Better Nate Than Ever (7 page)

“Okay, Anthony,” she says, “thank you very much.” She takes a pen and writes “#91” on a name tag, the sort of thing my dad might wear to the company Christmas party, once a year when the janitors are actually allowed to mingle with the heart surgeons. “Just put this number on your shirt,” she says, “and think about taking off your hat for the audition.”

My Yankees cap, its unbroken brim hovering over my forehead, had become totally forgotten, another thing that isn’t really me. Another foreign object in a day full of them.

“Wait,” she says, squinting at the application. Oh,
Carrie
!! She’s discovered the lie.

(
Carrie
, a nineteen-eighties megaflop musical, was based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, and evidently featured a mile of Spandex and fake pig’s blood, and wasn’t even played as a comedy.)

Frickin’
Carrie
!

“Anthony?” she says. “Didn’t you mean to put
twelve
for your age? Because the numbers are reversed, here—it says ‘twenty-one’—and I think that might not be true.” She picks up a tremendously huge Starbucks drink and sips at it and is
acting
like she cares, but
her eyes are still darting that already-recognizable Manhattan Dart.

“No. I mean yes. I wrote twenty-one.”

“Okay.” Her arm is shaking under the sheer weight of mocha. “Are you here by yourself?”

“Well, look
around
, there’s hundreds of us,” I think to say, but don’t, managing just, “Uh.”

She takes my application off the clipboard, folding it directly in half, writing a red
X
—suddenly she has the biggest red Magic Marker I may’ve ever seen, bigger even than her Starbucks—and drops my form into a garbage can below the desk. A garbage can that I swear wasn’t even there a second ago. I have a knack for spotting garbage cans, because I so often end up in them, headfirst.

The hallway is quiet, as still as that horrible elevator ride, and all fifty of these children, lined up against the wall, are gaping directly at me; so are the other million, with their moms and dads and bitter uncles, all watching as this idiot who belongs in Western Pennsylvania makes a total
Carrie
of himself.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, soft, picking up my bookbag. I pull my new Yankees hat back on so hard, hoping that perhaps some of the magic skills of these brilliant New York kids—these jugglers and flutists—might have rubbed off on stupid Nate Foster. That maybe if I tug this hat on hard enough, down over my entire
face, it might make me disappear, or turn me into a rabbit. Ninety bucks Uncle Robert Poppins has a delicious Crock-Pot recipe for stewed rabbit, and a
hundred
bucks he’d cook me and feed the result to Nephew Shawn.

I’m just about to spin on myself and hightail it to the elevators when the casting assistant woman pins my hand to the table, shouting: “Listen up, everyone,” shooting me daggers and pulling back her blonde-ringlet hair into a nervous twist. She turns her Starbucks over and spills a remaining gulp all over my lie of an application. “Unless you’ve got an adult to vouch for you today, don’t waste our time. This is
Broadway
,” and she leans over, pulling the dripping audition-form out from the garbage, and says (as loudly as anyone has ever said anything, as loudly as the shade of red she used to
X
out my application), “This isn’t
Jankburg, Pennsylvania
.”

“I’ll vouch for him,” I hear.

The hallway falls even more still, if possible, and from sixteen floors below us a siren whirs past, and you can practically hear the flap of a pigeon’s wings from outside the window.

“I can vouch for this boy.”

And when I turn, it isn’t my imagination talking, or Mrs. Rylance or Uncle Robert.

It’s a woman with Mom’s nose
and Mom’s chin and Mom’s sad almond eyes, but with better hair, straighter and trendier, and an umbrella and rain boots and the look of a thousand lost dreams all over her shoulders.

“Aunt Heidi.”

W
e find another corner.

These audition studios are a series of corners, hallways connecting to hallways, like an Escher drawing, a staircase becoming an upside-down door. I have a hunch there might be no actual rooms at all, that when you walk into the “audition studio,” it’s actually just a direct drop-off to the street below.

And that’s what I’m staring at, frozen: an ant path of cabs, a city of yellow where everything would be grey back home.

“Well, long time no see, Nathan,” Aunt Heidi says, clicking one of those free pens people get at banks,
click click click
.

“I’m—I can’t believe this,” I say, turning from the window. I’m not sure what I am most: embarrassed or freaked out or just knocked to my senses by seeing a forgotten blood relative. Someone I haven’t laid
eyes on since I was a toddler. Someone I only really recognize from the pictures Mom keeps hidden. “I’m really sorry I never thanked you for all the cool cards you sent me,” I say.

“Yeah, well,” Heidi says, taking off her rain boots and pulling up two wool socks. Wool socks:
that
would’ve been smart to pack. “Most aunts probably send money, so don’t be too hard on yourself, Nathan.”

“Nate, now,” I want to say, “I just go by Nate, now,” but I don’t want to stutter, so I just go, “Uh.”

Heidi puts her rain boots back on and looks me up and down, just like Libby did in my yard right before sending me off on my maiden moron voyage. But Heidi’s eyes are more concerned. Judgmental. “Nathan, what were you
thinking
?”

“You ran away from Pittsburgh yourself, Aunt Heidi,” I want to say, “and tried to make it in the big city, so don’t look at me like that,” but instead I say, “I dunno.”

A man comes out of the snack shop, holding a banana and a packet of Protein Graham Crackers, whatever those are. I’m starting to get the sense that you can’t get anything in New York without something else coming with it: You can’t get directions without getting condescended to, and you can’t even get graham crackers without somebody injecting them with protein.

“How—how did you know I was here?” I finally say, the most obvious question to lead with but one that begs an answer I don’t want to hear.

“Your friend Libby,” Heidi says, taking my shoulder and gently pushing me back, so a few grown-up dancers can pass us, “told your older brother.”

“She did
what
?” I say, or shriek, and press away from the wall.

“Keep it down, Nathan.”

How could Libby do this to me?

“Your brother got injured at some track event,” Heidi says, her eyes doing the Manhattan Dart, “and got home early and found your friend Libby going through his underwear drawer.” Libby! “It sounded like quite a thing.”

“Oh my God,” I say. Holy
Cats
! (
Cats
wasn’t technically a flop, but Libby says it was, artistically, so it’s on our list of alternate swears.) Holy
Cats
, I can’t believe Libby would do that, except I can.

“And Anthony asked her what the
heck
was going on, and she broke down and told him everything. That she’d seen an audition for
E.T
., online, and couldn’t make it because her mom would never let her go to New York. Not with—I don’t know, I forget.”

“Not with her mom’s cancer coming back,” I say.

“Yes,” Heidi says, sighing and sitting down. I follow suit. “And that all Libby wanted was to audition
for the part of Elliott’s younger sister. And that her good friend Nathan was so sweet, such a sweetheart, that he offered to go all the way to New York City to drop off her headshot and résumé in a manila envelope, and to bring a CD of the two of you doing some duet.”

Not
some
duet. “I’d Give It All for You” from Jason Robert Brown’s seminal
Songs for A New World
. We recorded it in the soprano key, even though it’s usually for a (normal) guy’s and girl’s voices. On us, it ended up sounding like a lesbian rock ballad. But still.

I know exactly the CD Libby would’ve secretly packed for me.

“Apparently you’re quite a bold friend, Nathan, but what were you
thinking
?”

“Mom is going to kill me,” I say.

“So it is true?”

“Is what true?” I say. A hip-hop dance class begins in a studio directly behind us. That, or a really, really angry guy has started sledgehammering the wall, such is the way the music pulses. If it
is
a guy with a sledgehammer, I hope he finds the spot right where my head is resting.

“Is it true that you came all the way here for your friend? That she actually sent you with a package of her materials?”

I reach into my bookbag and pull out the manila
envelope, sliding it open, and I lift a piece of paper that says, “You’re only reading this if there was an emergency and I had to cover for you. Good luck, prince.”

I put the paper back in and realize there is no duet, no headshot of Libby, no résumé or CD.

That Libby knows she is six years too old for Elliott’s younger sister.

That she has neither the right body for the part nor the right voice. Libby’s is a husky, throaty torch voice, and I can’t imagine the songwriting team has given Elliott’s younger sister a song on a piano with a bottle of scotch.

And forget all that, even: between you and me, Libby only acts for
fun
. She’s the world’s biggest theater
fan
, but she doesn’t want to be the world’s biggest theater star. Libby wants to be the world’s biggest theater star’s agent.

Libby wants to be . . .
my
agent.

“Yes, Aunt Heidi,” I say. I lie. “Yes, I came all the way here for Libby.” I did in a way. I did it for us, and Libby and I are practically one.

“Well, we’ve got to get you back on the bus, then,” Aunt Heidi says. “Come on.”

From down six sets of halls, I can hear the mean Starbucks-dumping casting assistant shouting for the next fifty children to line up. And to have gotten all
the way here, to have survived the night and two slices of awful pizza, to have lived through Jaime Madison not noticing me on the street . . . to return to Libby having not even stood in front of the director of the musical: I wouldn’t be her hero, and I have to return her hero. Even a fallen one.

“What time is it?” I say to Aunt Heidi.

She looks at her cell phone. “Late enough.
Way
late enough.”

“Okay. Okay. Listen: I think there’s a one forty-five bus, and I’m already in trouble anyway. Mom’s already going to kill me. So maybe I could hang out at the studio just a little longer, and, I dunno . . . while I’m here, peek my head in and sing a song or something, myself. Once I—uh—drop Libby’s CD off.”

“Nathan,” Heidi says, holding her coat tight around the neck, “your mom doesn’t even know you’re here.” She shakes her head. “And she doesn’t
have
to. Anthony found my phone number at the back of your mom’s address book, since she’s the only person in the world who still has a handwritten address book, and he called me. And he told me to get you home.”

To save his own butt, I think to myself, but actually: Wow, he could have just called Mom and Dad at the Greenbrier Hotel, interrupting their anniversary vacation to rat me out.

“Is he okay? Did you find out how bad his track accident was?”

“No, something about a strained or sprained calf or something, but the connection was bad.” And then—I don’t know why, who can ever tell with grown-ups?—Heidi bursts into tears. “Oh, God, Nathan, I’m sorry. I just—I didn’t ask for this.” She shouts above the ongoing hip-hop class. “I know I’m the worst aunt and that I disappeared, but your mom never wanted me around. I was never—I shouldn’t be saying this to a twelve-year-old.”

“Don’t worry, Aunt Heidi. I’m nearly fourteen.”

She laughs, her throaty cry intermingling in a weird duet with minor hyperventilation. “Oh, Nathan, you look so much like your dad. I can’t believe how much you’ve grown to look like him.”

Great. The genes of a janitor.

“Tell me—oh, Nathan, tell me you’re not actually here to audition
yourself
. Did you come all the way here to audition for this show, honestly now?”

I take her in. She’s beautiful, actually. Maybe a little soft on the sides, but her almond eyes are matched by a lovely old-fashioned face, shaped like a guitar pick, all curves leading dramatically to a small chin with a big mouth. The only one in the family that’s just like mine. Her big expressive mouth, now spilling with something that sounds like a confession. We were raised partially Catholic, so I’d know.

“Aunt Heidi, I—my whole life, all I’ve wanted was to come here.” Technically just the last three years, but who cares about anything other than Count Chocula when you’re under ten? “To experience it just once. And I need to get back down the hall and get in line, and have that chance. I just—I will regret it forever if I don’t.”

“Nathan, I’m sorry—I really am. But I need to get you back on that bus before things get . . . even messier.”

The hip-hop music cuts off abruptly, followed by quiet applause, and I say too loudly, “If Mom has already disowned you, what’s the worst thing that could happen here?”

Whoops.

“I need—I need to . . .” But Heidi edits herself, running into a girls’ bathroom just beyond.

Superwhoops.

Legs Diamond
! in fact. (1988, ran for sixty-four performances, which sounds like forever to me but is considered a flop, here. Starred an Australian with a legendary lisp. Flop. Big-ol’ flop.)

And here’s my chance. Here’s my chance to escape into the rabbit warren of hallways, back to the lineup of kids, to secure my place as number ninety-one, now publicly endorsed by an adult (even if she’s in the bathroom crying).

I’ll probably get looked up and down and laughed at by “the team” and released right after the type-out, unfit to audition for
E.T
. And then at least I can go back to Jankburg with the confirmation that I shouldn’t even be dreaming this dream, and just weave myself firmly back into the tapestry of local boredom. Of the greys of Jankburg.