You'd Be Home Now (51)

I wait for Daniel to maybe say something like “Oh, I was in the hospital, too,” or “The hospital, I know what that’s like,” but all he says is “That’s cool.”

“Thirty pages.” Max deVos grins. “Thirty pages of hobbits. I can do that.”

Liza Hernandez pumps her fist. “Yes,” she says softly. “Yes.”



* * *



—

In Drama Club, Simon Stanley paces the stage with a giant piece of chalk. He talks about staging and blocking. “Actors are like chess pieces on the stage. Wherever the director decides they need to be in a particular scene, it’s designed for maximum emotional effect.” He points to the ceiling and to the sides of the stage. “Lighting helps, too. Lighting can highlight a particular moment. It’s a subtle signal to the audience that something is important, an emotion is heightened, things are changing, or ending. Make sense?”

    Everyone nods.

“A role is the part you play in a production. Characters are the moving parts to keep the story evolving, keep all your chess pieces in play, keep the emotions alive. Actors for the stage learn how to use their presence, their voice, their physicality, to convey the meaning of the story. The play. ‘The play’s the thing,’ as we’ve all heard.”

Simon marks an X in the middle of the stage. “You,” he says, pointing to me. “Stand here, please.”

“What?” The blood drains from my face. Everyone is looking at me. Lucy Kerr whispers to the girl next to her and glares at me.

Jeremy nudges my shoulder with his. “Go on,” he whispers.

Simon points to Priscilla. “Pris, you go out into the seats, the middle row.”

Priscilla jumps off the stage, lean and lithe as a colt, and runs to a seat. I look beyond her to the seats in the back, where Joey usually sits if he doesn’t have tutoring. I wish he was here now. That might make me less nervous.

Simon says, “Come now, Emory, dear. The lovely thing about theater is that we simply have no time for shyness. The audience can’t wait forever.” He smiles gently.

I walk hesitantly to the X, all eyes on me.

“Now, repeat after me,” Simon says.

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

I repeat it, but softly.

“Now, what do you think that means?” Simon asks.

    I blink. Sweet, getting sour by something done, or something someone has done? Beautiful things that die are worse than ugly things we expect to die?

I say that, but quietly. Simon says, “Wrong! Just kidding. Maybe. Maybe that’s your interpretation of it. That’s fine. You have to try to interpret your character’s emotions and motivations from what the playwright has given you on the page, and from what the director asks you to do. Bring them to life. Now, who is speaking?”

“A girl?”

“Okay, that’s a good start. Where is she?”

I imagine a girl walking in a field of flowers.

“In a field of flowers?”

“Okay. We can start there. Do you think she’s sad, wistful, mad?”

“She sounds…maybe wistful, like she’s sad that lilies die. I don’t know, this is a weird quote.”

“Shakespearean sonnet, child. Nothing weird about that. If we don’t have the Bard, we don’t have half of our language. Now, your character is a wistful girl in a field of flowers. Let the audience know that. Start by thinking about whom she might be talking to. Is she addressing herself or someone else?”

I look out at Priscilla, my heart beating in my ears. She looks back at me, her face half shadowed. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me and my stomach clenches. I freeze, my blood pounding in my ears. Are they whispering about me? Time seems to stretch before me, like elastic. I think I might faint.

Simon Stanley whispers in my ear, “In this moment, you are not you, Emory, dear. Someone else has written your story for you. They’ve made you a wistful girl in a field of flowers, sorry that beautiful lilies die. No one is looking or listening to you, they’re looking and listening to that girl. They don’t see you, they see her. You aren’t here, you’re invisible. You’re invincible inside the skin of someone else’s story.”

    Priscilla leans forward, her face smooth and glowing, her long hair shining. She’s so easily pretty and confident. She’s like one of the lilies in the quote. So beautiful, but when she dies, she’ll reek terribly, just like the rest of us.

A kind of wave drops over me then. No one can see me, the meek mouse, the invisible girl, the girl in the car with Candy, Joey’s sister, the girl who hardly speaks and floats through life.

No one knows that that girl kisses the most popular boy in school. That that girl stood in a window across the way from that boy and arched and lifted her shirt and let him photograph her and felt wild and perfect and strong when he wrote Perfect.

My blood is pulsing, remembering that from last night. And what I watched him do, after.

Perfect.

I feel protected, someone else’s words in my mouth. I swallow and at that moment Simon Stanley whispers, “What if the girl isn’t wistful, but full of darkness and revenge?”

Priscilla in the auditorium seats, lithe and perfect in her own way, the way everyone wants girls to be perfect, and she wants a boy that is already had, by me, and she doesn’t even know it.