A series of gasps emerged from the students behind us and from the girls crowded in the wings. I tried lifting my head, but it felt like a hundred pounds. I wanted to speak up and tell Belinda that Lou was just being overly protective, that we should get back to work and talk about this later, like next year or when we graduated from high school. But I did nothing. I just stood there.
“Humph,” Belinda grunted, crossing her arms. “That’s what I thought.” She smiled smugly as she fixed Lou with her fiery stare.
My head began to throb. I closed my eyes tightly, wishing for a way to undo the last minute and a half. After all, no scolding, no criticizing, no bullying could be worse than this. Just as I was about to open my eyes I heard the shuffling of shoes, a pair of Converses to be exact. They thumped down the stairs and past the front row of seats. I looked up to see Lou storming up the aisle like a soldier in combat. She snatched her coat off a chair and slammed her hands against the double doors, pushing through the exit without looking back.
“Well,” Belinda said, straightening her sweatshirt. “Anyone else have a problem with how I’m directing this show?”
The cast stood frozen. No one made a sound.
“Sayonara,” a girl’s voice trumpeted from the wings. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Jenny brushed past the Hot Box Girls and onto the stage. She pranced down the stairs, breaking into an across-the-floor of ballet leaps and turns as she made her way up the aisle. Even though it was priceless, no one dared to laugh. She grabbed her dance bag and Lou’s backpack from the seats and shoved her way through the heavy auditorium doors.
Belinda’s face clouded over with anger. A thick vein pulsed in her forehead. She brushed back that same persistent strand of hair and crammed it behind her ear.
“Doesn’t matter,” she huffed. “If there’s one thing we have too many of in this show, it’s girls.”
A grunt sounded from the gangsters clumped around me. One of them marched across the stage, stomping down the stairs and joining Lou and Jenny in a dramatic exit. To my astonishment, it was Tanner Falzone.
“Well, here goes one of your guys,” he called out as the doors slammed behind him.
Then something even crazier happened. Sebastian Maroney jogged to the stairs, turning to look back at his castmates before charging up the aisle. Then Adam Hull. Then Grady Ayers. Then Martin Howe. In less than a minute the entire soccer team had defected. Bridget Livak was the next of the girls, emerging from the wings, the black binder containing her script smacking the stage as she marched toward the exit. The rest of the cast followed suit, tossing their scripts on the floor before sweeping out of the auditorium. The only person left was me.
The final door slam ricocheted through my body. My feet felt like cinder blocks. I looked up slowly, finding myself face-to-face with my tormentor, the top hat and cane on her chest rising and falling as she took in one panicked breath after another. Her eyes darted frantically around the empty hall, searching for anything to land upon besides the last kid standing in front of her. But as the angry footsteps faded, it became clear that she’d have to face me alone, no audience to listen as she spewed another villainous rant.
“Well,” she said after what felt like minutes of silence. “Bet that never happened to Mrs. Wagner.”
She gave a dismissive laugh and looked around the room, as if expecting at any moment the cast would reappear and apologize for their hasty exit. I lifted my tongue to speak, but the words felt stuck in my throat.
“Oh, come on, Jack,” she said. “I wasn’t serious about you being the worst of Broadway. We both know Lou can be a little dramatic.”
I just stood there, my feet refusing to move. My body felt numb, like I’d just been shot with one of those poison darts. Belinda crossed her arms as if to contain her agitation.
“Why are you still here?” she asked.
I searched my brain for a reason. I thought of my friends, huddled in the cold parking lot wondering if I would join them. I thought of the moment when Belinda first showed her ugliness to me, that day in the music room after the dance call when I’d dared to speak up. I thought of every insult she’d hurled at me, always making sure to highlight the fact that as a Broadway actor, I really should have known better.
“I don’t know,” I responded.
“Why don’t you follow your classmates?” she said, pointing to the door. “There’s obviously nothing left to do here. You got all your friends to leave, so why don’t you just go? You don’t have to rub it in.”
“I’m not rubbing it in,” I said, my throat becoming tight.
Whatever you do, I told myself, do not let yourself cry in front of this woman.
And then something strange happened. Belinda began shaking her head. She slumped into a seat. Her shoulders rose and fell as she sighed heavily.
“I know,” she said after a moment. “I know you’re not the kind of person who’d do that.”
Her words startled me. I wasn’t sure what to say. I wondered if maybe this was my chance. Whatever angry thoughts I was feeling, perhaps now was the time to say them. But she was right. I wasn’t the kind of person who’d do that. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew that whatever happened next wasn’t going to be bad.
“It’s because . . . you’re strong,” she continued. “Stronger than me.”
She turned away, fixing her gaze on the pile of black binders left on the stage like old bonfire logs on a beach.
“Is that why you keep picking on me?” I asked.
This question seemed to knock the wind out of her. She raised her eyebrows and peered down at the floor.
“No,” she muttered. “That’s not why, Jack. That’s not why.”
From the hallway, I could hear the thrum of the janitor emptying a garbage can as a wordless tension hung in the air. Belinda gave a little laugh. “It’s funny. Mike . . . I mean Coach Wilson,” she corrected herself. “He asked why I was so hard on you. Thought I might be a little out-of-bounds. I gave him the same answer I kept giving you. But he wondered if it might be because I felt . . .” She trailed off. I watched her take in a deep breath, her lips forming carefully like they were searching for the right words.
“The truth is, Jack”—she shook out her hands—“working with you . . . has been hard for me.”
I scrunched my forehead in confusion. Hard for you?
“Something I should have told you, when the show I was in, Top Heavy, closed out of town, it was really . . .” She hesitated. “Difficult. Everyone had been telling me I was going to be a big deal, and when that didn’t happen, well . . .”
I stood there, silent. I knew I could just let her struggle, watching her untangle the mess she’d created, but deep down I knew exactly how she felt.
“I understand,” I said, almost not recognizing the sound of my own voice.
“What?” She looked up, surprised.
“People said the same things to me when I got cast in The Big Apple. I know what that’s like.”
“But look at how you bounced back,” she replied.
“I don’t know. When I saw The Big Apple, I was really . . .” A warning flashed in my brain, Maybe choose a different word than jealous. “It was really hard to watch.”
She leaned in, clasping her hands between her knees. “To see something that was supposed to be yours?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. It’s so tough. I spent twenty years trying to get back to a place where people thought I was a big deal, and when that didn’t happen, I felt like a failure.”
“When I saw The Big Apple I couldn’t say anything to the kid who replaced me,” I admitted. “I didn’t even tell him congratulations.”
“I bet you were still a lot nicer to him than I was to you,” Belinda said, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, I didn’t tell him that he was the worst of Broadway.”
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Belinda winced at the memory of her own words.
“Of course you didn’t. I’m sure that boy looks up to you, just like how everyone looks up to you. I mean the way you got those soccer boys to dance.”
“I thought you said that was bad.”
She laughed to herself. “I said that because I wanted all the attention. It’s silly, I know,” she said, shaking her head. “But I thought coming home, I’d at least have that much. So when the first person I met had not only been on Broadway but had done more in a few years than I did in twenty . . .” She smiled. “Grown-ups don’t know everything, Jack.”
It was strange talking to an adult like this, hearing her be so honest and unguarded. It was like seeing your teacher at the grocery store, or watching your parent get a speeding ticket. You realize they’re human, after all. Just because someone was a grown-up didn’t mean they’d finished growing up.
“Well, you’ve got quite a friend in Louisa Benning, haven’t you?” Belinda said with a smile. “Not many people would do something like that.”
“Yeah, not gonna lie, even I was shocked,” I confessed. “I’ve never seen her do anything that crazy before.”
Belinda looked at me with the most genuine expression I’d seen since she’d first appeared in our classroom.
“I’m really sorry for how I treated you, Jack.”
I gave my shoulders a little shrug, hardly a twitch, but enough to let her know that at least part of me understood.
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
Her eyes began gleaming under the auditorium lights, but she jerked her head away and looked around the empty theater.
“So,” she said. “What should I do? How do I get everybody back?”
-LOUISA-
This made the second day in a row that I was walking home. Except I wasn’t walking, I was running—trying to get away as quickly as I could from that auditorium, from Belinda, from Jack, from my cast, and most of all, from the version of myself that had just screamed at a grown-up and quit the show. In my desperate rush to escape, I had only grabbed my coat, not wanting to spend the extra five seconds it would have taken to dislodge my backpack from underneath one of the seats. This would pose a problem when it came to doing homework later, but homework was the least of my worries right now.
With my arms pumping steadily against the wind, a carousel of images and sounds kept revolving in my head: Belinda’s shocked expression, Jack’s eyes wide as they pleaded with me to stay quiet, the deafening silence of my castmates after I exploded. I had never, ever done anything like that in my life. And while at the time it felt like there was no way to control what came out of me, now all I thought was: How could I have done that?
I was terrified of what I’d left behind—Jack, alone, an even bigger target at whom Belinda could aim her fire; an Adelaide-size hole to be filled by someone who didn’t know Jack (or the show) the way I did; an entire team of soccer boys who were all probably laughing about what I’d just done; a backpack full of unfinished assignments . . .
“Lou!”
The voice was so faint behind me that I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard my name. Still, I slowed to a jog and twisted around to see where the sound was coming from.
About half a block away was Tanner Falzone, running to catch up with me.
“Hold on!” he shouted. His long legs helped close the gap between us fairly quickly, and I noticed as he got closer that he was carrying two backpacks. One of them was mine.
“Jeez, you run pretty fast for a shorty,” he said as he reached me, his breath coming out in big clouds of steam.
“What—what are you doing?” I panted.
“Jenny wanted to catch up with you to give you your bag, but she said she couldn’t run fast enough in her fried boots.”
“Huh?”
“I dunno, something about her fried boots.”
I had no idea what Tanner was talking about, but then it struck me that he had simply misheard Jenny’s label-dropping.
“Frye boots,” I said, still breathing heavily. “They’re a shoe brand.”
“Whatever.” Tanner shrugged. “I knew I could catch up with you, so I grabbed your bag and started running.”
I squinted at him.
“You and Jenny left, too?”
“Everybody did. We all left.”
My heart, already beating fast, started to beat even faster.
If everyone had left, did that mean Guys and Dolls was officially over?
I swallowed hard and dared myself to ask another question, though I dreaded the answer. “What about Jack?”
Tanner looked back over his shoulder toward the school as if Jack might suddenly appear in the distance.
“Uh, actually, I don’t know about Jack. I just know that all the guys left after Jenny, and then we saw the girls come out when we were still in the parking lot. I didn’t see Jack leave, but . . . it’s not like there was anything left for Belinda to do once the whole cast was gone.”
There were plenty of other things I could have been thinking about, but the only thought I had at this moment was that these were by far the most words I’d ever heard Tanner Falzone speak. And they were certainly the most he’d ever spoken to me.
I hesitated. I had another question, but I wasn’t sure how long he was planning on treating me like a real person. Nevertheless, curiosity got the best of me.
“Why did you leave?”
Tanner looked up at the sky, which was getting darker by the minute.
“Um . . . ,” he started, “’cause, like, Belinda was being totally harsh. And you know, we all talk about how mean she’s been toward Jack, but we just thought that’s how it was with real . . . experienced kind of actors? Like, how are we supposed to know what’s normal? But then, when you suddenly got mad, it was like, ‘Okay, right. This is uncool.’” He paused, then looked at me in a way that made me feel funny.
“Like, if you say she’s being unfair, then it’s gotta be true. Lou Benning doesn’t say stuff she doesn’t mean, you know?”
I didn’t know what to say. Once again I felt ashamed that I had been so clueless about Belinda’s cruelty toward Jack, even while people as seemingly dense as Tanner Falzone were noticing. But there was something else, too, that left me speechless: Tanner Falzone had been paying attention to me, not merely dismissing me as some uptight theater nerd. And that made me feel really, really . . . strange. There was an awkward silence between us, and then he thrust my backpack toward me.
“Anyway,” he said, “here’s your bag.”
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing one of the straps and tucking it over my shoulder. The cold finally hit me with a freezer-like blast; I started to shiver. I’d forgotten to put on a hat this morning and my ears were not happy. Tanner glanced down at my chattering teeth.
“How far is your house from here?” he asked.
“Like ten more minutes,” I said, wondering if I should start running again. I’d get there faster, for sure, but I was also feeling pretty exhausted.
“Well,” said Tanner, digging in his coat pocket and producing a knit cap with the Cleveland Browns logo, “take this. You can give it back to me tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” I put on the cap, and my poor ears felt instant relief. Tanner gave a wry smile.
“It’s way big on you.”
I couldn’t help but smile, too.
“It’ll do the trick, though,” I said, pulling the other backpack strap over my shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” said Tanner, who surprised me by turning around and heading back in the direction of the school.
“Wait—Tanner!” I blurted out, making him stop and turn back. “Where do you live?”
“Oh,” he said, a bit sheepishly, “Lyman Boulevard.”
“Oh.”
His ne
ighborhood was even farther away than mine. Tanner must have seen me drawing a map in my head, because he added hastily, “It’s not that far. Remember,” he said, nodding toward my legs, “I can run faster than . . .”
“Than me?” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Than anybody,” he boasted. “See ya.”
And off he went, leaving me to process that Tanner Falzone, class bully, had not only chased me down, returned my bag, paid me a compliment, and lent me a hat, but he had also gone completely out of his way to do so. I had spent most of grade school avoiding that kid, thinking he was too dopey, too mean, too unlike me to bother with. It suddenly occurred to me that in the last twenty-four hours, two people had revealed themselves to be completely different from how I chose to see them. People really could surprise you.
The Cleveland Browns hat was helping, but the rest of my body was begging for warmth; I needed to get home. The Tanner incident had made me feel a little better, but as I hurried to get home, that carousel of faces and voices started spinning, and I was once again reliving the nightmarish scene in the auditorium. What was going to happen now? Would Jack forgive me? What would happen to the soccer team? As Belinda’s old friend, would Coach Wilson be forced to punish the boys in some way? Would they be kicked off the team? I felt nauseous as I imagined the disastrous ripple effects of my outburst. And as I got closer to my house, the question that started to burn with the most urgency was: How were my parents going to react to all of this?
“I’m calling Principal Lang first thing in the morning,” my mother declared when I finished telling my story. My parents weren’t upset with me at all—they were furious with Belinda.
“That woman should know better,” my mother continued, angrily stirring a pot of tomato sauce. “Poor Jack! Why didn’t he say anything earlier?”
Because he was embarrassed, I thought guiltily, once again recalling how slow I’d been in realizing the full extent of Jack’s unhappiness.
“How are you feeling, Loulou?” my dad asked, chopping green peppers for a salad. “That must have been pretty scary, standing up to Belinda like that.”
Act 2 Page 12
