You in Five Acts(19)

“Yeah,” you said. “Everyone seeing it makes it that much sweeter if you get what you want. But if you don’t . . .” You looked at me, your eyes flashing with something I couldn’t quite place. Concern? Pity? Either way it wasn’t good.

“I think I’ll actually be relieved if I don’t get cast,” Dave said. “I wouldn’t feel right showing up last-minute and taking someone else’s spot.”

“There’s no taking someone else’s spot,” Ethan said sharply, draping an arm around Liv’s narrow shoulders. “It’s either yours or it isn’t.” He smiled at her and she looked down at her lap, speechless for the first time in as long as I’d known her.

“Unless the person doing the casting hates you,” I said.

“No way she hates you,” you said. “She’s cold like that to everyone. Nobody knows where they stand.”

“Spoken by the only person who’s got a lead on lock,” I said. “At this point they should call it the pas de duh.” Dave laughed, but you just stared out at Avery Fisher Hall, resting your chin on your fists.

“Believe me, I don’t have anything on lock,” you said.

“Does anyone?” Dave asked. I felt a twinge in my ankle, just as Liv squirmed out of Ethan’s awkward embrace. You palmed the tin foil from your hot dog, aimed at a nearby trashcan, and missed. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for life at that particular moment.

? ? ?


By quarter to one I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to go camp out in the dance hallway to await my fate.

“It’s not gonna make a difference,” Liv said, sounding almost annoyed, as I packed my uneaten lunch back into my bag. But even though I knew she wanted me to stay as her buffer, I tried to tune her out; she knew she was getting the lead in Ethan’s magnum opus whether she made out with him or not, the same way she knew she would always get away with throwing blowout parties in her thin-walled apartment building. Liv never seemed to feel the threat of true failure. It was her most glaring character flaw.

“I’ll go with you,” you said, swinging your backpack up over one shoulder, and I tried to hide my disappointment. I’d had dreams all night long about seeing the cast list, weird, surrealistic walks through a hallway stretched like taffy, where I’d come upon the sheet of paper, my eyes struggling to focus enough to read the fine print. In some of the dreams I’d find my name in a cluster near the bottom, one more body in an anonymous mass. In others, I couldn’t find it at all. And while I was pretty sure (99 percent?) that I’d be somewhere on the list in real life, I didn’t want you to be there to see my face when I found out. The only bright spot of the dreams had been that I was alone.

But as we walked back to school from the fountain, it seemed like you were mostly following me to gossip.

“Was that vibe weird to you?” you asked, trudging up the steps to campus, one bare brown knee poking through a rip in your jeans. “Like, is it just me or does Roth seem like he doesn’t even want to be there but has no other choice?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said, watching the rubber toes of my boots hit the marble, studying the sparkling gray stone for slippery patches. “People were kind of weird to him at the party. Maybe we seem comparatively normal.”

“Sucker,” you laughed. “That party was crazy, though. You were smart to leave when you did. It was all downhill from there.”

“Why, what happened?” I feel guilty thinking back on it now; I wasn’t really listening, and the Liv/Dave/Dante layers of angst had eroded momentarily. I was just going through the motions, holding that cast list in my mind’s eye. It was like I was on autopilot, counting the steps until we reached the heavy green door that led into the basement offices, walked past the gym teachers’ lounge, climbed the back staircase to the first floor, and walked down my dream-taffy hallway to the bulletin board around the corner from the auditorium entrance. This walk was all about the destination, not the journey, and for one of the first and only times in our friendship, I wished you would stop talking.

“People just got wasted and started doing stupid stuff,” you said. “Someone put a cigarette out on the couch. There was definitely puke in the tub.”

My insides shuddered again. “Did she come down OK?” I asked.

“Uh—” We were almost at the green door, but our favorite security guard, a lively middle-aged Liberian man we all called “Coach,” was standing just outside, talking on his cell phone, so you stopped short a few yards away and lowered your voice. “Nothing too bad,” you said, “but at a certain point she was barely standing and I had to kick people out so she could lie down in her room.” Your face tensed; I could see the muscles harden under the skin. “Ethan wanted to go with her, but that seemed like an obviously bad idea, so me and Roth kept him out in the living room, talking about The Crucible or some shit, until he passed out.”

He stayed the whole time? I was ashamed that that was my first thought, but it was. I’d assumed he’d left right after the Liv and Ethan Show. I certainly would have. Or, I guess, I did.

“Do you know what she took?” I asked. You broke eye contact and shook your head, looking down at the fountain, where Liv was now sandwiched between Dave and Ethan.