I shouldered past them, thinking that Heather would just keep going, but in a minute she’d caught up with me.
“I’m allowed to be friends with them,” she said.
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“You were glaring. Incandescently.”
I didn’t want to be this person who glared. I didn’t want to create drama out of who she was friends with. But did she really think that she was going to be exempt from their judgment just because she used to be friends with them? Did she think they would go easy on her? “Gwen is the kind of girl who’s just waiting for a moment of weakness. The other two, I don’t know. I guess I’m beneath their notice. But she’s not going to be okay with you.”
We escaped the crush of bodies in the hallway and stood outside under the eaves. I could see the oak tree from where we were, and Jon sitting under it, but I didn’t start in his direction. “I know that,” Heather said. “But at least around them I don’t have to be on my toes pretending to be a saint, and I don’t have to watch what I say every minute in case I accidentally let slip something that’s a little mean.”
The way she looked at me told me that, yes, that was a little mean, and no, it wasn’t an accident.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked.
“Don’t,” she said. And then, quietly, “Don’t tell me.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have anything to say to you that you don’t know already. Except you’ve got better friends than that, if you want them.”
“I don’t know why it has to be so hard,” Heather whimpered, almost defeated. “I went through middle school and I said I wasn’t going through that again. And I went through three years of Catholic school and I said I wasn’t going through that again. But I’m still hearing this voice in my head telling me that I could have it easy and I could be popular and—I don’t know how I’m supposed to not want that.”
“I’d probably want that too,” I admitted.
“So I guess I should tell them I’m a thespian, and watch them be very confused?” She tried to smile. “Come on, I have an announcement.” And we walked over to the tree.
“Hey, everybody, listen up,” Heather said. “Today after school, we will be having a demonstration of costumes, props, special effects, and weaponry. Be there. Or else.”
“Since when?” I asked.
“Since I said so. Everything’s ready, right?”
“Right, but—”
“Then it is officially time to show off your artillery skills. So we’ll meet over at the theater after school.”
I wanted to say no. Just today, just for this moment when I wanted life to stop for a while and give me time to catch up. I was still a little mad, and Heather was pretending nothing was wrong even though it wasn’t true.
“It’s been a long day. And it’s only lunch.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have any homework yet, right? It’ll be fun, promise!”
I think I said yes because I wasn’t expecting that. Heather knew when to leave me alone in my moods—even if you could tell she was trying to be subtle about it—but other times she was pushy when she had a good reason to be pushy.
And it was true that I didn’t have any homework yet. She got there before I did; how long, I don’t know, but by the time I got there she was leaning against the side of the building and staring off into the distance watching for me, dressed in her pretty brocade kimono, which was hiked up on her shins so that the edges wouldn’t trail in the grass.
“What does that thing get, three miles an hour?”
“Twelve, with flat ground and not too much wind in my face.”
“You couldn’t put, like, an engine on it or something?”
“For that money I’d rather get a new Bianchi. I could get up to eighteen or twenty on it.”
“Well, you could paint flames on the sides, at least. C’mon, everybody’s waiting for you.”
While I loaded up the miniature catapults with artillery and set up my booby traps, Lissa was passing out costumes, holding them up to measure against the other actors—yards and yards of black silk, or not silk but the shiny artificial stuff that costs three bucks a yard, and there were individual details on each costume, a thin trim of yellow or pink or scarlet, appliqué or embroidery on the sleeves. And colored sashes, of course, to tell all the characters apart from far back in the audience. Rainbow for Jon, and orange for Amy, and for Lissa a sedate sage green. Heather’s was bright pink. Amy cooed in appreciation and tied the orange sash around her waist.
Oliver wasn’t cooing. Fine, I didn’t really expect him to coo. He just watched, resting his head in his hands, an inscrutable expression on his face. I kept wondering if this could really be real—if two weeks from now Jon and Heather and Ollie would be onstage, and the strange small orchestra we’d gathered would be playing, and my booby traps would detonate when they were supposed to. I’d seen school plays come together, of course. I’d seen that moment when a bunch of people of varying levels of talent suddenly clicked and created the illusion of something magical. But always with adults to watch over it; this felt very much like walking right up to the edge of the cliff.
Except that Oliver was the one who was leading us to the brink. Did he think about these things too? Or was he certain that he could make everything work okay, somehow?
All the lights were on, furiously bright and ugly, and they seemed to double the size of every place where someone’s brush had slipped or the jigsaw had cut a too-jagged line. But I wasn’t going to apologize for that.
Amy poked at the castle ramparts, weaving in and out of the little hiding spots. “This is just like in the script! And this is where Loud Ninja and Buddhist Ninja hide when they’re trying to eavesdrop on Hiromasa to figure out if he’s really on their side or not. Oh—and the ninja fort in the trees!”
And I set off the remote-controlled gadgets that could spring open and spring shut, or launch imagined arrows into the air.
Jon experimented with creeping stealthily around the booby traps. Lissa followed with her shoes off, and squeaked when she brushed up against the little lever in the wall that made an arrow fly just over her head. But Oliver’s face stayed glassy and frozen.
Well, that was okay. I put a carefully constructed smile on. “The niftiest things, if you ask me, are these little hand catapults. You can carry them around like this, and you can aim them at things, and fire them—”
Nothing happened when I flicked the switch.
Nothing.
“Okay, technical difficulties, no problem, it’ll be fixed soon. Um, Heather?” I asked. “Pass me the other one?”
I took it from her and loaded it with Ping-Pong balls. This time it worked, this time little balls flew in every direction across the room.
But it didn’t matter. The spell was broken, and I didn’t have it in me to keep up the front of cheerfulness when Oliver was staring into the distance with those hollow eyes.
And as the rest of them clapped politely, Oliver turned and started up the stairs.
“Hey,” I called out, and when he didn’t even look back I followed him. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s fine. You’re right. You’ll get it fixed.”
“I promise, I will.”
“Anyway—everything looks different when you’ve got the distance from the audience to the stage. No one is going to notice.”
“It’s fine.”
But I had seen things through his eyes; everything started to look desperately cheap and slapdash and not good enough. I knew he didn’t mean it. And no, I wasn’t going to let it go at that—not after all the work I’d gone through, the sandpaper scratches and knife cuts on my hands. No, I wasn’t going to let myself stew in not-good-enough.
“I’m not going to let you down on this. I know what this means to you and I’m not going to screw up. So can you stop pretending that you don’t care? Can you just talk to me honestly for a second?”
“Who said I wasn’t being honest?” Ollie asked. He titled his head down, hiding behind his hair.
I snorted. “You do the whole sensitive-guy-who-talks-about-his-feelings thing well enough, when it suits you. It’s not fair to hide behind gloomy monosyllables now.”
His mouth quirked. “Since when do I do the sensitive guy thing?”
“Since Julia was all moony over you. She did tell me some things, you know. Otherwise I wouldn’t have cheered for you guys.”
Oliver heaved open the big steel door and sat down on the steps by the theater’s back door. I sat down beside him, my fingers resting on the hot sun-baked bricks.
“You cheered for us? Really?”
“That is so completely, utterly, and totally beside the point that I don’t know where to start. But, yeah. One, I desperately wanted to find out what all this romance stuff was like without the hassle of personally getting involved with someone, so having you as Julia’s boyfriend gave me something to learn from besides really bad television. And, two, you are not an asshole or an idiot, you didn’t make fun of her interests, you didn’t cheat on her, and you didn’t indulge in locker-room jock-boy bragging.”
“You’re really setting the bar high there.”
“Also, I am obviously a huge expert on relationships.”
Yes. Finally got a smile out of him, even if it was just a little one.
“Like that decrepit old lady who gives sex advice on late-night TV.”
“Hey,” I said. Mock-offended. “Unlike me, she actually knows what she is talking about.”
Oliver got quiet then. He opened his mouth as if to say something, and closed it again.
I cautiously reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. He sighed, his eyes pointedly turned away from me.
“Cass,” he said. “I’m terrified.”
“Because of the play?”
He nodded.
“Look, everybody is a nervous wreck when they’re doing a play. Especially when they’re trying to produce, direct, and act. It makes you insane. Look at Mel Gibson.”
“Except that I’m completely unqualified to do any of those things, except maybe the acting.”
“But you survived
Oklahoma!
when the wind came sweeping over the plains and knocked over a set. And last summer at drama camp, didn’t you survive when the flaky director chick decided it would be awesome to have real cats in
Cats
even though one of the leads was so allergic he nearly had to go to the hospital?”
“This time it’s my responsibility, though. Whatever goes wrong is my fault.”
“Nobody said it had to be perfect.”
I said it, and I realized that I was wrong. “It’s Julia.”
“She wrote and arranged a musical in four months. While staying on the honor roll and rehearsing a play and getting in fights with me because she’d rather work on her super-secret project than go out on the weekend. Do you realize how amazing that is? I have no idea how to live up to that.”
The shadows had crept an inch across my hand while we were talking. I wondered if Heather and the rest of them had gone home yet, or if they were still camped out in the basement trying to pretend everything was okay.
I didn’t want to give him some stupid platitude about how it only mattered that we were all doing our best.
“Do you realize that she rhymed ‘love’ and ‘dove’ in one of those songs?”
“‘Maybe I Won’t Kill You,’ verse three. I
have
been rehearsing this thing for the last few months.”
“It’s just, she asked me to shoot her if she ever wrote such a banal and overdone rhyme.”
“Obviously she wouldn’t have asked
you
, if she really meant it.”
I had to smirk, just a little, at that.
“The point is, she might have had this idea in her head of a great musical epic. But even if she was scary-smart, and even if what she wrote is a lot more entertaining than half of what’s on Broadway, it’s not this perfect little thing with all the edges polished. It still has all the fuzzy bits and rough bits and weird bits in it.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Me neither. Because, the thing is, she did care about being great. But she was happy just to write something with love and revenge and violence and cool costumes and exciting twists, and parts for you and Jon and Lissa and Amy and even a little place for me chiseled out in a corner. And when you listen, you know that she gave us . . . herself.”
For the first time Ollie looked into my eyes. He nodded slowly, his whole face tensed.
“I can hear her in all of it. In the arpeggios and the chord changes and the lyrics and the instrumentation. It’s
her
. That’s why it’s so hard.”
“But that’s why it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be from you . . . and from me, and from all of us. Then we won’t betray her even if someone suddenly blanks on every single one of their lines, or the cellist accidentally knocks out the guy beside him.”
He ruffled my hair. He was even smiling, though I could see in his eyes that he was trying really hard to hold it together. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
“At least our costumes will be awesome.”
“Lissa’s a genius. And Heather’s not bad either, even though she’s only doing some of the hemming and lining and edging.”
“Huh,” I said. Of course, that was true. I’d known that already, but somehow I hadn’t connected it in my mind with Heather down in the basement with me all the time, squinting at her stitching in the bad light.
It shouldn’t have taken her so long. She didn’t have to be down there. It didn’t seem so strange, now that we were friends, now that we sometimes had to remind each other to pry ourselves away from talking and get back to work. But she had haunted the basement even when I could hardly look at her, when I would cross the room to get a tool that she could’ve handed to me. It wasn’t so easy to think now that it was as simple as needing any place to get work done.
“Thank you,” Ollie said. “For trying so hard to get along with Heather.”
“Oh.”
“What, oh?”
It hadn’t been that long. August when I came back, September now—not much more than a month. Hardly more than a month, and I couldn’t even tell Oliver how much had changed.