Donick walsh and the res.., p.35
Donick Walsh and the Reset-Button, page 35
YOUR SMILE IS LIKE LIGHT!!
BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND MAKE MIRACLES!!
YOU ARE STRONG AND FEARLESS AND BEAUTIFUL!!
BE CONFIDENT AND REMEMBER YOU ARE AMAZING!!
YOU ARE KIND, AND SMART, AND COURAGEOUS!!
BE PROUD TO BE YOU!!
Sitting in the drama-room at lunch, we were all buzzing, knowing this wasn’t some spirit-week gimmick.
I said, “Now we know Nick was one of the assmunches who wrote that back-to-school night crap.”
“I guess we also know what he had to do on Friday after rehearsal,” Brent added.
“It was a douchey thing to do back then,” Calista said, “but honestly…having read a couple of those messages, and seeing the faces of some of the students who were bullied before…well, I can’t help but think he’s sorta awesome now. Kind of an amazing thing he did.”
Nick had surprised me on Saturday morning by going off to his dance-studio to teach ballet and jazz to little kids—I had had no idea he instructed too. I smiled at imagining him teaching Topher and Cady to dance. They would probably get a kick out of it—they adored him already, running through the house chanting his name as soon as he came back. I thought of the sound of his breathing from beside my bed, almost a light snore as he slept. He tried so hard to keep out of my way, to not make waves in such close quarters. Somehow, I wasn’t as inconvenienced as I thought I would be.
“Yeah,” I murmured, half to myself. “He’s trying…and it’s working.” I found there wasn’t much of my usual grudging tone behind these words.
There were now less than two weeks before the opening of the Senior Revue. Rehearsals began running later and required more focus from everyone. Singers and dancers were all over the place; when we weren’t running numbers, we were helping with sets, props, costumes. Bits of glitter and sequins and feathers were everywhere from decorating the “Vogue” masks. When the glue had dried and the dancers had claimed them, all the singers sat in the house and grinned at the spectacle. The number looked amazing!
Thursday and Friday had specifically been allotted for our sitzprobe.
Wednesday night, Nick asked me what a sitzprobe was. His expression amused me, as though he thought he must be the biggest moron for not knowing.
“It’s the first time singers and orchestra work together. We’ll run the numbers with the band so we can get the right tempos for choreography and quick-changes and stuff. The rehearsals will go pretty late, but we usually get fed. The week before opening is called HellWeek for a reason. That pretty much starts tomorrow.”
For a lot of us, the two days of the sitzprobe were the first time we would be seeing each other’s numbers. It was a good gauge for what sort of reaction we would get from the audience. I hadn’t seen Calista perform her big number yet—“Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”—and kept irritating her with my professions of how much I wanted to see her acting feminine and wearing something skimpy—though since she had designed her own costume, that could mean skimpy for her. I had also seen nothing of Nick’s solo. I had a sort of scared anticipation for Friday when we would be running the second act where “I Can’t Do it Alone” was placed. I think a lot of people were curious about his number; he would be performing the only real dance solo in the show.
Then there was Nick’s duet with me. We had fudged through it once with Mr. Hardy, but I told him Nick and I would have no problem learning it on our own with my dad’s help. Nick had the male part of the song because it was a little more straight forward. The female part was mine because it was a bit more technically difficult. Dad sat at the piano and every day Nick and I sang through it, neither one of us particularly comfortable. I mean, come on! It was a love song! One that seemed to strike very near to the sort of bitterness our friendship had been invested with for so many years. Yet I also felt a little swept up in the song too. Nick sang it well. Dad and I gave him some coaching, and when he and I harmonized together, Mom would poke in her head and say, “You boys are giving me chills!” Still, Nick and I avoided each other’s eyes when we sang it, and if I was uncomfortable, Nick had moments when he looked in positive agony. I would think: There’s that inner homophobe again, rearing its face. All because he has to sing a love song with another guy. Stupid!
The sitzprobe ended up being very productive. There were a lot of great musicians at Kliewer High and the orchestra sounded great. We all sat in the house when we could, watching numbers, applauding and cheering.
Seeing Calista perform “Diamonds” was a trip! Her costume was pretty skimpy, in the vein of the rest of the masquerade section of the show. She surprised me with what good shape she was in, usually hiding herself in baggy, frumpy clothes. But there, playing with makeup and hair, singing her heart out, she blew me away. The teachers had found ways to push us all out of our comfort zones—Calista was perfect proof of that.
After running through “Cover Girl” and then its followup number, “Girl for All Seasons”, I all but started shaking when Nick’s number began. Standing in the wings where I had exited, Calista pausing beside me, I could see Nick’s nervousness, hear the quaver in his voice. He was singing alone in front of everyone for the first time, hearing his accompaniment in full orchestra rather than just piano, his singing amplified by the snake of a microphone taped to his cheek. Still, he didn’t miss a beat. When he started dancing, interjecting each combination of steps with the “she’d go” (now changed to he), then the “I’d go”, my mouth wouldn’t stay closed. It was one thing to see him dance in a group, but watching him perform alone (executing choreography that appeared to make him float, or contorting his limbs in ways I didn’t think were possible from someone with his build) made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. He darted and tumbled all over the stage and apron, using the stairs and platforms of the set. Seeing him in his costume, I had a moment when I didn’t recognize him.
“Holy shit!”
Brent appeared, smelling like sawdust, his tee spotted with dried paint. His eyes were huge, watching Nick execute a series of spins for the last “perfect unison” part of the song.
“Look at how fast he spots his head! He’s, like, doing a million forties!”
Calista smacked Brent’s shoulder. “Forties? Their called fouettés, you chew-toy!”
He grinned at her. “Thank you for putting him in those shorts, bitch.”
I was thankful the wings were dim so my Muskequeers couldn’t see my reddened cheeks. Yes, Nick’s legs were something to see, and once again my appreciation of them unsettled me.
When he finished, holding his final pose with the last accent of the orchestra, screams and cheers echoed in the house. Even Brent nearly deafened us with sudden hooting and hollering. Nick, I knew, would steal the show every performance. A combination of relief and disappointment settled on me when he exited the stage into the opposite wings. After watching that, I wasn’t sure what to say.
Truthfully, I wasn’t ever sure from one minute to the next what to say to him. He lived in my house, brushed his teeth in my bathroom, slept next to my bed. Yet it was impossible to keep him compartmentalized in my brain in the same way I had for so many years. Not only had too much happened recently, but our lives were being lived almost on top of each other’s.
One evening he started to leave the bedroom to do his homework, and I finally said, almost angrily, “Would you quit going into hiding like that? It’s okay. You can stay in here. Use the desk, sit on my bed, sit on your bed, or the floor…just chill. You don’t have to leave.” It was almost as though he felt he couldn’t leave after that.
So, mostly in silence we would hang in my room. Truthfully, there wasn’t often stuff for either of us to do. A lot of our classes seemed to be being taught with a teacher’s version of senioritis and homework was becoming slim. True, Nick was busier than me with his English 11 assignments, but still…
For the first time in a long time, I had someone to watch scary movies with; someone who looked as excited to watch them as me. I would make a suggestion (more like an I’m-putting-this-on-watch-with-me-if-you-want sort of thing) and then there we would be, him sitting in the desk-chair, or stretched belly-down on the air-mattress, me lying on the floor, or reclining on my bed, watching a movie together. Not much talking to each other, no, but it was good knowing he enjoyed himself as much as I did. It didn’t stop at horror movies. I would put on some anime and he would watch with me. I would feel like a rerun of Buffy and he would suggest which episode to watch (leaving me marveling that, yes, he had gone on watching the shows we used to watch together). All around, it just seemed to get more and more surreal.
I thought I began to notice Georgie getting a little moony over him. She looked like some sort of Ginny Weasley when they were in the same room together and began to be afraid to talk. Cady and Topher started to haunt my bedroom more often than usual, wanting to hang on him and get him to play with them, and wonder of wonders, he would! I worried they might hurt him—his shoulder was screwed up—but he seemed to enjoy being a kind of surrogate big brother. It must have had something to do with him being an only child. Mom and Dad enjoyed having him around too, and in that respect, at least, it was as though Nick Walsh was still my friend Donny, never having gone away. I didn’t know what to make of any of it.
After the first couple of days, it was impossible to crawl into bed, shut out the lights, then lay there in silence. Almost tentatively, we began to talk, not having to look at one another, the room bathed in the faint glow of the twinkle-lights.
At first it was easy stuff: the Revue, rehearsals, Brent and Calista (he was curious to know when and where I had befriended them).
Then the less easy stuff: I was curious about his friends and wanted to know why they had tricked him with that knee in the groin. I even wanted to know about his girlfriends, because with all the pointed ignoring of each other he and I had done these last six years, I never noticed him dating anyone. I felt taken aback when, after telling me about his girlfriends, he actually wanted to know about my boyfriends; further heightening the surreality, I found myself laying in the almost dark telling him about Dillon and Joel.
Then there was the hard stuff. He asked me about college, wanting me to talk about my clean rejection sweep (I still hadn’t said anything about the New York rejections to Mom and Dad). I brought up the locker graffiti. I asked more about what he had meant when he said he was “trying”. Though he started and stopped a lot, he told me all the ways he was attempting to make things right with the people he had wronged. I thought about the kids he had apologized to and done nice things for, and felt strange. It must be because I was finding a sort of respect for him, which I never anticipated ever feeling in a hundred million years. We talked about his dad (his voice wobbled a little and I hoped he wouldn’t cry again), but he left things fairly vague about his “Pop”. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to talk about it either. But there was something there, I knew, that had to do with whatever my mom had learned when she visited Nick’s house, something he wasn’t telling me. As much as I wanted to ask, I held my tongue and tried not to dwell on it.
One thing we did not talk about, and that was our past. Whether I was averse to bringing it up, or he was, we never touched on our old friendship and how it fell apart. It seemed like the only hint we would ever have was our interrupted conversation the day of the sack-tap. I supposed Nick’s guilt over me would be a long time in disappearing. Sometimes I would catch him looking at me and would feel the scar at my eyebrow as though it were a pimple the size of Mount Fuji.
I also never mentioned Secret Admirer. His notes hung above the desk, and sometimes Nick would gaze at them, and I wondered if he thought they might be leftovers from my all but meaningless relationships with Joel and Dillon. Yet he never asked.
I still texted Secret Admirer though—at school mostly, especially at lunchtime—and occasionally at night, but it was difficult. I was so busy and out so late at rehearsals, I wasn’t always available to text him. In fact, he seemed to have taken a step back himself, which lent more credence to my theory that he was in the Revue with me. And if not, maybe he just didn’t want me to feel pressured as I headed into the patience-trying stretch of HellWeek. But also, I didn’t want to spend every evening with my face in my phone when Nick was around. I felt like it would be rude to begin with, but also, I was a little afraid he would want to know who I was talking to. Sharing stuff about Secret Admirer with Calista and Brent was one thing, but I felt far too possessive and jealous to think of sharing anything about him with someone like Nick.
I was dying to ask Secret Admirer if he would come see the show, but held back. I feared he might tell me he was in it (which would make his presence very real), or if he wasn’t, he might say he wouldn’t come out of fear of giving himself away. Half a dozen times I typed the question, and every time I deleted it.
Still…I was becoming comfortable around Nick. He didn’t feel out of place in my house after awhile. Soon, talking with him didn’t feel strained and awkward. He seemed to carve out his own space in the morning car ride to school with Brent and Calista, more so than Dillon or Joel ever had, or Liam, or anyone who had palled around with us. Though he minded his own business during the school day, he was often with us at rehearsal. I almost could have tricked myself into thinking he was my old friend Donny…except there was a wall—some impenetrable thing I couldn’t name, couldn’t push beyond, but which I always sensed there.
Tech weeks are known by their other name for a reason. The days leading to opening night were very long and tedious. We couldn’t run numbers anymore because we wouldn’t have the band again until dress rehearsal. The tech students were in and out of the booth at the back of the theatre while Mrs. P. sat inside working with the lighting designer. Various spots of illumination came and went all over the stage as the cast slowly walked through all the show’s numbers. Calista had also set up racks of costumes and a continuous flow of people changed from one thing into another.
However, HellWeek also had its charms. A great deal of cast bonding happened because everyone felt like they were in a war-zone together. We talked (sometimes too loudly, silenced by increasingly grumpy teachers) or tried to cram in schoolwork. Sometimes we played games. But all in all, things went smoothly.
Nervous energy ran through everyone. I thrived on it. I loved the bustle; the jittery feeling in my limbs; the quiet moment sitting in the dressing-room at the makeup counter, working on my face in the mirror; waiting at the tech-booth to collect my body-mic, then securing it to my cheek, that damned mic-tape leaving a residue that seemed to take weeks to come off; slipping into my first costume of the show; focusing my mind on what it would feel like to step out onto the stage for the first time… It was all such a heady, almost religious experience for me—it was difficult not to think about the college rejection letters sitting in my desk-drawer. What was I going to do now?
Brent seemed to be the only one not feeling this sort of manic energy. He had done his job of completing the set and now he could hang out backstage, big clunky headset sitting over his hair as he listened to comments from Mrs. P. or the techies working all over the place. With his job now solely that of stage manager, he didn’t have much to do until showtime (aside from his one number with Calista and me).
Then there was Nick. He sat across the dressing-room looking completely bewildered the day of dress rehearsal. I watched him in the mirror. I couldn’t tell if it was nervousness or if he was scared. What would he be like tomorrow when the theatre filled with an actual audience? Noise surrounded us—someone’s iPod playing the soundtrack to Dear Evan Hansen—the guys in the room laughing and joking.
I watched Nick pick idly through the small boxes of makeup supplies Mrs. P. kept the dressing-rooms stocked with. He glanced my way, meeting my gaze in the glass. He didn’t look away, only tried to smile. That slightly petrified look in his eye seemed to dim the last six years and I could see Donny in there—a hesitating little boy.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
His smile went crooked. He turned his gaze back to the makeup box. “I don’t know what to do with this stuff.”
I brought over the black bag I kept my own stage-makeup in. “I don’t use the dressing-room makeup,” I said. “Who knows how many faces it’s touched. I have my own. You can use it. I’ll help you. I won’t make you look like a freak, don’t worry.”
His expression became a little strange, but he murmured, “I trust you. Thanks.”
I stood beside his chair, tilting his face upward, using my fingers to brush strands of hair away from his forehead. I explained what I was doing as I went, trying to teach him something so he could do it himself the rest of the run. It was strange, examining his face this closely. He needed to shave, and a couple of almost unnoticeable pimples spotted his temples. I also had to marvel at how good-looking he was, his eyes the color of chocolate, his sort of perfect lips. I had touched them with my own once, in another life. Suddenly I blushed so badly I felt grateful I had told him to keep his eyes closed while I darkened his eyelids.
I stood behind him once I finished and he turned to face the mirror, nodding his chin this way and that to examine himself.
“It’s a little thick,” I said, “but it needs to be. You can’t see that from the audience.”
He smiled. “Here I was expecting I’d look like something from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
I chuckled. “We could do that, though I think Mrs. P. might frown on it. But hey! You might end up liking it,” I teased. He gave me a startled look, then lowered his eyes. I had to fight the urge to apologize. It was becoming all too easy anymore for me to forget who I talked to.
Suddenly Liam burst into the dressing-room looking buoyant. He had barely opened his mouth, exclaiming, “Dress rehearsal, y’all! Are we ready for this?” when Brent followed, almost on Liam’s heels. He had lowered his headset so it hung around his neck like a big chunky necklace. He eyes were wide, dark blue dyed streak feathering his forehead as though he had been running.
