Waiting for Callback (21 page)

‘I promise. Any message you want me to give her?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. Just tell her to call me.’

‘OK.’ Nelly didn’t ask me to explain. Unlike most adults, she was good like that.

‘Good class today?’ she asked. She always wanted to know what we were doing. I think she longed to be downstairs on the stage with all of us and not up here on her own behind a
wobbling tower of paperwork.

‘Good. We improvised a
Game of Thrones/Gossip Girl
mash-up.’ I didn’t mention that I’d spent most of the class trying to avoid eye contact with Archie.

‘Sounds interesting.’

‘It came to life when Chuck Bass was taken down by the Sons of the Harpy.’

‘Who was playing Chuck? I love Chuck.’

‘Me too.’

We took a silent moment to dwell on his awesomeness. ‘Christian.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she said.

‘His casting provided strong motivation for the Harpies.’ I stole an enormous toffee from the bag on her desk. I was still chewing it when I went out.

‘Elektra.’

I jumped. The last person I’d expected to see hanging around so late after class finished was Archie. I blushed (obviously).

‘Here.’ He handed me my coat. ‘You left it in class.’

I swallowed the toffee so I could speak (which was quite painful). ‘Thanks.’

‘I think you left your phone in the pocket. Well, the pocket keeps barking anyway.’

‘Yeah, that would probably be my phone then.’

He laughed. ‘Probably.’ He sort of nodded at me and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It wasn’t much of a conversation, definitely a backward step from the
Open Outcry
banter, but it made me happy. Given that the last time we’d been together I’d sobbed all over him, the fact that Archie was still talking to me at all was a result.
Also I was eternally grateful that he still hadn’t ‘liked’ the slap video, far less commented on it, and I was even more grateful (pathetically grateful?) that he hadn’t
said anything to me about it in class. I wasn’t even going to go down the road of worrying if he was just sorry for me. I’d decided to be nice to myself for a bit.

‘You were a great Harpy today,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Sort of,’ I said. Good to know I’d impressed as a rapacious monster.

‘You OK about the
Open Outcry
thing?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. I wanted to say, ‘Sure!’, but I didn’t think I could pull that off, not after all the sobbing on his shoulder stuff.

‘I wouldn’t be cool about it either; it sucked.’

I really liked him for saying that.

‘Do you want some?’ He held out a seriously large bar of chocolate.

‘Just one square.’

‘Sure,’ he said and broke me off four.

‘God, I love chocolate.’ I think I said it with real feeling because Archie looked at me like I was a bit strange. ‘No, I really, really do.’

‘Milk or dark?’

‘Don’t care; it’s not really about the taste.’

‘Then what’s it about?’

How could he not know? ‘It’s always been there for me,’ I said simply.

‘Whatever gets you through?’

I nodded. I’d been eating a lot of chocolate recently. I’d probably got to the stage where on any analysis chocolate would register as one of the major elements of my body
composition, right up there with carbon and calcium.

‘So . . . I guess I’ll see you next week.’

I thought that he might hug me, I mean in a friends way (we both did drama and there was a lot of hugging), but he just kind of smiled and shrugged and crossed the street and stood at his bus
stop. I stood at the bus stop too – but my bus was going the other way. It was kind of funny, the two of us standing on opposite sides of the street, trying not to look at each other. It was
like a romcom moment.

Romcom moments were outside my usual experience (but nice).

I texted Mossy.
Archie . . . still hot. Just saying.

My phone barked. Yay! She was picking up for once.
Did u
talk
to him again?!!!!!! (PS I know he’s hot, we’ve stalked him often enough

Sort of . . .

OMG, it’s love!!!!!!!

Hahaha!

There is very little excuse for text exchanges like this so I won’t try to make any. Don’t judge.

Mum was stressing when I got home. ‘You’re really late. Why didn’t you call? I was worried. I almost called the police.’

That was typical her. She doesn’t think like anyone else would: ‘Elektra must be having a nice time at ACT; she’s probably talking to all her friends after class.’ Or:
‘Oh, the traffic must be slow, which will be a little irritating for dear Elektra.’ No, no, no, my mum thinks: ‘Elektra is thirty-five minutes late; she must have been attacked by
a child molester or a headless phantom.’ (Or something equally statistically unlikely in our part of London at 7 p.m.
when it’s not even dark
.) Then she goes pacing around and
wringing her hands. When she said she’d almost called the police, that wasn’t just parental hyperbole, it was fact. She’d phoned them before. I probably had a file. She was
outside normal.

‘Sorry.’ Maybe best not to point out her irrationality while she was still in the meltdown zone. ‘Sorry.’ I’d just keep repeating it.

‘And you
didn’t answer your phone
,’ she said (as she so often did). ‘I called a hundred times.’

This was, like, her number-one complaint; it bugs her even more than me saying ‘like’. It probably wasn’t a good idea to explain that I’d temporarily misplaced it. I had
noticed the three missed calls when I was texting Moss, but I sort of forgot to ring Mum in the excitement of the whole Archie encounter.

Priorities.

She was going on and on and on – a sort of white noise of ‘disappointed’.

‘Sorry,’ I said again, butting in before she started on some horrible statistic about how many hours it takes before missing children are chopped into small pieces by their abductors
or something equally traumatizing. ‘What’s for supper? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten all day.’

Ha, the siren call to my mother. Excellent distraction. No need to mention the chocolate.

I didn’t hear from Daisy till after the weekend.

She sent me a text
Had a bug, back at class soon. xx

I texted my reply under the desk. My lesson was a particularly trying one on ionic and covalent bonding, so I was grateful for the distraction.
Get better soon. We all want
you back.
And then I added,
Big Brian wants you . . . badly
because she would appreciate the irony.

I want him too. We are in a deep and meaningful relationship.

Hahaha

I heard about
Open Outcry
. That’s grim. I’m sorry.

I didn’t mind sympathy from Daisy because I knew that she’d get it. Like Archie. It’s only when you’ve failed to land a heap of auditions yourself that you can really get acting stuff going wrong. I wasn’t surprised that Daisy knew about
Open
Outcry
. Everyone did. Even people who weren’t on Facebook.

And I didn’t hear about callbacks for
Fortuneswell
yet, did you?

No

Big Brian got a part playing a delinquent in some BBC thing

Not a stretch for him

Archie got a voice-over for a new biscuit

Seriously?
(trying not to mind that Daisy knew and I didn’t and failing)
That voice

Why did it seem like this was easier for guys? With too few exceptions, the ones I know didn’t grow up on a diet of
Fame
,
Glee
and
Ballet Shoes
or fantasize about what
to wear to the Oscars. Most of them didn’t nag to go to drama classes; they got sent to football and, if they weren’t any good at it, either they didn’t care and did it anyway
(which is just not a girl attitude) or they just went inside and bitterly played
FIFA
on the computer. And there are way more (better) parts for boys than girls. You don’t get a whole
mob of boys turning up to castings – casting directors have to go out and look for them. They
stalk
them.

Casting directors are basically like teenage girls – they’re all on the lookout for the next hot boy.

Whatever Daisy had must have been quite a bug because she wasn’t in class the Thursday after that either. We had a stand-in teacher (or ‘drama mentor’ as he
grandly styled himself ) who was almost as ugly as Lens was hot. He spent thirty minutes lecturing us on Stanislavsky and his Method and the next thirty making us remember sad and/or distressing
things that had happened to us. It wasn’t a huge success as all the boys got embarrassed (so obviously the distressing things were all to do with sex) and all the girls started sobbing (so
obviously the distressing things were all to do with love or maybe small animals).

Not me. I couldn’t get into it. I just kept thinking about things that were sort of sad, but that I found bizarrely funny. I knew that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. I knew
that I was meant to be connecting with something that had really upset me and I knew that the teacher, sorry mentor, wanted me to use that. Despite the fact that he was so irritating and talked
entirely in textbook pretentious phrases (‘
playing with risk in a safe environment
’ I found particularly ironic as I was standing next to Big Brian at the time), I could see what
he was trying to do and on another day I would just have got over myself and done it. But the horrors of
Open Outcry
and now Flissygate were just too fresh in my mind.