Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (6 page)

“You’re kidding!” shrieked Alma. “You mean your dad
talked
to
Stu
?” She sounded as if she were reading her lines from a cue card.

The air itself quivered with the shaking of Carla’s head.

“Stu told my father that he’s really angry about all the rumours that have been circulating about them,” blared Carla. “He hates the way the press always misrepresents things.”

The disciples all murmured sympathetically – as though they cared what the press did.

“So guess what they’re going to do?” squealed Carla, loudly enough to get a response from the house across the street. She paused dramatically.

My curiosity was greater than my disdain for anything Carla Santini might have to say. I leaned back in my seat just a tiny bit. Was she going to say that Sidartha wasn’t disbanding after all?

When not even Alma hazarded a guess, Carla took a deep, meaningful breath. “They’re going to have a big farewell concert at Madison Square Garden to say goodbye to all their friends and fans.” If anyone else in the universe had made that announcement, she would have sounded excited; Carla sounded as though it had been her idea.

Alma, Tina and Marcia all started to sigh and screech, but Carla wasn’t finished yet.

“And guess what else?” she demanded.

I swear to God that the three of them gasped. “What?”

“My father already has seats in the press box.”

Alma, Tina and Marcia all went off like smoke alarms, but I didn’t blink. So this was Carla’s revenge. She didn’t even like Sidartha that much. She just wanted to get even with me.

“But that’s not the best part,” said Carla once the noise had died down. “There’s going to be an absolutely mega party afterwards for all their closest friends.” If I’d had a pair of scissors on me, I think I would have turned around and cut off her hair. “And guess who already has an invitation?”

I don’t know why I did it. I really and truly don’t. It wasn’t like I planned it or anything. But the smug triumph in Carla Santini’s voice really annoyed me.

I turned my head so that I was officially part of the conversation.

“It just so happens that Ella and I do,” I said sweetly.

Carla Santini’s eyes locked with mine.

“Oh, really?” Smug triumph now had a companion: sarcasm. Carla didn’t believe me. Which meant that no one else did either.

I, however, was cool and unruffled; I was self-possessed. Ignoring the horrified expression on Ella’s face, I met Carla’s eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”

There were a few darting glances and smirks around the table. Carla caught them all. A smile slipped over her face like a snake through water.

“And just how did
you
manage that?” she asked.

“The same way you did,” I immediately answered. “Through parental connections.”

“Connections?”
Carla made a sound that would have been a snort if a pig and not a perfect person were making it. “What connections do
you
have, except to the phone?”

To be a truly great thespian you have to be able to do more than act from a script. You have to be able to improvise. I improvised.

“My mother got them. Marsh Foreman bought a piece from her in the summer. I met him when he came to pick it up. He remembered that I liked Sidartha, so he gave my mother two invitations.”

This wasn’t technically true, of course, but it was definitely possible. Marsh Foreman was Sidartha’s manager. It stood to reason that he had money to spend on handcrafted goods. Lots of rich people bought my mother’s stuff. Why shouldn’t Marsh Foreman be one of them?

Carla arched one eyebrow. “Your mother must be some potter.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She is.” I laughed as if suddenly understanding something – something too silly for words. “Oh, you think she makes bowls and plates and stuff like that…” Bowls and plates and stuff like that are what my mother does make, but there are lots of other potters who aren’t obsessed with use and function. “Oh, no, my mother makes things like six-foot fish in suits. In fact, the piece that Marsh Foreman bought was a badger, a racoon and a fox playing Monopoly.” I smiled. “He put it in his garden.”

ME AND MY BIG MOUTH

Carla’s announcement lifted my soul to the heavens themselves. All was not lost, after all. Sidartha was having one last concert! Now Ella and I had the chance to see them at their very very best in a concert that would be part of the rock legend for centuries to come. Decades from now, Ella and I would be telling our grandchildren how we were at Sidartha’s farewell gig – how we’d even gone to the party afterwards and met Stu Wolff.

Ella, however, had a slightly different take on things.

“I really can’t believe you sometimes, Lola,” said Ella. She dumped a bag of crisps into a shining dark blue bowl. No clay dust or outrageous colours here. Mrs Gerard was at her cooking class, or pushing a book trolley around the hospital, or something like that, so Ella was fixing our snack for a change. “I really can’t. What exactly do
you
think is wrong with you?”

“You’re over-reacting,” I said with my usual reasonable calm. I helped myself to a crisp. “I’m sure you would have said the exact same thing if you’d been me.”

Hand-reared by Marilyn Gerard, Colonel in the war against dirt and disorder, Ella automatically brushed my crumbs from the counter.

“If I were you I wouldn’t know any better, would I?” she asked. “I’d be crazy enough to tell Carla Santini that Marsh Foreman had invited me to the Sidartha goodbye party.”

I flashed her one of my peppiest smiles.

“Be fair,” I begged. “I told her you were invited, too.”

Ella gave me a long, hard look. She sighed. “Have you really gone insane?” she asked quietly. “What were you thinking of? Doesn’t your brain ever get in touch with your mouth?”

“I was thinking what a pain in the neck Carla is, that’s what I was thinking of,” I replied honestly. “It drives me nuts the way she’s always tossing her hair around and smiling. She acts like she’s visiting royalty and the rest of us are just a bunch of lepers.”

Ella put the juice on the counter. “OK, so Carla Santini has insurmountable ego problems. That’s beside the point.”

I slapped the gleaming marble top with my hand. “I disagree. That’s exactly the point, in my humble opinion. If Princess Carla didn’t start practically every sentence she utters with ‘I this…’ or ‘My that…’ I would never have opened my mouth.”

And maybe if Carla had bothered to congratulate me on being Eliza instead of threatening my life.

Ella side-stepped my irrefutable argument.

“But you did open your mouth,” said Ella. “I tried to tell you that if Carla says she’s going to put you in your place, she means it. And what do you do? You open your enormous mouth, that’s what you do.” She shook with frustration. “You handed her exactly what she needs to humiliate and ridicule you for the rest of your life.” She scowled. “And me, too, probably.”

Ruminating, I bit into another crisp. “I don’t know about that…” I said slowly. “I mean, it depends, doesn’t it?”

Ella handed me a glass. “Depends on what? Whether or not someone drops a gold record on her head at the party and she develops amnesia?”

I stared at the glass for a minute. I was used to fingerprints on my glasses. This one sparkled the way they do in dishwasher advertisements.

“Well…” I said at last. “It kind of depends on whether we go or not, doesn’t it?”

Ella spilled grape juice all over the counter.

“On whether we go or not?” she shrieked. She was so upset that she wasn’t even mopping up the juice. She was just standing there, staring at me in stupefied horror. “What do you mean? We’re not going to the Sidartha party, Lola. This may have slipped your mind, but we haven’t exactly been invited.”

I waved this objection aside. “You don’t have to be invited to a party like that,” I assured her. “You just crash. There are people in New York who never go out unless it’s to crash some celebrity bash.”

“Well, I’m not from New York,” said Ella between clenched teeth. “And anyway, my mother would never let me go to a party like that, even if it were being held next door, and you know it. Not without her. Are you planning to take my mother with us?”

What a thought! Mrs Gerard stopped listening to music when the Beatles broke up. And although I’m pretty sure that she must have had a youth, I’m also pretty sure that it wasn’t what you’d call wild unless you were comparing it with the life of a drop of paint. I’d rather have taken the Pope on my honeymoon than taken Mrs Gerard to the Sidartha party.

“We can work around your mother,” I informed Ella. “She doesn’t have to know.”

“Are you kidding?” Ella’s voice was unnervingly shrill. “There’s no way on earth you and I are going to sneak into the city for a concert without my mother finding out. Never mind going to a party afterwards. My mother wants to know where I am every minute of the day and night.”

Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of truth in this. Mrs Gerard does everything but make Ella punch in and out on a time clock. It isn’t that she doesn’t trust her – Ella is an incredibly trustworthy teenager if you ask me – it’s that she worries about her all the time. If Ella’s ten minutes late getting home, her mother will be at the door before she turns in the front path. My mother might worry about me if she knew I was out on a motorcycle with someone for whom speed limits are merely suggestions, but otherwise she’s too busy worrying about a trillion other things to time my comings and goings. This, however, was not the moment to start agreeing with Ella.

“How do you know she’d find out?” I demanded. “There must be at least a dozen ways we could manage to go into the city and stay out the entire night without her ever finding out. All we have to do is figure out what they are.”

Ella gaped. “Tell me the truth, Lola. Are you on drugs?”

I laughed. A person could never get away with taking drugs in my house. My mother can just look at me and know if I’m about to get my period or not.

I scattered some more crumbs around. “I will be if I don’t get to that concert.”

Ella stared at the puddle of juice on the counter with sightless eyes. “Maybe you should just let Carla have this,” she said. “You know … you got the lead. Let her have the party and everything.”

Let her have the party and everything?
I could hardly believe my ears. How could Ella suggest that we just give up like that? Carla Santini may think that she’s God, but that doesn’t make me Jesus. “You’re the one who’s on drugs,” I retaliated. “A few minutes ago you said I’d already given her the weapon she needed to humiliate and ridicule us for the rest of our lives, and now you want me to load her weapon and pull the trigger.”

Ella turned her attention from the spreading purple stain to me. “But that’s exactly what you are doing. If you’d kept quiet and let her lord the concert over us for a few years she’d have been happy. Now she’s not going to rest till the whole school knows that we don’t really have invitations.”

“Exactly!” I was practically shrieking with emotion. “That’s why we
have
to go.” I held my head high. “It’s a matter of pride.”

Ella sighed with exasperation. “Pride goeth before a fall…” she muttered.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” said I. I picked up another crisp. “I refuse to give in. There’s no way I’m handing Carla a consolation prize.”

“It wouldn’t be a consolation prize.” Ella’s eyes were back on the juice. “It’d be more like … like a…”

I leaned closer to her. “Like a what?”

Ella shrugged. “Like an offering to unfriendly spirits so they leave you alone.”

“
Doodeedoodeedoodeedoodee…
What is this?” I joked. “
The Twilight Zone?
”

Ella looked at me, but she wasn’t smiling.

“You don’t know Carla the way I do,” said Ella in total seriousness. “You weren’t here when she was after Kali Simpson.”

“Who’s Kali Simpson?”

Ella shrugged again. “She was just this girl who used to go to Dellwood. But she and Carla had a fight about something and Carla decided to destroy her.”

“You’re making me tremble.” I trembled.

“You wouldn’t be so flippant if you’d seen the way she treated Kali,” said Ella. “She stopped talking to her and everyone else stopped, too. Any time Kali was around she’d start badmouthing her and the disciples would all laugh. She made up all these lies and spread them around the school – you know, that Kali was shoplifting … that Kali was having sex with half the boys in school … that her mother was an alcoholic…” It was Ella’s turn to tremble, but she wasn’t acting. “It was really horrible. The only person who really stuck by Kali was Sam Creek, and even he couldn’t help her in the end.”

Sam Creek, Deadwood’s token bad boy, is also its other great Independent. With his black leather jacket, his Celtic tattoo, his beaded dreads, his multitude of earrings and his attitude, Sam Creek is the antithesis of Carla Santini. He is also the only guy who doesn’t worship her.

“So what happened?” I asked. “Did Carla turn Kali into a frog?”

Ella gave me a “don’t-start” look.

“The Simpsons moved, that’s what happened.” Ella stared into my eyes. “Kali couldn’t take it.”

I raised my chin. “Well, I can.”

“That’s what you think,” said Ella. “But Carla’s only been playing with you so far. She didn’t really think you were a threat before. But now – if she wants to, Lola, she can really make your life hell.”

“I’m not afraid of Carla Santini,” I said, chin still in its give-me-your-best-shot position. I believe it’s important in life not to be afraid of anyone or anything, not even a bad review. “She’s a teenage girl, for heaven’s sake, Ella, not Lady Macbeth. There’s no way I’m going to let Carla Santini keep me away from the Sidartha concert.”

“Have you listened to one word I’ve said?” asked Ella. She shook her head in a kind of dumbfounded way. “You know,” she sighed, “sometimes I can’t tell whether you’re just stubborn or if you’re stupid, too.”

LADY MACBETH AT DEADWOOD HIGH

A few brave souls quietly congratulated me on my triumph over Carla Santini with a smile or a nod of the head or a quick “good one, Lola”, but Sam Creek was the only one who made a public statement about the casting.

Sam had been out all week, but on Friday he gave me the thumbs up when I walked into maths.

“The Queen’s been severely wounded,” Sam shouted gleefully. “May she die of serious complications.”

A couple of the other kids glanced our way, but no one laughed or winked or anything like that. I could feel Carla watching us from the back of the room. She was always watching me now, even when she was talking to someone else. But she never gave any sign that she actually saw me.

My counter offensive was to pretend that it was Carla and her friends who didn’t exist. I flapped my cape and laughed.

“We can only hope for the best,” I said loudly as I took my seat. My smile was sour. “I’m afraid, however, that the prognosis doesn’t look too good.”

Sam hooted. He may not have any friends, and he might have missed the first few days of my and Ella’s punishment, but he isn’t stupid. He’d noticed the way the room went quiet when I stepped through the door, and he’d noticed the way none of the others greeted me.

“That’s a shame,” said Sam. He kind of jerked his head in the Santini direction. “You may have to hire a food taster if this keeps up.”

Among the BTWs and BTRs, however, no one said a word.

And when I say they didn’t say a word, I mean not a word.

It took a few days, but by Friday, when the whole school knew that I was playing Eliza Doolittle and Carla Santini was playing Mrs Higgins, even kids who had never heard of
Pygmalion
were treating me and Ella as if we were the Invisible Girls. Silent and unsmiling, the friends, friends of friends, and would-be friends of Carla Santini passed us in the hallways, sat next to us in classes, and stood near us on the lunch line as though we had ceased to exist. And all with no outward sign of hostility or show of temper from Carla herself. There were no snide comments or black looks; no nasty whispers or back-stabbing attacks. She shimmered around campus like a butterfly, smiling and laughing and tossing her head as though she didn’t have an enemy in the world. But she could pass within inches of me or Ella as though we were air. She could say something to the entire class, and everyone would know somehow that Ella and I weren’t included because we weren’t really there. I got to the point where I could almost empathize with Carla. No wonder she’s the way she is, I’d think as I walked ghostlike through the corridors. She must be frustrated and bored out of her mind. That was when I began to realize that Carla Santini is as wasted in Deadwood as I am – and more or less for the same reason. My spirit and talents are too large for the narrow confines of a suburban world, and so are Carla’s.

“You almost have to admire her, don’t you?” I said to Ella as we walked down the hallway together like prisoners of war being marched through the streets. “Think what she could do if she were in a position of real power.”

Like me, Ella kept her eyes straight ahead of her, as though unaware of the darting looks and quivering silence that followed us wherever we went.

“She’s already got more power than she should,” said Ella. “If it gets any colder, we’re going to have to wear thermals to school.”

“Oh, please…” I pleaded. “These are humans, not ants.” In my experience, human group actions tend to fall apart eventually. “It can’t last.”

Ella gave me a look. “Yes it can. This is all Carla’s doing, and it won’t be over till she says so.”

I laughed again, this time heartily.

“Give me a break, will you? Who is Carla, Stalin? What’s she going to do when people get tired of acting like jerks and start talking to us again, send them to Siberia?”

Ella nodded vehemently. “That’s right. She’ll send them to Siberia – with us.”

I shook my head as we came to a stop outside the auditorium. “She can’t,” I said, dragging reason in on my side. “Carla Santini herself is going to have to start talking to me in a few minutes.” The rehearsals were beginning that afternoon. Which was one of the reasons I’d been able to take the Big Freeze with a certain amount of humour. There really was no way it could last. “And when she does, everybody else will give up with relief.”

Ella readjusted her book bag. “Carla won’t give up,” said Ella grimly. “The only thing Carla Santini’s ever given up on is the concept of letting someone else have their way.”

I, however, was optimistic as I walked into the auditorium by myself. Carla might have been waging a cold war against me during every other minute of the day, but she would have to leave her weapons outside the theatre. The way I saw it, that was the rule. Inside, we were part of the same team. A nation divided against itself must perish; and so must the cast of
Pygmalion
.

I paused with my hand on the door. Through the thick metal I could hear the rest of the cast reading the revised script and chatting aimlessly while they waited for the rehearsal to begin. I ruffled my hair for that urgent, passionate look, and flung my cape casually over one shoulder.

The silence of the Apocalypse fell over the room as I opened the door. All but a few people were pretending to look through their scripts or brush dirt from their shoes, as if they didn’t know I’d arrived. The rest were watching me and watching Carla at the same time, waiting to see what was going to happen.

Carla Santini hadn’t left her weapons in her locker, as she should have.

She was sitting in the front row, looking at Mrs Baggoli’s revisions. I could tell from the set of her back that she was fully armed.

I called out a general, “Hi!”

There were a few brave mumbles in return.

I came to a stop at the front row. Carla was in an aisle seat, deeply absorbed in what she was reading. I couldn’t back down. One way or another, I was going to make her talk to me.

“Hi, Carla,” I said, as though these weren’t the first words I’d said to her in days. I threw myself into the seat across the aisle from hers. “All ready to start?”

Carla Santini is not a great actor – she’s too self-absorbed for that – but she is a good one. She did the best impersonation of a stone wall I’d ever seen.

Glances were furtively exchanged among our audience.

“What do you think of Mrs Baggoli’s changes?” I asked with so much good humour and interest that I should have been given an Oscar.

Carla looked up then. But not at me. Carla looked at Andy, the boy who was playing Colonel Pickering.

“I wonder what’s keeping Mrs Baggoli,” said Carla, sounding so concerned you would have thought there was a good chance that Mrs Baggoli had been jumped by hostile guerrillas in the English wing.

Andy blinked. It took him a second to realize that Carla was asking him a question. She didn’t normally speak to Andy; he’s overweight and has acne. He looked around uneasily, a drowning man desperately searching for a passing log. Jon, who was playing Professor Higgins, rolled his eyes towards the gods. Everyone else was even less helpful; they looked away.

I raised my voice, just a little. “I saw her heading towards the office after last class.”

Catlike, Carla kept her eyes on Andy, waiting for him to answer.

Andy had gone from uneasiness to a kind of mild terror. You could practically hear his palms sweating. He glanced at me, and then turned back to Carla.

“She went to the office after her last class,” said Andy. He twitched, trying to decide whether or not he could safely move away now.

He couldn’t.

“But school ended half an hour ago.” Carla tilted her head to one side. “It isn’t like Mrs Baggoli to be late for rehearsals. Especially not the first one.”

Andy stared back at her, looking as if he might implode. “Well … uh…” he grunted.

“She had some Xeroxing she had to do,” I went on, warming to my story. “For us. She has a last-minute change to the script.”

Andy shifted from one foot to the other. “She’s Xeroxing,” he informed Carla. “You know, a last-minute change to the script.”

The delicate, sculpted nostrils twitched.

“What changes? I discussed the revisions with her during lunch period and she didn’t say anything about more changes.”

Andy gulped under the interrogation-strength beam of Carla’s gaze.

“Oh.” He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. By now everyone else was looking at me, too.

I truly believe that if you have a good, brave heart the forces of the universe will help you if they can. Even though the forces of the universe had been unable to keep me out of a world that included Carla Santini, they were able to do something else. They inspired me.

“She only thought of it last night,” I said. “But she believes it could revitalize the entire play.”

Andy started to relax a little.

“It was sudden,” he said. “But it’s big.”

“Oh, really?” drawled Carla. “And just what is this big idea?”

I dropped my cape from my shoulders and leaned back in my seat.

“She’s writing out Mrs Higgins,” I said with a smile.

Totally forgetting that I no longer existed, Carla turned to me, her face full of scorn. “Oh, hahaha.”

I grinned. I’d known I could make her talk to me.

Not that I actually heard her, of course. Everyone else was laughing too loudly.