, and the sentiments are genuine. After you’ve auditioned, you are no longer competition, because you are no longer thrumming with potential. What’s done is done.
Before your audition, however . . .
We observe only in lingering side-eyes; we communicate in throwaway whispers; we indicate our emotional state through the crinkling of our printed lyrics, the cracking of our knuckles, the rewetting of our dry lips, and the unconscious wiping of our damp hands along our thighs.
MOM: I made risotto. I even saved some for you — but you better act fast before I finish it.
MOM is eating standing up, hunched over the counter, in a matching set of maroon sweats. The house is freshly cleaned, a load of towels recently folded on the dining table. Catching up on neglected chores and babying a risotto — these are the kinds of things MOM does on her nights off.
RORY: I’m not hungry.
She leaves the kitchen and heads for the stairs.
MOM: Wait! It’s American Idol night. Don’t you want to — ?
RORY: We already saw this one.
She indicates the TV, where Ryan Seacrest stands before a crowd of starry-eyed hopefuls. In the next sixty minutes, some of them will be exhilarated when the judges say “yes.” Most of them will be rejected and never understand that they were only brought before the judges to be laughed at.
MOM: How can you tell?
RORY: It’s Atlanta. We already saw Atlanta. Look. There’s the guy dressed like Uncle Fester.
MOM: We could find something else to watch.
RORY: Mom, I don’t have time to sit around and watch TV, okay? I’ve got homework. And then I need to shower and get to bed because I have to be at school extra early tomorrow.
Without waiting for a response, RORY goes up the stairs. MOM waits until RORY’s bedroom door closes, then turns up the TV volume and scrapes the rest of the risotto into a Tupperware.
Scene 2
Interior. RORY’s bedroom. There are posters on the walls: Phantom of the Opera, Romeo + Juliet, Cabaret, Titanic. A collage of the pastel playbills from every Bosworth production she’s been a part of is taped around the mirror of her secondhand vanity. Her bedsheets are a faded pink floral pattern, soft and twisted, a tower of clean folded clothes on her pillow.
RORY enters her room, closes the door with force, and drops her backpack onto her bed, disrupting the stack of laundry. She flops into the chair at her vanity with a heaving sigh, then faces the mirror.
RORY: (addressing the audience directly)
I know. It’s a cliché to be so rude to your mom. If the producers of some new teen drama on the WB wanted to rip off stereotypical dialogue for when their snotty characters mouth off to their parents, they could just come sit in my living room. But I couldn’t help it. I walk into my home, and it’s like this energy flares up inside of me. Like I want to either bury myself in my bed and never come out or immediately turn around and run away, run as far away from this house as I can, and never come back. That flare inside me . . . it turns into anger whenever I see my mom. Whenever she tries to talk to me — and it’s not that she’s doing anything wrong. I know she’s just trying to be nice to me, nice to her daughter. Especially on her night off. I know she feels guilty because she works so much, and she always cooks me something fancy when she’s got an evening free. But it feels like a trap. The food, the TV, the clean laundry that just appears on my bed . . . Mom’s trying so hard to get me to spill my guts, to nose her way into my world, but she doesn’t know the first thing about me. Not really. Not anymore.
And she doesn’t want to know. Trust me. She’d regret it if she had any idea what I’m up to.
What I’m up against.
She takes a granola bar from her backpack and eats it.
She leaves to take a shower. When she comes back into her room, she pulls homework out of her backpack and spreads it across the desk but barely looks at it. Instead, her gaze goes out the window.
Scene 3
Interior. Living room.
MOM sits on the couch in front of the TV, patching a hole in her work shoe. RORY comes downstairs in a hoodie, wet hair slicked back into a ponytail.
RORY: Is it okay if I go print something at the Hastingses’? It’s due tomorrow.
MOM: (glances at the clock, which shows it’s 9:30)
Do you think they’ll be up?
RORY: Travis doesn’t go to sleep until late. And he said I could come by tonight. He’s expecting me.
MOM: Sure. Come right back, though, okay? It’s dark.
RORY: (slipping into her shoes)
Okay.
MOM: And next time, just email it to me. I don’t mind printing it out at work.
RORY: (smiling)
Thanks, Mom. I will next time.
RORY goes out the front door and crosses the frozen grass of their front yard to the house behind them, a house with every window ablaze.
THE HASTINGS FAMILY BELONGS TO THE SAME CHURCH boundaries as the Kings; Rory and Travis would attend the same public high school if they didn’t both get into Bosworth Academy. But though their homes share the sheddings of a willow tree and a property line, they may as well be miles apart. Travis’s house is on the very edge of a beautiful and ornate subdivision, constructed by a new, trendy builder, and it’s big enough to swallow the Kings’ house in one gulp. Big double garage, wraparound porch, multiple bathrooms, open-concept kitchen. One look at the Hastings place, and you understand why Travis belongs at the prep school — and as you take in the contrast between the Hastings house and the dumpy split-level next door with the sad, shriveled lawn, you might wonder why Rory, clearly bound for the cheaper prospects of a community college diploma, doesn’t just quit school now and chase after an assistant manager position at Foot Locker.
You can live in the same neighborhood and belong to completely different universes.
Instead of heading around to the Hastingses’ front door, Rory follows the darkness of their side yard, toeing the property line until she is deposited onto a sidewalk that leads into a neighborhood park.
Under the fragile glow of a singular street lamp, half a dozen boys are gathered, some on their bikes, some tucked near the bushes, hands in pockets, the standard pose for teenage boys who are generically up to no good. As soon as they spot Rory, they get louder, guffawing and shoving, reminding Rory of a pack of wolf cubs showing off their ferocity — not for her, not really. The peacocking is for each other.
When she is close, their voices hush, draw deeper, more deliberate. The skunk of cheap weed breezes past her, but she is more scandalized by how boys choose to dress in winter — T-shirts and jeans, shorts with sweatshirts, as if they could change the weather, defeat the cold just by withstanding it.
“Hey,” Rory says first.
Travis’s friends don’t go to the prep school. They are at the public high school until they inevitably drop out to take the GED. She isn’t there to make pleasantries, and she isn’t concerned about what they think of her. She assumes they talk about her, and they know why she’s here.
“Hey,” several parrot back. One of them whispers to another, who laughs, a gesture that Rory understands is not meant to hurt her or make her feel inferior, but rather to puff themselves up, demonstrate how tight-knit they are, how confident even in her presence.
Rory feels like a babysitter with a group of ten-year-olds.
“What’s up?” Travis Hastings, the shortest among the seniors here, is a quiet, nondescript boy with the requisite modish wave of hair swooping into his serious eyes. He is the only one in a jacket, one of those zip-up Volcom hoodies, which he pairs with jeans and beat-up skater shoes. He carries himself with an aloofness here, much different from the Travis Hastings that Rory sees in church, sitting with his younger brothers and sisters.
“I was wondering if I could use your computer tonight,” Rory says. “I need to type something up and print it out.”
Travis does that remarkably obnoxious thing that boys do, where they don’t answer you right away and instead steer right back into their prior conversation. “Did you guys see SNL?”
“No, we were driving back from my sister’s away game,” another boy answers. “Who hosted?”
Impatience zaps Rory like a mosquito. “Is that cool, or what?”
Travis regards her and shrugs. “Sure.” Stepping forward into the pool of light, he walks past her and keeps walking along the sidewalk, farther into the park.
“Good night, Romeo,” teases one of the boys. The group speeds off to find a new place where the shadows pool to continue their illicit smoking circle.
It isn’t hard to know where Travis Hastings will be on a Tuesday night. Like a good boy, he attends Scouts on Tuesday evenings, but he walks home and meets up with his friends. His parents probably think he just can’t get enough of that merit badge life, sneaking in more outdoor wilderness time, but really, the boys are sharing a single bottle of beer, or a nudie magazine, or a Grand Theft Auto smuggled in a Spyro case.
“Sorry to tear you away,” Rory says as she catches up to Travis.
He’s not walking faster because he’s embarrassed or unwilling to be seen next to her, but because he’s the kind of person who always walks at his own pace, and if someone wants to catch up with him and keep stride, that’s their business.
“Nah. Those guys are dumbasses.” Such is the way one speaks affectionately about one’s friends. “Fenton popped a boner in the locker room.”
Travis rehashes the story, which has no punch line, no point except to explain that someone else is below you on the humiliation ladder, and Rory listens, not because it’s entertaining but because Travis is filling the silence. It’s always like this — shallow, lifeless conversation. It’s best for both of them. This way, they don’t have to pretend they have anything in common except their addresses.
Rory used to babysit his younger siblings, and Travis used to mow Rory’s lawn in the summers, but other than that, there is no reason to act like this is more than what it is — a business transaction, essentially. A mutual exchange of goods and services.
Their path leads out of the park to a freeway overpass, and here, among the pigeon feathers and the faded graffiti, the two of them stop.
“It’s cold,” Travis notes after they’ve been standing here for a moment, kicking a pebble with his fat shoe.
“Not too bad.” Since Rory left her scarf in Pam’s car, she tugs her jacket up as high as it will go, but it barely scrapes the bottom of her chin. “At least there isn’t wind.”
Travis nods, then peeks at his cell phone, a dark purple brick of a thing he shares with his siblings. “My mom’s expecting me by nine thirty.”
They have twelve minutes, then, until he needs to be walking through the door, or else Mrs. Hastings will start calling. At ten cents a minute, calls from a worried mother could add up.
“No problem.” Rory lets Travis settle into the darkest part of the overpass, a little notch where the concrete is nice and smooth.
She stands as he paws at her, reaching for her chest. They are not even really making eye contact; instead she stares up at the ledges where the birds roost. Travis finds her breasts, finds her nipples, lets out a muted moan.
Her hands go to his pants, feeling that he is ready.
She checks beneath her for sharp rocks and broken glass, and then she kneels.
No kisses exchanged, before or after. Nothing more than this — Rory is a fast worker, efficient at this point. She knows exactly what Travis requires, and when they’re finished, he catches his breath and asks, “You’re good, right?”
Travis has only journeyed into Rory’s anatomy a handful of times, where he explored for a second, without much interest or curiosity, almost too respectfully, and when Rory didn’t give him any further instructions, he pulled his hand out of her pants and moved on to other things.
Yes, Rory is good.
“You don’t really like it, do you?” he asked her once, and before she could answer, he hurried and zipped up, since someone was approaching with a dog on a leash.
“I’m on my period” has become her standard defense for when he inquires — and when he does offer, it’s driven by a palpable guilt, and to Rory, that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about mutual pleasure; she gets her reciprocation in other ways. Call her old-fashioned, but she’s not going to have a boy finger her to ecstasy before she’s even been kissed.
And Travis is not for kissing.
When they get to the Hastings house, Travis scratches the back of his head and opens the door for her with reluctance, as if he wishes he hadn’t agreed to any of this. “Uh, you need the printer, you said?”
“Yeah, if it’s okay with your mom.”
“As long as you’re not here too late.”
He heads inside, letting the door close on her as if he were alone.
Rory pushes the door open and goes right into their living room, where their family computer is set up in a corner. The rest of the Hastingses are bustling upstairs — getting little sisters ready for bed, Mr. Hastings changing out of his post–church meeting shirt and tie.
“Mom?” Travis calls. “I’m home.”
“How was Scouts?” Mrs. Hastings sounds like she is wrestling an unwilling child out of the bathtub.
“Fine. Hey, Rory King’s here to use our printer — is that okay?”
Permission is granted with enthusiasm: “Of course! Hi, Rory. Make yourself at home. Let Travis know if you need any help, all right?”
Travis types in the password and leaves Rory to it, heading into the kitchen to make himself a second dinner. He offers Rory nothing.
Ignoring the bitter, resinous taste in the back of her throat, she pulls out a folded paper from her jeans and starts typing.
Minutes later, printed sheets in hand, she takes them back home, where she folds a letter into an envelope, stamps and addresses it, and runs it out to the mailbox before finally going to bed.
AUDITIONS FOR A HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL ARE . . . WELL, how can I put this delicately?
Sort of like a cruise ship lineup, or a dumpster dive. You’ll get talent the likes of which you’d never expect — glorious things, voices and performances that could only emerge from that teenage cocktail of ambition and bravado.
And you also get moments more embarrassing than American Idol B-roll footage.
The auditions for the spring musical will be no different.
Pam always sits a few rows from the front, near the center of the Elizabethan. The stage manager, Shandie, joins her, with one seat between them. The house lights stay dim, the stage lights bright, an attempt to make it seem a warm, inviting place. They are blinding, actually, so you cannot see out into the crowd — a mercy, I tend to think. No need for the hopefuls to look their judges in the eye while they bare their souls in the form of their best practiced sixteen bars of some Broadway standard.
“You’ll come in, hand Shandie your audition sheet, and head up onstage. You should have already run your music up to Jake in the booth. He’ll have it cued for you. As soon as you’re ready, introduce yourself and what you’ll be singing. Then take it away.” Pam’s instructions, simple enough, become a herculean task to remember when nerves scramble your brain, even for some of the seniors who have been auditioning for Pam for years now.
Audition slots are every seven minutes, which gives Pam and Shandie time to write their notes, recover, and prepare for the next entrant.
It seems like a grueling thing to sit through. I can’t imagine the emotional toll, witnessing the unraveling of all my students, trying not to die of secondhand embarrassment.
But Pam is a rock during auditions, a brick wall. She reveals nothing, not a twitch of a lip, a cocking of an eyebrow. You truly never know where in the pecking order you fall until the cast list is posted.
This week’s auditions bring all the usual suspects, and a few surprises — for instance, a dancer from the drill team stops by to dazzle the jury with a song and dance. She practices a kick-ball-change and twiddling jazz hands in the foyer. There’s a role in Good Knight! Sweet Lady that’s fit for a dancer — a jester who performs at the royal wedding — and this drill team darling clearly has her eye on it. Fair enough — none of the Princely Players could contort or chassé well enough to nail the role. It pays to have an odd skill — to know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or river dance. You never know what obscure talent might win you a part that you otherwise would never be considered for.
There are, of course, the beloveds, the Elizabethan regulars, the ones who have been charging toward this moment for literal years now — seniors, that pathetic bunch, all of our wings pinned by Pam the moment we stepped into her classroom as sophomores, and now we all expect, with an incendiary hope, that Pam will loose us and let us fly.
But Bosworth is not a fair arena. All that pamphlet bullshit about private schools rewarding merit — Pam writes her own rules here, and they are underscored by her own senses, her own ideas, tilted or no, about how the world should operate. “The real world isn’t fair, either,” she announced to a cluster of us last fall. “You see the same people getting leads over and over — maybe someone’s uncle is the producer of the traveling Broadway show, or maybe someone’s grandparents offer to donate the funds to fix the proscenium at the local community theater. Or maybe someone is just prettier, louder, and flashier than you are. There’s nothing fair about any of this — so don’t try for fairness. Don’t crave fairness. Crave justice instead. Justice is better than fairness. Justice will always be on your side eventually — it’s in everybody’s pockets.”
Pam knows how to think big and small at the same time. But she’s either missed a problem with her logic or she’s lying.
And Pam doesn’t miss a thing.
Those of us who finish our audition emerge from the auditorium flushed and perspiring, as if we’ve stepped off the battlefield — if not triumphant, then at least alive. Those of us clogging the hallway, who have yet to take our turn in the gauntlet, congratulate our peers on their survival, and the sentiments are genuine. After you’ve auditioned, you are no longer competition, because you are no longer thrumming with potential. What’s done is done.
Before your audition, however . . .
We observe only in lingering side-eyes; we communicate in throwaway whispers; we indicate our emotional state through the crinkling of our printed lyrics, the cracking of our knuckles, the rewetting of our dry lips, and the unconscious wiping of our damp hands along our thighs.
