Viola in Reel Life (5 page)

“It’s not like you have to go out with these guys or even see them every day. This is a
dance
. It’s a chance to shake things up and make new friends who happen to be boys. They are not a separate species. When it comes to boys, we all need practice. We’re at an all-girl boarding school, and our options are limited. So, let us all be open to the possibilities. We’ll talk. We’ll dance. Maybe one of us will even kiss a cute one.”

I lean back in my chair. I think we can all guess who would come away from this dance having been kissed. It won’t be Romy, it won’t be Marisol, and it surely won’t be me. But Suzanne will do everything she can to convince us that we should
try
.

The dance that I wasn’t ever going to attend in about a jillion years just turned into a make-out session with random boys we have never met. The pressure is almost too much to bear except that I really do want to kiss a boy that I like—and when the time comes, I don’t want to be bad at it. It makes sense that there should be some practice involved, or at least the development of the skills that lead up to kissing. Now, this could be a plus to being in Indiana. I could practice here and then when I go home to Brooklyn I’ll be a pro. But any way around it, I am already in the presence of a girl with wisdom and experience. Suzanne knows what she’s talking about.

“Now…,” Suzanne continues, “you absolutely are not required to kiss any boy just to kiss them. It’s not like there’s a scorecard or anything.”

“Really? We’re being herded onto a bus to drive across town to an all-boy academy where we disembark and join our lonely counterparts on a dance floor. Sounds like a scorecard situation to me.” I salt the tetrazzini.

“You’re making way too big a deal out of this,” Suzanne says. “We should be talking about what we’re going to wear, not about how we’re going to feel. Who cares about that? If it sucks, and the boys are idiots, we always have each other.”

“I’m in,” Romy says solemnly.

“Me too.” Marisol jabs me with her elbow.

“Okay, okay. I’ll go.” I stab my apple pie to take a bite because I oversalted the tetrazzini. I wonder what my mother would say about eating dessert for dinner, but that’s the beauty of boarding school. I make all my own decisions, small and medium, while the big ones are left up to the Prefect Academy—and as far as boys go, to the only expert I know: Suzanne Santry.

“Hi, honey! We’re in Wardak. It’s near Kabul.” My mom waves into the video conference camera on my computer. “You look great!” Mom moves in toward the eye of the camera, her face so close to the screen, she fills it. It’s such a tight shot, our dentist, Dr. Berger, could examine her molars.

“Viola, how are you?” My dad moves into the frame, pushing my mom aside.

I look around my dorm room to make sure none of my roommates are lurking. “There’s a school dance coming
up,” I tell them.

“How fabulous!”

One of my mom’s worst traits is that she gets excited about things like school dances.

“Ugh.”

“Now, Vi, attitude is everything when it comes to your social life.” Mom bites her lip and sinks back in the frame, while Dad leans forward to deal with me. His forehead wrinkles up in small lines like a tree trunk.

“Your first dance.” Dad smiles.

“And it may be my last! Princess Snark lives!” I make a tiara on the back of my head by waving my fingers.

“So does your sense of humor. I think you like the idea of this dance,” Dad says teasingly.

I just shrug.

“I’m going to let you two talk for a moment.” Mom looks at Dad and then goes out of frame.

“Oh, Dad.”

“Your mother thinks we should have a talk.”

“About what?”

“Boys,” Dad says.

“I know all about them,” I promise. “I mean, Andrew is a boy—and you used to be one—how much do I need to know?”

“Good point. We’re just people.”

“Yeah.”

“Just talk to everybody and have a good time,” Dad offers.

“Great advice, Dad. If I had a personality like that, I could follow your instructions.”

Dad laughs. Mom comes back into the frame. “I didn’t listen to a word of that,” she lies. “So, how are your roommates? How’s Soledad?”

“Marisol,” I correct her.

“Right, right. I loved her blog.”

“I like Marisol a lot. We have a lot of classes together. Suzanne is, like, totally pretty and nice. Romy talks nonstop.”

“Maybe she’s nervous,” Mom says.

“No, she just likes to talk,” I say.

“It’s good to be around upbeat people.”

“I guess.”

“Have you been working on your video diary?”

“Oh yeah. The Viola Reels. It’s going great. I’m kind of known for my camera now. That’s how I’ve been dragged into working on Founder’s Day.”

“Oh, you’ll love it. The girls dress up in costumes that are the uniforms from every era in the school’s history,” Mom says.

“I know all about it. I’m helping with the play. I’m
doing computerized scenery.”

“How wonderful!” Mom actually claps her hands.

“How are the classes?” Dad asks.

“The teachers are totally Midwestern.”

“You’re in the Midwest, Viola,” he reminds me.

“That’s the problem. South Bend, Indiana, will never be Brooklyn, New York. Indiana has its charms. I like twilight. The girls are growing on me. The hash browns are most excellent. But I miss home. I miss stuff. Like, I miss our house. I miss our stoop where people leave cards for emergency locksmith service and stacks of flyers for Indian food to go and discount coupons for Tel Aviv airport rides. I miss Andrew. I miss Caitlin, even though her mother is way too strict and annoying. I miss LaGuardia. I miss Ray’s Pizza and the Manhattan skyline at night from the overlook at Dumbo. I miss gummi worms in Ziplocs from our bodega. I miss the garden on Clark Street where they planted sunflowers that got as tall as the second-story windows. I miss taxi cabs and gyros and frozen hot chocolate from Serendipity on Saturdays. I miss the fountain at Lincoln Center in December and the ballerinas in their leg warmers on their way to a Nutcracker matinee. I miss Mr. Sandovitch in his tuxedo when the car service comes to pick him up with his ginormous bass fiddle to play a classical concert
at the Steinway Hall. I miss New York. I miss Brooklyn. I miss the subway. I miss you.”

“We miss you too, honey,” Dad says.

“With all our hearts,” Mom adds.

“Then fly me over there. I can be very quiet in Afghanistan. I can do some amazing handheld camera work. You know I can do it!”

“Viola, someday you’ll be able to travel with us.” Dad looks at Mom and then back into the eye of the computer camera. “And even make movies with us. But right now, it’s best for you to have an experience like boarding school. I promise that it will open you up in ways you never imagined.”

“It was so good for me, Viola. I know it will be good for you.” Mom nods slowly.

“Okay, okay.” The notion of what might be good for me makes tears come to my eyes. I wipe them on my sleeve. Dad and Mom reach out and touch the camera on their end, and I do the same on mine. For just a moment I can feel their hands on mine, and a rush of warmth and security and love washes over me like autumn rain. As the screen goes to black, I remember that a year is just a year, even though it seems like so much more, like a forever and always more.

I took a risk before I came to PA and had my bangs cut—and the results were more Pippi Longstocking (bad) than Hayden Panettiere (perfect) so I’m using this time wisely by growing them out, and practicing my dance skills in gym—just in case I will actually
dance
at a thing called a dance.

I think my bangs will have time to grow before the dance if I don’t get tempted to cut them short when they start to get in my eyes. That is the problem with bangs—there’s a lot of upkeep involved. Growing hair out is a lesson in patience. Scientists have confirmed that human hair grows on an average of half an inch a month, so I’m about six weeks away from the tops of my ears.

“Are you ready to go?” Trish pokes her head in the doorway.

“Yep.” I stuff my laptop into my backpack.

“It’s really nice of you to help with Founder’s Day.”

“No problem. I think it’s important to understand what you come from in order to move forward. That includes the history of the Prefect Academy.”

Trish thinks for a moment and then smiles. “You’re joking, right?”

“Trish, you’re onto me,” I tell her.

We head over to Hojo. Trish is growing on me. She helped Romy through a bout of food poisoning, took
Marisol over to the infirmary when she was starting to get a case of carpal tunnel syndrome from all her key padding, and best of all, she remembered Suzanne’s birthday and baked a cake for her. And it was good. Trish is on her game as an RA and when I see how some of the other resident advisors act around here, I’m glad we ended up with her. She is someone you can interrupt any time, day or night. And
that
is a gift.

“Aren’t you glad you didn’t take that single?” Trish says as we walk.

“Uh, yeah.”

“You hesitated.”

“It was a comic beat, Trish.”

Trish thinks a moment and then laughs. “You’re a pip, Viola. Room forty-seven.” Trish motions for me to follow her.

There’s a portrait of Phyllis Hobson Jones over the entrance that is post-modern. It’s done with a bunch of tiny stones, pointillist almost, in an enormous frame.

Phyllis had a real 1950s face: simple red lips, pageboy hairstyle, and wide-set eyes full of wonder. Would she think it was funny that we call the hall named after her Hojo, or would she be insulted? Women as beautiful as Phyllis rarely have a good sense of humor. That’s just my unscientific opinion.

Room 47 is a black box theater. It’s used for rehearsals and the occasional performance by some overly talented senior who does a one-woman show of Ruth Draper monologues that she uses to audition for the theater program at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

There are a bunch of upperclassmen sitting on painted black wooden cubes formed in a circle when we arrive. Diane Davis pops up and comes right over to me. “Our director of photography and set designer!” Diane says to the group, introducing me with the announcement of two jobs I’ve never done before. Great.

I settle on a cube and pull out my laptop. Diane starts the meeting by talking about a play that they do every year that was written about the founding of the Prefect Academy by a student who graduated in 1938. Diane explains that they, the committee, would like to breathe some life into the old script and come up with something new. She passes around photographs of past productions.

I’ve seen better theatrics at American Girl birthday parties in Manhattan. In the photos, the students romp around in bad wigs, long dresses with bustles, and high-top shoes made out of modern shoes with paper spats glued on top. Awful. The scenery is bad. Paper trees in one, and a giant map of the campus painted on a sheet in another. The worst.

“Something wrong, Viola?”

“Have you guys ever heard of blue screen?”

“What’s that?” Diane asks.

“Well, I am able, with the proper technology of course, to take video I’ve shot and put it on a giant screen behind the action. Something like this.”

I turn my laptop around and show them how I wrote my Shakespeare paper for Carleton’s class with images I downloaded of Shakespeare’s England and then wrote passages that appear at the bottom of the page explaining the action.

“We could have that onstage?” Trish’s eyes widen.

“Yeah. I could film around campus and then you could do the play in front of the scenes.”

“Oh my God. This is great.” Diane sits up straighter on her cube. She is proud to change the course of crappy Founder’s Day productions of the past and bring them into the new century.

“It’ll take some work, but it could be pretty great,” I admit.

“Could you work with Mr. Robinson in computer science? He helped install the computer tech system in the theater.”

“Sure. Whatever works,” I tell her.

When I get back to our quad, there’s a bowl of cold microwave popcorn waiting for me on my desk. Marisol is asleep already. Suzanne and Romy are doing their homework by the small, bright beams of their desk lamps so as not to disturb Marisol.

I tiptoe to my desk and pull out my laptop.

“Sorry the popcorn is cold,” Romy whispers.

“No problem,” I tell her.

I IM Andrew.

Me: You up?

AB: Yep.

Me: Just got dragged into the Founder’s Day—shoot me now—planning committee. I’m doing sets for the play. They didn’t know anything about blue screen.

AB: No way.

Me: Yeah.

AB: Do you have the new program for it?

Me: There’s a new one?

AB: Yeah. We used it on our fall production of
All My Sons
at LaGuardia
.

Me: No way.

AB: You want it?

Me: Absolutely. I can already see this thing is gonna eat up, like, my entire life. The old program takes forever. I don’t have
time to program each individual scene.

AB: This will help. You download the images, and this actually sorts and stores them per your instructions. Then you just do an assembly on a DVD and you’re done.

Me: That will save me hours!

AB: Okay. Will send.

Me: You rock.

AB: I know.

I sign off my computer, so tired that I think I may skip pajamas and BR (beauty routine). But I think of Mrs. Doughty and her false teeth, and how I’d like to grow old with my own choppers, and the only way for
that
to happen is to take care of them, so I grab my toiletry kit and head to the bathroom. Nothing like the idea of dentures to get me to brush, rinse, and floss before bedtime. First, though, I wash my face with Cetaphil. I dry it carefully, remembering that my mom told me if you scrub your face too hard it tears the fibers underneath, which leads to premature saggage, which I have to start thinking about when I’m thirty. But my mom says good habits can’t start too early. My mom knows everything about skin maintenance, even though she totally skips steps when it comes to her hair.