The Fall Musical

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Charles stepped forward with what looked like a scroll. He unraveled it to the ground, a ridiculous number of loose-leaf pages stapled end to end. “Whereas,” he announced, “we the Drama Club have put our feet in mouth one too many times without watching where we've stepped—”

“Charles, that's nauseating,” Reese said.

“Nobody edited this!” Brianna called out.

“And whereas,” Charles continued, “we have managed, without meaning to, to chase away one of the nicest, most talented and clear-thinking human beings in our school . . . and whereas, she has, in world-record time, proven said talent beyond a doubt and better than anyone ever seen by the gathered members hereto—”

“Herewith,” Harrison corrected him.

“Herewhatever,” Charles said. “We do hereby offer outright, without competition and by acclamation, to Casey Chang the position of Stage Manager of the Drama Club of Ridgeport High.”

They fell silent and looked up at her with wide, tentative eyes.

One by one they dropped to their knees. “Please?” Harrison asked.

“It's the most important job in the club,” Charles said. “It's the person who runs everything.”

Begging. They were begging her to take this job with no experience. At
Ridgeport
.

Read all the Drama Club books:

The Fall Musical
The Big Production

SPEAK
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Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007

Copyright © Peter Lerangis, 2007

All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C TALO,GING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lerangis, Peter.
Drama club : book 1 : the fall musical / by Peter Lerangis.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-440-68436-4

Prologue

THEY SAY IF YOU STARE AT THE PHOTOS LONG enough, you'll see yourself. You can't miss them. They cover an entire wall of the school lobby, every year since 1907. The ones way up top are hard to see, but they're all boys in togas, animal skins, and drag. Often a mysterious blurry bear lurks in the background, supposedly the ghost of a murdered kid but probably some forgotten joke. It was a boys' school then, and when girls showed up a couple of decades later, the Masque & Wig Society became the Drama Club.

Every few years a newspaper will do a feature on this. They'll say most high schools have walls for sports teams, debate teams, math squads, etc. But, they'll conclude, Ridgeport High is “not most high schools.” And they're right. Okay, if you look
real
hard, you'll find a small dusty cabinet near the boys' room that contains a few trophies and a list of track records intact since Lamar Williams high-jumped 6' 1¼” in 1985. I guess Kyle Taggart's football records will be added someday, but no one seems to be rushing (ha ha). But the lobby wall, the school's prime show-off spot, is reserved for something else, something much more important.

Ridgeport is the kind of place where Stephen Sondheim is sung in the hallways,
The Light in the Piazza
is on everyone's playlists, and you can spark a heated argument by mentioning the name Martin Pakledinaz. (He's a costume designer. I didn't know that either.) Kids give impromptu concerts in the halls, and teachers sing backup. Even Mr. Ippolito, the custodian, does a mean doo-wop second tenor and can recite Shakespeare. He keeps the photos spotless. Especially the Shrine, a glassed-in photo display of the five RHS alums who went on to win Tony Awards.

Brianna Glaser swears she was, in a previous life, the girl playing in
Annie Get Your Gun
in a 1966 photo; the girl doesn't resemble her at all, but it's hard to disagree with Brianna. Harrison Michaels is the guy playing Zeus in some 1931 play. Reese Van Cleve is, of course, the babe in 1989's
Pajama Game
with the 300-watt smile, long legs, and big boobs—a girl who, depending on who you talk to, went on to become a backup singer for Madonna or an Internet porn star.

Me? I didn't pay much attention to the photos at first. For one thing, there were no Asian faces for, oh, seventy years. Brianna insisted that didn't matter and that I was being close-minded, but I think I'm a realist. People see what they want to see. I mean, we all dream of a perfect place, where everyone
gets
you. Where you can be exactly who you want to be and not worry about making an ass of yourself or pleasing someone else. Some people find it in teams and social cliques. Some have to travel to an imaginary wizard school or through a hidden wardrobe or on a Kansas tornado. In Ridgeport, people find it in the Drama Club.

As for me, I had to work a little harder. A few weeks after I turned sixteen, in another life in Connecticut, everything changed. Nothing I knew or believed made any sense. On that day I stopped being Kara Chang. I was no longer the good girl, the Organized One, the class president and yearbook editor who could do Whatever She Put Her Mind To. After the school year ended, Mom and I moved away. We had to. Dad probably would have wanted us to stay, but he'd walked out on us three years earlier, so his opinion didn't count. So, of all the places to move, why did Mom choose Ridgeport, Long Island? I don't know, probably something like water quality or school SAT scores or the availability of good nursing jobs. I don't think it was because of the magic that's here. That was for me to find out. And I did. I realized that in a town where the stage was reality, I could become a new person.

Of course, I couldn't go too far with this. Mom would have had a heart attack if I'd called myself Ethel or Bernadette or Idina, so I stretched to the limits of my available options. I introduced myself to people as K.C., which isn't exactly a lie, but just as I hoped, they spelled it the way it sounds.

And that's how I became who I am today, Casey.

I became one of those people who need to escape themselves to find themselves. Only I didn't do it via a trip to Oz or Hogwarts or Narnia. I didn't even expect to do it through the Drama Club.

Then I ran into the hurricane known as Brianna Glaser.

Prepare Ye

September 4

1

24 . . . 15 . . . 4.

Casey spun the lock for the third time and pulled on the locker handle. For the third time, nothing happened. She smiled, tried not to look like an idiot, and checked the locker number against the assignment sheet. Yup—217.

The warning bell clanged loud enough to wake a corpse, but no one seemed to notice. Three minutes to homeroom. Later for the locker. She gave the handle one last sharp, futile yank.

Thwack
.

The door lurched open, throwing her off balance. It smacked loudly against the locker next to it, causing at least four hundred heads to turn. Casey's backpack slid down her left arm, and as she twisted around in an effort to save it, her belly popped out over her pants, and for some reason she was reminded of yeasty bread rising in a pan. It had not been a great summer for weight, and as she now had a rapt and unwanted audience, she pulled down her shirt, and the pack flung itself onto the floor, sliding across the tiles.

“Fumble!”

A blond boy the size of a Dumpster thumped after the pack, scooping it up. He cradled it briefly, lurching from side to side, faking out no one in particular, then tossed the backpack to another Supersizer, who scrunched it into a roughly oblong shape and lifted it as if to pass.

From behind, a third hulk grabbed the pack roughly and turned toward Casey. Oh, great. Now what? Lessons in Humiliation 101, and her career at Ridgeport wasn't even three minutes old. She thought about the open locker. With a little sucking in, she could squeeze inside, pull the door shut, and stay there the rest of the semester.

Until Hulk Number Three came closer, and she got a good look at him.

“Is this yours?”

He was looming over her now, about nine feet tall. Or maybe six feet three. His shoulders strained the seams of a button-down striped Abercrombie shirt that hung loose over a navy T. Possibly jeans, too, but Casey didn't pick up that detail because she was stuck at the upper half, specifically the eyes, which were blue—well, in the sense that freedom and joy and dancing in a field of wildflowers could be called blue. He cocked his head to the left, causing a shock of sandy-blond hair to fall across his face, which seemed less a motion than a change in the weather, a sudden spring breeze.

He held out the backpack toward her. “Sorry about my friends,” he said. “They're animals.”

Casey moved her lips, attempting to respond, but no words came out. By the time she could try again he was gone. She watched him bound down the hallway, his head floating above the sea of shorter people.

“Thanks,” she squeaked belatedly, to no one.

“Okay, now, breathe.”

The voice startled Casey. It belonged to a girl from a locker to her left. She was the type Casey's dad used to call “a tall drink of water.”

“Huh?” Casey said.

“He has that effect on everyone,” the girl continued. “Girls, guys, teachers. He can't help it. Brianna.”

It took Casey a second to realize the girl was naming herself and not the guy.

“Kar—Casey,” she replied, pulling back her old name and cringing at the fact that she had to.

“Make up your mind.” Brianna laughed, her eyes crinkling into triangles and her mouth showing a little too much gum line, the only flaws in a face that was otherwise all cheekbone framed by blond ringlets. “
His
name, in case you were wondering, and I know you were, is Kyle. Kyle Taggart. Where are you from?”

“Westfield,” Casey said, adding as an explanation, “that's in Connecticut.”

“Thank you, Carmen Sandiego. Who do you have for homeroom?”