In the Spotlight (12 page)

We’d all been asked to bring specific things for snacks and dinner, as well as random items that Ms. Bard had requested, even though I couldn’t fathom what we were going to do with most of them, like the spring-‐-loaded part of a toilet paper roll thingy.

There was pizza in the Commons when we finished setting up our beds. Ms. Bard had also organized our snack foods by color, which was an interesting approach. I sat down at a table with Kaylee and waited for Maggie to select her food. Maggie had some…issues with food selection. Everything she ate had to fit into the food pyramid proportion chart thing. She refused to go over or under those guidelines ever. It took her forever to calculate so she was constantly the last one eating. We all joked that it made her endearing, but really it made her slightly obnoxious.

When Maggie finally got her food all situated, and sat down with us, Kaylee said, “Okay, let’s rate the guys in the cast before the freshmen get a crack at it tonight.”

I snorted. “Yeah, because once the freshmen rank the guys it’s totally official.”

Maggie laughed too, but said, “Still it is fun to rank the guys.” That was all Kaylee needed by way of agreement to pull out her notebook with all the guys’ names listed. She spelled out her rating system (looks, personality, talent) and explained again how we would all average our ratings together for the ultimate rating.

“Let’s start with Kyle,” Kaylee said. “Looks?”

Maggie chewed her carrot stick thoughtfully. “On a scale of one to five, I would give him a three point five.”

“You can’t give half points,” Kaylee said with an exaggerated sigh. “It messes up the scoring process.”

“Fine, I give him a three,” Maggie said. “I can’t stand the way he dresses.”

“Really?” Kaylee asked. “I love the way he dresses. I give him a four. Hannah?”

Her voice had a sly wink wink nudge nudge quality to it. I still hadn’t told them what had happened at Kyle’s house.

Suddenly it was really hard for me to swallow my pizza. Finally, I said, “I give him a one.”

“What?” Kaylee’s shrill yelp caught the attention of several other tables, so she lowered her voice. “This is a new development.

When were you going to tell us that you didn’t like him anymore?”

I didn’t like the accusatory tone in her voice, but I tried to keep my voice steady. This was neither the time nor the place to get into what happened with Kyle. “I just found someone else who’s made me rethink some things, that’s all.”

Maggie nodded. “I told you she likes Josh.”

“No, I told
you
she likes Josh,” Kaylee argued. “I called that months ago.”

“Um, guys, it really is a recent development, and who says that I like Josh? It could be some random guy I met at work.” I took a bite of my pizza hoping that the conversation would end.

Maggie’s eyes widened. “You mean, it isn’t Josh?”

I laughed. “I didn’t say that either. Let’s just not talk about it right now, okay? I don’t want everyone in the cast knowing all my business.”

“Fair enough,” Kaylee nodded, shutting her notebook.

“We’ll continue this later when we have more privacy.”

“No, it’s okay, we can finish now,” I said.

Kaylee smiled in approval and flipped her notebook back open. I knew she didn’t want to stop. She lived for the guy ranking in the musical. We had been doing this even before we were in the shows. The first time we did the ranking was at a slumber party in fourth grade, after Kaylee’s parents had taken us all to see the show. Our teacher’s daughter was the lead. It was incredible.

Kyle ended up with an overall ranking of three, his lowest ever, thanks to my newfound dislike of him. Josh ended up with a five. Even Kaylee and Maggie agreed that he was as close to perfect as you could find. I reminded them that even just a month ago, I wouldn’t have been giving him such a high rating. Maggie just grinned happily at me. Kaylee pointed out that the rankings were given in the present moment, and my argument was, therefore, irrelevant.

For Hayley’s sake, I made sure Mike got an overall score of four even though he and Kaylee couldn’t stand each other. We made our way through each of the guys in the cast, working from seniors down to the freshmen. When we got to Kevin, both Kaylee and Maggie grimaced, but I remembered his enthusiasm for the show. Due to my soft spot for Kevin, he got a three on our scale, which was virtually unheard of for a freshman.

Our rankings were purely for fun, but during our freshman year, Ms. Bard had overheard us and made it a part of our annual sleepover. I wondered what the guys did at their lock-‐-in. The guys refused to call it a sleepover, even though that’s exactly what it was. By the time dinner was over, we were full and giddy on our own silliness. The first activity of the evening was a weird relay race. Ms. Bard divided us into teams by grade, which left some of the teams wildly uneven. Ms. Bard said that the smaller teams could win easily if they just tried a little harder. Was this some weird way to teach us a life lesson? I couldn’t help but wonder.

The sophomores won hands down because there were so many of them. I hoped she wasn’t trying to teach us a lesson about the little guy winning if he just tried hard enough, because if that had been her intended message, she failed miserably. The relay had involved us grabbing weird items from our luggage or the pile she’d instructed us to bring and then racing up to her. We juniors had absolutely no chance whatsoever. Kaylee, Maggie, Claudia, and I had no motivation. And sometimes just for fun, we’d take up the wrong item just to see Ms. Bard’s exasperated expression as she sent us back to start over, which sent us all into a fit of giggles.

After our strange relay race, Ms. Bard had us all sit on the stage in a big circle. Maggie giggled and asked, “Ms. Bard, are we going to sing Kumbaya?”

“Ooo, that’s a good idea,” Ms. Bard said, suddenly distracted from her original purpose. “But not right now. Now we are going to make collages.”

“Collages?” Several people seemed genuinely confused as Ms. Bard began to distribute paper and scissors and glue sticks and magazines.

“Oh, yes, collages,” Ms. Bard said. “I want each of you to create a collage using different pictures and words to tell the background story of your character, even if your character is small.

Each character has a story to tell. By doing this our show will be richer and deeper, and the audience will be able to feel the difference.”

Luckily, we were all a group of girls who didn’t mind craft projects. I couldn’t imagine the guys in our cast doing this. I started sifting through the magazines that Ms. Bard had dumped in front of me. I tried to think about Kelly from different angles, but I kept coming up short. Finally, I decided to start with the very basics.

What was Kelly’s favorite color? My first instinct was to say something like blue or green. I didn’t find her to be overly girly so pink seemed like an unlikely choice, but blue and green seemed too plain. So I kept flipping through the magazines. Suddenly I came across an ad that had an electric blue border. That was it. That was Kelly’s favorite color. She was from the eighties after all. I carefully clipped the border out and pasted it to the center of my paper.

Good, at least I had a start.

I started to wonder what sort of food Kelly liked to eat when she went out with her friends. I liked fries, but did she? And what sort of place would she and her friends hang out? The first thing that caught my eye in one of the food magazines was a huge plate of super deluxe nachos piled high with cheese and black olives and jalapeño peppers and green onions. She totally struck me as the kind of girl that would have eaten something like that. Something totally unhealthy, yet delicious. She and her friends would have shared it. But where would they have gotten something like that?

What sort of place was a hangout for this group of girls? Then I just knew. Jimmy’s Red Hots or a place just like it. Awesome sauce. I felt like I was totally getting to know Kelly.

So after gluing the plate of loaded nachos to my paper, I wondered if Kelly ever had a pet. It seemed like she was a dog person. When she wanted to de-‐-stress I could see her curling up on her bed with a big dog, like a golden lab or a golden retriever. I found the picture I needed fairly quickly. Apparently, golden retrievers make good advertising dogs.

But what did all of this really tell me about Kelly? What were her hopes and dreams? What was she passionate about? What made her do the things she did and make the choices she made?

And yes, I realized that it would be hard to answer all of those questions with a collage, but I could try. So what did she hope for in life? As cheesy as it sounded, I think Kelly wanted what all of us wanted. Love. I found plenty of loopy hearts that I cut out and arranged around the page. In a moment of inspiration, I found a pair of lips that I used to make it look like the hearts were being blown from the lips. I sat back for a moment to admire my work thus far. It was definitely an incomplete picture of Kelly, but it was taking shape nicely. I knew more about her than I had before at least. I peeked over at Kaylee’s, wondering what she would do since she wasn’t technically in the play, being assistant director and all. Much to my surprise, her page was almost completely covered.

She had huge words splashed across the page like “bold” and

“action”. Somewhere she had found a director’s chair. She clearly had a good handle on her role in this production.

Maggie’s page was relatively blank at first glance. When I looked closer though I saw that all of her pictures and words were all concentrated in the middle of her page. It was an interesting tactic and I wondered if she was going for any kind of specific symbolism. I decided to ask her about it later.

I couldn’t see Claudia’s but I realized that despite all of my reservations about her, I actually wanted to see it. Heck, I wanted to see everyone’s collages.

With a few finishing touches, my collage was finished.

Thankfully, too, because Ms. Bard announced that we were supposed to hurry up so that we could all share our character interpretations.

It was fun to hear how everyone else viewed her character, and in a strange sort of way, I totally saw what Ms. Bard had meant when she’d said that our show would be deeper and fuller.

Characters were starting to make connections with one another, and instead of feeling like a scripted show, it was starting to feel, well, real; like our alter egos lived in a separate plane in time and space.

After we finished with the collage circle, Ms. Bard opened the school’s kitchen to let us bake cookies. She had a plethora of ingredients stacked on the counters. Groups of girls broke off to start mixing up cookies of their own. I was pretty sure most people just ate the dough, though, because we ended up with maybe two dozen cookies.

“For our last activity of the evening, you’re all going to participate in a truth or dare trust circle. Kaylee has been given a stack of school-‐-appropriate cards that contain plenty of fabulous truths or dares. She’s in charge of the activity, as my assistant director, so please listen and defer to her. Everyone must participate, but only as far as you feel comfortable. Even if you just say one word. And above all else, please remember that anything said in the trust circle, stays in the trust circle.”

Kaylee held a stack of elaborately decorated note cards. She looked pretty smug as Ms. Bard ushered us all back up onto the stage. We settled down, but it was ridiculously uncomfortable, and Kaylee made the executive decision that we should all get into our pajamas and do the trust circle in our sleeping bags.

Most of the girls, myself included, had brought modest pajama pants and tank tops to wear to bed. And since it was pretty chilly in the choir room, most of us still had hoodies on. Claudia, on the other hand, had chosen to bring a lace nightie to our sleepover.

A nightie was the only way to describe what she had on.

Nightgown would have implied more material. This piece of lingerie was blue sheer lace. I hadn’t known anyone my age who wore stuff like that until that moment.

When Claudia entered the choir room, everyone got quiet.

Rather than being embarrassed, Claudia preened. She loved the attention. After a little twirl, she settled onto her sleeping bag beside me.

“You should get one of these,” Claudia said quietly to me.

“It would totally look good on you. Drives guys wild. Kyle totally loves it on me.”

My stomach knotted as I thought about that night with Kyle, and I had the feeling again that he and Claudia had to be dating. I pretended to be interested in the zipper on my sleeping bag.

Thankfully, Kaylee started reading the instructions and everyone got into playing the truth or dare game set up by Ms. Bard. After a few rounds of incredibly lame questions like “What was your first pet as a child?” and “Why do you think Ms. Bard is such a fabulous teacher?” we all started to get bored.

Kaylee must have sensed a mutiny because she said, “Do you guys want to ditch the cards and play a real game of truth or dare?” After a chorus of agreement Kaylee continued, “Okay, Jenny, it was your turn. Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” Jenny replied. “No, dare. No, truth. Wait, dare.

Definitely dare.”

“Are you sure?” Kaylee laughed. She didn’t seem nearly as irked by Jenny as she normally did, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she had up her sleeve.

“Definitely dare,” Jenny repeated.

“Okay,” Kaylee grinned rather smugly. “I dare you to pick a guy from the musical to call and tell that you are sitting in the bathtub thinking about him.”

Jenny’s face flushed red, and for a second I felt kind of sorry for her. I even wondered if Kaylee had gone too far. Finally, Jenny stuck her chin out, and staring straight at me, she said, “I choose Josh.”

There was much shuffling and giggling as Kaylee dug out the list of cast member phone numbers. She recited Josh’s number to Jenny, who squirmed in massive discomfort. Jenny looked like she might puke, so I could only assume she was nervous. While she was waiting, I found myself holding my breath, hoping that Josh wouldn’t answer, and the more times the phone rang, the more that seemed like a reality.