He smells of soap and he’s standing just a little too close to me. He pushes the coat inside the locker and makes sure that the edges of the coat brush against the interior edges of the door. Now the coat can’t expand outward.
Then he closes the door quietly, grabs the combination lock, and closes it.
“See?” he says. “Magic.”
Then he smiles.
My skin gets even warmer. Does he know about the magic? Is he making fun of me? Because if he is, and I don’t realize it, I’ll look even stupider than I already do.
“Thanks,” I whisper, because Mom says that be-nice covers every situation, even the situations where someone is trying to make a fool out of you.
He hasn’t moved away from me. His smile brightens though. He has lovely brown eyes—not that blue that seems natural to the Johnson Family—and a little bit of stubble on his chin.
“You’re welcome. You’re Lise Johnson’s sister, right? The one that grew up overseas?” His smile fades and now he just looks intense. “I’m Jake Krueger. I have AP English across the hall from your Modern World History Class.”
My flush travels down my face to my neck and into my chest. I must look like a giant blonde tomato.
He clearly expects me to say something.
I manage, “I’m…um…Brittany.”
I forget about the last name for a minute because I’ve never had one before, and Johnson doesn’t feel like me.
“And you’re Lise’s sister?” he asks.
“Stepsister,” I say, hating the word. That makes me sound like those idiots from the Disney movies, the ones that Cinderella’s Wicked Stepmother loves and no one else does. (I’ve heard that the stepsisters are actually nicer than the real Cinderella, but I heard that from Lachesis, one of the original Fates, and I’m not sure I can trust her.)
“That explains why you look different.” He’s still too close, but I’m pressed against the locker and can’t move away without being impolite.
Still, I slid toward the middle of the corridor. “Thank you for the help.”
“Looks like you needed it,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a trick to the simplest things.”
Don’t I know it. And I don’t know any of the tricks.
“What do you got now?” he asks.
It takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about classes.
“Drama,” I say.
He smiles. “I bet you’re good at it.”
I shrug. I don’t say anything in drama class. I just listen. I took it because the principal and Mom thought it would be both familiar and easy for me, since the other classes are so different from anything I had back home. (Except math. Thank you, Athena.)
“I’ll walk you there,” he says.
I don’t move. I’m not sure I like the attention. “What’s your first class?”
“Study hall,” he says. “Stupid way to start the day. And today, I have an excused absence because I’m trying out for the basketball team. Maybe this year, I’ll make varsity.”
I know that varsity is a big deal, although I don’t know why. Leif talks about varsity all the time. He plays a bunch of sports.
“I don’t want to keep you from it,” I say.
“You’re not,” he says. “First bell hasn’t even rung yet.”
Dang.
“Do I make you nervous?” he asks.
I shrug. “I’m just not used to talking to people here. Usually, no one notices me.”
“Oh, people notice you all right,” he says. “They just can’t get up the nerve to talk to you.”
He glances over his shoulder at the other boys, who are still standing down the hall. One of them gives him a thumbs up, which makes me even more uncomfortable.
“Did you win a bet or something?” I ask, maybe a little too pointedly.
“I just figured I could help you.” His smile no longer reaches his eyes, and he’s still a little too close.
“Well, thank you,” I say again. I step sideways to get away from him.
“I’ll walk—”
“I’m okay,” I say. “Really.”
I put my head down and head toward the drama room, walking faster than I usually do. That whole experience made me uncomfortable, and I’m not sure why.
It didn’t feel like he was interested in me. It felt like he (and those other boys) have been watching me and waiting for the right moment to talk to me.
And they only seemed interested because they saw me around, not because I said something witty or they thought I seemed smart in class.
I round a corner, and finally look over my shoulder. He hasn’t followed me, thank heavens. Or if he has, I can’t see him, because there are like two dozen kids crammed into the hallway.
I’ve been concentrating so hard on getting away from him, I hadn’t even noticed the other kids and the noise and the laughter and the slamming lockers.
I feel really weird because he was just being nice, but the nice felt wrong somehow. Like the nice was a cover for something else. Plus he stood too close, and Artemis always says you should protect your personal space. Although her solution—elbowing someone who is too close (or stabbing them with a knife that she says you should carry at all times)—is probably too extreme.
Besides, he was nice. And why should anyone complain about nice?
I’m beginning to think there’s a lot more to nice than I’ll ever figure out.
I duck into the bathroom closest to the drama room. I comb my hair, which doesn’t look as bad as I expected it would, and pinch my cheeks, trying to put some color in them. I don’t wear makeup because Mom doesn’t approve. I doubt I would anyway, because I don’t know how to put it on. I used to spell it on, and I used to use magic to pile my hair on top of my head too.
All those things were easy once, and now they’re so hard I can’t even figure out how to do them half the time.
After I finish, I glance out the door to see if Jake Krueger followed me. I’m not sure why he freaked me out so bad, but he did. I just can’t put words on it.
I don’t see him, and the number of kids in the hall is getting pretty sparse. So I head to the drama room.
It’s behind the theater, near the music room. There are two elective drama classes every year. One’s for the real theater kids. They have to audition to get in. The other’s a “lunch class,” which I didn’t understand until Anna explained it to me. A lunch class isn’t a class held over lunch; it’s an easy class—as easy, I guess, as eating lunch.
I’m in the lunch class version. I thought it would be lame, but I like it. I never raise my hand to read out loud or anything because my accent makes me sound weird and everyone looks at me. But I do my drama homework first because I love reading the plays.
My seat is to the back on the door-side of the room, so I can escape as fast as possible. When I first got here, I picked seats like that in all of my classes because I was afraid I’d get lost in this big weird building. But now that I know my way around, I use the extra time to find different routes to my classes. I’m still trying to learn this place, and learn things about the people here, and going different directions instead of on the same path helps.
I’m almost to my seat when Mrs. Schmidt, the drama coach, pulls me aside. She’s a thin, dark-haired woman who wears her black hair in a bun on the top of her head. Today, she’s wearing a black sweater over black pants and ballet slippers. I know if I look, I’ll see boots underneath her desk. She wears the ballet slippers most of the time, and they allow her to move quietly through any room.
She’s startled me more than once.
“Miss Johnson,” she says in her deep, musical voice. “A word.”
My shoulders tense. I have no idea what she’s going to say to me. I get my homework done and I answer questions when she calls on me. I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, but as strange as this world is, I never really know.
She leads me to the room’s side door, which opens into backstage. She
once said she wanted to hold classes there, but the administration wouldn’t allow it.
Backstage feels magical to me. It smells of dust and sweat and makeup. Mrs. Schmidt keeps a light on the stage, which filters back here. She calls the light a “ghost light” to protect the theater, even though it’s pretty new as theaters go, and I wouldn’t expect the theater to have ghosts.
So, I’m not sure what she’s protecting the theater from, because she also laughs at herself, saying the theater is full of superstitions that go back to the ancient Greeks. When she said that the last time, she looked directly at me, as if she knew that I know a bunch of ancient Greeks.
Only they don’t seem ancient to me.
She eases the door closed, but doesn’t shut it all the way. Then she leads me deeper into the wings, near the pull cords for the heavy velvet curtains.
“You know that we’ve entered into some theater competitions, right?” she asks.
I had heard that, but didn’t know what it meant. Like so many things I don’t understand, I just ignored it.
“I think so,” I say.
“Well,” she says, her voice echoing in the empty theater, “these competitions are practice for the State Drama Competition, which we participate in every spring. I want my kids to be used to performing onstage.”
I nod. I have no idea what this means for me. I thread my fingers together.
“I entered us into a small regional competition before I knew all the rules.” She rolls her eyes. “They are one of those silly contests that make everyone perform the same bit of a play and then judge based solely on interpretation. Honestly, Miss Johnson, had I known this before, I never would have signed us up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
She smiles at me. The smile seems fond. I have no idea why she would look at me so very fondly. “You don’t know why I object to that, do you?”
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry.” That phrase is almost rote to me. I have learned that it works in a lot of conversations, especially since I usually don’t know anything about anything.
She looks at the stage, as if someone is performing on it right now.
“Well,” she says, “not only is it dull for the judges, it doesn’t let individual school departments shine. Not all of us have the talent to perform certain kinds of plays.”
“Oh,” I say, as if I understand, which I don’t.
Apparently, she can tell, because her gaze meets mine. It seems like she’s assessing me. Maybe she is. I have no idea how I can tell.
“We have a choice,” she says, “between a scene from Henry the Fifth and a scene from Doctor Faustus, by Marlowe. Both are challenging.”
I nod, hoping that I look like I’m following the conversation.
“But this is early in the year, and all of my drama club students who can handle Marlowe or Shakespeare are male.” Her gaze remains on mine. “Which is why I’m thinking about Doctor Faustus, quite frankly. It’s Act four, scenes one through four, the most famous section of the play. You know, the Helen section?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, ma’am.” I’m still not sure what this has to do with me.
Her eyebrows go up in surprise. “I would have thought with your European education you’d be familiar with both the Bard and Marlowe.”
I’m not even sure who the bard is or how he relates to plays. I thought bards were musicians in royal courts. But language has proven my Achilles’ heel in this Greater World, and I’m finally becoming smart enough to know it.
“I’m afraid not,” I say as politely as I can. “I was homeschooled.”
Mom taught me to say that. When she told me that meant I was taught at home by my family, I decided the description wasn’t that far off.
“Oh, hmm,” Mrs. Schmidt says, “you’d think they would have covered Shakespeare at least.”
“I was raised mostly in Greece,” I say. Karl told me to add that when someone has expectations of me because, he says, no one knows anything about modern Greece. (Including me.)
“Well,” Mrs. Schmidt waves her right hand dismissively. “All of that is neither here nor there. We need a full cast for the act they’ve chosen from Henry, and a mostly male cast for the section from Faustus. Normally, I would protest the gender-specificity, but my hands are tied. The scene from Faustus is the one with Helen of Troy. I take it you know who she was?”
I do. I know that my sister Athena hates Helen, my stepmother Hera won’t let anyone even mention her name, and they both blame Aphrodite for the Trojan War, when Daddy says they should blame Eris. (The Fates finally, finally, managed to get her to pay for all her crimes not too long ago. Before me, Tiff, and Crystal became the Interim Fates.)
Helen died a very long time ago, but it’s almost like she’s still alive at our house. Well, our house, back at home. On Mount Olympus.
But I can’t say any of that. So I say, “The woman that started the Trojan War?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Schmidt looks pleased. “ ‘The face that launch’d a thousand ships. And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.’ That quote actually comes from Faustus, did you know that?”
“No, ma’am,” I say. She’s acting like I should know the quote, and obviously, I don’t.
“Helen is an important part of the scene,” Mrs. Schmidt says. “She doesn’t have a line, and yet her appearance is the center of the play.”
I bite my lower lip. Mrs. Schmidt is going somewhere with this.
“I would like you to play her,” Mrs. Schmidt says.
“Me?” I ask. “I’ve never been in a play.”
Mrs. Schmidt puts out her hands in a stay-calm gesture. It doesn’t work. My heart is starting to pound.
“You won’t have to do much,” Mrs. Schmidt says. “You’ll walk on stage and be a subject of discussion. I’ll teach you how to react to everything said, and then, at the end of the scene, you’ll walk off with Dr. Faustus.”
On stage. In front of everyone. All those people who’ve been staring at me. Yeah, like I’m going to do that.
“You have better choices than me,” I say.
Mrs. Schmidt glances at the stage again, as if she can imagine someone else on it. Or me on it. Or something like that.
“I really don’t have better choices,” she says to the stage. Then she turns her attention back to me. “Have you looked at the girls in my drama club? Most are either too small, or won’t clean up well, no matter how much makeup I put on them. And the rest are a bit too heavy to play the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Mom would say that’s sexist, that beauty is different everywhere. But Helen was slender, in that athletic ancient way that so many statues got made of.
“They’ll be fine in the role,” I say. “Who knows what ancient Greeks look like?”
Mrs. Schmidt tilts her head at me. “We’re not going for historical accuracy here,” she says. “I need someone who would be credible as Helen of Troy.”
“Not me,” I blurt. “I look nothing like her.”
Mrs. Schmidt grins. “And you know that how? You just said no one knows what ancient Greeks look like.”
I can’t tell her how I know that, because then I have to discuss my family, specifically Daddy. He has often remarked on how much Tiffany looks like Helen. I used to think he would say that to piss off Hera, but Athena once told me it was true. Athena says Helen had skin the rich color of teak, black eyes, and matching dark hair. Athena says all of the poets got it wrong, because they wanted to describe what they considered to be beauty rather than what really was beauty.
“You realize that your statement isn’t true,” Mrs. Schmidt says.
My breath catches. How does she know what Helen looked like?
“We do know very well what the ancient Greeks looked like. They left a lot of representative art. I suspect your coloring is off—I have no idea how you survived the Mediterranean sun—but you have that willowy form that the ancients prized.”
I survived the sun with magic. I had the
worst sunburns off and on all summer, and Mom says the sun isn’t fierce in Northern Wisconsin, not like it is back home.
I had had no idea my skin was magicked until I came here, and didn’t have my magic any longer.
“Um, I’m sure there’s lots of girls who do,” I say. I try to think about the girls who aren’t in the drama club. A few cheerleaders come to mind, and so do several members of the girls’ basketball team.
“But that doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Schmidt says. “What I need is a girl in the part who will command attention and whom the audience will believe is worth Faustus losing his one shot at redemption over.”
I have no idea who this Faustus is, but I know he had nothing to do with the original story. Paris is the one who fell for Helen, not Faustus, whoever he is. But I don’t correct Mrs. Schmidt. I’ve discovered the level of misinformation in this world about the history of my family is astronomical.
“Not me,” I say. “Seriously. I can think of half a dozen girls who’d be better, and they’re not even in drama.”
“That’s part of the problem,” Mrs. Schmidt says. “I want one of my people in the role, not someone that I have to rope into it.”
I know “rope” in this context doesn’t mean an actual rope. I made that mistake weeks ago.
“Maybe you should just ask,” I say.
Mrs. Schmidt’s smile fades. “I am asking.”
Me. She’s asking me. Again.
My heart is really hammering hard.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” I say. “I’d rather not.”
Mrs. Schmidt makes a face at me. “I can’t think of anyone who would be more perfect than you. Tell me you’ll consider it.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I just got a job and—”
“We can work around that,” she says. “After all, you won’t have a speaking role.”
Then she leans forward just a little. Why is everyone standing so close to me today?
“You did take my class because you’re interested in drama, right? Not because you heard it was easy?”
My stupid cheeks heat up again. They betray me before I can even open my mouth.
Brittany Bends Page 7
