The Fall Musical (5 page)

Next to her, Brianna was already busy writing:

“I thought she was good,” Casey said.

“You haven't been to a Ridgeport audition before,” Brianna replied.

The next auditioner, Lori, sang a religious song that bounced off the walls, filling the auditorium. Then, while everyone just stared in awe, she sang a few bars of some Italian opera song.

Next was Corbin Smythe, who cracked everybody up with Gaston's song from
Beauty and the Beast
and went on to sing an incredibly sweet “Loch Lomond” in a Scottish accent.

Casey swallowed hard. She had always thought of herself as picky, but not like this.

“Casey? . . . Casey Chang?”

It took a moment for Casey to realize that Harrison was calling her name.

“That's you, girl,” Brianna reminded her.

“Can't be,” Casey said. “I signed up way at the bottom.”

“Damn, forgot to tell you.” Brianna slapped her forehead. “I saw your name all the way down there when Harrison gave me the sheet. There was a cross-out near the top, so I moved you up. I just figured you'd get it over earlier. That was okay, no?”

“No!” Casey cried out.

“Casey?” Harrison called out. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Casey squeaked. She rose from her seat on shaky legs. She felt like she wanted to throw up.

“Hey, want me to ask Harrison to change the slot?” Brianna offered.

Casey almost said yes, until she realized it would mean experiencing this awful feeling twice. Best to get it over with now. “It's . . . okay,” she said.

Brianna smiled and hugged her. “You go, girl. ‘You'll be swell . . . you'll be great.' Quick, what musical is that from?”

“I . . . don't have a photographic memory like you,” Casey replied numbly, staggering into the aisle.

As she slumped toward the stage, clutching her sheet music, Ms. Gunderson chirped, “What will you be singing for us?”

Casey had to read the song title to remind herself. “‘The Colors of the Wind'? From
Pocohantas
?”

Ms. Gunderson immediately began playing it . . . without the music. By heart. She
knew
it already. As Casey wobbled past the piano toward the stage, Ms. Gunderson was getting to the part in the music where Casey was supposed to start singing.

Right . . . now.

Crap.
The song had begun, and Casey hadn't even reached the stairs to the stage. What was she supposed to do—sing as she was climbing them?
Get up there—move, any way you can!
her brain screamed.

She lurched to the left and ran for the stairs. Her right foot caught on the bottom step, causing her left foot to thump down loudly on the second step.

“Are you okay?” asked Mr. Levin, rushing toward her. The way he was looking at her was easy to read: This girl is an accident waiting to happen.

“No rush, I'll vamp until you're ready,” Ms. Gunderson said cheerfully, playing the introduction over again.

Casey walked out to the center of the stage. She took a deep breath. She had practiced her song at least a hundred times. She had planned every facial expression, every gesture. She remembered what her drama teacher in Westfield had told her:
Don't move your eyebrows so much. Think of your eyes as spotlights, and stand still unless you have a reason to move
.

She glanced into the darkened audience and saw Brianna's shadow in the back, poised with a pencil. Suddenly Ms. Gunderson's notes sounded totally unfamiliar, like some ancient Icelandic folk chant. Casey took a breath, prayed for the right key . . . and squeaked. Loud. She felt as if someone had crawled inside her and sandpapered her throat. “C-can I start again?” she croaked.

“No problem, sweetie,” Ms. Gunderson said, vamping some more.

But at the moment she opened her mouth again, a scream rang out from backstage, followed by a loud
CRRRRRASHHH!

Charles leaped from his seat in the auditorium. “Charle-e-ettes!” he shouted. “Oh, good Lord, time out.” As he jogged onstage, he said to Casey, “Sorry, doll—at Ridgeport, half the drama is backstage. Go ahead. I'll listen from there.”

Vamp . . . vamp.

Casey started again. She sang the right words. She moved her eyes and her arms to the music. Sort of. The sound from her mouth seemed tiny and raw. It didn't help to hear the hiss of arguing voices coming from backstage. She couldn't bear to look at anyone, so she stared into the empty seats on the left side of the auditorium. This was torture. Nothing like yearbook. Answering questions, assigning tasks—
that
she could handle. Not this!

About halfway through, Ms. Gunderson started playing really softly, then not at all. Harrison was standing up, looking at her.

Casey's voice tailed off like a dying bird.

“Thank you,” Harrison said pointedly, as if he'd said it several times before. “That was great. Callbacks will be posted tomorrow.”

“You're welcome. I mean, thanks.”

That was it. The audition was over. One song. A
quarter
of a song.

Casey wanted to take it back. She wanted to rewind time, to before the backstage argument. To before Brianna had changed her sign-up. To before the collision with Dashiell. It wasn't fair. The cards had been stacked against her.

Harrison had called her “great.” But that's what he'd said to Royce, too. This must be another Ridgeport tradition. Lying to the Tone-Deaf and Talentless.

Brianna was writing something on her sheet. What was it?

Another toilet? A cesspool? An atomic bomb? There was no way Casey could face her on the way out.

Instead she ran backstage, hoping no one could see her burst into tears.

5

 

Charles snapped shut his cell phone. “Oh, please, people! You act as though I flooded the prop room on purpose, just to make you work!” he hissed at the pouting Charlettes, who were taking things out of the prop/costume room and listlessly dumping them on the backstage floor. This offended every one of the Five Senses of Charles Scopetta: Order, Loyalty, Style, Relentless Dedication, and Fun.

And when any of the Five Senses was violated, Charles was inclined to lash out. Which was a bad habit he had been working on, to the tune of expensive weekly visits with Dr. Eustis Fink the Useless Shrink. So, per Dr. Fink's instructions, he counted to three (internally) and said (calmly), “This is the theater, darlings. We go on. And”—he picked up a wig that had been dumped on the floor and looked like a dead possum—“we do
not
”—he hung up a military uniform that had been thrown over an armchair—“
MAKE A MESS
!”

The Charlettes were staring at him. With their slouches and slack, surly features, they resembled a Calvin Klein ad for the pimple set. Charles forced a smile. Everything seemed suddenly very quiet. It took him a moment to realize that the girl—Casey—had just finished her audition. Oh, lovely. He had barely heard her. He should have been out there with the other DC officers, but no, he had been busy text-messaging his shrink and dealing with the prima donna freshmen and sophomores who thought it was beneath them to clean up. This year's batch of Charlettes needed a training session. Boot camp. A spanking.
Something
.

“My fingers are schmutzy,” said Vijay.

“Okay, um, so where are these supposed to go?” said Ruby Dionne, holding two spiked World War I helmets.

“And where do we put these ostrich features?” asked a freshman named Dan Winston.

“Well, let's see . . . ” Charles began. “How about up your—”

With a
whoosh
, the backstage curtain opened, mercifully cutting off Charles's answer, and a blur of hair, shirt, and jeans rushed past him.

“Wrong exit, honey,” Charles called out. “Try again. With feeling.”

“Ggghhh . . . ” she replied, her voice strangled by tears, her body blocked by the mound of costumes and props that lay between her and the exit. It was Casey, the girl who had just auditioned. “Sorry,” she said, between jerking sobs. “S-sorry!”

Charles bolted up from the chair. She was upset. Damn, he
had
to curb the catty remarks. “No,
I'm
sorry,” he said, leading her toward the card table. “I'm a jerk, ask anyone here. Look, I take back what I said. You can use any exit you want, okay? You can use
two
exits—go out that door, come back in, and then use the one near the big room.”

Casey smiled a little. “That's . . . not why I'm upset.”

“That's a relief. For me. Doesn't do
you
a lot of good. Come and sit. We're having a crisis back here, too. Maybe we can share miseries.” Charles gestured to the table, but on each chair was a plastic but nonetheless surprisingly realistic World War I helmet, complete with tasseled spike pointing straight upward. “Ouch. We'll, uh, move them first.”

He handed her a handkerchief and swept aside two of the helmets. As they sat, she wiped her eyes. “Thank you for not laughing,” she said.

“Oh?” Charles said. “Is there a reason to laugh? Tell me, I
need
one.”

“I meant, at my audition?”

“Please!” Charles said in his best heartily scoffing voice. “You were way better than my first time. Why do you think I'm back here with these losers—because I love to fondle gowns soaked in sweat from 1993? Well, yes, but you should have heard
my
audition. Harrison nearly passed out during my ballad. The school nurse rushed in thinking I was dying of strangulation. So I read the handwriting on the wall. I found my bliss elsewhere.”

Casey smiled, her eyes slowly taking in the enormity of the mess. “And . . . this is it?”

“I design. That's what I do. I make things beautiful. This mess is something different. It's what happens when you lose a stage manager, the prop room floods, and your loyal underlings turn against you. Normally, we're very cuddly and milk-and-cookies back here.”

Casey smiled. Judging from the little gut that pooched over his belt, Charles had had much happy experience with milk and cookies. Somehow that made her feel at ease.

“Well, there's plenty of space to put things away while the room dries?” Casey said.

“Is that a question or a statement?”

Casey blushed. “Sorry. I do that sometimes when I'm nervous. The uplift. It's a statement? I mean, it's a statement! You can reorganize. You need to reorganize. Okay, I'm telling you. Reorganize.”

“Bossy thing, aren't you? I was thinking of a Dumpster. There's one out back, near the construction site for the new wing.” Charles grinned. “Which adds to the other two new wings that have been built during our lifetimes, and which, upon completion, will finally allow the school to fly away.”

Aha. A laugh. Casey was loosening up. She stood, picking up a few helmets. She eyed the fretwork of pulleys and taut vertical ropes against the wall and stacked the helmets snugly behind some of them. “How about here? By the time you need these ropes to raise and lower the backdrops, the prop room will be dry.” She picked up a fistful of empty hangers and hooked them onto a horizontal metal pipe just over her head. “This will hold a lot of weight. You can get the costumes off the floor.” She glanced at the Charlettes, who did seem pretty motley. “Um, can you guys give me a hand?”

As she began picking up the garments, Vijay, who had been leaning against the wall, scooped up a jacket or two. “She's cool,” he said to Charles.

“I'm about to faint,” Charles replied.

The other Charlettes pitched in to help, too. They found old boxes and vases and stuffed them with props. They made shelves out of music stands. They made a discard pile of old useless material.

Charles quietly sneaked away and scurried back into the audience. Back to his Drama Club audition duties.

“Everything okay back there?” Harrison whispered.

Charles nodded. “We are in very good hands.”

He sat back and listened—a Kelly Clarkson soundalike, a guy with a sweet high-pitched voice, a girl who speed-sang. Aisha, Jamil, Becky. All good. Charles liked auditions from this side of the stage. His dad used to say the eyes were the windows to the soul, but he was wrong. You could hide things with your eyes. Singing was being naked. Nothing hidden. Whoever you were—timid, brave, tender, tough, unsure, giving, selfish—it all came through when you sang, whether you wanted it to or not.

They were nearing the end of the list when Mr. Levin excused himself for a break.

Harrison was smiling. “This is great. I think we already have what we need.”

“Not yet,” Brianna said. “Just wait.”

“Meaning . . . ?” Harrison said.

“Meaning just wait,” Brianna shot back.

Harrison's smile tightened. “You know I hate secrets.”

“You know I am all about secrets,” Brianna said. “And this is why we adore each other,
vre
Harrison.”