You in Five Acts(21)

“Dave got it after all,” I reported when I got back to the spot where you were still bouncing anxiously next to our bags.

“You’re surprised?” you asked. “Even if he sucked, Ethan would have cast him.”

“I just thought he might be . . . I don’t know, jealous,” I said. I leaned next to you, starting to feel hot and itchy in my down coat, resisting the urge to squirm. My heart thudded tirelessly in my chest. I knew it was just a muscle responding to a series of involuntary spasms, but it was hard sometimes to wonder why it didn’t just give up. Why I didn’t just give up. It was so exhausting to feel constantly like I was fighting for my future. If dancing was my destiny, shouldn’t it have been easy? Inevitable? It didn’t feel like destiny should require so much constant vigilance.

“Now, why would he be jealous?” you asked with a smirk. “He got the girl, didn’t he?”

I smiled sadly and shook my head. I was about to open my mouth to say I couldn’t see that ending well when my breath caught in my throat. Ms. Adair was coming down the hallway, the heels of her black boots clicking impatiently on the tile as she moved, her narrow hips swishing her wrap skirt back and forth like tiny, lapping waves. In her hands was a single sheet of folded paper. I felt dizzy and sick.

“Moment of truth,” you whispered, squeezing my clammy palm just as the sixth-period bell rang.

“Sorry I’m late,” Ms. Adair called out as she approached the group. “Believe it or not, we literally just finished.” She reached the bulletin board but then paused, running her fingers along the crease in the paper. “It was a somewhat contentious decision-making process this year,” she said. “But I hope you’ll agree that every dancer got the part they . . . deserve.” She turned and fastened the list to the board with two red pushpins. “I’ll be in my office after four,” she said, stepping aside to let the buzzards descend, “in case anyone has anything they need to discuss.” She looked right at me when she said that last part, and then swished past us, clicking back down the hall as quickly as she’d come.

“I can’t look,” I said, my voice thick with nausea.

“Then I will,” you said. A few yards away, Lolly leapt back from the list and started shrieking. She was happy about something. Of course she was. Of course she got it and not me. How could I ever have convinced myself otherwise?

I watched you move through the mob, my heart still going like a runaway train. It seemed like it took you forever to travel ten feet. That taffy-pull feeling came back, a pinhole focused on you, everything else starting to go gray. My fingers fumbled for my coat zipper. I wondered if I was about to faint.

But then I heard it: that wolf like whoop, your trademark celebration song. You ran back over to me, your face lit up like Christmas morning, and scooped my rigid body into your arms, swinging me around in a circle.

“We did it!” you said. “You and me, baby, pas de deux.”

“You and me,” I repeated, not quite believing. “But Lolly—”

“Lollipop got a solo,” you said, stopping for a minute and holding me at arm’s length. “Dominic, too. But the grand pas de deux is all you and me. And get this—it’s Don Quixote. I told you! I told you we killed it!”

Everything felt off-kilter, but all of a sudden in a good way, like stepping off a roller coaster, the rush settling into your bones as gravity pulls you back down. You hugged me again, laughing into my hair, and then I was laughing, too—crying, almost—letting it all wash over me: the relief, the giddiness, the pride and amazement.

I was one step closer to beating the odds and realizing my dream. But there was something else happening, too. I couldn’t place it then, but I know it now.

That was the moment I first felt it. That obvious, unstoppable truth.

You and me.





Act Two


   Dave





Chapter Eight


    February 2

100 days left


I WAS PREPARED for New York to change me. I needed it to. I didn’t just want to live somewhere different, I wanted to be someone different. First and foremost, not a dick, which seemed to be the general consensus at Harvard Westlake before my untimely departure.

But that was behind me. No more faking it in a city of fakes. No more dry L.A. heat, no more freeway traffic, no more awkward auditions for too-tan casting directors who raised their eyebrows at my résumé, jotting down notes next to my Saving Nathan credit, probably some variation on LOL. No more Daphne—my agent—leaving me voicemail messages that started with long, dramatic sighs, which I would immediately delete because I knew what that meant without having to listen to the words that came after. No more Mom pushing me to go out for humiliating acne commercials or community theater productions, telling me I just had to keep my name out there. I once heard her on the phone with my dad, after they split but before Dad and I left, telling him my brand was failing. My brand. I never wanted to be a brand. I didn’t even really want to be an actor anymore. So as messed up as everything had gotten, I was kind of excited to start over. I was ready for a change.

I just wasn’t ready for you.

Less than a month in and I was more miserable than I’d ever been. I thought a new school would be the best part of the whole deal, some nice, boring white noise to numb me for the quick five-month slide to graduation—that had been the point of the string-pulling, just making sure I’d get left alone—but then I’d seen you, and been stupid and helpless, and before I knew it I was memorizing lines and learning blocking and spending my days the opposite of numb: pent-up and pissed off. Ready to burst.