Five, Six, Seven, Nate!

by Federle, Tim

  “Let’s all come to attention, people,” he says, rapping a cane against the floor. “We’ve just had an emergency production meeting outside in Nora’s Town Car.”

  “Yes,” she says, as if to confirm.

  Asella snorts. She’s just behind me, standing in the aisle with hip-glued hands.

  “There is troubling news,” Garret says.

  Oh God, we’re closing.

  “There’s quite troubling news.”

  We’re closing before we’re opening.

  They’ve pulled the rights. My photo leak has caused too many people to phone in and cancel their tickets.

  “Occasionally,” Garret continues, taking a glass of tea from Monica, “an occurrence befalls a company just before the first preview.”

  “An incident,” Nora says, suddenly tugging foil from her hair, then rolling it into small balls and tucking the result into her fur pockets. The lady is so skinny, I wouldn’t be surprised if she snacked on these treasures. The iron content alone has got to be pretty high.

  “Is somebody dead?” Genna’s dad says, and this sets the children off. Everyone but me.

  I’m certain they’re about to call me out, and at that point I may as well be dead. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will finally do an article about me: “Local Boy Makes Bad, Closes E.T., Comes Home to Town Square Hanging; Older Brother Thrilled.” The headline wouldn’t be that long probably but you get what I mean.

  “Nobody’s dead!” Dewey shouts, his eyes tennis-matching back and forth between Nora and Garret, who bookend him like British umpires. “Nobody’s even a little dead!”

  At this point, Calvin actually walks down the aisle and manually seats Dewey, who is shaking so hard, his entire hairstyle has shifted before our very eyes.

  “Is the show closing?” a mother shouts.

  “Okay, let’s be clear, gang.” My hero, Calvin, takes control—and nobody stops him. “Jordan Rylance has lost his voice.”

  What?

  “Jordan Rylance stood in the cold yesterday, and sang his guts out, and he seems to have completely lost the ability to sing.”

  “Let me cut to the curry,” Garret Charles says, probably pulling British vaudeville phrases out of his trunk of a skull. “We don’t have an Elliott.”

  “What about the understudies?” somebody shouts.

  “What about my boy?” Keith’s mom calls out. She’s already holding a bunch of flowers and balloons, and this makes me miss my mom’s floral shop. The low stakes of life back home. “Keith’s the Elliott understudy!”

  “So’s my son!” another mom says.

  But both their sons, nice enough boys if you can get past how appalling most boys are, whisper under their breaths at exactly the same time: “Shut up, Mom.”

  See? The thing is: None of the understudies are ready. How could they be? We barely know our own parts, most of us. There’s never been a formal understudy rehearsal. It’s every actor for himself around here, like if the Titanic were a musical, which it was, and which illustrates my point if you knew how quickly it closed.

  “Your sons, yes.” Garret Charles showcases a deadly grin. “The complicated detail about rehearsing any new show, mothers, is that—on paper or not—no understudy is ever ready to go on.”

  Calvin cuts in—“barely by the second week into official performances, let alone previews.” His whole job is to get understudies up to speed after we open. Calvin appears to have wet his pants, unless his jeans are polka-dotted. “So we’re up the creek without a paddle.”

  “We’re up the ocean without a life vest,” Nora says. Her face loses color and even muscle definition.

  But I’m barely taking her in, because I’m hunting for Jordan in our crowd. Weird, right?

  We learned in Health class that when people lose a relative, it takes a while to fully believe it. It’s really difficult to grip the whole thing at once. And so my eyes search the theater, convinced this is a sick sort of joke. And it’s only when I realize that Jordan’s mother isn’t here either that the storm cloud of it all settles directly above my own head.

  “Thus,” Garret says, “we’ve made the very difficult decision—”

  He suddenly turns to Dewey, of all people, to complete the sentiment. But Dewey is burrowed so deeply into his seat, he’s beginning to turn the color of the cushion.

  “—we’ve made the very difficult decision to cancel the first preview.”

  Panic.

  Children scurry to parents’ arms, stars dial their agents, and a grandparent in a wheelchair somehow stands, wagging his Reader’s Digest in the air. “But this will spell disaster in the news!”

  “Yes,” Nora says, swallowing hard and for the first time not looking theatrically dramatic but instead like the real thing. “This is precisely what we worry about too. Nobody enjoys the taste of blood like the press—”

  When she says this, I swear her fur coat actually laughs a bit.

  “—but this is the fate we’ve been dealt.”

  “This is exactly what the media has wanted all along,” Dewey says, hopping to his feet, and looking furious and shell-shocked at once. “The story they’ve been crafting for weeks. Months! That I couldn’t hack it. That a video-game director couldn’t, quote, helm a Broadway show. Who says ‘helm’ anymore, anyway!”

  “Pull it together, man,” Garret says.

  But he doesn’t. “They’re going to be Tweeting a storm!” He doesn’t pull it together in the least.

  “If we’re lucky,” Garret says, laying a sad old hand on Dewey’s rumpled shoulder. “If we’re blessed, the worst they’ll do is Tweeter.”

  This should cause misplaced giggles, but it doesn’t. Not at all.

  “But as we know—” Monica decides to join the squad, her voice as sharp as peanut brittle and not nearly as comforting “—there are plenty of shows that got past canceled first previews and went on to become huge hits.”

  But that’s not true. The sequel to Phantom, called Love Never Dies, did die. A ferocious public death. They canceled their first preview and never recovered. This is a terrible omen, like waking up after losing a tooth only to find you owe your parents money.

  “And so here is what’s what!” Garret says, elbowing Monica out of the way, and spilling tea all over what appears to be four separate cashmere scarves, strangling his neck in agreement. “We will cancel the next three days of shows and use the time to prep Jordan’s understudies.”

  “And if he isn’t healthy by then,” Nora says, but she doesn’t have a backup plan. Or else her tongue is playing Hide-and-Seek.

  Dewey has had enough, and he runs to an exit door and races through it. And when we all turn to watch him flee, out onto a cold winter street on the afternoon of our first canceled preview, I expect him to barrel into theatergoers, snaked around the block. Early fans. Gawkers.

  But he doesn’t. We watch as Dewey slams into dozens of cameramen, snapping away. They’ve heard. Word has leaked. We’re going to cancel our first previews, announcing to a city that’s already got their knives out that we are, like, indeed worth stabbing.

  “As I was saying . . .” Garret begins. But even he, an aged rock of steadiness, loses his footing.

  Our child star is sick. Likely because I made him wear my sweaty T-shirt in twenty-degree weather—which propels me into the type of shuddering that probably means we caught the same flu.

  Nora races to the exit and returns moments later with Dewey, tumbling in after her.

  “My God!” Asella shouts.

  Dewey’s sweater is torn! He’s been mobbed!

  “Don’t anyone go out there,” he says, thrashing, pulling away from Nora. “Don’t anyone talk to the press.”

  “What did they ask!” calls an alto.

  “What did they want?” screams a tenor.

  “They want to know if we’ve got a show.”

  A sad voice tinkles like a broken bell: “And what did you tell them?” It’s Genna, who must be devastated about
Jordan. Her Jordan.

  “I just shrugged,” Dewey says, performing a sad little act like in one of those terrible cop-show reenactments. “And I said, ‘You’ll have to talk to the producer.’ ”

  Nora takes her purse and whacks Dewey across the shoulders, and the grandfather in the wheelchair takes his kid and shields her eyes. “This is a circus!” he yells.

  “Hear hear,” a mother shouts.

  And just as the room falls into the sort of anarchy usually reserved for the Miss Saigon evacuation scene, Asella taps me on the shoulder. “Hoist me up,” she says.

  “What?” I call out above the din.

  “Just hold my legs steady—” she hikes herself up to stand on the armrest of my chair “—so I don’t careen to my death.”

  I do as told, ever her dutiful golden retriever.

  “We are not canceling the first preview!”

  The temperature in the theater drops by a full degree, reacting to the only voice in the whole company that’s naturally amplified enough to draw the room’s attention.

  “What was that?” Garret says, shushing the noisiest of my kid-mates. “What was that again, Asella?”

  “We,” she says, pausing until the room is as reverent as a church at eleven, “are not canceling the first preview.”

  “What in Midtown Heaven are you talking about,” says Nora, picking sparkles out of Dewey’s hair. (Her purse is beaded—or was, before the assault against him basically blew it to smithereens.)

  “The first preview of E.T.: The Musical,” Asella says, “will commence this evening at eight on the clock.”

  For a moment I forget that I’m Asella’s primary source of balance, and when my grip goes slack and she tumbles into my lap, I instinctively swing her directly upright again, like she’s my dummy. She is now hovering above the armrest.

  “Exactly what are you imagining?” Nora calls. “We don’t have a star.”

  “Nate Foster is going on tonight.”

  What what is what what tonight?

  I swear the basement mouse is the only thing you can hear, stirring mischief behind the walls of the theater. The building falls so quiet that you can practically hear the water heating in the boiler.

  “You’ve lost your mind, old girl,” Dewey says to Asella, his voice softer, even, than Nora’s slack jowls. (She’s very jowly, which you only notice when she’s staring right at you.)

  “I’ve worked with him behind the scenes for over a month,” Asella says, her voice gaining authority. “He’s got the part down cold.” Garret grunts but refuses to look away. “And Nate’s been cut from so many numbers, all the kid’s had to do, throughout all of tech, is sit in the audience. Tracking Jordan throughout.”

  Staring at him, she doesn’t even have to say.

  “He can do it.”

  And here, I give Monica the dance assistant credit: She stands, folds her arms, pinches her expression, wiggles her head a little, and makes a Well, I’ve heard of worse ideas kind of face at Dewey. But he withers her with his stare.

  “This is ludicrous,” Nora says. “Am I to trust one person who’s seen him do this?”

  “Two.”

  My Aunt in shining armor.

  “Two people. Nate can do it.”

  She must have gotten the message from stage management and rushed here after the real parents.

  “I’ve watched him play every single role in your show.”

  Heidi’s giving away our secrets. I never should have performed my one-man version of E.T. for her, last weekend. But then, she did dangle frosting, straight from the container, as a reward. So? You know.

  “He has a photographic mind,” Asella says. “For anything. Blocking. Scene work. Bizarre facts that children shouldn’t even know.”

  “He does,” Keith calls out from his seat. “The kid knows every musical that ever played this theater. I’ve never even heard of most of them, and Nate will tell you who, like, the first assistant stage manager of each was.”

  He’s exaggerating. I only memorize the production stage managers.

  “I love you,” Aunt Heidi whispers, kneeling by my side. She takes my hand and notices my nails. Oh God, she realizes I’ve got clear polish on.

  “All I’m saying,” is all Asella’s saying—now shouting again to mute the cast’s roar—“is that you’ve got two choices: Put the kid on, or cancel the first preview. What kind of ticket sales are we talking here? A hundred thousand?” Nora strokes her mink. “More? The damage that’s un-calculable? Shall we just write the Post headline for them?”

  “ ‘E.T. Go Home,’ ” the dancer April offers, earning polite applause.

  “Or ‘Newcomer Saves Show,’ ” says Calvin. He rubs his stubbly chin and smiles at me.

  “Uh, folks?” Roscoe shouts, running into the auditorium from the stage door. Did anyone even see him exit? “Somebody seriously needs to handle the press. We’ve got the New York Times in Shubert Alley with a live feed. Nobody can get our publicist on his cell, and they are quite literally beating down the door out there. Looking for answers. Or a star.”

  “Well?” Garret Charles says, slurping his teeth and flaring Gila monster nostrils. He is the oldest person in the room, other than Angry Grandpa, and so I guess he’s the senior figure. “What do you have to say for yourself, Nate Foster?”

  Asella hops down, landing in a heavy thud, joining every other set of eyes as she turns to me.

  And it’s only then that I realize my chest is drenched. And that I smell like a . . . hot dog.

  “Can I change my clothes?”

  I stand, dropping the ketchup bottle to the theater floor, a giant squirt covering my heart. Genna gasps.

  “Get him to wardrobe,” Dewey says, shaking purse beads from his hair. They shoot out across the seats, showering the crowd with color.

  “Are we doing this or not?” Roscoe shouts, now leaning with all his weight—and he’s a big dude—into a man in a three-piece suit and a note pad, who’s pushed his way into the theater; an old-fashioned reporter with flashing slits where cartoonists usually put eyes.

  “We are,” Nora says, grabbing Garret by the elbow. “Tell the press—tell everyone—that E.T.: The Musical will begin previews tonight. As scheduled. No refunds given. No questions asked.” She sniffs the air. “No business like show business.”

  And that’s the precise moment when somebody—I may never know who, or whom (I’m terrible at grammar right before Broadway debuts or during Grammar tests)—lifts me up high, higher even than Elliott across the moon, and body-surfs me all the way to wardrobe, past backstage reporters and first-preview floral arrangements. So many flowers line the hallways, you’d think the theater was a funeral home. But no, this is the very opposite of someone dying.

  This is someone’s dreams coming to life.

  Get Me Calvin

  (Late afternoon. The day of the first preview. Aaaaah!)

  The room swirls around me.

  Mom has one of those hand-held blenders at home, the kind people buy on TV at two in the morning, and that’s what my life feels like right now: in the hands of others! The dangerous blades of energy whirring inches from my destiny! Or something.

  “Do you want me to get you . . . food?” Aunt Heidi says, braiding her own hair in my dressing room mirror, for some reason. “Are you warm?”

  (Default. Is the child warm?)

  “I’m boiling, actually,” I say, peeling off my ketchuppy jacket, which I’d never even taken off in the stage managers’ office. I wonder if you’re still in trouble if you’re going on as the star of a musical. Tonight.

  I’m going on as the star of the musical tonight.

  “Nate?” somebody yells. “Look alive.”

  “He does this,” I hear Heidi explaining. “It looks like he’s totally zoned out but really he’s off in some vivid fantasyland.”

  In my defense, Heidi looks the same way when she reads the J.Crew catalog.

  Asella slaps me. “Stay with us,
kid,” she says. “You’ve got a big evening ahead of you.”

  “Don’t attack my nephew!” Aunt Heidi says.

  But I cut in. “Ladies, there isn’t time for this.” Heidi drops her own braid. “I need everyone out of here for two seconds. I need Calvin.”

  The makeup and wardrobe and stage management people all give in to my demand, clearing the room just as Keith and Hollie are motoring their way in. “Nate, text us if you need anything,” Hollie says, talking fast and anxious.

  Keith butts in: “Donuts . . . Red Bull . . . anything, man.”

  “Thanks, guys, that could be important. I’ll let you know.”

  They do kind of a weird, solemn bow, like they’re at a Japanese funeral or something, and back away into the hallway, with Heidi following on their tails.

  “Calvin, to Jordan’s dressing room,” I hear over the intercom. They don’t even use my name. But that’s okay. Because hearing Jordan’s name? I’m worried about him. I really am.

  “Oh! Aunt Heidi,” I yell. She pops her head back in, right as Calvin winds the corner, his chest puffing. “I think stage management still has my phone. They took it from me. Because I got in . . . trouble. Sorry.”

  Heidi’s face is a scrumple of confusion.

  “Just . . . will you please text Libby and tell her the news? She’ll want to know.”

  “On it,” she calls out, disappearing into the hall.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” from the intercom. “This is Roscoe. Stay tuned for a bunch of announcements.”

  You can hear them chattering. The cast. All the pipes and vents are connected in this theater, and you know what? Everybody’s talking about me. Everybody’s scared. You could add me to the list.

  “Nate, buddy,” Calvin says, tapping me on the shoulder, even though I’m already staring at his shirt. (It’s a really nice shirt.) “What’s happening? How are you feeling?”

  Calvin was my savior at the audition. The guy who made everything okay—who gave me my first-ever acting compliment that wasn’t from Libby.

  “I’m sorta dyin’ here, Calvin,” I say, fanning myself.

  He sits on Jordan’s makeup table, folding a clipboard onto his lap.