The Pretty One (16 page)

How can I admit to Drew that the only reason I was a techie was because it was the only major that didn't require an audition? That if I had an ounce of my sister's talent I would have been a theater major? “I don't know. I didn't put that much thought into it.”

“But you like it, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, thinking about my dioramas and designing sets with Simon. “I guess I do.” Oddly enough, I have never considered that before. It didn't seem to matter whether I liked it or not because I didn't have a choice.

“Well, I think you're really talented.”

Drew smiles at me. I'm staring at his lips. They look so soft, and experienced. It seems like a heated moment where
something
could possibly happen and I'm hoping with every fiber of my being that it does. I'm looking into his eyes and he's looking into mine and I feel I'm about to melt when the unmistakable sound of George Longwell's soprano singing voice comes wafting into the room.
“What good is a field on a fine summer night if you sit alone in the weeds? Or a succulent pear if with each juicy bite you spit out your teeth with the seeds?”

We both laugh and his hand gently rubs the back of my shoulder. It's a relief from the tension, if not the ending I hoped for.

seventeen

chewing the scenery (noun): a completely hammy and over-the-top performance.

For some people a long, long, long time means months, maybe even years. For George Longwell it apparently means nineteen hours.

I'm walking to third period (stage production with Mr. Lucheki), trying to remember my discussion points on whether the light board operator is more important than the sound operator (which pretty much boils down to whether it is more important to see the play or hear it), when someone yells, “There she is!”

Just as I'm about to escape into the theater, George throws himself down on his knees in front of me.

“Megan, you are a rose

With a perfect nose

I know you are afraid

Of the love we could have made

But patient I will be

As I am sure you will eventually see

That I was meant for you

And you were meant for me.”

George pats his heart twice (as per usual) and stands up. “Next Thursday.” He kisses my hand for emphasis. “I won't take no for an answer.”

I'm distracted by the appearance of Catherine's friend Laura, who has stopped in the hall to watch and is smiling at me from ear to ear, nodding encouragement. “I have to go to class,” I say, stepping around him.

“Thursday night, Megan!” George calls out.

I want to tell him that I can't go, that in fact I don't want to go out with him at all,
ever
, but I can't bring myself to say the words.

“Okay,” I say, hurrying into class. Simon is already there but he's not sitting in our seats. Once again, he's sitting across the aisle in the far corner of the auditorium, directly behind Laura and Catherine. The minute I see him leaning over their seats, chatting with them amiably as if there is nothing odd about his behavior or seat selection at all, I feel a little sick to my stomach. I'm getting extremely tired of this.

I pick up my stuff and walk over toward him. “What's going on? Why are you sitting back here?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Catherine shoot Laura a look as if to say,
Well, look who's here…Miss Attitude herself!

“I didn't know we had assigned seats,” Simon says with a shrug, giving Catherine and Laura a little grin.

What?
What kind of smart-alecky response is that?

“Good morning, class,” Mr. Lucheki says enthusiastically. I drop into the seat beside Simon as I attempt to focus my attention on Mr. Lucheki. Besides having been the stage manager for the Kennedy Center for fifteen years, Mr. Lucheki's other claim to fame is his shiny, not a hair on it, bald head. Normally his head is so shiny it reflects light all over the place. But not today, primarily because he's standing in complete and total darkness.

“Which is more important,” Mr. Lucheki asks. “Sound? Or…” He claps his hands and suddenly he's bathed in an almost luminescent light. “Light?” he says silently, mouthing the words.

“I was waiting for you,” I whisper to Simon. “Jane said I could sit—”

“I don't care about lunch,” Simon whispers back.

“So why are you mad? Is this about George?”

“George?” Simon says. “I couldn't care less about George Longwell. I'm just tired of you making promises you don't keep.”

Catherine glances back at me and sneers.

“What are you talking about?” I ask Simon, doing my best to ignore Catherine even though I'm really tempted to give the back of her chair a nice kick.

“What we're talking about,
Miss Fletcher,
” Mr. Lucheki says, looking directly at me, “is the ability to attract attention. The ability to…” His voice fades away, replaced by static. He continues talking but all that is audible is a quiet mumble. He claps his hands again. “You see,” he says clearly again, “without sound, there are no stars.” He smiles, obviously extremely pleased with his demonstration. “I remember back in eighty-eight when
Gypsy
was in town. Tyne Daly was about to sing when…”

“You make plans, you cancel them,” Simon whispers. “You tell me you're going to call, you don't. I'm getting sick of it, that's all.”

And suddenly I remember that I was supposed to call Simon last night.

“I forgot,” I whisper back. “I had practice after school and when I got home it was time for dinner and after dinner I had to study for the English test.”

“Whatever,” he says.

I'm silent for a few minutes as I turn my attention back to Mr. Lucheki. “Naturally her laryngitis made it difficult, if not impossible, to hear her,” he is saying. “So I decided to increase the volume on the…”

“Of course,” I say to Simon, “
you
could've called
me
.”

“That's not the point,” he says.

“Since when do we keep tabs on who's supposed to call who or who owes whom a phone call?”

“I knew you wouldn't get it,” he says so loudly that Mr. Lucheki stops talking. Catherine rolls her eyes toward me and whispers something to Laura, obviously mocking me.

“What is
your
problem?” I scream at Catherine.

“Miss Fletcher!” Mr. Lucheki says.

Simon is staring at me, openmouthed. So is the rest of the class, including Catherine who is looking at me like I just doused her with a freezing pail of water.

“Why don't you come sit down here?” Mr. Lucheki says sternly, pointing to a seat in the front row. I shoot Simon one last dirty look before grabbing my backpack and heading down the aisle.

         

Production class is right before lunch, and usually Simon and I walk each other to our lockers and go to lunch together, but not today. Even though I know Simon doesn't want to go to lunch with me any more than I want to go with him, I hurry out of class, dump my books into my locker, and slam the door for emphasis before heading to the lunchroom where I plop myself down at my sister's table as if I have been sitting there my entire life. As if I belong.

Maria and Jane look at me, but if they're surprised, they don't show it. The only person who seems surprised is Lucy, who greets me, once again, by asking me where Simon is.

“I don't know.” Simon hightailed it out of class with his two little (in Catherine's case, not so little) minions and I'm not about to chase him down again. If he doesn't want to sit with me, then so be it.

The conversation stalls with my arrival, and I can feel Lucy's eyes on me as I put my lunch on the table.

“Why did you pack my yogurt?” Lucy asks, pointing toward the nonfat lemon yogurt that I have just taken out of my lunch bag.

Up until I began my official “Lucy” diet, Lucy is the only one in our family who ate yogurt. “I just grabbed it out of the fridge,” I say nonchalantly.

“I only had two left.”

I probably should apologize, but instead I just shrug.

“You don't even like yogurt,” Lucy says.

“It's not bad,” I say, peeling the top off the container and giving it a lick.

“I have to get going,” Lucy says, disgustedly tossing her own half-eaten nonfat lemon yogurt into her bag.

She's leaving?
Again?
“You can have it,” I shout, stopping her. I push my yogurt in her direction. “I'll go sit someplace else.”

Lucy takes a look at my yogurt, sighs, and sits back down. “I guess I can wait a couple minutes,” she says, sliding my yogurt back across the table toward me.

There are a few moments of uncomfortable silence. Marybeth, Jane, Maria, and Annie are looking at me, their eyes open wide. I think this is how sharks look when they see a sea lion swimming through the water. I don't know what Lucy's been telling them about me, but they seem a little anxious, as if they're expecting me to jump over the table and pummel my sister to the ground.

“So what were you talking to Drew about?” Jane says finally.

“When?” I ask, assuming she's talking to me.

But she's not. She's looking at my sister who says, “Figuring out the logistics for the Kennedy Center.”

“What's going on at the Kennedy Center?” I ask.

“Drew and I are going to see a play,” Lucy says casually.

I put down my spoon. I try to keep my reaction to a minimum as I begin to gnaw on my thumb.

“Just the two of you?” Jane asks, which coincidentally, is exactly what I'm wondering.

“She and Drew were talking to Mrs. Habersham and she told them she had seen this play last week by this new playwright,” Annie says. “She mentioned they were doing a special weekday presentation. So Lucy asked Drew if he wanted to go see it with her.”

Wait a minute.

Did Lucy ask out Drew or did Drew ask out Lucy?

“I don't remember who asked
who
first,” Lucy says, correcting her. “But he offered to drive.”

I glance longingly toward the vending machine at the opposite end of the room. When I walked past yesterday I had noticed that it now carried Oreos. I could really, really use an Oreo. But the question is: Are they on the Lucy diet?

“I hope it's a love story,” Marybeth says. “One with a lot of make-out scenes.”

“Yeah,” agrees Jane, who laughs like the Wicked Witch of the West, surprisingly.

“Speaking of making out,” Annie says, blinking her overly made-up eyes as she rests her giant boobs on the table, leaning toward me. “Do you have anything to share with us yet?”

“Like what?” I ask, as Lucy begins to dig through her wallet.

“Have you kissed Drew yet?” Jane asks. “On a scale of one to ten, how does he rate? And be honest.”

“Lindsey gave him a ten,” Annie says.

A ten.
I can barely swallow my mouthful of yogurt. Although the news that Drew is a good kisser is hardly shocking, it doesn't exactly put me at ease, either. “I…we haven't gotten to that scene…”

“Not yet?” Jane gasps. “What have you guys been doing all this time anyway?”

Her question catches me by surprise and is enough to make me gag on my yogurt. I take a big sip of water.

“Leave her alone,” Lucy says. I glance at her, stunned that she's actually standing up for me. “This is her first play, after all. It's probably taking her awhile to get used to blocking and everything.”

“You have to be getting to it soon,” Marybeth says.

In fact, we are on page five, which means that today (if we followed the same schedule as yesterday) we'll be blocking the kissing scene. Which is exactly why I took a double dose of my nose spray that morning. I have no intention of having snot on my face when I finally get to kiss the man of my dreams.

“Don't forget. We want a full report,” Annie says.

“Won't it be weird when you see the play and have to watch your sister with the guy you like?” Jane asks Lucy.

But if Lucy's bothered by the visual, she doesn't show it. “I guess I'll find out. Russell is sick today and since Megan and Drew have the auditorium, I thought I'd watch.”

I glance at Lucy, horrified. I do not want my sister to be in attendance on the day when I finally get to kiss Drew.

“Anyone else interested in coming?” Lucy asks, handing me a dollar for the vending machine.

Unfortunately for me, almost everyone is.

Great.

         

I've spent quite a bit of time imagining what it might be like to kiss a guy. Not just a quick peck, but a real, heavy-duty, make-out kiss. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be with Drew. Nor did I think it would be in front of an audience, especially one that consisted of my sister and her friends. Nor did I think I would be so nervous that I would spend the minutes leading up to it keeled over a toilet in the school's first-floor bathroom. But that's where I've been for the past half hour.

I didn't throw up, which was fortunate, considering I'm pretty sure my breath is stinky enough as it is. I purposely laid out my toothbrush and toothpaste this morning but I forgot it on the kitchen counter. I tried to touch my tongue to my nose to smell my breath and I'm pretty sure it smells like peanut butter. (The vending machine was out of Oreos, and the only other thing that looked good was the Nutter Butters.)

When I was in the bathroom I kept reassuring myself I'd feel much better once I actually got onstage. Lucy has always said that the minute she gets onstage she feels as though she's been transported to another world and is never aware of the audience. But as I stand in the middle of the stage, gagging on my own peanut butter breath while holding my script and waiting for Drew to give me my blocking, I couldn't be more aware of the audience if they were still giving me dirty looks across the lunch table. And it certainly does not help that (unlike in Mr. Lucheki's demonstration) the auditorium lights are on. They're all right there in front of me, sitting in the third row: Annie Carmichael, Jane Hitchins, Maria Merton, Marybeth Wilkens, and last but not least, Lucy Fletcher.

“Okay,” Drew is saying. “Let's start at the bottom of page four. I remember…”

I glance at the script, but my hands are shaking so badly I'm having trouble reading it. I think about how great Lucy was yesterday and how she had moved me to tears even though she was just receiving her blocking and was still reading from her script.

Oh crap.

I attempt to steady the script by balancing it on the edge of my belt as I clear my throat. “I remember the first time we got together. You told me I was special…that you had never felt like this about anyone before. Remember?”

“I remember,” Drew says, reading the part of Guy.

“Was it a lie?” I glance into the audience. Lucy's arms are crossed and she's giving me a smug
you stink
sort of look. I wipe away a bead of sweat from my forehead. I had a feeling I shouldn't wear my hoodie but I just felt safer in it. But here I was, onstage for two seconds, and already dripping with sweat.