A Step Toward Falling (29 page)

Like I can't breathe and there's a voice in my head screaming very loud.

“I can't go in,” I say. My body starts rocking to calm itself down but it doesn't calm down. My bonnet is too tight. I can't breathe and I feel like I'm choking. Mom is talking but I only hear a little. “Don't do this now . . . You promised these people . . . You have to go in . . .”

I rock so hard the car starts to move. “BE QUIET!” I scream.

I don't know how to calm myself down. I hum and keep rocking until I hear a knock on the window. It's
Anthony, wearing his costume, only he's wearing a new hat that makes me stop rocking. It's tall like the hat that Abe Lincoln wears. I don't remember seeing any hat like that on Colin Firth. It's also too small so he has to hold it on his head with one hand. I start to breathe again. I roll down the window. “What's that hat?” I say.

“It's okay! I look good!”

“Not if you have to hold on to your hat the whole time.”

“It's okay!” He doesn't take his hand off. “I'll hold it, that's all. It's good!”

This hat thing has made me forget my panic. “You can't hold a hat on your head for the whole show, Anthony. That's not a good idea.”

“Yes I can, Beminda. You can't all the time boss me around.” He's smiling like he thinks it's funny to not listen to what I'm saying.

I open the car door. “I'm not bossing you around, I'm worried. Let me see your hat!”

W
ITH EVERY DISASTER SCENARIO
I've imagined for this play, I never pictured this one: Lucas, who once mentioned a slight history with fear of public speaking, is sitting across from me experiencing what I can only describe as an all-out flop sweat. His face is red as a tomato, puffy and wet.

“I'm
sorry
about this,” he says, sitting in a back room fanning himself with a copy of our script. “I have no control over it.”

“Is your shirt too tight?” I try.

“No, I'm just hyperventilating or something. This used to happen before games sometimes and I'd duck in the shower.”

“Lucas, there's no shower here.”

“Right, I know. That's what sucks.”

It's sweet and endearing and also fairly worrying. He looks like he needs medical attention. I leave him in the back office because I have no choice—the cable access people are setting up in the classroom, with lights that make me worry Lucas won't last five minutes. Mary has set up forty or so chairs for the audience along with a potluck buffet of food in the back for the party afterward.

“Don't worry,” Mary says when she sees my face. “This will be fine. I'll admit I didn't expect the TV cameras to be quite so imposing, but I'm sure it'll go fine.”

Standing in front of one of their lights, I feel my own flop sweat start. I can't let Belinda or Anthony see these cameras and lights before the show starts. If they do, they'll fall apart more than Lucas has.

Then I see something that
really
surprises me: Chad is here. He sees me and smiles and walks over. “So you're putting on a play, Mary says. Like with costumes and actors. Pretty intense.” He laughs like this should be the start of a joke.

I wish he wasn't here. I wish I didn't have to worry about looking more stupid than we already will. I don't
want to even care what he thinks. “Yes,” I say. “I should go, though. We're getting ready back there.”

B
EFORE
I
KNOW IT,
I've followed Anthony inside, right past the lobby full of people who are all here to see our play and afterward ballroom dance. Anthony is still holding the hat on his head when he shows me our dressing room which isn't really a dressing room because it doesn't have mirrors. It looks more like someone's office.

I say, “How about this, Anthony? I'll let you wear that hat for the whole play if you'll take it off afterward and waltz dance with me.”

He turns around and smiles at me for a long time, like maybe he's thinking about this kissing thing, too. “Okay,” he says. “I'll waltz dance with you. What's waltz dance?”

That's when I look over and see a surprise. Lucas is sitting in the corner of our dressing room. He looks sweaty and not very good. He looks like maybe he's having a heart attack.

“Are you having a heart attack?” I say.

He shakes his head. “I have a little problem when I get nervous. I sweat a little.”

“But you're sweating a
lot
,” I say because he is. His neck is sweaty and his shirt, too.

“I'll be okay, I think. Emily's getting me some water.”

I don't want Lucas to have a heart attack. I hate heart attacks. “Why don't you do some yoga breathing. I can show you how. Maybe we should all do it but we have to stand up.”

Anthony stands up but not Lucas.

“You have to stand up, Lucas. We're going to yoga calm ourselves so you can stop sweating.”

“Oh. Okay.” He stands up. Even his pants look wet, but not like pee. More like his knees are sweating.

“Let's start with tree of life, but you don't have to stand on one foot. That's too hard in our costumes. You can just close your eyes and bring your hands together.”

I used to do a yoga tape every day at school so I didn't have to go to any PE classes. I remember all the moves so well I can do them with my eyes closed. “Feel your breath,” I say. “In through your nose, out through your mouth.”

I peek my eyes open and I'm surprised. He's doing what I'm saying. So is Anthony.

We keep going for a little bit and then I say, “Okay, that's enough.”

Lucas looks a little better, I think, but it's hard to tell.

I look at Anthony's costume that his mother put together. It's a purple velour jacket with shiny gold piping around the edges. I don't remember seeing a jacket like that in any of the movies, but I still love it. I especially love his shoes which are green and left over from a Halloween costume when he was Peter Pan.

I take a deep breath. “You look good, Anthony,” I say.
I don't want to mention how Lucas looks because it's still not very good.

“I know, thank you,” Anthony says. “You look beautiful, too, Beminda!” The way he says it, it sounds like
bootiful
.

I
F
L
UCAS FREAKING OUT
is my first surprise of the night and Chad is the second, here is my third: I walk into the lobby to get Lucas some water and there's Richard in the corner, standing by himself.

“Hugh dropped me off, so I need a ride home,” he says. “Is that okay?”

I'm so happy to see him I put my water down and give him a hug. “Of course,” I say. “Thank you for coming. Hugh couldn't stay?” I step away and look at him.

“Too much homework, but he was happy to drive me here. That way he can be nice and a dick at the same time. That's sort of his specialty. He's an almost-great boyfriend.”

He's smiling enough for me to see—it's not terrible. He's almost great. I want to say, maybe for now this is okay. My almost boyfriend looks like he's gone swimming in his clothes so neither one of us is exactly living the dream. But we're living something and it's more than either one of us expected this year.

“Why don't you come back to the dressing room?
Maybe you can help calm everyone down. We're having a little issue with stage fright.” I roll my eyes a little. “And they haven't even seen the TV cameras yet.”

“Excuse me, Emily?” I turn around to see Belinda, in her costume—homemade but resplendent, with yards of puffy material in a lavender color that flatters her beautifully.

“You look great, Belinda!” I say.

Her lips are pinched. “We have a problem,” she says. “Not with me, but with Lucas. Anthony and I don't think he should do his part plus narrate.”

I'd forgotten this last-minute addition I made, based on the wonderful job he did last week talking to the class about the story. I suggested having Lucas narrate some of the plot holes I had to leave out in editing. We hadn't gotten too specific or written any lines because I thought he'd be fine ad-libbing it.

“We can skip the narration, Belinda. That'll be okay,” I say, wondering if Lucas is all right in my absence. “This is my friend Richard, Belinda. Maybe he can help us out.”

“Hi, Belinda. It's nice to meet you. I'd be happy to narrate a little. I think I've watched
Pride and Prejudice
enough times . . .”

Belinda's eyes widen. “How many?”

“I don't know. Maybe five.”

She nods. “I've watched it a lot more than that.”

“Would
you
like to narrate, Belinda?” I suggest. Maybe having more responsibility is the secret for calming her nerves.

She thinks about this for a minute. “No, thank you. I need to concentrate on my part. Why don't we let Richard do it.”

Richard shoots me a look that's almost a laugh but not quite. Hopefully this won't be a disaster. He'll see—up close—why I wanted him here, why this feels different than the other work we've done.

Thankfully there isn't time to get any more nervous than we are. Back in the dressing room, Richard ties an ascot scarf around his neck and borrows Anthony's hat to open the show. I explain the most important part with the audience. “Make it short and simple. Don't include too many details.”

Richard looks through the scripts quickly and points out a few of the gaping holes I'm missing in the plot. “Never mind that,” I say. “Just fill in the story and emphasize the main emotions coming up. That's what they'll be watching for.”

On this score, he's perfect. We miraculously get through our first scene by starting quickly before Belinda and the others have had a chance to see how big the camera lights are. After that, Richard steps onstage, welcomes everyone, and explains, “What you are watching is a love story, though it might take a while for you to figure that out, because this is what happens with the best love stories sometimes. No one realizes they're happening in the beginning.” He smiles at me and then cues the audience for what's coming up. “It's going to be a party scene, but watch for this, everyone. He sees her and thinks he might
like her, but he can't bring himself to be nice to her.”

For this scene, Lucas pulls it together beautifully. He might be acting in clothes that are 80 percent damp, but he's every bit as good as he was the first time he read this scene with Belinda in auditions. Subtle, complicated, wildly effective. When he finishes the scene and steps “offstage” behind the curtain we've set up, I squeeze his hand and say, “You should be an actor, Lucas.”

He opens his jacket so I remember why he shouldn't.

I want to kiss him right there, but I resist.

He's even better in his third scene, the marriage proposal, which has killed me every time we rehearse it: the way he hesitates and grapples and swallows right before he spits out the words. There
is
a bit of Mr. Darcy in Lucas. Even Belinda, who has a hard time noticing anyone else onstage, seems to love it. Her fan flutters wildly all through the scene, which prompts Anthony to overact in our next dance-party scene where he's playing Bingley and I'm playing Jane. We're supposed to be pretending we're too shy to say how we feel, but Anthony gets so carried away that our scene culminates in a kiss we have certainly not planned.

“Sorry,” he says right afterward, smiling at me. His hat is skewed and his ascot rumpled by the spontaneous moment.

“It's okay,” I whisper, and the audience applauds, as they do for virtually everything we've done tonight, including walk onstage.

There are plenty of mistakes, like a terrible moment where Belinda falls over her dress, which is too long, and
delivers her line from the ground as if she's hoping no one will notice. But for me, the biggest surprise of the night is the way I can see and feel the whole class on the edge of their seats, following the story. Francine nods her head wildly anytime a character talks about love, and Simon shakes his head if any character speaks disparagingly of anyone else. I can hear him in the audience saying, “That's not
right.
”

Halfway through the show, we break for “questions and suggestions,” and everyone has something to say: “She should just give him a
chance.
”

“He shouldn't listen to his friend all the time.”

“I just want everyone to fall in love!”

The last comment surprises me most of all because it's from Harrison, my first partner in the group, who, in all these weeks, has never once said he wants to go on a date or fall in love. Now I watch him zeroing in on Richard and I understand why he's hesitant about all this. Apparently it's possible to be legally blind, autistic, and gay.

I don't know if Richard sees this, too, but he and Lucas seem comfortable enough at our “intermission discussion” for me to leave them fielding questions while I take Belinda and Anthony for a quick trip to the bathroom. This is another quirk I've learned working with these two. They can seem so high-functioning—memorizing their lines and discussing Jane Austen—but would definitely get lost if I told them, “The bathroom is three doors down on the left.”

Alone in the hallway, I tell them they're both doing a
great job. Belinda is grinning ear to ear, happy in a way I haven't seen her be in ages.

“I was great, wasn't I!” she says, clapping her hands.

Anthony can't take his eyes off her. “Very great, Beminda.”

“So were you, Anthony! That was so good when you kissed her.” I laugh at this. I wasn't sure how Belinda would react to Anthony's spontaneous stage moment, but she's right not to be jealous. It was a great, actorly flourish.