Over the Top

by Alison Hughes

  CHAPTER 19

  Nowhere to Hide

  It’s one thing to have Madame Ducharme set out her great, exciting vision for the play. But it’s a whole other thing to have to lie on the dusty stage floor during rehearsals pretending to be a magical road with some kind of “presence.”

  I kept telling myself it would get better when Mom had finished my costume and I had something to hide behind. I made sure Mom talked to Madame Ducharme so she knew what to make. She came home from the parents’ meeting very excited about the “vision” for my role, hauling in acres of yellow material from the fabric store down to her sewing machine.

  “It’s going to be phenomenal, Deev! An amazing costume!”

  I scrambled down the stairs after her.

  “I’m going to be able to walk in it, right, Mom? Because that’s super-important. There are stairs up and down the sides of the stage, and I have to move from side to side when I’m onstage. I also have a lot of turns. It won’t be tight at the ankles like the mermaid tail?”

  “Oh, no. Long, loose. Flowing.”

  I relaxed.

  “What an inspiring lady Madame Ducharme is,” Mom said. “This production is going to be so big, so lavish, you could be performing it on Broadway! And I joined the parent committee doing the sets!” she said. “We’re doing exciting things with long mirrors and mirrored tile. They’re supposed to ‘reflect the audience back at themselves.’ At least, I think that’s what Madame Ducharme said. Something like that. Poetical. Anyway, it’ll sure be a sparkly show!”

  As I listened to her, I had a cowardly yearning for the slapped-together plays at my old school. Where kids stayed in at lunch recess painting messy sets on cardboard refrigerator boxes the custodian hauled from an appliance shop. Where people used old Halloween costumes and dress-up clothes for their parts. For example, Warren Pitts just wore a big, yellow mustache (that he had to keep pressing back onto his upper lip) and a long, fuzzy orange sweater as his costume for the Lorax. At my old school, kids forgot their lines and it was no big deal because somebody else just helped them with a few whispered words until they caught the thread again.

  Yes, those plays were lame. Thrown together. Small-time. Probably very, very painful to watch. But at least they’d been fun. They’d been ours. And, more important, they were almost stress-free. Zero pressure.

  I was already stomach-churningly nervous about this gala production. Warren Pitts would never have gotten a lead role in this school play, and if he did (by some miracle), he’d have been stuffed into an expensive, professional-grade, orange fake fur Lorax onesie before you could say “Truffula Tree.”

  The number of people involved in this Wizard of Oz play was daunting. There were almost seventy kids performing, another group of Tech Club kids working the theater’s complicated sound and lights system, a team of hyper-perfectionist parents doing sets and costumes, and several teachers assisting Madame Ducharme. Mom was right. A big, over-the-top, Broadway-scale production. And there was very little laughing or joking around during rehearsals. It was all business once we had each gotten a full script of the play.

  “Know the whole play, but especially you must know your own role. Back to front. Up and down,” said Madame Ducharme firmly. “I will ’ave no patience for people forgetting their lines. Learn them. Recite them. Word by word by word.”

  On paper, The Yellow Brick Road wasn’t such a bad part. I only had to sing the “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” song, which I knew already and, even if I didn’t, was so simple and mindlessly repetitive that I’d have to have been a total slacker not to be able to memorize it pretty quickly. Not exactly rocket science. I had other lines, too, but not many. The Road wasn’t much of a talker.

  But because I was onstage during Dorothy meeting the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, basically leading them all the way to Emerald City, there were a lot of stage directions for my part. Where I was supposed to be, whether I swept the road left or right, and which side of the stage I exited. Lots of stuff I had to remember. I honestly didn’t know if I could do it the way Madame Ducharme wanted it done. I hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed in me.

  But the real problem, the huge problem, with my role was that I was onstage with Miranda all the time. Or, as she probably saw it, she was onstage, but I had to be there, too.

  I have to be honest, though. Miranda was an amazing Dorothy. It pains me to say it, because meanly, secretly, I hoped she wouldn’t be. But she is a born actress, completely losing herself in the role, so that at times you really, truly believed she was Dorothy, swept up in a tornado and desperate to find her way home. I liked Miranda waaaay better when she was Dorothy.

  And her voice. When she sang, everyone in the theater went still and silent and just listened. Crystal clear, beautiful, and so alive. It gave me goosebumps. It was as if her flat, dead, daytime, non-theater voice belonged to somebody else, as if she were saving up all the emotion for her Dorothy voice. As if she were two separate people.

  But rehearsal after rehearsal, I came to realize that theater-Miranda wasn’t completely different than regular-Miranda. In the midst of a big production where we were all supposed to work together, she was still astonishingly selfish. She threw herself into her role, sure, but when she wasn’t actually talking or singing, she resented not being the center of attention.

  Especially when I was. She did not want me there, and she let me know it.

  She started out with small acts of sabotage. She would look away as if completely bored, and fidget or pick at her nails. I was too busy flushing and singing and stammering out my lines to care, but I started to notice her when I calmed down. Then her distractions became bigger: she’d sigh or hum or swing her arms or pretend to be practicing a few dance steps. Just enough so that I got thrown off the rhythm of the song or lost the train of my lines.

  She really took it up a notch during my only solo song—“Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” It became a total nightmare. I guess Miranda was still bitter that I “stole” her song, as she so inaccurately hissed at me during one rehearsal. She hummed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” all the way through my song, just loud enough for me to hear, but not so loud that Madame Ducharme, sitting in the stalls, could hear. I had to frantically block out the humming while trying to sing. I tried to ignore her, but it was almost impossible.

  Miranda watched me like a hawk. If I wasn’t exactly where I was supposed to be (or, sometimes, even if I was), she’d stop everything, call me out, and make a big deal of it. She’d groan in frustration and snap: “Road is supposed to be stage left!” Or “Road is in my way!” Or “How can I dance with Road right here?”

  Never “Diva.” Never even “you” or “she.” Always “Road.” Or “It.” Not a person, not a human being. Deliberately. I knew it was pathetic, it was so pathetic, but it still bothered me. A lot.

  Today’s rehearsal was especially, particularly dismal. Miko (who was the Tin Man. No heart; pretty accurate) and Kallie (the Scarecrow. No brain; accurate again) were onstage with Miranda and me when Caleb shuffled in from stage right. He was the Cowardly Lion and was actually really funny in the role.

  “Who… who…” he started his lines, cringing comically and jumping away from us in fear, landing with a big thump.

  A wooden tree prop near me wobbled and fell backward from the impact. I tried to catch it as it fell but missed.

  “Oh my God!” Miranda stopped everything. “Road is so clumsy!” she wailed over to Madame Ducharme. “It’s throwing all of us off!”

  “She didn’t—” Caleb started to say.

  “Shut up,” hissed Miranda.

  “Remind me again why Road is here at all, Professor,” she called angrily. “This scene, every scene actually, would be better without Road. We could just find some yellow carpet or something.”

  “You would like to be the director, too, Miranda?” Madame Ducharme sighed. “Calm, people, calm. We all work together. Miranda, a little less drama; Diva, perhaps a littl
e more carefulness? There, it is over.”

  My face felt hot. It wasn’t worth complaining. Madame Ducharme wouldn’t believe me.

  I looked at Miranda. Her angry, triumphant eyes glared back.

  It’s not over, I thought.

  And it wasn’t.

  Miranda continued her covert sabotage. She’d shoulder me out of the way, even though I was where I was supposed to be. If I struggled with a line, I’d look up and she’d be looking at me with a smirk. She’d sigh when I started singing, and hum through the song. She took to lightly tapping her ruby-red slipper to throw me off the beat.

  And she did all these things when no one else was close enough to hear. Only she and I knew she was doing it.

  And that’s the thing about being onstage with someone. Or, I guess, being bullied generally.

  There’s nowhere to hide.

  CHAPTER 20

  A Smash Hit (Literally)

  The rehearsals went on. And on and on and on.

  They went on to the point where, as Shaya said, “I will seriously throw up if I ever have to watch this show again. Like ever. In my whole, entire life.”

  We were eating our lunches outside under my tree. My days of backpack rummaging were gone. Shaya and I were officially friends and ate our lunches under the tree every day. Jeremy and Spencer often came by as well.

  “Honestly,” she said, “I’m one of like a thousand Munchkins. I run in holding up my sign and yell a bit with all of them about our Munchkin revolution. We’re onstage for three, four minutes. Then it’s over and I have to watch the rest of the play for the millionth time.”

  I knew how she felt. I was desperate for the play to be over and done with. I hadn’t told her about Miranda wrecking every scene for me. I hadn’t told anyone. It would all have sounded so pathetic and small: “So this girl clears her throat or taps her ruby-red shoe when I’m just starting to sing. And sometimes she totally ignores me, but sometimes she stares at me hard and even smiles a little! And she knows and I know—only the two of us know—that she’s being mean, and that I feel trapped and helpless. And she knows I dread being up there with her, and it gets worse when I give her any reaction at all, and it never, ever stops…”

  Who would believe that? Who would believe mind games like that? I probably wouldn’t if it wasn’t actually happening to me.

  Anyway, rehearsals intensified the week before the show—three during the week and one on the weekend. Madame Ducharme was increasingly snappish and irritable, which made all the actors more on edge. The lighting in the theater short-circuited. A Munchkin twisted her ankle and had to go to the hospital for an x-ray. The girl with the really good scream (like, I’m talking horror-movie good screamer), whose only role was to be offstage and scream when the farmhouse supposedly landed on the Wicked Witch of the East, lost her voice. You can only let loose so many blood-curdling screams, I guess, before the old throat shuts down. Anyway, a girl with a far inferior scream got put in the part. These things all seemed small, but the small things added up.

  It seemed like the more we rehearsed the more problems happened. The play got worse, not better. Bumpier, not smoother.

  Mercifully, May 28 finally came around. The night of the performance. The very, very end of the Yellow Brick Road.

  Mom had made an incredible costume for me. It was a long, loose gown, almost like a ghost costume, only yellow. There was a round hole for my face, and slits for my arms, but otherwise, the costume trailed far behind me when I walked, like a long, long cape. She’d Sharpied the black outline of bricks all over the costume, bigger at the end of the cape, getting smaller as they got near my head.

  “Perspective! See?” She’d shown me in the mirrors at home. It was a neat illusion: when my back was turned, when I was walking away from the audience, the road looked like it was receding into the distance.

  I wore a yellow long-sleeved shirt and leggings underneath. And, because I begged for it, Mom found some yellow face paint online. I wanted to be almost completely invisible. No Diva, just Yellow Brick Road.

  The cast was supposed to arrive at school an hour early. I decided to put on my costume at home because it involved a lot of struggling and material management. Mom helped me into the costume and did my face paint. She even bricked over my face with eyeliner.

  “Wow,” I said, for once grateful for those full-length mirrors by the stairs. “That looks great. You did an awesome job on this costume, Mom.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, looking relieved. “I’m so happy you like it! I have a great—”

  “No, no,” I interrupted her, holding up a hand. “If it’s a great feeling you have, I’m glad. Good. But just don’t say it. No great feelings, Mom. No warm-fuzzies. Just tell me to break a leg. That’s what actors tell each other.”

  “Break a leg, honey,” she laughed. “You go break both of them.”

  Dad walked me over to the school, carrying the back of my long costume like a bridesmaid at a royal wedding. People stared out the window of a car that drove by, and I giggled at how ridiculous that weird, long yellow brick ghost and her helper must look.

  “How you doing up there?” Dad called.

  I turned my yellow face. “I’m okay. Nervous.”

  “Curb coming up. There you go. Me too, actually. I’m nervous too. It’ll be fine. Fun!” Dad was trying very hard to be positive. Brave, even. I knew, though, that being in a play was the very last thing in the world he would choose to do. His nervousness was all for me.

  As we passed Miranda’s house, there was a burst of loud shouting. Then a door slammed. Hard.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Dad. He shook his head and shrugged a little.

  “Not a great situation there,” he said in a low voice. “Not a happy house, Mom says.”

  We crossed the street to the school.

  “I can take it from here, Dad,” I said, once we were inside. “Thanks for the help.”

  “You sure? Dust bunnies down the hall…”

  “This is St. George, Dad. No dust bunnies allowed.”

  “Haha. You look great. Very Yellow Brick Road-ish.”

  “Excellent.”

  We looked at each other. He ran a hand over his thinning hair. I could see him struggling for words.

  “Almost over,” he said. “Almost summer vacation, Deev. Then you can relax. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “So, see you from the audience!”

  “See you from the stage! I better get going here.”

  “Yep, you betcha. Get out of here.” He gave me an awkward hug and pulled away with a smear of yellow face paint on his blue shirt. He gave a little wave and turned, walking quickly away.

  I swooshed my way down to the theater.

  There is nothing quite like the opening night of a play. There should be a word for the feeling, although maybe there are too many things all going on at once for it to fit into just one word. I’ll have to think about that for my book.

  The actors are all in costume and makeup, and there’s a backstage atmosphere of suppressed excitement and nervousness. Some people get quiet, some get loud, some get panicky, some get chatty, some get annoying. I was, not surprisingly, one of the quiet ones. The play, which seemed stale and boring at rehearsal yesterday, started to take on an exciting life of its own, and seemed fresh and new.

  And there were the sounds from the other side of the curtain. Sounds of families and friends and students and teachers talking, laughing, coming in, settling down, taking their seats. There was a cheerful, expectant feeling in the audience, with maybe a little simmering nervousness thrown in.

  I hiked up my costume and waddled over to the curtain where a bunch of other kids were peeking out at the audience. The theater was almost full of what seemed like an incredible number of people. I searched the crowd near the front, sure that my family would have come early to get good seats. Sure enough, there they were in the third row—Mom and Dad and Hero
. Dad was still wearing the yellow-smeared shirt. Mom and Dad were holding hands, and both of them were laughing at something Hero was saying.

  “My family is basically taking up the whole left side of the theater,” whispered Shaya, giggling. She looked cute in her Munchkin costume, her dark hair curling out from under a colorful, floppy hat. “Honestly, my parents, my brothers, my grandparents, my aunt, my uncle, my cousins. I better make my three minutes count!”

  Two sharp claps sounded behind us. Madame Ducharme’s call to the cast to gather around her.

  Before I turned away from the curtain, I saw Miranda’s parents, a few rows behind my family. They were both dressed up—she was wearing a sparkly top, dangly earrings, and lots of makeup, and he was wearing a suit. She looked miserable and he had his arms crossed and an angry look on his face. In that laughing, chattering crowd, they sat in a bubble of dead silence, staring straight ahead at the black curtain.

  As the curtain rose, I had a moment of complete peace. There was nothing I could do about anything now, other than do my best. I knew my part, this whole play, better than I knew some parts of my pink house. Whatever happened, whatever this evening held, it would be over soon.

  I watched the first scene from the wings. A huge burlap backdrop was the only set for the farm in Kansas. Everything went well, and Miranda did an amazing job of the last song—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I saw people in the audience wiping away tears and heard the thunderous applause as the curtain closed.

  Second scene. The sound system played crashing sounds of a destructive tornado. Dorothy staggered around the stage, making the wind from four fans offstage look like a straight-up terrifying storm. Then swirling lights and howling wind. The girl with the inferior scream managed her best one yet—a real ear-shatterer. Then the tech kids played the horrible crashing sound they’d taped, which I think was them banging on an empty dumpster with brooms. That had the audience jumping in their seats.