Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance (19 page)

“Well. I— She acts like— I mean, she’s been kind of acting pissed at me all the time …”

“Of course she’s pissed at you! She thinks you’re rejecting her!”

“It’s not … I’m not … I just …”

“Listen, kid, it’s really none of my business anyway. But if you can find a way to fix this by opening night, I think it’s going to help us all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a plate of nachos up there with my name on it.”

I watch the rest of the game without taking it in at all. People come and sit by me for half an inning or so and I try to make conversation, but my brain is a million miles away.

Charlie’s in love with me?

It certainly explains a lot. It also gives me a whole lot to think about.

On the bus back to the festival grounds, I keep sneaking peeks at Charlie, and twice I catch her sneaking peeks at me. It’s no wonder she’s pissed. Charlie’s the ultimate control freak, and love is something that makes you completely out of control.

Something that makes you, for example, lie awake in your cabin thinking, trying to make all the data fit with the new evidence. Maybe she sees my rejection of the show as a rejection of her. Which it is. Or was. Only not really. It was about something else. I think.

And then there’s me. How do I feel? If Charlie really is in love with me, can I reciprocate without just becoming part of someone else’s plans again? But this isn’t part of her plan, which is probably why she’s so upset. And it’s certainly not part of my plan. But I don’t know if I have a choice about whether to reciprocate. I kind of have to evaluate my own recent behavior against the possibility that my feelings for Charlie might not be the same ones I always thought they were.

My thoughts keep going around in circles, which is completely exhausting. So why does it keep me up half the night?

And then there’s this, the next day: Act 2, Scene 1 on Monday’s dress rehearsal. Charlie’s costume prominently features her most prominent feature, the globes of glory that led to a hundred Web sites posting countdown clocks to her eighteenth birthday. And she changes up her performance just enough to make me wonder.

“I cannot endure my Lady Tongue,” I spit in Beatrice’s direction as she enters stage right while I’m exiting stage left.

“Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick,” Don Pedro says to Beatrice.

“Indeed,” she says, and though I’m standing offstage and she’s supposed to be staring wistfully after me, she pauses, meets my eyes, and says this: “Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it—a double heart for a single one.”

Then she takes a beat and turns back to Don Pedro. It’s clear to me that Al’s right. Charlie is in love with me. And maybe she always has been.

I’ve been a complete idiot. But at least now I know why my plan to be a lazy, rich young adult or possibly a lazy, rich college student left me feeling empty. Because she’s completely infuriating, she drives me crazy, and I don’t know what the hell I would do without her. Without Charlie in the plan, it’s never been enough. Maybe it never will be.

21
LOVE SOUGHT

Charlie

“I can’t breathe,” Kyanna says, clutching her stomach.

Backstage, a whirlwind of activity. Al dusting his face with powder; a makeup person putting finishing touches on eyebrows, slicking them with thick, waxy paste so they show up under the glare of the house lights; actors running through lines or warm-ups; and Kyanna mending her own shoe, a high-heeled boot, actually, whose button popped off. I pull Kyanna up to a standing position and she’s still grabbing her waist.

“Look, women wore these every day, so quit moaning,” I tell her and try to stand up straight to maximize every inch of breathing space in the ridiculously tight corset. “We can handle this.” My makeup is worse than on
Jenna & Jonah
, thick enough to stand up on its own, with eye shadow bright enough that it’s probably visible from space. I keep thinking about this song Aaron and I sang a cappella under the bleachers in Season 1, before everything got out of control on set and off: “When you seek love, it finds you, open your eyes—it won’t blind you. Love sought, never bought. Love sought.” We used to mock it, rhyming “overwrought” with “sought.” But now it’s not the lyrics I’m thinking of. It’s the way we hung out under the bleachers after the filming stopped. It’s the way we ate dinner together in Carpinteria. It’s the way I realize I’ve been looking for one thing—fame—when what I’ve really wanted has been next to me for so many seasons.

“Speak for yourself.” Kyanna shakes her head. “I’ll never be tough enough for corsets.”

“You know what they say in Hollywood.” I shrug. Kyanna gives me her “no, I really don’t” look, all cocky with her hip thrust out. “If you want a Golden Globe, you’ve gotta wear a corset.”

“Or have an accent,” she adds in an unidentifiable one.

I nod. “Take slow, shallow breaths.” My floor-length gown is deep rose trimmed in midnight blue silk, with slightly poufed sleeves and enough cleavage revealed so no one mistakes me for a boy, like in the production of
Twelfth Night
we saw yesterday in the outdoor space. There are lots of other plays going on at the festival and it’s been refreshing to see so many actors put themselves out there for rejection or praise.

I keep thinking about that performance, about pretending to be someone other than who you really are, to disguise your feelings, to find out other people’s feelings, to mask love. Love sought is good, but given unsought is better. That’s the line I repeated over and over as I tried to fall asleep last night. Outside was a party, the revelry that announced the show goes up today. Since some of the people will stay on and some will leave, this is the beginning of the end—so this will serve as a wrap party, too. In some ways, I’m ready. I know the part, I have the lines down, the outfits are pressed and fitted, our blocking is finished. But in other ways, I know I’m not at all prepared for the ending of this, because it’s really the ending of so much more. All the work we’ve put into this, that I have put into my role, makes me sure I’m on another level in terms of acting. But then what’s next?

“Did you see
Twelfth Night
?” I ask Kyanna.

“It was set in the 1920s, right?”

I nod. “Great Depression. Hats. Suits. Ankle boots with buttons. But it worked.”

“It’s funny how many of Shakespeare’s plays focused on mistaken identity,” Kyanna says. “This one class I took back in the city was all about how those mix-ups allowed the characters to be themselves.”

“Like you’re more you as someone else?” I ask, and then it hits me. All that time I was pretending to be Jenna, part of me was there, and another part grew attached to my costar. And it wasn’t all bad, despite what Aaron thinks. And when we were in Carpinteria, that was another side of me. “Did you ever think that maybe you’re not just one simple person? That maybe there are lots of you?”

Kyanna doesn’t make a joke or laugh; she just regards me in the mirror. “Different versions of the same self.”

“Exactly,” I say.

Al, who has been eavesdropping a bit, approaches us before he takes his place on the other side of the stage. “You didn’t read that book all the way through, did you?” I shake my head. “If you had, you’d have read this line: ‘Only when we accept that our true selves and our character selves are one, and they comprise multiple layers of the same person, will we be great onstage. To act is to admit to more than one reality.’ ”

Tears spring into my eyes and though I’m surprised by them—I am human after all!—I will myself not to ruin the acres of makeup applied to my skin. So much time and effort has been put into this. I honestly don’t think I’ve worked as hard on anything in my life. I tell that to Kyanna and she nods, facing me in her gown, which is three tiered and makes a swooshing sound as she spins me around in a pretheater show of excitement and nerves.

“But I think there’s something else you have worked on just as much,” she says, joining her hands in mine.

I think about this while practicing my curtsy, gracefully pulling one leg behind me and keeping eye contact while bending down. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Oh, fair lady,” she says in an accent no one would know isn’t authentic. “Surely you can delve into the past and present and conjure the reality of thy hardest work.”

“A hint would be good here.”

“What thou workest hardest at is the same thing as that which thou needest most.”

“A job. Exactly.”

Kyanna shakes her head, sending a little errant braid down from the careful pile on her head. I go over to help her pin it up. “Think again. Or rather, don’t think, feel. That which thou workest hardest at is the same which angers thee the most.”

Anger. Work. “Ah, methinks understanding hast come to find me.” I check my eye makeup in the mirror. “Just to clarify, yes, Aaron took an inordinate amount of work. And he infuriates me like no other.” I clear my throat. “But that’s as far as it goes.”

Kyanna nods slowly, deliberately. “Yeah, that’s what I told him you’d say.”

I whip around. “What? What do you mean you figured that’s what I’d say? When did you guys speak about this?”

Kyanna shakes her head, going to the mirror to reapply her lip gloss. “At the baseball game the other day … and that night at rehearsal … but never mind. It’s no big deal.”

I twist the gloss right from her hand. I may be dressed as a maiden, but the costume doesn’t hide my character’s pluck. “Stop. Go back. From the beginning.”

Kyanna takes my stage direction, practicing her dance moves as she does, elaborately twisting and pirouetting as she explains. “So he—the gentleman in question—pulls me aside and does what any true annoyed person must do. Confess. He leans in and says, whispering in my ear with breath that, I might add, did speak well of his vegan lifestyle in that it reeked neither of hot dog nor salami but of mint. He says—”

“We have six minutes before I either go and make an idiot of myself or shine, Kyanna. Out with it,” I say, hoping I can keep my lines straight with all this new info being poured into my brain.

“The long and the short of it—mainly the long—is that he doth protest too much.”

“In English. Real English, not theater-in-the-round stuff.”

Kyanna tilts her head and lays it on me. “Dude, the guy’s crazy about you.” She waits for my reaction, but I have none. “He. Loves. You.”

“Benedick, you mean?”

Kyanna nods and my spirits sink. But why would they sink if I don’t care myself? Of course Benedick loves me. My character. That’s how the play works. Then Kyanna says, “Benedick
and
Aaron. They’re one and the same in this matter.”

He loves me? Benedick? Fielding Withers? Aaron? He—they—love me?

“Two minutes, Charlie,” the stagehand, a shadow in black, whispers. My throat is dry, but my heart flickers like the lights at intermission. He loves me? I can’t help but smile, a real smile, a full smile. Kyanna takes her place and I ready myself. Out there, somewhere, is everything that comes next, on camera or stage and off, but where does Aaron fit into the picture?

The house lights are dark. Only the stage is illuminated. Well, the stage and me. If he loves me, then what do I do? And what does it mean? Love sought is good; love unsought is better. We never asked for love, did we? Now, in my corset, with my heart tight against my rib cage and my future in front of me, I’m the one who can’t breathe.

22
TEAR THE ROOF OFF THE SUCKA

Aaron

I’m more nervous than I have ever been in my life. Years ago, when they flew me from Cincinnati to LA for the final callback for
Jenna & Jonah
, I didn’t sleep for two days. And then nailed the audition. Now I haven’t slept in two days
and
my stomach has rejected pretty much everything I’ve tried to eat.

It’s not the play. It’s really not. I know we’ll be playing to a full house, and most of the people in the audience will be there waiting for us to fall on our asses, hoping to be the first ones to e-mail Perez and tell him how much we suck. And there will probably be a few industry types there, maybe not hoping to trumpet our failure all over the Internet, but just gawking at the horror of our performances like rubberneckers staring at a wreck on the I-10 at rush hour.

And we’re going to disappoint them all by not sucking. We’re going to smack them upside the head with some iambic pentameter and make them thank us for it. Rehearsals this week have run the gamut from competent to brilliant, so when I say I’m not worried about the show, I really mean it.

I really thought I was going to have to address Charlie’s apparent love for me before the show if, like Al said, it was going to affect her performance. But it looks like Charlie has finally hit her stride, and she’s been getting better and more confident with every rehearsal.

Which is good, because I couldn’t figure out what I would say. “I will always treasure our friendship, but, as Vanessa so memorably sang in
High School Musical 2
, I gotta go my own way.” Or possibly, “I think maybe I have similar-type feelings, but if we’ve learned anything from the last four years, it should be that it would never work between us.” Or possibly, “I love you, too.”

That’s the scariest one, and when I rehearse these things in my head, that’s the one that feels the truest. Which is why I’ve been barfing so much.

I
cannot
be in love with Charlie. It’s simply not in the plan. Not that I really had a detailed plan in place, but the one thing I felt sure of was that I was getting off the Hollywood merry-go-round.

Two days after the baseball game, Ryan called me to tell me that he’d secured me an apartment in lower Manhattan at a ridiculous bargain price. (For Manhattan. My one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan cost me about what a ten-bedroom house in Cincinnati might.) It’s too late for me to get into NYU or Columbia for the fall semester, of course, but maybe I can just live in peace and relative anonymity for a while.

I can’t enter into some kind of bicoastal romance. And, anyway, I’ve been pretending with Charlie for the last four years, and I am ready to play the field for a while. I am not in love with Charlie. I’m not.

That’s what I tell myself. But my stomach is apparently not convinced.

Dammit.

There was an episode about this, of course. Season 1, Episode 20, when it wasn’t clear whether we’d be picked up for Season 2, and the writers figured they should have friends/next-door neighbors/bandmates Jenna and Jonah admit their love for each other just so the kids who loyally watched the first season wouldn’t feel cheated if it never came back.

It is, in my opinion, the best episode of the show. Maybe because the writers figured they had nothing to lose, they made an episode that was just as corny as the other nineteen but which was, according to the fans, genuinely touching, too.

“You know she likes you,” Hunter Davenport, who played my dorky asthmatic sidekick Nebs (’cause he had such bad asthma as a kid that his baby sister thought his name was Nebulizer—because what’s funnier than childhood asthma!) said as we pretended to play video games, staring at a nonexistent screen that was actually the camera lens.

“Well, of course she likes me, Nebs,” I replied. “We’ve been friends for, like, ever. I like her, too!”

“No, dummy. I mean she
likes
you likes you.”

I dropped my controller and hopped off the couch, and Nebs continued. “Did you see the way she was staring at that girl who was hanging around you after the concert last night?”

“Not really.”

“Well, it was the same way she looked at me when I broke her Barbie dream house in fourth grade,” Nebs said.

I bugged my eyes out. Big laugh. Shaking, I went to the fridge and poured myself a soda to calm my nerves.

“And you know what else?” Nebs said. “You like her, too. Like that. Yes, you do.”

Spit take—I sprayed soda all over the kitchen. We had to work on that for an hour before I could get the proper volume and coverage from my spat soda. Long pause for laughter. They actually had to cut some of the laughter when they aired the show, because I had managed to spit soda on the then-president of the network, who was standing just off camera, and the audience roared as he flapped his silk tie around, trying to shake the soda drops off.

“You are crazy, Nebs,” I said.

“Am I? Then why were you going to fight Jimmy Bonasoro?”

“He said I couldn’t play guitar!”

“And it had nothing to do with him taking Jenna out for ice cream?”

“That … that was a coincidence!” I stammered.

“If you think about it, you’ll see that I’m right,” Nebs said.

Cue montage! Our song “Maybe You’re the One,” slow, pretty, and featuring a harmony so sweet it should come with an insulin shot, played as a montage of shots from the past nineteen episodes flashed past—us laughing together, me looking jealous as Jenna and Jimmy eat ice cream, Jenna looking jealous as Candy hangs around the stage after the concert, and the time we got locked in a supply closet backstage and almost kissed.

Back to the beach house. I was still standing in the kitchen, slack-jawed. Nebs walked in, wearing different clothes than the last time we saw him. “Whoa, dude, when I told you to think about it, I didn’t mean you should stand there all night!” Big laughs.

Two scenes later, Jenna and Jonah found themselves backstage and locked in a dressing room courtesy of their wisecracking unattractive best friends.

“Jenna,” I said. “Don’t quit the band.”

“Why not?” Jenna spat back. “I’m dead weight, remember? Just the pretty girl singer who can’t play an instrument.”

“I’m sorry, Jenna. You know I didn’t mean that.”

“And, anyway, I think this band is ruining our friendship. I mean, we’ve been friends since kindergarten, Jonah, and I don’t want to lose that. I’m afraid the band is changing things.”

“I don’t think it’s the band that’s changing things,” I muttered.

“What do you mean?” Jenna answered, looking both confused and hopeful.

“I mean, we’re ruining our friendship because … because I think … because I want to be more than friends, okay?”

Jenna looks at the ground. She looks up, and she’s laughing.

“Yeah,” I say, terror in my eyes. “I was just— I mean, we’ve been friends for so long I guess it would be kind of funny—”

“No, dummy! I’m just laughing because I thought you’d never get it! No offense, Jonah, but you are pretty slow sometimes. I was afraid I was going to have to literally hit you over the head for you to recognize what’s been going on between us!”

“You mean … you, too?”

“Of course, goofy. Listen, if we’re going to ruin our friendship, I’d much rather ruin it this way than with a stupid fight.”

“Cool. Me, too.”

“So are you gonna stand there all day, or are you gonna kiss me?”

So I did. Cue the up-tempo, hard-rockin’ reprise of “Maybe You’re the One” and roll the credits.

That episode has been the blueprint for how real romance begins for an entire generation of teens and, yeah, I guess I have to include myself in that. But when I play my own montage, I don’t edit the bad stuff. And Charlie and I don’t have much of a friendship to ruin. And nobody’s going to write the lines for me. Oh, yeah, and I don’t know in advance how it’s all going to turn out. I mean, you get the main characters on a teen show together, you know nothing bad’s ever going to happen. They’re not going to cheat on each other, or grow apart, or ever face any problems more serious than wacky schemes gone awry, unless the producers decide they need a Very Special Episode.

But in real life, you don’t know how it’s going to work out. You don’t know how the other person is going to respond, and you don’t know if you’re going to say the wrong thing and ruin everything, and sometimes you don’t even really know what the hell you want.

Opening night. I managed to keep down a papaya smoothie this morning, so I may actually have enough energy to give a competent performance. The house is filling up slowly, and we’re peeking out from backstage just like I did in middle school.

Ten minutes later, Flannery calls us all together in the greenroom. It’s a tight squeeze. She climbs on a table in the middle of the room and says this:

“Actors. Watching this production go from the hell of our first run-through to the last two dress rehearsals, which were brilliant—if flawed, and I know you’re all remembering my notes—well, this is one of those experiences that makes me proud to be here, proud to be a director, proud to have devoted my life to a craft that is often cruel, rarely remunerative, present company excepted”—she looks at Charlie and then me, and everybody laughs, including us—“and always uncertain. I’m proud of you, I’m proud of us, and our audience is going to thrill to what you do here tonight. Good show,” she says quietly.

“Good show,” the cast answers, slightly louder.

“Good show,” Flannery says, yelling now.

“Good show!” we answer back.

“GOOD SHOW!” Flannery screams.

“GOOD SHOW!” we scream back.

I catch Charlie’s eye across the room. I nod and smile. She, for what feels like the first time in weeks, smiles back at me. My pulse quickens, and my stomach, a cold, hard knot all week, suddenly feels warm and relaxed.

Actors talk about becoming the character, but you never really become the character. At least I don’t. What I become is a guy who’s watching from the very back of my brain as the character inhabits my body and uses my voice. Which is to say I never really go away and let the character take over. I’m always there, in the back of my head.

And sometimes I sneak into the front of my head. Like when I’m masked in the Act 2 party, spinning Charlie around the dance floor, I’m trying hard to be Benedick, all bluster and ego, but Aaron can’t quite stop feeling Charlie’s rib cage under his hand. Benedick wants to talk about himself, and Aaron just wants to profess his love and get to work on that corset. I suppose it’s a toss-up as to which of us gets the semi during the scene.

I avoid Charlie backstage like she’s paparazzi with swine flu. Because if we talk backstage, Aaron’s going to take over, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find Benedick again, even though I swear he was just here.

Except in Act 3, one of us does disappear. Benedick is moping around and feigns a toothache. All his friends make fun of him, and he takes Leonato aside to tell him something where “these hobbyhorses” can’t hear him.

Al and I have always ad-libbed under our breaths as we walk offstage, in voices so low that only we can hear. In weeks past, I’ve said things to him like, “I’faith, sir, the sausage thou hadst at thy luncheon dost give thee breath that reeketh like the grave,” and he’s said, “Truly did the tabloids take thy measure correctly, as thou art far too light i’the loafers to have a genuine interest in my curst niece.” Stuff like this.

Tonight, though, this comes out of my mouth. Or Benedick’s: “I’faith, Leonato, I do love her.”

“Tellst thou me something I do not already know next time,” Leonato says.

From the wings, I watch the action onstage as Charlie/Beatrice mopes around and her friends tease her. She walks right past me on her way backstage, and we look at each other and say nothing.

Intermission comes after Act 3, and the audience is making happy buzzing sounds. They’ve been laughing in all the right places, so we knew we were doing something right, but the intermission sounds they make just confirm what we all suspect: something special is happening here.