“Scene Day for Freshman Acting is January nineteenth,” she said, and I heard this kid William gasp. This redheaded girl named Donna sucked her teeth.
“We have plenty of rehearsal time,” Mrs. Zeig said. “And if you mind your three Ps—if you’re always prompt, present, and prepared—you’ll do fine.”
I hoped so.
The next Monday after school, sitting on the platform bench at the 50th Street subway station, I was thinking about how the hell I was going to make the first moment of my scene with Max work. We were playing a brother and sister, and Max’s character, Emil, was always getting in trouble. My first line was, “Wasn’t she cross with you on account of your fighting?” and it just seemed impossible to say without sounding totally fake and actory. But that’s my job, Mrs. Zeig kept saying, “To make the words
your own
.” Jesus.
Suddenly I looked up, and there was Julie Braverman standing in front of me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“How goes it?”
“Um, pretty good, I guess.” I felt a little startled. “How ’bout you?”
“Just peachy,” she said. “Hey, I tried calling you last night. I looked you up, but I guess I spelled your last name wrong.”
She tried calling me?
“Don’t you have the class list?” I said.
“I left it in my locker,” she said breathlessly, lightly smacking herself in the head. “Sometimes I’m a total space cadet.”
She started to dig in the pockets of her bag, just as the train pulled in with a loud whoosh.
“I forgot to copy the French homework off the board!” she yelled over the noise. “Do you have it in your book?”
“No problem!” I nodded. Oh. That was all she called for—the homework. We got on the train and grabbed two seats next to each other. I took out my French notebook as Julie swung her dark blue bag into her lap, looking for a pen.
“Did you get that bag at Chocolate Soup?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I love it. Wasn’t it expensive?”
“Umm . . . no, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everyone at Riverdale had them,” she said, flipping through her notebook, looking for a blank page. “I think I have an extra one—you want it?”
“What?”
“I have an extra Chocolate Soup bag. Only it’s light gray, not navy. I don’t know why I got two, since I, like, never use the gray one, so you can have it.”
Chocolate Soup bags were so cool. They were canvas shoulder bags with a big flap that covered over a huge inside pocket for all your books and then two outside pockets that snapped where you could keep pens or your makeup or whatever. Julie’s was pretty worn in—part of the outside flap was a little frayed, which made it even cooler.
“Really?” I said. “Thanks. That’s so nice of you!” I couldn’t believe she was going to give me a Chocolate Soup bag for free! I mean, she barely knew me.
“No biggie,” she said. Then my eye wandered over to three kids about our age sitting two doors down from us. They were the ones I had seen hanging out outside of school on the first day smoking clove cigarettes. Julie looked where I was looking.
“Have you met them yet? They’re in our class.”
“They are?” I said. “I thought they were, like, juniors or something.”
“Nope. They’re freshmen—Daisy Curerri, Jennifer Smalls, and Gordon Pomeranian. They’re in my dance class. I heard Daisy’s been in an ABC Afterschool Special already. And she’s got an agent,” Julie said. At P.A. you weren’t supposed to work professionally as an actor until you graduated, but plenty of kids did.
“Wow. Are they nice?” I asked. “They seem kind of tough.”
“They’re okay,” Julie said absentmindedly. “A little cliquey.” Then her face lit up like she got an idea. “Hey, what are you doing right now?”
“Just going home,” I said.
“Wanna come over for a little while? For, like, a snack or something?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah. My mom won’t be home yet. She gets home late on Mondays. And I could give you the bag.”
“Okay, sure! Oh, but . . .” I hesitated. “I’ll have to call my parents when we get there to tell them when I’ll be home. Okay?” I hoped she didn’t think I was a total dork or something.
“No problem.”
“Okay, then,” I said.
“Great!” Julie said.
Her apartment on Riverside Drive was huge: three bedrooms, a living room with a view of the Hudson River, a dining room, and even a maid’s room off the kitchen, but they didn’t have a maid. They called it the sewing room ’cause it had a sewing machine in it, but it was also full of clothes. Like an extra giant closet. There were three bathrooms and Julie had her own nineteen-inch color TV
in her room
with a video cassette recorder! My parents were so behind the times, we
still
had a black-and-white set in the living room and no VCR. I tried to hide my awe and jealousy. Julie had her own vanity table sprinkled with little baskets of earrings and bags of makeup and perfume bottles and lipsticks, two closets stuffed with clothing and shoes and boots, and a dark purple bureau that looked crammed with more clothes.
“Sorry, as you can see, I’m kinda messy,” she said as she scooped a couple of T-shirts and some underwear off her strewn-about rainbow comforter and tossed the clothes into a closet. On the walls were a Bruce Springsteen
Born to Run
poster, a Fiorucci poster of two angels (I had the same one), and a small painting of a squirrel in a square frame.
“My sister Ruby did that,” she said pointing to the squirrel. “There’s lots of her art all over the apartment. She’s really good.”
We left our jackets and bags in Julie’s room, and she led me to the kitchen. I sat down at the table while Julie stood staring at the contents of the freezer. They had the fancy kind of fridge where the whole right side is the fridge and the whole left side is the freezer, which, by the way, was packed: bags of Zabar’s fresh-ground coffee, frozen bagels and croissants, leftovers in Ziploc bags, and, like, five pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. She pulled out a pint of Swiss Almond Vanilla and showed it to me, raising her eyebrows.
“Yum,” I said.
“So what do you think of Mrs. Zeig?” Julie asked as she put down some light blue ceramic bowls and spoons.
“She’s pretty good,” I said. “Kind of formal, I guess. But I like her.”
“Yeah, me, too. You know that guy Reggie Ramirez? He was telling me that he heard Mrs. Zeig was the best of the freshman acting teachers.”
“Cool,” I said. “I thought I would recognize more kids that I met on my audition, but I only knew one guy—David Wine. Do you know him? He’s pretty cute—I love his hair.”
“Totally. I think he’s friends with Reggie Ramirez. Who is
also
cute, by the way. I haven’t seen anyone from my audition. Maybe that shows you how few kids actually get in,” Julie said, smiling, like weren’t we the coolest.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “And isn’t it cool that we have so many periods of drama classes each day?”
“Uh-huh. But I think it’ll be better when we’re juniors, because by then you can be in a play, and you can stay and rehearse after school. I heard some days when you’re rehearsing you have to stay as late as six o’clock!”
“Wow. That’ll be cool, to be juniors. It seems so far away,” I said.
“I know,” Julie said with her mouth full of Swiss Almond Vanilla.
Then we went through almost every other freshman drama student whose name we could think of: who we thought was probably a good actor; who would suck; who seemed like a druggie (Max, my scene partner); who’d be good to be friends with; who seemed cliquey, popular, slutty, conceited, materialistic; and so on. We started cracking up so much I totally relaxed and didn’t notice that time had flown. Before we knew it, we had eaten the entire pint of ice cream and it was almost five o’clock. Then we heard the keys in Julie’s front door.
“That’s my sister Mandy,” Julie said.
“Hello?” Mandy called from the living room.
“In here!” Julie shouted. I could hear Mandy walking down the hall to the kitchen. Her walk sounded slow and soft, like a saunter.
“Oh my God, Julie!” I gasped. “I never called my parents!”
She pointed to the phone on the wall and I picked up the receiver and quickly dialed my number. As I listened to the phone ringing, I looked up and saw Mandy in the doorway. She was loaded up with a Chocolate Soup book bag like Julie’s but in dark brown, a guitar, and a big stack of mail. She was a little taller than Julie, and a little thinner, with shoulder-length dark blonde hair in tight, tight curls.
“That’s Julie,” Julie said.
“Hi,” I said, checking out Mandy’s vintage burgundy suede jacket. It had a ripped pocket hanging off one side. She dropped her jacket and stuff into a chair. I put my hand over the receiver and whispered, “I’m calling my parents.”
“No sweat,” she said, peering into our ice-cream pint. “Anything left?”
“In the freezer,” Julie said.
“Hello?” said my dad’s voice.
“Hi, Dad. I’m so sorry I forgot to call. I went home with a new girl I met at school, Julie Braverman. She lives on Ninety-Ninth Street. Actually, we met at Caitlin’s Bat Mitzvah last year.”
“All right,” Dad said, but I could tell he wasn’t really listening ’cause I heard Mom’s shrieky voice in the background saying, “Is that Julie? Where is she?” Mom was always cranky when she got home from work. She was the book editor at
Ladies’ Home Journal
magazine, and she hated her boss, Angela Woo, who was really mean and uptight. I thought
Ladies’ Home Journal
was a totally stupid magazine, because it always had knitting or cookies on the cover.
Dad put his hand over the receiver and I heard a muffled, “Helene, relax, she’s at her friend’s.” Then I heard my mother say something else that I couldn’t make out, but it sounded angry.
“Hold on a sec, Jule,” Dad said to me. Then loudly to my mother he said,
“Please!
I am on the phone! I can’t hear her when you talk to me when I’m trying to talk to her!”
Then Mom screamed one more thing, but it sounded like she was walking away. I rolled my eyes at Julie and mouthed, “My mother,” and she smiled.
“Sorry, Julie,” Dad said to me, sounding exasperated. “Are you coming home for dinner?”
“I’ll be home by six or so.”
“All right. It’s your night to set the table, you know.”
“I
know
. I’m not completely irresponsible!”
“No one thinks you are,” he said calmly. “All right. See you later, pussy cat. Have fun.” I hung up.
“I’m glad he’s the one who answered,” I said, breathing a small sigh of relief. “He’s the more reasonable one. I think my mom had a cow.”
“Does your mom freak out a lot?” Julie asked.
“All the time,” I said.
“That’s funny,” she said, laughing.
“Our mom never freaks,” Mandy said, opening a Fresca. “You could, like, call her from
jail
, and she’d be like, ‘Well, when you get out, can you stop at the drugstore for some Apple Pectin conditioner? We’re all out.’” Then Julie and Mandy started cracking up. “Speaking of Mom, where is she?” Mandy said.
“I think she’s at a meeting,” Julie said. “There’s a note on the dining-room table.”
“Oh,” Mandy said. She opened the fridge and plucked a few grapes from a middle shelf. “So, Julie. Are you in drama, too?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And you’re at High School of Music and Art, right?” Julie had told me. “My sister’s there, too. She’s a senior in the art department.” Music and Art (or M&A) was kind of like P.A. ’cause it had three arts majors: art, voice, and instrumental music. “Do you know Ellie Prodsky?” I asked.
“Don’t know her,” Mandy said without even thinking. “I only know musicians.”
“Mandy’s in voice; she’s a singer,” Julie said.
“And
composer
,” Mandy said, slightly irritated. Julie smiled and rolled her eyes.
“Yeah,” Julie said. “She’s in a band. Fried X. Sometime we’ll go hear her play—especially since there’s this totally gorgeous British guy in the band, Oliver Moloney. Oh my God, I have such a crush on him. He plays guitar.”
“Bass,” Mandy corrected her. She took her soda and headed out of the kitchen, leaving all her junk in the chair.
“Sorry,
bass
.” Julie rolled her eyes again. “Oh! Let me get the bag,” she suddenly remembered, and ran back to her room.
“The only thing is,” she said, coming back down the hall right away, “there’s a blue ink stain on one of the pockets, but it’s hardly noticeable.”
“No, it’s even cooler this way,” I said. “I like it worn in- looking. Thanks so much!”
Walking home the seven blocks from Julie’s, I was so excited just thinking about everything. What a day it had been. I had gotten a Chocolate Soup bag and a new friend!I Not necessarily in that order.
By October, Julie and I were meeting to take the subway home after school pretty much every day—we planned it. And because we were always coming and going together, kids in our acting class started to call us Julie B. and Julie P. One time Gordon said, “There go the Julies!” (There was a Julie L. in Freshman Acting, too, but we didn’t hang out with her much.) We were Julie One and Julie Two. Julie and Julie Too. Or Julie and Julie Also. Somehow I was always introducing myself second, so I was Julie Also.
Most of the time Julie’s mom, Mimi, was never home, but the first time I met her, she was wearing only a bra and a pleated skirt and I thought she was so much cooler and younger-seeming than my parents. She shook my hand with both of her hands, and I noticed her perfectly polished bright red nails.
“It’s so nice to meet you, Julie!” she said with a big smile. “I’ve heard a lot about you!” Julie sucked her teeth a little.
“Don’t worry,” Julie said to me, “I haven’t really told her that much.”
“I think it’s fabulous that you girls are aspiring actresses!” Mimi said, ignoring Julie’s comment. She didn’t seem to mind or even notice that she was standing there in her bra. “Well, I should finish getting dressed,” she said. “I’m going to a meeting with Harvey.” And in a little while we had the place to ourselves again.