Snark and Stage Fright (20 page)

Mrs. Parker hurried in then and started talking, rapid-fire, determined to make up for lost time. I heard Michael let out a sigh beside me, but I was grateful to end the conversation. Later, as we walked out of class, he stopped me and asked, “Will you be by the auditorium again after school today?”

I nodded, saying, “Yep. Me and my little brood of fake Austrians.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he promised and took off down the hallway.

Even though I wasn’t exactly eager to hear him bring an end to our last official partnership, I wasn’t able to focus on my last two classes and after school ended I hung around the auditorium doorway, just waiting for the axe to fall, instead of going right in to meet the kids. When Leigh walked into the auditorium, I assured her I’d join them soon and she promised to deliver the message. A minute later, Michael came by, dressed in a pair of crisp khakis and a denim-colored Oxford, not his running clothes.

“Is cross-country over for the season?”

“Just about. We’ve got Regionals, and then we could go on to State but … ” He shrugged and set down his black messenger bag. “I wanted to talk to you. About the project.”

Now it was my turn to bite my lip.

“I know,” I said, bracing myself and wondering why, if it was so hard to work with him, I still didn’t want to lose this last tie to him. Probably because it was my last tie to him.

“Here’s what I’ve been wondering,” he began as Curt and two of the von Trapp boys pushed past us. Michael took my arm and pulled me into the auditorium and led me up the stairs to the very back, what we call the Peanut Gallery, where the seats are dark and empty. He sat down and I slid next to him into an aisle seat, my legs shaking like I had just run a four-minute mile, something Michael could probably do without breaking a sweat. He said, “Our projects
could
work together, you know. We’re not so far apart, I think.”

I should have been relieved, but I raised my eyes from his face to the darkness above because I had the feeling I was going to cry again. I must’ve been setting the world’s record for most pronounced case of PMS or something because I always seemed to be on the verge of tears lately—especially when I was within fifty feet of Michael.

Before I could find my voice, Diana came running up to us dressed in an adorable costume with a flared skirt, tight white bodice, and lederhosen, calling, “Costumes came in today! What do you think?” She twirled for us.

Michael swallowed deep in his throat and told her, “You look great, Di. Really.”

I nodded and forced out, “Yeah. Super cute. At least you don’t have to wear a habit and wimple, like Leigh and the other nuns.” Though, at the moment, I sort of wished she did.

Diana giggled and looked back toward the stage, where some of Leigh’s fellow nuns were trying on their costumes and attempting to twirl like Diana had but getting very little swirl out of their black robes. She turned back to us and looked at Michael with her perfect blue-green doll’s eyes, round and shiny.

“So, Michael,” she sing-songed. “That thing we were talking about earlier … ?”

Michael shifted in his chair a bit and said, “I haven’t forgotten,” then ducked his head for a moment, as if embarrassed.

“You promise? I gotta run! George, I’ll keep an eye on Leila and Andy for you. They want to know if they can finish up the clouds on the mountain backdrop?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Put them to work. But watch Andy with anything breakable.” Hands shaking, I tried to pick up my bag from the floor, but it seemed to be glued there.

Diana bounced away as I felt like all of the air had been knocked out of my lungs. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see Michael’s face, saying, “Look, I know it’s not going to work, our project, the same way you and I were never going to work. You’re a reasonable, moderate, Alexander Kerensky kind of guy and I’m Sofya Perovskaya, a half-baked Bolshevik. Like you said yourself, I get fired up about stuff and at crunch time, I’m totally ineffective.” I sighed, rubbing my clammy palms on the knees of my jeans. “I throw bombs that don’t go off. Or just blow up in my face. Like both of my feminist crusades on behalf of Cassie. Kaboom. You get things done, though. And you’ll get the project done better with someone else.”

He frowned, brows knit together in confusion. I wondered if he could tell that I had been talking about something besides our project—our relationship, past and present. We sat in silence for a long couple of seconds before I collapsed back into the hard back of the theater seat, utterly defeated. But at least I had done the right thing in letting him off the hook with our project.

Michael leaned back, too, his head tipped very close to mine.

“Is that what you think, George? That we are irretrievably far apart?” he asked, and I could barely hear him above the band tuning up and the nuns shouting about their ugly, itchy habits.

“Yeah. Don’t you? We can’t even study together in the same kitchen.”

I felt his eyes on me, and when I looked over, he seemed to be searching for something on my face, his eyes so intense I forgot how to breathe.

He leaned in even closer now, still frowning like he was thinking very, very hard, and asked, “You’re not still upset about my letter in
The Alt
, right?”

“No! I was, yeah, but you were right to do what you did by organizing the other teams in protest.” I laughed quietly, bitterly. “You were the better revolutionary, Kerensky. I’m not going to change the world. I am not going to dismantle male privilege. Or the meat industrial complex on my own. I should just stop trying.”

He was so close now I could practically feel the curls on his forehead brush against the striped headband I’d put on rather than get up early enough to wash my hair. I regretted that choice so much at the moment. When he reached a finger and brushed a strand of hair off of my chin, I stopped breathing altogether and waited for the rest of my autonomic nervous system to collapse with it.

“No,” he said quietly. “You should never stop trying.”

I sat there, dazed and trying to swallow the ping-pong ball that had formed in my throat, looking at him as he sat there looking at me—until Ms. Duvall called my name so abruptly I leaped out of my seat into the aisle.

“I’ll … be right there!” I managed to choke out. I felt very hot in the face and very light in the head when Michael grabbed his bag and slid out to the aisle.

“I have to go, too, but I’ll talk to you later, okay?” he said. I nodded and he walked away, waving to Diana, who returned the wave like she was flagging down a taxi in the rain, but he stopped at the auditorium’s main doors to look back at me. He nodded, once, then disappeared into the hallway.

I remained stuck in the aisle until I could trust my legs to carry me to the stage below, hoping that the whole talk about our project had not been about our project at all.

17 
Unintentional Experiments in Torture

Later, I left Gary in charge of the other von Trapp kids as they finished the ersatz Alps so I could add some white paint to the gazebo we had fashioned to go over a stage in the “town square” for one of the final scenes of the show. The kids had grown to love Gary as much as they loved Diana, but I kept watch with one eye because Gary spent more time giving piggyback rides and letting Leila and Maddie touch his spikes than he did on monitoring their painting.

Diana interrupted my task, saying, “Hey, Georgia,” and putting a warm slim hand on my arm for a second. “Are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

She wrinkled her nose a little in her bunny-cute way and said, “Well, Michael is always telling me how feisty you are, how you take on the school administrators and bullies and the football team—and I’ve seen you do that, too. But lately … Well, where’s old fightin’ George!” She put up her fists and feigned a couple of punches like Mattel’s new Ultimate Fighting Champion Barbie. “You just seem to have lost your spark lately. Is … something wrong?”

A day earlier I’d have wanted to say,
Yeah. It’s a five-foot-two-inch woodland nymph with strawberry blond hair and a smile like the sunrise
. But my conversation in the Peanut Gallery had given me a dose of hope.

“It’s that obvious, huh?” I said instead, and I saw something flicker in Diana’s eyes and I remembered. She’d been through a lot. In the last year she had seen her father embroiled in an ugly public legal battle that would probably send him to prison, a scandal I would know more about if I spent more time paying attention to the world around me and less time paying attention to myself. She’d lost her home and her school and probably spent most evenings with her mother huddled over bowls of Kraft mac and cheese and wondering what the hell happened to her. She didn’t deserve any of that. She deserved much better than what life had given her lately, but she wasn’t wallowing in her sadness, unlike me. And here she was now, trying to make me feel better. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I need to get over myself. Like, fifty feet over myself—not that that makes any sense.”

She laughed and began, “Listen, I was talking to Michael the other day and I said —” But she was cut off by a wail from behind us and the sudden appearance of Leila, who was swatting my knees with her fists and hopping up and down yelling, “Georgiaaaaaa!
Andy spilled blue paint
. All. Over. The. Stage.”

I turned to see Gary helplessly mopping a large pool of paint with some newspapers we’d used to protect the stage. I raced over to help and we got most of it, except for a stubborn patch of blue that wouldn’t be mopped up. Unless the drama club planned to feature a lake in all of their subsequent productions, we were in trouble.

“Aw, shit, I mean ‘crap,’ Georgia, I’m sorry,” Gary said.

I could see that Andy was trying really hard not to cry so I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s okay. It was an accident. We’ll figure out a solution.”

Diana reappeared with a roll of paper towels and then Spencer showed up, carrying a bottle of soda. That’s when inspiration hit.

“Can I have that?” I asked, pointing at his Coke, and he shrugged a shoulder and handed it to me. I poured some onto the stain and within seconds it started eating through the paint—right through the varnish and into the wood, so I began frantically sopping it all up with the paper towels.

“Wicked!” Andy yelled at my impromptu chemistry experiment and the other kids squealed with joy.

“Georgia to the rescue!” Gary laughed. “How did you think of that?”

I shrugged, but I was relieved that I not only solved the problem but had proven to myself that I had a functioning brain in my body, thanks to Diana’s unknowing reminder that the sun hardly rose and set on my problems alone.

“Well, I figured if soda eats the enamel off your teeth … ”

Spencer made a horrified face and began wiping off his teeth with one finger and all the kids laughed.

“You really are a master thespian,” I said in appreciation of his pantomime.

“And you’re a genius, even if you have ruined Coke Zero for me forever,” he said as he jumped off the lip of the stage to meet Ms. Duval, who had come into the auditorium and begun clapping her hands to get our attention.

When I found myself smiling for the first time in a while, Diana asked, “Does this mean Fightin’ George is back?” giving me a little one-arm hug.

“Maybe Problem-Solving George has been born. And it’s about time,” I said, rolling my eyes, but I was smiling, too.

“That’s way better than Morose George,” Gary agreed and I had to wonder exactly how pathetic a creature I had been and for how long.

“What does morose mean?” Topher asked, and I let Gary explain it as he trooped the kids down to the front of the stage for Ms. Duval’s directions. I wanted to close up my own paint can before another accident happened. Then I returned to my kid-sitting duties, still smiling a little and resolved to be less self-involved after that, and not just because I didn’t want to see Andy or anyone else I was responsible for leave a swath of destruction in his wake.

***

The next day—the day before Thanksgiving vacation—we had history class first period, which was good, because I couldn’t wait to see if Michael and I really had been speaking obliquely about our relationship. Mrs. Parker treated us to a short quiz and then told us to spend the rest of the class time meeting with our project partner to finalize the material to turn in after break.

“So, Sofya,” Michael said, smiling and trying on a pretty terrible Russian accent, “here is what I zink. I zink you and I can be comrades in dees project after all.”

I blushed and rolled the tip of my pen along my notebook and tried to match his tone and accent when I said, “Really, Alexander?”

“What I was trying to say the other day, when we got interrupted in the auditorium … ” he began and then paused again as I shivered inside when I remembered being so close to him in the Peanut Gallery days before, his forehead nearly against mine, so close that I could have counted his long eyelashes if I’d had my eyes open. “ … Is that I
don’t
think we are so far apart, really. We
are
like Kerensky and Perovskaya, sort of, and that’s what’s going to be brilliant about this project: we’re going to look at social change from two different angles. We’ll present examples of people who want to work within the system, like Kerensky in keeping the Duma appointed by the Tsar, and people like Perovskaya, who want to wipe out the system entirely … What do you think?”

My heart squashed flat as a pancake as I realized that he really was talking solely about the school project, and probably had been yesterday, too. But I could be okay with that. After all, nothing had changed, right? I raised my eyebrows and thought for a while. “Yeah,” I said. “I think that can work.”

“Great! So we can work out a framework to put your work and mine together and decide the focus of our presentation over break?”