Don't Touch (12 page)

Mandy shows up reeking of smoke. “I had the windows open on the way here and everything,” she says. “It didn't matter.”

“You're not going to have any voice left if you don't take it easy,” says Drew. He's in his usual slouch against the wall of lockers, thumbing through a car magazine.

“Aren't you nervous?” Mandy asks.

“What's the point?” Drew says, but it's clear he's on emotional lockdown. He doesn't look up from the magazine, and he flips the pages with so much force you'd think they conspired to give him paper cuts.

At lunch, Livia's extra-impulsive. At one point she lunges for the saltshaker and rains salt down on Oscar's chicken-fried steak. He eats it. For a laugh. Then he opens his mouth in my face to show how dry the salt made his tongue.

According to Oscar, once you've been in a movie with Lance Dalton, nothing about a school audition can make you nervous. He feels bad for the rest of us. Really bad. He tells us so about fifteen times.

Hank wanders around singing Hamlet's lines to the air.

And Peter. Nervous looks good on Peter.

I see him once in the hall singing Billy Joel. When a girl laughs at him, he goes down on one knee for a serenade.

At lunch, he asks if we want more fries, and before anybody can answer, he's up and jogging to the front of the line. He comes back ridiculously fast with a huge mound of fries—the lunch ladies, the students he cut in front of, all charmed by him. Nothing and nobody gets in his way.

“How are you in such a good mood?” Mandy says, diving for the fries and biting the ends off of four all at once.

“I'm excited,” says Peter.

“How are
you
so calm?” she asks, glaring at me. I'm anything but.

“I'm nervous,” I say, stabbing a fry with my fork and nibbling, even though the sight of food makes my stomach wobble.

“Could have fooled me,” she says, and her eyes drop to my hands. “You
could
take your gloves off to eat.”

“I could,” I say, and I swallow the rest of the fry. It goes down in a lump.

I should show my nerves—nerves make us normal—but one crack might open the floodgates. I'm a wreck, and I hide it too well.

Peter's eyeing me. I meet his gaze, and for a second I'm caught there, not able to move or to breathe. His eyes drop to my gloves, then away.

We enter the theater together, a tribe. A girl with porcelain skin and white-blond hair guards the base of Nadia's stage. She looks fragile and cold and untouchable.

She looks like Ophelia.

“Sign your name here and pick up your sides,” she says.

For a second, I think she means, “pick sides,” like we're going to have to battle one another to make it to the stage, but no, by “sides,” she means copies of the scenes we'll be reading.

“Hi, April,” Mandy says to the girl, and April smiles—a sharp line that's more like a grimace.

“I'll go ahead and hand you these,” April says, giving her the Ophelia sides.

April is a senior—her attitude gives her away—the senior who would be playing Ophelia if she hadn't gotten caught drinking in Lincoln.

“Cute gloves,” she says, and it's a real talent she has as an actress for saying nice words while making the subtext so clear:
I hate those stupid gloves, you weirdo poser who wants to steal my part.

I sign my name but hover over the sides marked “Ophelia.” It scares me how much I want it.

“Read for Ophelia,” a voice whispers. It seems to come from inside me, except for the warm breath at my ear, too close, making me shiver.

I shrink and twist around to find Peter standing over me.

He leans past me and reaches for the Hamlet sides with no hesitation. April smiles for Peter. She can't help herself; his smile's contagious.

As he straightens up, he says, “You want to play Ophelia, right?”

I stare at the sides. “Maybe I want a man part.”

“Yeah?” He picks up another set of the Hamlet sides. “I bet you could give me some competition.”

I shake my head.

“Do you want to play Gertrude?”

“No.”

“Then you read for Ophelia.” He hands me the sides, and it's done and decided. No stress. No embarrassment.

He turns and finds a seat at the end of a row, where he starts reading over his lines.

I do the same. It's easier than facing Mandy with the sides in my hand.

The front of the theater fills up quickly—we'll be watching one another audition. At precisely 3:15, Nadia crosses the stage to stand center. All this space is hers—we won't forget.

“Welcome,” she says, at normal volume since all talking stopped the second she entered. “I know you have scripts, but try to make physical choices.” She holds out her hands and waves, cuing the audience to speak, and they do, in a chorus I haven't learned yet: “Don't be boring.”

Nadia steps down from the stage to April's table, scans the sign-in sheet, and sits a few rows back. She calls the oldest students first. There are a couple of senior girls who either missed Lincoln last year or didn't participate in the partying. One handles the language well, the other trips over the words, but neither seems strong enough for one of the leads.

Of our group, Mandy and Drew are called first for the breakup scene. Mandy's all about physical choices. She circles Drew like a stalking wolf, runs her hands down his chest.

“Too sexy,” Nadia says. “Ophelia represents everything pure and innocent,” Nadia says. “All the things Hamlet's lost faith in.”

“See, but I don't think Ophelia's so innocent,” Mandy says, and Drew rolls his eyes to the rafters. “In the Branagh version, she and Hamlet have sex and he's all about it, but then he turns into a hypocrite.”

I told Mandy to watch the Branagh version, but I didn't think she actually would.

“Mandy, cool it,” Drew mutters, but she goes on.

“He thinks she's this perfect angel, but the second they do it, she's a whore.”

“Welcome to the history of Western literature,” Nadia says. “I like that you want to make the character complex, but we still need to see Ophelia vulnerable.”

“Okay, can we try it again?”

Drew sighs, but they go back to the beginning. Drew's stiff, but Mandy looks at him with love and seems hurt when he says, “I loved you not.”

Her “I was the more deceived” breaks hearts. I feel silly for competing with her.

Then Drew starts in on Hamlet's “Get thee to a nunnery” speech. He delivers it more to the audience than to Mandy, doesn't even start to make physical choices. It's like he's not even trying anymore. At first, Mandy acts affected—she puts her hands to her head, contracts as if she's been hit, but eventually she gets frustrated.

“I'm supposed to be hurt by this, Drew,” she says. “He says that women make men monsters! You've got to
be
a
monster
!”

Drew goes red, and Nadia says, “Actors don't direct other actors, Mandy.”

“But he's not being physical. He's hardly talking to me.”

Nadia studies Drew's face. “There's some Hamlet anger. Take that speech again, Drew.”

He starts, and he does sound angry, but he's still just as stiff.

“Mandy,” Nadia says, and it sounds like she's having a lightbulb moment, “You're a dancer. Pretend you're doing choreography, and put Drew in a shape you think works for the scene.”

Mandy's eyes burn with new power. “I can just move him?”

Nadia nods, and Mandy pulls Drew down so he's on top of her on the floor. A couple of students snicker. Mandy takes Drew's script away and moves his arm so it's pressing down against her collarbone. Drew more or less goes along, but he makes his body floppy and heavy to move.

“I think, like this . . . ,” Mandy says. Drew looks more and more irritated as she wiggles his shoulders, requesting more tension.

“Speak from there now, Drew,” Nadia says. “Where he says, ‘Be thou chaste as ice.'”

“I don't have it memorized,” Drew says.

“You don't need to. Just say that much.”

Drew holds his position for a second, puffs out air, then bends down and grabs his script, holding it beside Mandy's face. He reads the line, but the words don't come out any differently. For Mandy though, her voice comes out desperate and strained by the shape she's chosen.

“Better,” Nadia says. “You can leave the stage. I've seen enough.”

Drew takes the stairs to the audience two at a time. Mandy tries to make eye contact with him, but he keeps his head down.

“We can't try one more time?” Mandy says.

“Mandy,” Nadia says, “sometimes when a director says they've seen enough, that's a good thing.”

Mandy nods and keeps her face composed, but on her way offstage she seeks me out and pops her eyes wide—did I hear that? She's in.

I promise myself I'll be happy for her when she gets the part.

“Peter, come on up,” Nadia says, and he jogs to the stage. He bounces on his feet while Nadia scans the audition list. I get a feeling right before she calls me, so it's less a surprise that it's me and more a surprise that my feeling was right.

All my nerves fire at once, and my legs go wobbly as I stand. Already, my hands are shaking. I take a deep breath before walking the aisle to the stage, looking down, not at Peter. He's probably worried about reading with me after I messed up at Mandy's.

It will be okay. There's a character to play and words to be said. In a way, the scene's already happened. We all know how it's supposed to end.

I stand across from Peter, and he gives me a nod, his lips already pressed in a grim line, eyes guarded but full. He holds my gaze, the papers at his side—he has the scene memorized. So do I, but I'm afraid to let it show.

Nadia says, “I'd like to hear, ‘To be, or not to be,' from you, Peter.”

My instinct is to search out Drew. He's just been told, basically, that he isn't being considered for the part. I resist looking, but it makes me cringe.

“So, Ophelia,” Nadia says, “wait in the wings and listen to the speech. Let that inform how you enter.”

I nod, but she's humoring me, giving me notes on how to act offstage so that I'll feel like I've done something when she cuts us off halfway through the scene.

Peter goes into the speech, and it's clear he understands the choice Hamlet has. Is it better to stay alive and suffer, or to let his “sea of troubles” drown him? He's afraid that what comes after life might be worse, so it's safest not to act at all.

“—Soft you now! The fair Ophelia!”

Ophelia's just heard her boyfriend say he would kill himself if he weren't too afraid. I try to compose my face. Ophelia's an actress too.

“Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day?”

I focus on Hamlet, on saying what I came here to say, and that gets me into the scene, but soon I catch myself pushing again.

I take a breath to refocus. I'm breaking up with Hamlet even though I love him. I can imagine loving Peter. And my whole family's just broken up. It's not Ophelia's story, but it's better than thinking about how the words sound.

I repeat the line about returning Hamlet's gifts. It's good I know the lines—my hands are shaking so hard I'll never find my place again.

Nadia's voice chimes in, “What do you want to make him do, Caddie?”

My frustration comes out when I answer. “I want him to feel bad,” I say. “I want him to stop acting like everything is normal.”

“All right, then, say the line again.”

I do. This time I watch for Peter's face to change, for him to break and let me see if he cares. I don't think I'm doing terribly, but I shouldn't be
thinking
about how I'm doing at all. I should
be
Ophelia.

Peter gets scornful, and it takes me off-guard. He's so good, so real, that for a second I forget he's acting. He's not, in a way. I'm pretty sure this is how Peter looks when he's angry. “Ha, ha! are you honest?”

He takes a step toward me, and I back up. “My lord!”

He reaches for me, reaches for my face, “Are you
fair
?” and I duck away, raising a hand.

“What means your lordship?” My voice cracks, but from real fear this time. He means to touch Ophelia.
Physical choices,
she said.

Peter answers, “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”

He steps away again, smiling, which confuses me. I want him to turn around.

“Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”

He advances, and as he speaks, he reaches for me again. I step away, but he moves faster, grabs me around the waist with one arm, his other hand on my shoulder. No skin's touching, but the wave is crashing in. I can't have a panic attack on stage, but my breath rasps.

“Ay, truly,” he says, “for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd . . .” He claps his hand down nearly on my backside, pulls my hips toward his, our faces so close . . . I make a noise, push back against his chest, but he goes on: “. . . than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness . . .” He relaxes his hold but keeps his hands at the backs of my elbows, keeps me close, looks me straight in the eye, so unguarded, so in need.

No one has ever looked at me this way before.

“I did love you once,” he says.

And he reaches one hand toward my cheek.

Ophelia would let him. I'm Ophelia, but I'm Caddie, too.

I'm not sure what's real anymore.

I lift my gloved hand to catch his wrist. It feels strong in my hand, and his fingers, his palm, burn an inch away from my already hot cheek. The wave rises over our heads. I breathe in once, twice—it's hard to get enough air. His hand floats so close but doesn't move closer. It would be a choice to let him touch me. I almost want to pull his hand to my face, close the gap, and let go.