Beyond Clueless (17 page)

“Martha,” she said sternly. “Time to focus.”

“
Myyyy mother makes me mash my M&MMMMMMs!
”

The whole cast belted scales, hitting the high note on “mash” before plummeting down to the low note again. Mrs. Murray overemphasized each word, her mouth expanding to a great maw and then contracting to a pinch. She must make it really easy for her dentist, I thought as I painfully stretched my own lips as wide as they would go.

“Again!” she shouted, holding up a clenched fist as if she were Evita Perón on the balcony of the Casa Rosada. (If you don’t know, go watch the movie. Madonna!)

“
Myyyy mother makes me . . .
”

Oh, good Lord. Even higher?

“
Myyyy mother makes me . . .
”

Higher, really?

Warm-up vocal exercises were a lot more intense than I’d ever had in middle-school theater, that’s for sure. Maybe
this
was the hazing Maria had joked about?

On the other hand, it felt good to finally apply myself to something, to pull out the stops and really see if I could cut it. I saw beads of sweat forming on Derek’s forehead as he strained to hit the high note, but he did hit it, impressively.
Felix, on the other hand, had long since given up, smiling duck-lips (still cute!) and shaking his head in disbelief and admiration at everyone still in the running. Maria, of course, was totally killing it, her operatic soprano notes filling the room. I hated-slash-loved her.

Music rehearsals felt totally different from the other rehearsals, where we were scattered about and working on various things, like some chaotic insect colony slowly working toward a single goal in a thousand different ways. Here, however, we were a single organism, with Mrs. Murray as the brain; I mean, she really embraced “director” in the title “music director.” We were like the pipes of a church organ, arrayed before her and responding to her lightning-quick pointing.

“Now you, Cinderella! Jason! Penelope, louder!”

If you’ve ever heard
Into the Woods
, you’ll know that it’s way complicated; unlike most musicals, it doesn’t have people singing their own songs and then joining together for a duet or an ensemble piece every once in a while. This show has those traditional songs, sure, but a lot of the show is basically conversations set to music—conversations with ten people involved. People are constantly interjecting little phrases, explaining things, weaving different sentences together—it’s a nightmare for performers, basically. If anyone misses a line, it throws the whole thing off. Christy is a super-impressive piano player, but she basically only kept time and played the top notes that we would be singing, no chords or intros or interludes or anything.

At first, a lot of people were worried about how some of the songs didn’t seem to have a melody.

“It’s just words and notes,” Derek complained. “They don’t . . . go together.”

But the more you listen to it, the more you can hear the melody. And, in fact, soon you can’t get the melody out of your head. Eventually it becomes a part of you; it becomes so perfect in your mind that you can’t imagine the song going any other way.

“. . . into the woods to Grandmother’s house and home before dark!”

When we were sitting in the rehearsal room, I started to get a much better sense of how people were going to perform onstage. When Maria rapped her song about losing her magical beans, she wasn’t afraid to ham it up. This meant that whenever she
really
sang, it came as an even more impressive revelation. She was so good, she didn’t have to show it all the time. It’s funny how confidence works in different ways in theater: It’s not just about putting your insecurities aside; it’s about putting your pride aside, too.

“Martha. Martha! You missed it.” Mrs. Murray waved at Christy to stop. I frantically glanced down. Oh, shit. My cue. But which one?

“I—”

“You jump in on
See it’s your fault!
” Mrs. Murray said. “Let’s take it again. One, two, three . . .”

I flushed crimson, embarrassed. Here I was, evaluating everyone else, thinking I had this all down. This was going to take a lot more concentration, clearly.

Felix wasn’t helping the situation, of course. It seemed that every time I looked up, he was looking at me.

And I looked up a lot.

A
t Tuesday’s rehearsal Oliver had a present for me. Derek was up onstage pretending to feed a cow, Jimmy was going over sound cues with Jenny, and Felix had gone outside for a phone call. I was sitting on the floor in a corner, trying to get through my algebra problem set, when Oliver walked over and slumped down next to me.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Well, well. If it isn’t Mr. Sukkot. Am I pronouncing that right?”

“Uh . . . no idea. Let’s just say yes?”

“How was the fishing expedition?

Oliver sighed heavily. “Horrible. As expected.”

“Really?”

“I can’t stand fishing. It’s so painfully boring. The worst. But my dad gets worried about me not being butch enough.”

“Aww, I think you’re plenty butch.”

He grinned. “Why, thank you. I appreciate that.” He reached into his pocket. “It’s ridiculous that my dad worries about it, and it’s not like he himself doesn’t realize that it’s ridiculous, but . . . well, it is what it is. So I humor him. And, bonus! I brought you a souvenir.”

He held out a fist and dropped a pebble into my outstretched palm.

“Wow. Some girls obsess about getting a rock someday.” The pebble was gray and smooth; I rubbed it with my fingers, luxuriating in its surprising silkiness.

“It’s precious,” Oliver said. “It was spared being skipped, unlike four thousand of its riverbed-mates. Take good care of it.”

Jenny suddenly materialized above us. “Martha, it’s your turn out in the hall.”

Man! If she wasn’t pulling Oliver away for something, she was sending me somewhere else. She turned and marched away, her clipboard clutched to her chest and her shoulders seesawing with every step. I wrenched my own shoulders back and forth, a busybody imitation that bumped against Oliver.

He bumped me back before I managed to struggle up to a standing position.

This week each of the cast members had to get measured for our costumes. One at a time, Jenny was sending us out into the hall, where Calliope Connor was busy working a tape measure.

Now, Calliope was the perfect choice for the role of costume designer. She was constantly being called in for “discussions” with Sister Margaret, the vice principal, because of her crazy hair extensions and the different ways she hacked our uniform. For Calliope, dressing for school every day seemed to be some kind of
Project Runway
challenge.

“Sister, I read the policy very carefully,” she’d say sweetly. “I didn’t see any rule against adding shoulder pads. They’re excellent padding for these heavy book-bag straps!” Or, from the look of them, excellent for an NFL game or a Tartar invasion.

Naturally, she was taking our costumes very seriously.

In the corridor, Calliope had arrayed all her fabric samples, shoes of different sizes, and tangled piles of measuring tape in haphazard rows. She got straight to work, measuring my arms and my bust—however lacking it is—and taking careful notes.

“Do you need to turn your head a lot onstage?” she asked, reviewing a questionnaire she had written up.

“Uh, yeah. I think so,” I said, thrown by the question.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, frowning hard. “Hmm.”

Oh, dear. What was she planning?

“And the red cape. Do you have to wear it the whole time?”

“No, it definitely has to come off. The Baker takes it from me, in fact. And it gets fed to the cow.”

Calliope looked disappointed again, and she scratched several lines off her list of questions. “I’m having trouble figuring you out,” she said, shaking her head. “How old are you?”

“Um, fourteen. Fifteen in December.”

She glanced up at me, and it was clear from her face that she thought I was the dumbest person on the planet.

“Oh—you mean my character!” I exclaimed, fully mortified.
“Ha-ha. Um, you know, just generally a kid? Old enough to go into the woods by myself but young enough to be really scared?”

That made her laugh. “That doesn’t narrow it down much, now does it?”

But let’s not forget about Felix.

How could I?

Unfortunately, sneaking around with him was a lot harder than I had imagined. During the entire month of October, we only managed to find
a few
more chances to duck into an empty room (or, on one occasion, the janitor’s closet) to kiss some more. We didn’t even really talk to each other; we’d make eye contact, he’d tilt his head toward some room, and then we’d drift away from everyone else—separately—find each other in there, and, well, make out. All tongues and hot breath. But we didn’t dare stay long, so, like, thirty seconds later we’d duck back out, one at a time, and act as if nothing had happened.

These moments weren’t all that much (or many) in terms of making-out action, but they made being at rehearsals excruciatingly . . .
electric
. We had this massive secret, this crazy attraction, and it took all our acting abilities to keep it natural and cool. During breaks we’d gravitate toward each other—totally unplanned, I swear—so we’d both end up standing by the entrance lobby, or the stairwell to the dressing rooms, or the snack machine. But there were other people around, too, of course, so I don’t think anyone noticed
anything odd about it. We were just hyperaware of each other, all the time.

Occasionally his hand would brush past mine, and a tingling sensation would blossom over the rest of me.

My lips ached.

So, to make a long story short(er), that’s basically the situation that continued all throughout the whole month of October. Xiang kept getting
closer
with Parker—and telling Kirby all about it, not me. Jimmy and I weren’t spending as much time together as we’d hoped: At rehearsals he was always running around doing Jenny McCafferty’s bidding, and otherwise he was disappearing without a trace into Derek World.

But, honestly, I didn’t mind too much. I was busy doing insane amounts of homework (child-labor-law violations!), going to endless rehearsals, smooching Felix in a dark corner every once in a blue moon, and getting my snark on with Xiang and Oliver. In fact, Oliver and I got into the habit of sending funny texts to each other pretty much every day.

And I said about three words to my parents the whole time.

In the middle of the month was Set Day, when the whole cast was required to come in on a Saturday to help construct the set. We were really excited and energetic for the first few hours in the morning, when the sketches were passed around and the power tools came out. Then the pizzas arrived for lunch. But when the afternoon wore on, and the
monotony of painting leaves or hammering various rolling walls together set in, it became . . . a drag. A boring, annoying drag.

Jenny’s bossiness didn’t help matters. On the other hand, I was getting pretty good at imitating her dorky mannerisms. This made me quite popular with the cast, and I kept getting asked to do impromptu performances; Chloe nearly choked to death on her pizza from laughing. (Doing impersonations is a necessary skill for any aspiring actor. Think about it: That’s the best part of late-night talk shows, seeing celebrities mock one another!)

At one point, though, Jenny walked in on me mid-impression. Felix tried to warn me, widening his eyes and jerking his head, but I was too absorbed in marking off my “checklist” that I didn’t even notice. When I looked up, Jenny was staring—no, glaring—at me. Then she just kind of shook her head and walked out.

Felix burst out laughing, but somehow it didn’t seem all that funny anymore.

Actually, it was pretty bad.

But whatever: Had she been acting less irritating, there would have been nothing to mock.

OK,
yes
, it was still bad. And, to be fair, Jenny wasn’t the only one being annoying that day. In the morning, while we tried to paint a stone-wall pattern on one of the flats (framed muslin panels that are used as walls onstage), Jimmy kept going on and on about how
hard
it was that Derek didn’t go to his school, that Derek lived in Weeksburg, a
twenty-minute drive
from Bracksville. He made it sound like they lived on different continents and that they never, ever, ever saw each other in this long-distance relationship.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was, like, “Jimmy. Look around you. No one here lives in the same town as their boyfriend. Think of Xiang. And—hello—Kirby and his many boyfriends? And think of me and
you know
.” I nodded toward Felix, who was trying to screw rolling casters onto the hooves of a giant plastic cow.

That shut Jimmy up, but I could tell he was annoyed that I didn’t feel sorry for him. Then my phone buzzed, and I looked at it. The message said,
This is your fault. To think I could be fishing.

I giggled and looked toward the back of the room, where a bunch of people were tying branches onto a rolling ladder, to serve as Cinderella’s wishing tree.