Snark and Stage Fright (21 page)

“Yeah, sure.”

He told me the details of what he was putting in his part of the essay until the bell rang and he stood up but kept talking.

“If our team places well at Regionals today,” he said, “I’ll have the state meet on Saturday, but you and I can work on Sunday, if that’s okay with you.”

I nodded, said, “See you at lunch,” and he waved and disappeared into the crowd surging through the hallway. I was pleased that the new George was dealing with this disappointment so well—until I got to the caf to find Diana sitting in Michael’s lap.

My arrival, along with Dave and Gary’s, forced Diana back into her seat, giggling all the way, and I found that my appetite had shrunk like a raisin. We were all talking about Gary’s new hair color, radioactive green, but I barely said anything. I kept noticing how Diana would nudge Michael every now and then, and he would smile and roll his eyes, and then she’d giggle. They were freakin’ adorable. After a couple of minutes of it, I told everyone I had to check on a project in the art room so I could finish it before break, packed up my things, and fled. I practically cheered at the sound of the last bell and the opportunity to live by proxy in the make-believe world of musical theater, where any problem can be solved by a shuffle-ball-change step and a rousing tune. I could finally see why Leigh loved being part of it.

Rehearsal went pretty smoothly for principals and understudies, and I was proud of how well my little charges knew their lines. After the younger kids were sent home, Ms. Duvall called the rest of us over for a huddle before break.

“As you can see, we have enough nuns to fill the stage,” she said, “but our party scenes and crowd scenes are lacking some Y chromosomes.” She looked around at us over her rhinestone half-glasses and reminded us, “And there is
no
way we can have an all-female squadron of Nazis in those final scenes—I need you to recruit some male bodies for us.”

“At last, a job I can throw myself into!” Spencer enthused, fanning his heart with his hand, and everyone laughed with him except Curt the Concussive, who was so well suited to his junior Nazi uniform.

I wanted to help, but with Dave and Gary already in the musical with the orchestra, that ruled out any male I could recruit, but Diana had other ideas. At Ms. Duval’s words, she squealed, grabbed my shoulder, and began hopping up and down.

“You have to ask Michael!” she cheered. “And he can get Cameron and the other cross-country guys to join him! Even if they make State they’ll be done with the season by the last week of rehearsals.”

I took a deep breath, reminded myself that she was not being cruel by intention—more like a puppy who bites hard in play—and said, “You’ll have better luck asking him.”

“No, you have to,” she insisted. “Trust me.”

She was so resolute about my suitability for the task, it worried me, but I said, “Okay. I’ll see him this weekend to work on our project. I’ll ask him then. But I doubt it will do any good. Michael is more likely to volunteer to walk in front of a firing squad than to volunteer to walk across a stage in a musical theater production.”

“I bet he’s out front now,” Diana yelped with a grin and absurdly wide eyes when we reached the main doors of the building. She pointed to the bus in the circular drive that was disgorging the cross-country team and all of their gear, a sweaty and defeated-looking group. “Come on!”

Even if Michael and the team had returned in triumph, I would not have wanted to ask Michael for anything, and, judging from the slumped shoulders and silence, they hadn’t broken any records today. I was about to back out when I thought of Leigh and how much the show meant to her. And Diana was practically pushing me in his direction so I walked over to his car and waited, dreading my task.

When he showed up, disheveled and holding his keys for a quick getaway, I asked the dumbest possible question I could have asked: “So how did it go?” I wanted to flee. But Diana sensed I was going to bail and scurried over.

“Not well,” Michael sighed. “So we can meet for the project on Saturday instead of Sunday if you want.”

“I’m sorry. Really.” I wanted to brush a damp curl that was stuck to his right eyebrow, but as this was no longer my right or privilege, I glanced over at Diana and said, “Um, Diana has a favor to ask you—I don’t know why she won’t ask herself, but—”

Michael sighed again, but smiled. “For her, anything,” he said, hitting the bull’s-eye of my heart. “What is it?”

We explained the need for able-bodied men onstage for the production. Michael frowned, clearly uncomfortable with the idea, brow furrowed in consideration. But he looked back and forth from Diana to me a few times until he said, “Okay. I’ll do it. And I’ll get the other guys on the team to come with me. It’s not like we have anything else going on after school right now.”

Diana squealed and hugged him. He looked over her shoulder at me and rolled his eyes a little, as if embarrassed, despite the fact that he had eaten lunch in the caf with her in his lap a few hours before.

“Thank you,” I said. “You guys are saving the whole show. And I can imagine that you want to do this about as much as I’d like an up-close tour of a slaughterhouse.”

He smiled at that analogy and asked Diana, “I don’t have to sing, right?”

“No. You just have to look handsome in a tux and menacing in a Nazi uniform!”

He rolled his eyes again and opened his car door, asking if either of us needed a ride. I had my mom’s car and had to bring Leigh home, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be in an enclosed space with the two of them anyway, even for five minutes.

“I’ll call you about Sunday. Or Saturday,” Michael said to me out the window. “Happy Thanksgiving, George!”

I waved and trudged over to my car, wondering why Diana had wanted me to ask Michael when clearly she could get him to do anything.

***

At least when Leigh and I got home that day Tori was there, and she immediately wanted a report on what was going on with me and Michael or me and Dave. As she unpacked in our room, I told her there was nothing to tell, which was true, and over dinner, fortunately, no one wanted to hear about anything besides Tori’s college experience, which was going much better since her roommate was now indulging in practices far more secular than turning the lights on, on Saturdays.

“She got her hair cut really short and it’s electric blue,” Tori marveled. “She looks like a really cute manga character, and she has a boyfriend who is a sculptor now so she stays with him when Trey comes to visit.”

My dad made a grumble-y noise at that, but everyone was so happy to have Tori home that he decided to keep his discomfort to himself. At least he would never have to worry about my spilling details of my sex life at the dinner table.

For dinner on Thanksgiving, we drove to my mom’s parents’ house in Cheshire. When we got back, Trey was just pulling up to the house to see Tori and catch up with all of us. After giving me a bruising bear hug, he offered to “talk some sense” into Michael for me, but I assured him that Michael was happy with his sweet new girlfriend and that I wasn’t even being sarcastic for once when I said that. Trey looked confused but didn’t press it, instead inviting me to join him and Tori at the movies, which I declined.

On Saturday, Michael texted that he’d be happy to work at his house again. I agreed, rather than having him come here and having to deal with my entire family scrutinizing us or Tori or Trey ambushing him like some romance-driven Mafia and demanding that he love me back or they’d break his kneecaps. So I biked over again and, after saying hi to his parents and assuring them I had had a lovely Thanksgiving Day, I met Michael in his kitchen.

We sat reading each other’s papers to decide how we could edit them together to make a single document that didn’t seem like it had been written by someone with a split personality. Michael made me a cup of tea and offered, “There’s plenty of leftovers, too, if you’re hungry. I think the sweet potatoes are safe. No marshmallows.”

I felt a sad smile tugging at my mouth as I remembered how last spring, on the night we had first kissed, he had gone all the way to Ashworth to find vegan marshmallows for me to make s’mores. It was possibly the most loving thing anyone has ever done for me. But I choked the memory down with a sip of tea and said, “Marshmallows are for wusses. Sweet potatoes are just fine on their own.”

He nodded and flipped a page of my part of the paper and said, “Diana was here on Thanksgiving. Her mom made this amazing stuffing. I’d offer some leftovers, but it had oysters in it so you wouldn’t want it.”

“Oh. Well, I wouldn’t hold that against her. Or Diana,” I answered.

“Diana likes you, too, you know. All through dinner she kept talking about you, and how grateful she is that you helped her join the drama club, how smart and funny you are, how quick-thinking you are and handy with a bottle of soda, apparently … ”

I rubbed my eyes in case they started tearing up and said, “She’s a great person. She’d have to be pretty special to get you to agree to go onstage in a high school musical, right?”

He frowned, flaring his nostrils in mute confusion, then shook his head as if I’d said something hopelessly cryptic, then turned back to scrutinizing my paper.

“And thank you, by the way,” I added, “for helping out with the musical, if I didn’t say that before.”

“You did,” he assured me as he marked something on my essay with his felt-tip pen.

“It must be really hard for Diana,” I mused as Harry came in and wagged his tail for a good ear scratching. “At least, I’ve heard things don’t look good for her dad, legal-wise.”

Michael grimaced, put down his pen, and nodded. “She’s pretty mad at him. But no one wishes prison on their dad, I guess.”

Suddenly I wanted to talk about anything but Diana and blurted out, “So how are we gonna pull this off? Turning two papers into one, I mean?”

He gave me his most stern look and directed, “I need to keep reading yours, and you keep reading mine, and see if you can find any places where we seem to be talking about something similar so we can patch it together.”

After an hour focused on reading, we decided that he could write the introduction and a version of the transitions between our sections and I would add to that and do the conclusion. With that decided, there didn’t seem to be any reason for me to stay and since he didn’t try to convince me to, I said goodbye and left. He was so engrossed in his writing, he barely looked up from his paper when I walked away.

And yet, Sunday morning, when I left my bedroom and my English homework to grab a snack from the kitchen, I found Michael in the family room with Trey and Tori.“Hey, George,” he greeted me when I walked in as if he were often a fixture on our couch. “Trey was just commiserating with me about Regionals.”

“Uh, hey, everybody … ” I said.

Trey smiled and offered me a plate of the cookies I had just made earlier that morning. Then he turned back to Michael and said, “Last fall, the lacrosse team got destroyed at our regional match.” He took Tori’s hand in his and added to me this time, “If your sister hadn’t cheered me up … ”

What would he have done—OD’d on Scooby Doo vitamins? At least I didn’t say that out loud, but the idea of Trey Billingsley, the human endorphin, feeling suicidal was as ridiculous as my having to stand there next to Michael and witness the world’s most adorable couple in action, though Michael and Diana were rapidly giving Tori and Trey some competition for that prize.

I took a cookie and a seat in a chair across the room and commiserated, “No one likes to feel crushed, and no one is better at picking you up when you feel bad than my sister.”

Michael nodded absently and sat down on the edge of the chair next to mine, holding out some papers. He told me, “I wrote an intro and some ideas for transitions. I can look at your conclusion, too, before we copy and paste it all together if you want.”

“I can’t believe you’re done already.” I accepted the papers and kept my eyes on them when I admitted, “I didn’t add anything to my part yet.”

Michael sighed but said nothing. I was a pathetic slacker while Michael was always the kid in the project group who did all the work himself, including signing your name to it, rather than risking someone messing it up.

I made myself look him almost in the eye when I lied, “I thought it made more sense to write the conclusion after I saw what I was concluding, wrapping up.”

He actually agreed. “Oh. Well, that makes sense,” he conceded. It certainly made more sense than the truth, which was that I had been so tired of feeling bad that I spent the afternoon watching a
Project Runway
marathon.

I waited for Michael to take off, our project business concluded, but he helped himself to a cookie. Trey asked him about some of the guys he knew from the lacrosse team last year and where they were applying to college. As the chatted, Tori half-listened while looking at me with big, sad eyes like she was waiting for me to do something.Since Michael seemed done with me and content to catch up with Trey, I was about to excuse myself to get to my part of the project when my mom appeared in the doorway, beaming at the sight of her daughters having healthy, co-ed fun, and announced, “Georgia? There’s another young man here to see you.”

All four of us turned to the doorway in surprise to see Dave standing there behind her, looking incredibly sheepish and wiping raindrops off his glasses with the hem of his hoodie. My mom was practically squealing with delight as she made her reluctant exit; imagine her most recalcitrant daughter having
two
gentlemen callers in one afternoon. She was probably off to get some lemonade set up on the veranda for them. Not that we have a veranda.

“Oh,” I heard Michael say and I turned to see him getting up stiffly from his perch. As he said to me, “Look over what I wrote and then email me your conclusion paragraphs and I’ll put it all together,” he leaned in close to me for a second, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek, but then just as suddenly pulled away without saying anything more. He said to Tori and Trey, “Have a safe trip back to school,” and, “See you tomorrow,” to Dave, who was standing there looking like a five-year-old who’s waiting to have his first cavity filled.