Last June, my friend Caitlin Braunstein had a Bat Mitzvah and she invited practically every kid from Riverdale, which was a school for rich kids. Her dad was a big lawyer and they lived in this huge apartment on Central Park West where Miss America used to live, Caitlin said. The front hallway and foyer had marble floors, and the bathroom off the study had a little gold door in the wall with a button. When you pushed it, the toilet paper popped out. I really liked Caitlin, but when I met her Riverdale friends at her Bat Mitzvah, they seemed cooler or older or something. They were all these pretty girls with expensive clothes and great hair and names like Alyssa, Jackie, Robin, and Elise. Oh, and Julie—one of them was named Julie. Like me.
“How did you remember me?” Julie said as she stepped down a couple of steps so we were both on the sidewalk. She smiled this big smile with her movie-star teeth and adjusted her canvas bag that I recognized from a store on the East Side called Chocolate Soup. It’s a bag I always thought was really cool, but too expensive.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I remember people.”
“I’m Julie. Julie Braverman. You’re a friend of Caitlin’s?” she said.
“Yeah. I’m Julie, too. Julie Prodsky.”
“Oh, right! You went to elementary with Caitlin, right?”
“Yeah,” was all I could say.
It turned out that Julie and I were on our way to the same homeroom, Mr. Werner’s, room 301.
In room 301, Julie and I found seats next to each other in those chair-desks, and this big kid in the back with stringy black hair and an army jacket took out some drumsticks and started playing the desk in front of him. Other kids were filing in, and the room buzzed with so many conversations going on at once. Occasionally you could hear screaming in the hallway from more friends reuniting. The bell rang, an obnoxious high-pitched shriek.
“So, where do you live?” I asked Julie.
Her big brown eyes looked right into mine as she feathered her fingers through her bangs.
“On Ninety-Ninth Street and Riverside Drive,” she said.
“No kidding! I live on a Hundred Sixth Street—hey we’re practically neighbors!” I blurted back. Oh my God, I sounded like such a dork.
“Yeah,” Julie said, seeming kind of distracted by all the kids and noise. Then I started staring at her lips. They were perfect and full and heart-shaped. She was so pretty, I couldn’t get over it. I mean, it wasn’t like I
liked
her liked her—I just couldn’t stop staring.
“Are you trying to figure out what lipstick I’m wearing?” Julie said. Oh my God. Caught in the act.
“Yes!” I said. “Where’d you get it?”
“It’s Shiseido, my favorite brand. It’s called Iridescent Baby Pink.” Then she pulled the tube out of her purple LeSportsac makeup bag to show me.
“Here it is,” she said, handing me a shiny black lipstick with curves in the plastic.
“Oh my God, Julie Braverman!”
screamed a husky voice with a Brooklyn accent. Both of us spun around to see a short girl with thick eye makeup, her hair in a bun, and a huge Capezio dance bag, almost twice as big as her body. Anyone with a bun walked like a dancer, with her feet turned out. Even guy dancers had that walk.
“Natalie!” Julie said as she got out of her seat to hug her. “What are you doing here?”
“I got in!”
Natalie screamed.
“I never heard from you after I got home,” Julie said. “How was August?” The two of them hugged and giggled and whispered a little about something for a few minutes while I pretended to be interested in the contents of my fluorescent green pencil case.
Then suddenly Julie turned to me and said, “Oh my God, I’m sorry, this is Natalie Schaeffer. We went to camp together last summer. Buck’s Rock. That’s Julie.”
“Hi. Another Julie!” Natalie said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you in drama, too?” Natalie asked me.
“Uh-huh. You’re in dance?”
“How could you tell?” she said sarcastically, slinging her huge dance bag under the chair next to Julie. At first I thought she was making fun of me, but then she laughed, and Julie looked at me and laughed, too.
“So you’re in my homeroom?” Julie said to Natalie.
“Uh-huh.” She cracked her gum.
Great. At first it seemed like Julie needed a friend, but in fact she already had one. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew other kids in our class, too. She was popular, and it wasn’t even lunch yet.
Mr. Werner, a tall, white-haired man with little half-moon glasses on the end of his nose, came in and asked us all to simmer down. He took attendance, calling everyone by their last names.
“Auerbach? Barinni? Braverman?” he shouted, peering at us over his glasses.
“Here!” Julie said.
Normally, homeroom was going to be in the afternoon—it was only in the morning today because it was the first day of school. Mr. Werner explained how this would be an abnormal day, with shortened classes and orientation and special instructions, and then he told us about some rules, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Then the bell rang again.
“Hey,” Julie said, lightly touching my arm. “If we end up in different classes later, do you want to meet after school and take the subway uptown together?”
“Sure!” I said, trying not to sound too desperate, and I went off to find room 205, Mrs. Krawler’s class, Voice and Diction.
Julie and I had acting and French class together. Acting was every day, but French was only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The schedules were confusing. There was so much to remember that by the end of the day, my brain hurt.
On the number 1 train going uptown, I noticed guys checking Julie out as they passed. Julie acted a little like she was used to that. I asked her if she had any siblings.
“I have four,” she said. “Three sisters and a brother. But I only live with one of them—Mandy—she’s just a year older than me. We’re the only two that have the same dad. I mean, like, the same mom
and
dad. We all have the same mom. There are three dads among the five of us.”
Well. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never known anyone who had such a big family, let alone with all those fathers. I’ve always wished I had brothers, older or younger—that my parents hadn’t stopped with me. But I just had Ellie, who annoyed me and barely acted like a big sister. She never gave me advice about guys, ’cause she was totally inexperienced, which was completely pathetic. I mean, she was seventeen! One time I asked her what kind of birth control she would use if she needed it, and she got all flustered and made me get out of her room, saying she had too much homework.
I was still mulling over Julie’s big family. “Uh-huh,” was all I could muster. Should I have acted like three dads was no big deal?
“My parents got divorced when I was eight,” Julie added.
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
“Are your parents still together?” she asked me.
“Uh . . . yeah,” I said, feeling so ordinary.
“Wow! That’s kind of unusual, don’t you think?” she said.
It was true. My old friend Kristin had divorced parents, and I could probably name at least five other kids I knew who lived with their moms and hardly ever saw their dads.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “But my parents fight all the time. Sometimes I wish they’d get a divorce!”
“No you don’t,” Julie said solemnly.
“No, I guess I don’t, but my sister and I wonder sometimes if they might.”
Then nobody said anything for a second as the train stopped at 66th Street and more kids got on, probably on their way home from school, too. My eyes wandered over to a set of subway doors where only one door opened; the other was stuck shut. This always surprised and annoyed the people on the platform. When the single door closed again I could read the giant silver spray-painted graffiti: CHRIS 217. Chris 217 really got around the West Side. He left his mark on the tile walls of the 103rd Street stop, too. I knew ’cause I walked by it about a thousand times a week.
“Does your mom have a boyfriend?” I asked.
“Yeah, Harvey,” Julie said. “He’s pretty cool. I probably see him more than my dad.” She laughed. “My dad lives on Eighty-Eighth Street. But Mandy and I mostly like to stay at his place when he’s out of town.” She laughed again.
“Wow. Your mom lets you do that?” I asked.
“Well . . .” She smiled mischievously. “Let’s just say she doesn’t really know. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh.” I nodded, smiling back. “Where does the rest of your family live?”
“Well, Ruby’s the oldest; she’s an artist and lives in Tribeca. My brother, Hudson, and his wife, Renee, live on Eighth Street. And Liza lives with her boyfriend on a boat at the Seventh-Ninth Street boat basin.”
“Wow,” was all I could say again. I wondered if I would ever meet these people.
“I grew up with all of them around, so I don’t consider any of them ‘half,’ even if we have different dads. Well, except Mandy and me,” Julie said.
“So you’re the youngest?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Me, too. I just have one older sister. Ellie.”
“Is that short for Eleanor?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Eliza.”
“Oh. Cool.”
Then we stood there holding the pole not saying anything again, listening to the conductor say something over the PA system, but all it sounded like was really loud static. I was wondering if Julie liked me, which I knew was pretty stupid since she was totally spilling her guts. That must have meant she felt comfortable with me.
As we approached 96th Street, Julie’s stop, she said, “Well. I’m next.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” she said as the subway doors opened. She stepped onto the platform, and I watched her shiny, straight brown hair swing from side to side as she disappeared into the crowd.
2
Wasn’t She Cross with You on Account of Your Fighting?
That first week of school I only saw Julie Braverman in acting or French or when passing her in the halls in the drama department. Though we talked a little bit, I thought I’d probably never really get to know her. She was too cool and exotic to be my friend and she always seemed to be with somebody. Everybody liked her, especially the boys. I once overheard Wally, this guy in my acting class, saying he had a huge crush on her.
In Mrs. Zeig’s acting class we got our first assigned scenes. Mrs. Zeig was a tiny woman with beautiful dyed black hair that she kept pulled into an extremely tight ponytail at the back of her neck. This accentuated her big forehead. Mrs. Zeig sat in her chair very straight, kind of regal-like. She wore a lot of really tan foundation, and her eyeliner was always a little smudged, like she put it on without a mirror. She spoke in an almost British accent but not exactly—it was just kind of proper-sounding. She said it was called “Eastern Regional Speech,” and her goal was to get us all to sound like that. Good luck.
“Julie Prodsky and Max Friedberg. You will do a scene from a play called
Tomorrow the World.
” We were all spread out on the floor in our black leotards and tights or sweats, the required dress for acting class. Max was a few kids away from me, over by David Wine and Reggie Ramirez. I could tell the three of them were going to be friends. I remembered David Wine from my audition because he had such great hair (it was kind of like Scott Baio’s, but blond), and he was kind of cute.
At the audition to get into P.A., there were like a thousand kids waiting in this big open area in the basement. They called it the basement even though it was on the first floor, near the lunchroom. The audition to get into the drama department had four parts, and you knew your chances were getting better if you kept moving on to the next part. The first part was the two contrasting contemporary monologues.
When I read the Performing Arts audition letter that said, “Please choose two
contrasting contemporary
monologues; for example, one dramatic, one comedic,” I asked my dad, “What do they mean by ‘contemporary’?”
“Something current, modern,” Dad said. “They just don’t want you to come in and perform Shakespeare or something too difficult.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said. Dad taught Speech and Drama at St. Andrew’s College in New Jersey, so he was my drama coach; I was going to perform Anne from
The Diary of Anne Frank
and Snoopy being the Red Baron from
You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown.
Every time I even thought about my audition, I got nervous.
Then the big day arrived and I sat there in the basement near David Wine with the great hair, waiting for my name to be called. Dad looked funny sitting in a wooden school chair with his legs crossed reading the paper, and my stomach kept doing flip-flops. We had rehearsed my monologues a million times and I knew I was ready, but I had to keep running to the bathroom anyway. I probably had to go, like, four times. Thank God my monologues went pretty well. (One of the auditioners, a drama teacher, even laughed out loud at my Snoopy monologue.) By some miracle, I made it through all four parts of the audition, but I never stopped feeling nervous until Dad and I got on the subway to go home.
And now I couldn’t believe I was actually sitting in my first acting class at P.A. When Max and I got picked to do our first scene together, he looked at me, gave me the thumbs-up sign, and murmured, “Julie . . .” I think we were both relieved to get each other. Max was a little bit of a hippie-druggie but also a pretty good actor. At least that’s what I had heard. Sometimes he talked too softly, which annoyed me, but I could live with that. As far as scene partners went, I got lucky. Reputation was everything. You just kind of heard about people.
Then Mrs. Zeig announced the rest of the partners, and reminded us that we would perform our scenes on Scene Day for the whole drama department.