Better Nate Than Ever (10 page)

Monica takes a deep breath and says, “I need
everyone
”—her head whipping to the hiccupping child, the same stupid boy, I see, who yelled “Aliens!” earlier—“to be completely still. Whether or not you realize it—and I think this is a lesson that’s worth learning as a child—every moment in life is an audition. Every moment, and not just when you’re dancing or singing for us, if you get that far, is a moment to show who you are. And what I see here are a bunch of children who are wearing good little outfits and good little shoes but can’t stand still.” God, does she love to talk. “And that’s the first thing Garret Charles asked—was for you to please stand still.”

He actually didn’t say that. Garret Charles actually gave us a generic monologue about the dust of California in the eighties. It was Rex
Rollins
the large casting director who asked us kids to stand still, almost twenty minutes ago, and
he’s
the most hyperactive person in here: swilling away at his third can of Diet Coke and pawing a string cheese into his mouth like he’s a bear who found his first salmon after a drought. But whatever.

Garret Charles comes back, and when I turn to see him enter, I catch sight of the clock. I’m going to be toast if I don’t make it out of here in the next hour.
Mom and Dad still don’t know I’m in New York, and Libby can only cover for me so long. Especially having lost Anthony’s goodwill, I have to imagine, by sniffing around his Hanes.

God, I hope his calf is okay. If he’s medically hobbled by this mysterious track injury, he’s going to be home a lot more, and that means our shared bathroom is going to be a real negotiation that I will lose every time.

“You,” Monica says to me, suddenly standing right in front of me. “Daydreamer. Where are you from?”

“Oh, uh—” Do I look like that much of a foreigner? Can they smell the grey on me, the fumes of Jankburg? “I’m from Pennsylvania.”

“How old are you?” Garret Charles says, his eyes beady. God, have they
all
seen my coffee-stained application? Do they know I lied about being twenty-one?

“I’m as old as you need the character of Elliott to be,” I’m about to say, to steal that boy’s line from the elevator, but instead I go, “I’m thirteen. I’m thirteen, sir.”

Monica laughs at my saying “sir,” muttering something like, “I bet this kid thinks you’re a knight, Garret.”

And she makes no mark at all by my name, moving on to Cindy with the braces. Cindy does a strange Japanese bow to them, funny because she’s very
clearly not Japanese, and that’s all it takes for Monica to scratch right through her name on the clipboard.

“Do you think they just
eliminated
me,” Cindy says just as soon as Garret Charles and Monica are on to the next victim, and I say, “Nah, I think they probably really fell for that formal bow you gave them,” and she flashes her big scary braces at me again, and I actually let out a yelp, sounding like Mom’s horrible dog, Tippy.

The only other real notable, in the walk-down Garret Charles is doing, is a child at the far end of the room who begins to cry when they get to him. He, too, appears to have pee-peed his pants, just like the poor boy to my left. Either that or he popped a water balloon in his shorts. (Unlikely.) The boy is excused—one of the bearded boys taking him by the hand, out to the waiting area—and then Rex Rollins puts his Diet Coke down on Sammy’s piano and begins to clap again, to quiet a room down that has already become so quiet, the clapping itself makes another little girl begin to cry; suddenly everyone seems to be crying.

“There are many different types of children for many different types of shows,” Rex Rollins begins, and I can see that he’s given this speech about a billion times. “So if your number is not one of the numbers we call in just a moment—if you aren’t asked to stay for longer, today—I want you to keep in mind that
there are lots of opportunities for all sorts of children.”

Really? What kind of shows need girls with horrible braces, who bow like Japanese men, or little boys who pee their pants? Or me?

Garret Charles crouches low against the mirror, with Monica, and flips through the pages on her clipboard fervently. He’s actually squatting so deeply that I can’t help but stare; this dramatic Yoga pose is the first evidence that he must have really been a good dancer once. Garret Charles is, like, at least ten years older than Dad, and if Dad tried that kind of crouch, his knees would probably fly right off his legs, across the dining room.

Monica reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, hightailing it to the door. Doesn’t she want to watch our faces as we’re kept or cut? Isn’t the chief interest of being in charge that you can enjoy the crushed or giddy reactions of your subjects? I won’t ever understand adults, I swear.

“Number fifty-nine, do you have any special skills?” Mark, one of the bearded casting assistants, says. Garret Charles has called Mark over, in Monica’s absence, and is now whispering into his ear.

“I’m a straight-A student,” number fifty-nine says, a boy whose socks are pulled so high, he may’ve actually lost a bet with someone.

Mark laughs and scratches his little beard, saying,
“That’s wonderful, but I think Mr. Charles is looking for special skills that could apply to a Broadway musical.”

“This
is
Broadway after all, children,” Garret Charles says, tilting his head down to peer through the tiny glass of his tiny glasses, perched on his tiny sharp nose that could probably pick a lock if tilted the right way.

God, his accent is something else. If I tried to impersonate a British person, like that, Libby would tell me I’m working too hard and ruining the scene. “Let the words do the work,” she said to me once during a two-week summer intensive on
Arden of Faversham
.

“Well,” number fifty-nine continues, “I’m a straight-A student
and
I played Seymour in my middle school’s production of
Little Shop of Horrors, Jr
. And my parents said I was the best thing in it, and so did my history teacher, Mrs. Cahoon, and that was the last thing she ever saw, because she was killed in a hot-air balloon accident in France.”

“Oh, my,” Mark says, and moves on to the next number on his list. I’ve figured it out already: They’re only following up with the children who they haven’t made their final decision about. Whose fate is hovering in the air like a bee.

“Number eighty-eight, do you have any special
skills?” And really, just like that, number eighty-eight performs a forward handspring, landing in the splits. The room erupts into applause, but number eighty-eight isn’t done, not by the half of it, calling to Sammy at the piano, “Do you know ‘Slow Boat to China’?”

And Sammy, quite amazingly,
does
seem to (not that I know that song), and begins thumping out a beat. And number eighty-eight—still in the splits!—spins out of them, onto her back, and yells “Faster!” to Sammy, which gets a nice big laugh out of Mark and Marc, the bearded boys. Number eighty-eight ends up—and I’d need to watch the whole thing on slow-mo to really understand how she even
thought
of it, let alone pulled it off—balanced on her chin, legs in the air, arms out in an upside-down T, looking like Mr. Jesus Christ himself jumping headfirst into a river made out of a dirty wooden Broadway audition floor.

Number eighty-eight flips up to her feet, which had shone in the air, shone as she spun, glittering in the light. I hear the clickety-clack of metal, and—my God—number eighty-eight is in tap shoes, launching into a series of time steps so accomplished, I feel at this point like I should be paying money to watch the routine.

And just as soon as she’s done, somehow backhand-springing directly into line, her feet in a perfect
“parallel first” position, Garret Charles makes a small notation next to her name on the clipboard.

And in order, I suppose, to destroy her, he simply says, “Okay.”

If an act like
hers
only gets an “okay,” what the heck am
I
going to get when they get to
my
name? A death threat?

By now, with Monica back in from her smoking break, Mark scurries out of the way and Garret stands. His body snaps and crackles in so many places, he sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies. My stomach growls.

“Number ninety-one,” Monica calls out to me. “Any special skills?”

I clear my throat and catch a quick look at myself in the mirror: that new red shirt and those jeans, my boring new slip-on shoes. Everything feels like it’s a size too small for me.

“I can walk on my knees.”

And I really can.

When Libby and I workshopped our two-person
Fiddler on the Roof
, for the private performance we put on for her mom right when she started getting sick, I decided to stage the famous Bottle Dance. In the musical
Fiddler on the Roof
, a rambunctious Jewish father has to marry off his daughters, and during one of the ceremonies, the town villagers place a series of
real live glass bottles atop their heads, pushed into the divots of their felt hats. Arm in arm, these men—because what woman would be willing to look this ridiculous?—perform a series of leg dips and crawls—knee walks—all the while making sure their bottles stay securely balanced on top of their head.

Libby told me that in real life, if the bottle fell off and crashed to the floor, tradition dictated that the village children didn’t get Hanukkah presents for, like, three years or something awful.

“I can walk on my knees, or crawl on them, I mean,” I hear myself say.

Garret Charles hands the clipboard to Monica and says, “Well, this shall be interesting.”

“Sammy,” I want to call out, “Keep playing
Slow Boat to China
, but reroute that canoe to Russia,” but instead I just step forward, out of line. Cindy with the braces snorts. I start to bend my knees when, with a pinch, the new jeans stop me, tugging at the crotch.

Too tight to perform any kind of trick.

My big chance, ruined by denim.

“Children: a lesson,” Monica says. “When auditioning for a new musical, it’s very, very important to wear clothing that allows for movement.”

“I could—I could change,” I offer. “I could put on a pair of shorts,” thinking I might pop my head into the hall to scream at Aunt Heidi, “GET BACK TO
OLD NAVY AND JAYWALK IN FRONT OF YOUR EX-BOYFRIEND THE COP IF YOU HAVE TO, JUST GET ME A PAIR OF LOOSELY FITTING SHORTS THAT ALLOW UNINHIBITED, JEWISH-WEDDING-DANCE-TYPE MOVEMENT.”

Garret Charles looks at me, peering again through his glasses, and says, “Changing your garments won’t be necessary.”

I should have just stayed in my Thug outfit. The Thug outfit would’ve, at the very least, allowed free movement. I could probably have nailed one corner of it into the floor and disappeared within, performing all of
Fiddler on the Roof
as if under a summer stock tent.

Mine is the last number they call today, the team so clearly distraught at the lack of special skills displayed before them, they’re just going to chuck our whole group.

“Okay, children!” Rex Rollins says, taking the clipboard from Monica. “Please take your belongings into the hallway, and wait with your parents for just a moment. We’ll confer and then come out to announce the next step. But you all did a sensational job!”

Ridiculous. Only
one
of us did anything near a sensational job—spinning on her chin—and the rest of us either peed our pants or couldn’t move in them.

When I return to Heidi (after finally running to
the bathroom myself), she looks up from her cell phone and rises from a creaking wicker seat. “What’s wrong, Nate?” I suppose I look like I’m about to cry.

I suppose I’m about to cry.

I suppose I cry.

I’m crying.

“It was horrible. They hated me,” I say. “It wasn’t anything like what I thought an audition would be. They were just—just
looking
at us, and trying to intimidate us.”

Heidi just stands there, probably afraid to touch me in case it makes me cry harder, and a girl standing next to us—number seventy-six, a tall girl who, earlier, ran around on her hands and then, for her special skill, kicked number seventy-seven in the eye—says to me, “It wasn’t so bad in there. When I auditioned for
The Lion King
, they cut me just because I’m not black.”

“See,” Heidi says, clearly not believing the words as she says them, “it could have been . . . worse.”

Rex Rollins spills out of the door frame, with Mark and Marc flanking him like slices of wheat bread, and—yup—claps his hands at us.

“First off, congratulations to the parents for raising a bunch of wonderful kiddos!” One of the moms shouts “Hear, hear!” and earns polite applause. “As I already said in the room, casting a new musical is such
a delicate process because there are so few slots for so many kids. We could probably cast the national tour of
E.T
. just out of this group of fifty kiddos alone!”

A dad looks up from his BlackBerry and says, “When does the national tour go out?” And Rex Rollins says, “It was just an expression! We’ve got to get this show open on Broadway first!”

The “Hear, hear!” mom yells, “I smell a Tony Award!” And the whole hallway is just so confusing to me, everyone pretending to be friends when really nobody is friends, when nobody wants anything but this chance, this job.

“Will the following numbers please stay,” Rex Rollins says. “You’ll be asked to sing in our afternoon group, at two p.m., after the creative team takes their lunch.” And I swear to God one of the pee-pee-pants boys yells out, “You deserve a wonderful lunch!” and Rex Rollins does his signature curtsy.

The BlackBerry dad isn’t so into this guy, and holds his daughter tight.

“Breathe, Nate,” Heidi says, and hands me back my bookbag. And that’s when I see it, hanging from a wire ring looped into a zipper: my lucky rabbit foot from Libby. I squat and, despite hands that are sweaty and shaking, unspool the ring from the zipper. I hold the rabbit foot so tight that I bet some distant, footless bunny must be wincing or shouting.