Even without an auditorium or a piano, singing with her and the rest of my cast is as perfect as I’d hoped it would be.
As we move into “In My Own Little Corner,” I tell myself not to worry—I might never need to improvise again. Once we get our scripts, we’ll be learning our blocking and our music at rehearsal, not playing games. I’ll never be asked to improvise a class presentation, and I can always practice what I’m going to say before I present a petition for myself or someone else.
I may have found the one thing Abbi can’t do, but I’m still going to be absolutely fine.
On Wednesday morning, the day of our makeup read-through, I wake to someone banging on our door. Christina turns over and pulls a pillow over her face, and I consider doing the same—I have ten more minutes before my alarm is supposed to go off. I thought staying in character all day every day would get less exhausting, but so far it hasn’t, and I need all the sleep I can get. But the knocking gets faster, more frantic sounding, and then someone calls, “Abbi?”
“Just a second,” I say, and my voice comes out early-morning croaky. I throw off the covers, stand up, and take a second to let Abbi climb back into my body—no matter how hard I try to hang on to her, she always slips right out of my skin while I’m sleeping. Once I feel settled, I redo my ponytail and pull the door open.
It’s Grace, and she looks like a complete wreck; her hair is sticking up on one side, her eyes are red and wet, and she’s wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas, the belt trailing on the ground. She has two different socks on, one with hearts and one with giraffes. Before I can ask what’s wrong, she says, “Did you check your email?”
“No,” I say. “I was asleep. What happened?”
“Ms. Gutierrez quit,” Grace says, and two more tears spill down her cheeks.
“She quit the play? Why?” I picture our director leaping around the lawn two days ago, her eyes bright with excitement.
“She quit Brookside.” Grace wipes her eyes on the cuff of her robe. “She’s been my drama teacher since sixth grade, and I was finally going to get to be her assistant director after two years of waiting, and now she’s just gone.”
I hear Christina roll over, and I step out into the hall and close the door so I won’t bother her. “Did she say why?”
“She got a part in a Broadway show. I guess she went down to New York City and auditioned last weekend. She said it was a last-minute decision, but she feels like this is ‘the right career move for her’ or whatever. She’s leaving tomorrow, so we won’t even get to see her again before she goes.”
“Wow,” I say. “A Broadway show? That’s amazing for her.”
Grace glares. “Yeah, but not amazing for us. She obviously doesn’t care about us at all or she wouldn’t have auditioned.”
“I guess,” I say, even though I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit too if I were her. “Who’s going to be our director? Ms. Solomon?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think she knows anything about acting or directing.”
A cold feeling rears its head in the pit of my stomach and reaches its fingers up my throat, twisting around the question I’m about to ask. “Is there … The play is still happening, right?” I can’t bear the thought that I’ve finally psyched myself up to act in front of other people and now the opportunity might be ripped away before we’ve even had a single real rehearsal.
“I don’t know,” Grace says. “I’m sure they’ll try to hire someone new, but with the auditorium being closed mysteriously and all the pianos in the school being off-limits at once and now this … Maybe Ms. Gutierrez was right. Maybe someone talked about the Scottish play and now we’re cursed.”
We have had ridiculously bad luck. It could be a curse, or maybe it’s a series of coincidences. But when I think about Sydney telling me not to audition for the play, and about that weird expression on her face when she saw the cast list, I suddenly start to think there might be a more straightforward explanation. It seems impossible that my sister could’ve gotten Ms. Gutierrez a new job, but I still have this gut-deep feeling that she’s to blame for everything else that’s gone wrong. And if she’s the one standing in our way instead of some Scottish theater ghost, maybe I can fix it. I’m probably the only one who can.
“We should get ready for class,” I tell Grace. “I’ll see what I can find out, and we’ll talk about it more later, okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. She wipes her eyes again, and then she reaches out and hugs me, quick and unexpected. Nobody has ever come to me for comfort before, and I’m not really sure what to do. I put one arm around her shoulders and sort of awkwardly pat her hair with the other hand, and I guess that’s close enough to right, because I feel Grace relax a little. When she pulls away, she looks calmer.
“We’ll figure this out,” I say with all the Abbi confidence I can muster. “I have some ideas already.” I’ve done a lot to fix things for my classmates this week, and there’s no reason I can’t do this too. I touch the sign-up sheet on my door and remind myself that I’m the voice of the people now.
Christina’s alarm goes off as soon as I come back into the room, and she gives me a halfhearted wave and stumbles off to the bathroom. I should really take a shower—my hair is getting greasy—but instead I pull out my phone and call Sydney, ready to lay into her the moment she picks up. She doesn’t answer, so I call again, then again. The third time, it goes straight to voicemail, and I know she’s hitting the ignore button, which turns the ice in my stomach into bubbling rage.
PICK UP, I text her, but she doesn’t reply.
I throw on my clothes, weave my slightly disgusting hair into a quick side-braid, and storm out the door.
I’ve never been to my sister’s dorm, and even once I pull up a campus map on my phone, it takes me a while to find it—all the ivy-covered brick buildings look the same. I have no idea what room she’s in, so I wait in the lobby until a girl in running clothes finally directs me to room 309. When I knock, the lock clicks open almost immediately, and I steel myself to confront my sister. But it’s a girl I’ve never seen before, dressed in a field hockey jersey. Her hair is in two perfect French braids.
“Yeah?” she asks.
“Is this Sydney’s room?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she here?”
“Nope.” The girl squats down and starts messing with something inside a duffel bag.
“Do you know where she went?”
“No idea.” A door that I thought was a closet swings open, and another girl comes out—there’s a second bedroom on the other side. I guess my sister lives with two friends. The other girl is wearing an identical jersey, track pants, and braids. “Do you know where Sydney went?” the first girl asks.
“Nope,” says the second girl. She grabs a matching duffel. “Ready to go?”
“Hang on,” I say. “How long ago did she leave? Is she usually gone this early?”
The girls shrug in unison. I don’t see how they could possibly not know—they live with Sydney—but I just say, “Can I leave a message for her?”
“You can write something on the whiteboard,” the first girl says. “I don’t know when she’ll see it, though. You should probably text her.”
“We have to go to practice,” says the second girl. “Could you, like … move?”
I scoot out of the way, and they lock their door and head off down the hall. One of the duffel bags bangs into my shoulder as they pass, but they don’t apologize. I didn’t think it was possible, but it looks like my sister actually managed to find roommates as rude as she is.
I scrawl “S—CALL ME—A” on the whiteboard, but there’s no way I’m waiting till she returns to get to the bottom of this. I head to the dining hall, more determined than ever, but of course Sydney isn’t there. I only have time to grab a bagel before I have to go to class.
The minute the bell rings for lunch, I’m back in the dining hall looking for my sister—she has to eat sometime. But girl aft
er girl walks past me, and none of them is her. A few girls from the play wave at me from the table by the juice dispenser and beckon me to come sit with them, and Nadiya and Bridget do the same from a few tables away. I let myself feel a moment of pride that I’ve already woven myself right into the fabric of Brookside after such a short time. But I’m on a mission. I wave back and keep moving.
I’m walking up and down the aisles between the tables and trying to work out a plan when I spot the Committee member who always wears a dragon pin on her blazer. She’s reading, and she’s so riveted by her book that she keeps bringing half her sandwich up to her mouth, then putting it down again without actually taking a bite. I approach her and say, “You’re Lily, right?” I had looked up the names of the Committee members on Brookside’s website, and I’m pretty sure I have them straight.
The girl starts, and it takes her a second to focus on me, like she’s coming back from somewhere very far away. I totally get it; I feel the same way when someone interrupts me while I’m reading. “Yeah,” she says. And then her eyes widen like she’s just registered who I am, and she starts packing up her stuff at top speed, cramming her book into her backpack with one hand while she shoves her sandwich into her mouth with the other.
“Wait,” I say. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
She shakes her head hard. “I have to go,” she says, even though it’s still the beginning of lunch and she was sitting there calmly until I arrived.
“It’ll be quick.” I sit down next to her, thinking she’ll feel more comfortable if I’m not looming over her. But she leaps up like her chair has given her an electric shock, then looks over her shoulder like she’s checking to make sure nobody has seen us together.
“I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” she says. “If she sees, I could get in—I have to go.” And then she’s out of the cafeteria so fast I’m surprised a cartoon dust cloud doesn’t appear behind her.
There’s only one person Lily could be referring to, and it proves that I’m on the right track. Sydney wouldn’t have told the Committee they couldn’t speak to me unless they had something to hide.
Fortunately I spot Gianna walking into the dining hall with a friend, and I dodge in front of them before they can make it to a table. “Hi,” I say, and the smile falls right off her face.
She looks over her shoulder the same way Lily did, and then she says, “Umm. I can’t … I have to—”
I cut her off. “I know, you’re not supposed to talk to me, right? But I really need to ask you some stuff. Can we go somewhere nobody can see us?” She fiddles with the cuff of her blazer, and I can tell she’s thinking about saying no, so I continue, “Look, I’m going to keep following you around until you talk to me, so you might as well get it over with.”
“Fine,” Gianna says. “I’ll meet you in the far-right bathroom in three minutes. You go first.”
I nod, and as I walk away, I hear Gianna say to her friend, “Don’t tell anyone I was talking to her.”
“Who even is that?” asks her friend.
There’s a row of one-person bathrooms right outside the dining hall, and I slip into the one on the right and lock the door, then pace around the little space, twisting my braid around my finger. Gianna clearly doesn’t want to give me the information I need, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to force it out of her; I’ve never done anything like this before. But after a minute, I make myself be still—nervous pacing and braid twirling are Abby things to do, and I need to embody Abbi now more than ever. If the Petition Days I’ve been to are anything to go by, Abbi’s great at getting people to give her the things she wants. There’s no reason information should be harder to get than three hundred dollars for Art Club.
I shake out my hair and redo my braid, and by the time I’m done, I feel more like my new self, confident and ready.
A minute later, there’s a rap at the door. I open it, and Gianna slips inside and turns the lock behind her. “I only have a minute.”
“Then I’ll get right to it,” I say, and I’m happy with how forceful the words come out. “Is my sister trying to sabotage the play?”
At first Gianna’s poker face is pretty good, but then her eyes shift to the side for a second. “What do you mean?”
“I guess I don’t have concrete proof,” I say. “I just know she didn’t want me to audition for some reason, and she seemed annoyed when I got in, and now everything is going wrong for us. And I know she has a lot of power to make things happen, and … I don’t know, it seems like maybe some of this stuff isn’t coincidental.”
Gianna seems to relax—I guess it’s clear to her how little I know. I shouldn’t have been so honest. “I don’t really understand what you’re asking,” she says.
I sigh. “Okay, fine. Did the Committee vote to have the piano in the common room of Kaufman tuned?”
Gianna looks surprised. “Well, yeah. How is that sabotage? How does that even have anything to do with the play?”
This line of questioning clearly isn’t going to get me anywhere, so I switch to something else. “Do you know why the auditorium was off-limits on Monday?”
“I’m pretty sure Robotics Club was in there,” Gianna says. She takes a tablet out of her bag and opens some sort of calendar app. “Yeah, they were. Aren’t you the one who petitioned for that? When they said they needed a whole building nobody else was using? Sydney said the auditorium was free that day, so we gave it to them.”
I know Grace had reserved the auditorium for that day, and I’m sure Sydney knew it too. Now I’m finally getting somewhere.
“You know Ms. Gutierrez quit, right?” I ask.
Gianna nods. “I heard she’s going to be in a Broadway show?”
“Did you talk about what’s going to happen with the play at the Committee meeting this morning?”
She sighs and drops her gaze to the floor. “Mm-hmm,” she says quietly.
“When is the principal going to start looking for a new director?”
Gianna’s eyeing the lock on the door now like she thinks she might be able to slip out of the bathroom without me noticing. “I can’t … She said I couldn’t … I’m not supposed to tell you—”
I take a step toward her. “You guys are going to have to tell the cast what’s happening before our next rehearsal anyway. I’m going to find out. What does it matter if you tell me now?” Gianna’s silent, and I say, “They are hiring a new director, right?”
“I don’t know,” she says, and then her voice drops so low I can barely hear it. “Probably not.”
That cold feeling from this morning creeps into my stomach again. “You guys are canceling the play?” She doesn’t say anything, and I step closer, forcing her to look at me. “Gianna. Tell me what’s going on.”
It feels incredibly weird to bully her like this, and a big part of me is convinced she’s going to see past my tough Abbi exterior and laugh right in my face. But she just shrinks away and mumbles, “Yeah. It’s not happening.”
“You already voted on it?” Gianna nods. “But why? Can’t we get someone else to direct it?”
“There’s not enough money in the budget to hire an outside director,” she says. “The play was already really expensive. It takes up way more than its fair share of money.” It sounds like she’s reciting something she’s been forced to memorize.
“But why would it have to be an outside director? Isn’t the school hiring a new drama teacher? It would be part of their job. It wouldn’t cost anything extra.”
“I don’t know. Anyway, it’s too late now. We already voted.”
“But Grace and I could appeal that decision on Friday, couldn’t we?”
“I guess, but Sydney’s going to say no.” She swallows hard. “I’m really sorry.”
My palms are starting to sting, and I realize I’m digging my nails into them. I force myself to uncurl my fingers. There’s a reservoir of words pooling in my chest, all kinds of things I’d like to yell about how rid
iculously unfair all of this is, how my sister has no right to take away something I love because of her own petty jealousy. I know it’s not about the money; it’s about getting back at me, personally. But I also know that even as Abbi, I wouldn’t be able to yell at another person—thoughts like this always get caught in my throat when I try to get them out, stopping my breath and reddening my face and leaving me in silent, frustrated tears. I refuse to let that happen now. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to the new me.
I take a slow, deep breath, and then I say, “Do you think the play should be canceled?”
“No,” Gianna says right away. “I love Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. I watched that movie a million times when I was little. I was super looking forward to—”
I cut her off. “So Lily and Maya want it to be canceled?”
“I don’t think so.” Gianna looks miserable, and I almost feel sorry for her. “They, um … Lily said some of the same stuff you are saying in the meeting.”
“I don’t understand how this happened,” I say. “If Sydney’s the only one who wants to cancel it, why can’t you vote her down? There are three of you and one of her.”
Gianna shakes her head hard. She’s edged so far toward the door now that her back is pressed against it, her palms flat against the wood on either side of her. “We can’t … We have to do what she—”
Someone knocks on the door, and relief washes over Gianna’s face. “We should get out of here,” she says. “Someone needs the bathroom.”
“They can use one of the other ones. Just wait a second.” My voice comes out like I’m begging, but I can’t help it; I know this is my last chance to talk to Gianna. There’s no way she’s going to let herself get trapped with me again. “I don’t understand why you have to do what Sydney says. I know she can be mean, but it’s not like she can kick you off the Committee. If you and Lily and Maya think what she’s doing is wrong, you can band together and overrule her.”
She's the Liar Page 6
