Encore Edie (6 page)

I mumble something and try to slip away, but he says, “Walk with me.”

“Why?” I say.

“What else do you read?” he asks.

I look up at him and can’t think of the title of a single book I’ve read lately.

“It’s okay, Edie,” he says.

“Orwell,” I say. “Hemingway. Agatha Christie. Graham Greene. P.D. James. Whatever my dad has on the shelf. He has a lot of books.”

“Any drama?”

“Shakespeare,” I mumble. I am such a dork.

“Stand up straight,” Mr. Harris says. I stand up straight. “Say that again.”

“Shakespeare?” I say.

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Shakespeare,” I say.

“That’s better. See you in the theatre.”

I go to get Sam. She’s got her coat on, and her backpack over one shoulder, and her piccolo in its little piccolo suitcase, and looks as if she’s about to go. “Don’t you dare,” I tell her.

“Well, you’re late. I look ridiculous standing here all on my own.”

“You look like a person waiting for a person.” I grab my stuff from my locker and slam the door, a little harder than I mean to. “We should not have to worry about this kind of stuff, what we look like standing and waiting for each other. It’s not normal.”

Now she looks panicked. Maybe I was a little loud.

The theatre is a real theatre, with raked red velvet folding seats and a stage and curtains and banks of lights and the whole thing. There are already thirty or forty students sitting in the first few rows by the stage. Mr. Harris is sitting on the edge of the stage, looking through some papers, ignoring everyone.

“That’s my teacher, Mr. Harris,” I tell Sam.

“I heard he used to be a real actor,” Sam says.

“What?”

“In the movies. Supposedly there’s this clip of him on YouTube where he’s—”

“Quiet, people!” Mr. Harris calls.

“He calls people ‘people,’” I tell Sam.

“Yikes,” Sam says.

“Thank you all for coming,” Mr. Harris says. “I know we’re going to have a fabulous
year
, you’re all going to put in a big
effort
, make the school
proud
, blah-blah-blah. Okay, moving along, suggestions for this year’s musical.”

“Don’t show any enthusiasm or anything,” I whisper to Sam, meaning Mr. Harris, but she tells me to shush. People start calling things out.

“Mamma Mia!”

“High School Musical!”

“Hello, Dolly!”

“Hello, lobotomy,” I whisper to Sam. Except maybe I don’t quite whisper, because suddenly the theatre is very quiet and people are turning around to look at me, except Sam, who is concentrating very hard on the latches on her piccolo suitcase.

“Hello, Edie,” Mr. Harris says.

I mumble, “Hi.”

“Did you have a suggestion?”

No, no, no.

“I think you did, though,” Mr. Harris says. “I’m pretty
sure you were saying something just now. Offering some kind of opinion.”

“It’s just—”

I look at the faces all turned toward me. I think,
Stand up straight
.

I stand up.

“It’s just,” I say, in as big a voice as I can, “why don’t we do something new? Something a little less—”

“Predictable?”

The voice comes from behind me. I turn around. It’s the tall girl from the art room, the one with the faux-hawk. She looks straight at me with her spooky blue eyes and then stands up. Today she’s wearing a white lace dress with black Doc Martens.

“She’s right, you know,” she says. “Those shows are all boring. We should do something new.”

“What do you suggest, Regan?” Mr. Harris says.

Regan?

“It’s Edie’s idea, ask her,” she says, and sits down again.

HOW DOES SHE KNOW MY NAME?

Everyone is looking at me again. I say the first thing that pops into my mind. Except it doesn’t pop, not really. It’s more like something way deep down under the water that surfaces all at once, big and surprising and scary and exciting—and familiar, somehow, too. As if it was always there, waiting.

“King Lear,”
I say.

“Okay, what just happened?” Sam says.

We’re walking home. What just happened is too big for Sam not to come over to my house and spend the rest of the afternoon reliving it with me, and probably trying to talk me out of it. Sam is smart and cautious and almost always right.

She’s also a musician. That will come in handy.

As soon as I spoke, everyone around me started groaning.
Boring!
they said.
This isn’t English class!
One older girl sitting in the first row looked me up and down over her shoulder and said, “A five-hundred-year-old play is your idea of something new?”

“We’ll make it new!” I said quickly over the rising swell of dismissive voices. I was already losing their attention.

“How?”

“Modern dress,” Regan said, behind me. She was somebody; they quieted down for her. “We set it in a club or something.”

Sam poked me hard and hissed, “With music.”

“With music,” I said loudly.

The older girl in the first row narrowed her eyes. “You mean background music or singing? Like, numbers?”

“Oh, numbers,” I said. “Definitely. Big musical—numbers.”

She and four or five other girls in the first row put their heads together, whispering hard.

Mr. Harris, who had been watching all this with his usual bored expression, said, “I’m guessing you know that
King Lear
runs close to four hours long?”

“We’ll cut it,” I said.

“Oh, well then,” he said. He seemed startled.

“We’ll cut it, we’ll add musical numbers, we’ll do it in modern dress.”

He stared at me for an odd moment, then said to everyone, but still looking straight at me, “Show of hands.”

For a moment, no one moved. I raised my own hand, wishing I didn’t have to.

“That’s two,” Mr. Harris said.

I looked behind me. Regan was sitting slumped back down in her seat again with her arm as straight in the air as it could go.

“Three,” Mr. Harris said, because Sam had just put her hand up too. I gave her a grateful look and she shrugged without looking at me. She was still picking nervously at the latch on her piccolo suitcase. “Five, six, eight, ten, fourteen,” Mr. Harris was saying. “Twenty-two, twenty-five, thirty—”

“King Lear,”
I heard one girl say as Mr. Harris kept counting. “Is that the one with the witches?”

“No, brainiac,” the boy next to her said. “It’s the one with the big storm and the magician with the book. We did it in grade nine. Duh.”

“No, man, no,” another boy said. “Doesn’t this one have the midget?”

“Little person, you’re supposed to call them,” the girl said.

“Forty-two, forty-three, okay, enough,” Mr. Harris said. “That’s more than enough. Edie!”

“Hello,” I said. I was feeling a bit dazed.

“Since this is your idea, I’m putting you in charge of fleshing it out,” Mr. Harris said. “Come up with a plan of what you want to do: who’s going to write it, who’s going to take care of the music, all that. Remember, this is a collaboration. I want to know how we’re going to bring this off as a group. I’ll give you one week, no more. We need to start casting and rehearsals and working together. Is this too much for you?”

“Number One!” someone called out. Snickers all around.

“Could we please stop with the Number One?” I said. “My name is Edie.”

Mr. Harris said, “Is this too much for you, Edie?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Good answer,” Mr. Harris said. “One week.”

As we were leaving the theatre, the girl named Regan handed me a slip of paper. “That’s my phone number,” she said. “If I can help.”

Around us, everyone was buzzing. “Is
King Lear
the one with the fairies?” one of the girls from the first row was saying. “That could be some cute costumes.”

“Thanks,” I told Regan.

Now Sam and I are walking on the grass between the woods and the street, where cars are whizzing by. It’s starting to drizzle. “You should call that girl,” Sam says.

“Regan?”

Sam nods.

“I can’t,” I say. “She scares me.”

“She scares me too. But she’s big in the drama club. Same with all those girls in the front row. They’re singers, or think they are.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” I demand.

Sam shrugs. “I pay attention, Edie. These things are important. You want to get along, you have to know your way around. If you just stand back and watch and listen and don’t draw attention to yourself, you can learn a lot.”

“Because that’s my strength, as we all know,” I say. “Not drawing attention to myself.”

“Call her,” Sam says.

“Plus, she thinks I’m in the special class. With Merry.”

“That would be the special class where they read
King Lear
?”

“That special class,” I say. All right, she has a point.

At my house, Merry and Dexter are playing Scrabble Merry-style, which means three-letter words and not keeping score. “How was it?” Dex says brightly. So Mom is somewhere within earshot.

“Come on,” I say, dragging Sam after me into the kitchen.

“How was it?” Mom says, with a look that says,
You don’t have to answer your sister, young lady, but you’re going to answer me.

“They put me in charge of
everything
,” I say, loud enough that Dexter will hear.

Dexter coughs splutteringly in the other room, making Merry giggle. They’re laughing at me.

“No, really, Mrs. Snow,” Sam says. “They really did.”

“Really,” Mom says, narrowing her eyes.

We take our snacks to my room and spend the next hour getting not very much done. I find the play on my bookshelf, but I have no idea where to start cutting, and in the end we don’t even open it to page one. Instead, we argue about what kind of music to use. Pop? Rock? Punk? Hip hop? Emo? Nothing seems right.

“Call Regan,” Sam says as she’s heading out the door to where her mom’s car is waiting in the driveway.

At supper, I tell my family about what happened in the theatre. Mom and Dad and Dex all look at their plates without saying anything. I realize they’re trying very, very hard not to laugh.

“All right, that’s just not nice,” I say.

“If you’re going to call that girl, call her by nine,” Mom says. “People go to bed.”

“I guarantee you one hundred percent she doesn’t go to bed at nine.”

“The good TV shows start at nine, though,” Dexter says to me. Which makes sense, actually.

At five to nine, I take the little screw of paper from my wallet and look at it. Blue ballpoint on white scribbler.
Nothing fancy; nothing crazy; nothing to be scared of. The phone rings five, six, seven times. I’m about to hang up.

“What?” A man’s voice.

“Is Regan there?”

There’s no answer, but he doesn’t hang up either. Down the open line I can hear the noises in Regan’s house—trudgy footsteps, TV, a door slamming. “Here,” the voice says, not to me.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I say.

“Who is this?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I mean, oh, sorry. I mean, it’s Edie.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“From today,” I say. “From the theatre. You gave me your number—”

“I know who you are. What’s up?”

“What’s up?” I say back, assuming this is some kind of cool-girl salutation.

“No, I mean, my dad really needs to use the phone. What’s up? Why are you calling me?”

“You gave me your number,” I say again, stupidly, my face burning.

There’s a little space where she might sigh if she were the sighing type. She’s not. “Edie,” she says slowly, a little too loud, “do you need help?”

“So, so much help,” I say.

She exhales once, hard. She’s laughing.

“Do you want to come over?” I say, too fast. “Tomorrow?”

“Over?” she says.

“I mean go for coffee,” I say quickly. They do that, the older girls. I know because of Dex. “Maybe I could run some ideas past you. About the musical.”

“Coffee? That’s cute. Okay. I’ll meet you tomorrow after school at The Shot to talk about the musical.”

I’m opening my mouth to thank her, no doubt far too effusively, when the line goes dead.

The Shot is in the strip mall a few blocks from the school. Dexter and her friends do their homework there together, hogging the big soft armchairs by the fireplace if they can get them, their books and things all over the big square table with the blue glass chandelier hanging low over it. They drink fabulous concoctions that make Dad slap himself on the forehead—cream, caramel, soy, chocolate, pomegranate juice, peppermint, hazelnut, vanilla, frappa-lappa this-that-andthe-other. “Just so long as there’s no coffee involved,” Dad always says. “No coffee allowed! It’s a coffee shop, after all!”