We’re on the couch in the backstage lounge, not in his office, but it’s just us so far. He asks how I’m doing, if I’m in much pain.
“Not too bad.” By dinnertime last night my wrist was throbbing again, and I had to take a couple of painkillers and prop my arm up against my chest while I watched TV, but it’s not hurting now.
“Did the doctor give you any restrictions on what you can do?”
Weird question. “Not really. Just not to get the cast wet.”
There’s something I have to say, and it might as well be now.
“I’m sorry. I messed up everything.” And now, crap, my eyes are stinging and my throat has gone all tight. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this!
“That’s life,” says Stephen. “Stuff happens. I’m just glad you’re not too badly hurt.” He clears his throat and gets down to business. “So I wanted to talk to you about what we’ll do with your part.”
I nod miserably. “Will you ask Kendra to take it over and double up her roles?” We never appear onstage together, so it would be possible, I guess.
He frowns. “Maybe. But I spoke with Amanda about it yesterday, and we think, if you’re game, we can still make it work with your cast.”
You’re insane. That’s what I want to say. It’s ridiculous! I have a fleeting, horrible vision of me onstage as Lily, and nobody even paying attention to the character because they’re all staring at the cast.
I’m tongue-tied for once, but I must be shaking my head because Stephen hurries on.
“Just hear me out. We’ll reblock the scenes so you don’t have to use that hand—you’re right-handed, yes? So it shouldn’t be too hard. Bring the sleeves down on your dress, maybe see if Beth can work up a flesh-colored cover so the cast is not so eye-catching.”
Oh no. This really seems to be what Stephen wants, but I just don’t see how it can work.
“It won’t fool anybody,” I protest. “Look at this thing—it’s like a big, heavy log hanging off my arm.”
“And that’s the part that will be down to you,” says Stephen. “There’s a way people in a cast move, especially early on, when they’re not used to it. You’ll have to learn to hold yourself differently, as if your arm is just as light and natural feeling as before. It’s a challenge, and there’s not much time, but—”
“Are you kidding me?”
I jump at the sound of Kiefer’s voice. Where did he come from? I crane my neck and see him standing against the counter, openly eavesdropping.
“There’s no way she can do that!” he says. I can’t believe him, barging in like this—as if anyone cares what he thinks about it. Stephen shoots him a look that clearly says, You are interrupting, but Kiefer is so wound up he doesn’t notice. “It’s a terrible idea. That big cast will be a horrible distraction for everyone. It will make us all look stupid!”
And then I get mad. I don’t know if I’m madder at his assumption that I’m not good enough to pull it off or the fact that all he really cares about is how he’ll look.
And recklessly, for no better reason than to spite Kiefer, I turn back to Stephen and say loudly, “I’ll do it! If you really think it’s possible, I’ll do it.”
His wide grin tells me he really was hoping I’d say yes. Kiefer is silent. Stephen turns to him and says, “Thanks, Kiefer, for your help with this meeting. Now, since we open in just a few days, perhaps you could get back to whatever it is you are supposed to be doing and leave the directing to Amanda and me?”
Kiefer’s sunburned face flushes even redder. He glowers at me on the way out. I give it right back to him.
“Right, we have work to do.” Stephen pops up from the couch, then stops himself. “Uh…did one of your parents drive you here?”
My mom has taken the morning off work. “Yes, she’s waiting for me in the parking lot.”
“Let’s go talk with her.”
Ten minutes later I’m back at the farm for real, with a bottle of painkillers in my pocket and a promise to phone my mom at work if I crash and need to come home early.
“We’ll look after her,” Stephen promises.
“Sorry about the interruption back there,” he says to me. “I should have met with you in my office, I guess.”
“Why didn’t you?” I had been wondering.
“I wanted to be around if Amanda or Terry needed me. But I guess I also thought if you were back in the midst of things…”
“I’d be more likely to agree?”
He laughs. “Something like that.”
“Well, it kind of worked.” I’m trying not to freak out. It felt great to throw it in Kiefer’s face, but that doesn’t mean he’s not right. How can I be ready in only three days?
Twelve
We go to see Beth, who throws herself into my costume adjustments with her usual enthusiasm. She even takes a photo of my cast. Then we’re marching back to the barn, Stephen two steps ahead and on his phone with Amanda. “Yeah, she’s in. So you’ll hand out that revised rehearsal schedule? Thanks. The priority is to get those scenes reblocked…We’ll need Terry for that too.”
Stephen and Amanda must have been busy yesterday. An entire plan B is ready to go.
We’re almost at the barnyard, and I’m suddenly shy. I usually love the limelight, but not now. Hey, everyone, here’s clumsy Ava with her cast! My feet come to a stop.
“Ava!” It’s Will, sitting in the far bleachers. He jumps up and runs over. “Hey, it’s great to see you! You’re okay?”
I nod. “Yeah. Just embarrassed.”
“Pfft.” He dismisses that with a wave. “I heard you’re still in the play!”
“I bet you did.”
Will bursts out laughing, and I do too. I always feel better around Will.
“Okay, so not everyone is pleased. But it’s great! Seriously, you are Lily. This is awesome.”
We find a seat in the bleachers. The scene keeps running. Stephen and Amanda and Terry are huddled on the side, and a couple of people come over and whisper, “Welcome back.” And it does feel great. Maybe I can pull this off after all.
We start working through the scenes, making a series of little adjustments that put my left arm, whenever it’s reasonable, in the background. In my first scene, I’m now sitting at the other end of the table, so my right arm faces out to the audience. Little Treena, who plays my sister, is sitting in my lap and pretty much hides the cast (though it would help if she could stop staring at it). Stephen says, “Ava, don’t try to hide your cast. It will just look like you’re hiding something. We’ll take the spotlight off it with the blocking, but the key here is that you’re simply going to ignore it. The more you can act like it doesn’t exist, the more the audience will forget about it.”
It feels impossible. I’m just in a T-shirt (because Beth is working on my costume), so my cast is hanging white and huge off my arm. It’s hot and tight and heavy, and I’m still really focused on not bumping it and hurting my wrist.
Terry must see that I’m worried, because he takes me aside just before lunch. “When did you get your cast on?”
“Right after the party.”
He nods. “So it’s basically brand-new. I broke two bones in my hand last winter, and I know it feels really weird at first.”
“Yeah. Like my arm’s the size of a tree trunk.”
“But you’ll be amazed at how quickly you get used to it. Today we’ll do the blocking and get everything organized. By tomorrow, you’ll already notice a big difference, and what Stephen is saying about ignoring the cast won’t seem so crazy.”
Amanda raids the kitchen and concession stand for my lunch. We eat quickly and then reconvene for the scene with the reverend and his wife. Stephen arrives onset, looking pretty excited.
“Don’t ask me why I didn’t think of this before—just dense, I guess!”
He then announces dramatically, “We don’t need to reblock this scene, or the next.”
He seems a little disappointed that nobody prote
sts. Finally Terry says, “Okay, I’ll bite. Why not?”
Big grin. “Because we’re going to use the cast. Dr. Barnardo goes to visit Lily, who is being mistreated, and she comes into the scene with an injured arm. Why not? It totally fits!”
He looks at me. “In fact, I think we’ll put it in a sling. Yeah…So Ava, don’t let anyone sign it or draw on it, okay? Lily wouldn’t have had friends with Magic Markers!”
The actors are looking at each other, slowly nodding as they work the scene through in their heads.
“Will we need new dialogue to work it in?” asks Erin.
“I’m not sure,” says Stephen. “Maybe just a remark from your character, Erin, when they’re talking with Barnardo, about how clumsy Lily is. Let’s run the scene and see how it plays out.” We take our places, and then he adds, “Hang on. I should call Beth first.”
The scene works perfectly. The reverend’s hand on my shoulder is now so full of threat it makes my head spin. I can easily imagine what led up to this moment—Mrs. Talmadge telling the doctor Lily fell down the stairs, the reverend warning Lily to keep quiet.
Gary as Dr. Barnardo lets his eyes play over my arm with an openly worried look. I can feel him wanting to ask about it and chickening out.
As the scene ends, everyone is grinning. Stephen spreads his hands wide and turns to Terry. “Well?”
“It’s brilliant.” Terry actually sounds a little awestruck. “Hot damn. Brilliant.”
Stephen’s nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s great.” Then his face furrows into an exaggerated frown. “There is one problem though.”
Erin takes the bait. “C’mon, it was all good! What?”
“If we ever do the play again, we’ll have to break some poor kid’s arm.”
By the time I get home, my arm is really hurting. I’m dead tired, but my mood is 100 percent better than when I left the house this morning. Brandon can’t even find anything to tease me about, because I’m too happy to react.
Mom nags me into an early bedtime, and I’m sure I’ll be awake for hours, but almost as soon as I hit the pillow, I sink into silent blackness. The next thing I know my alarm’s ringing.
It’s Tuesday. Two days to preview.
Thirteen
“Now if this starts hurting, you tell me.” I nod, but Amanda shoots me a hard, no-nonsense look. “I’m serious, Ava. If you wreck yourself now, it could screw up your performance when it counts, so don’t be a hero. I need you to speak up and tell me if what we’re doing is too much.”
“Okay, I get it.” She has a bunch of blown-up balloons in her arms, so it’s hard to imagine how I could get injured.
I’m doing my own special warm-ups to get me used to my cast, and Will has been recruited to assist.
“Okay, it’s just the balloon game. I’ll toss them up, you bat them back and forth and keep them in the air.” She grins at us. “Just a small variation—right hands behind your back.”
It’s stupidly hard at first—I’m like the slowest, clumsiest balloon batter ever. But it’s with Will, so soon we’re laughing and out of breath and I’m lunging around clubbing at balloons, breaking the odd one in the process. Amanda just lets us go at it for a while, then calls a halt.
Will high-fives me. “The Mighty Balloon Slayer prevails!”
“Maybe not for long,” says Amanda. “Now comes the tricky part. Tea-party balloons.”
We raise our eyebrows and she explains. “Now we want to try for some lightness. Delicacy, if you will.” She pulls two chairs over and sets them across from each other.
“So. No brutalizing the balloons. Will is going to float them gently your way, and you are going to gently, precisely tap them back.”
I snort. “As if.”
“You can do it,” she says. “Use your fingertips, try to adjust for the weight and speed differences, and see how quick and light you can be.”
On the first round, the balloons either go flying past Will’s head or land at my feet. It’s funny but frustrating. On the second round, my competitive spirit kicks in, and I get serious.
“Whoa. She looks like she wants to kill me!” says Will.
“Not you,” I smile. “Just the job.” And I land the balloon quite close his feet.
By the end of the third round I’ve got it. Tap, tap, tap, and the balloons float gently back, more or less, to Will.
We move on to the next exercise.
The scene with Kiefer that we first worked on in auditions is the hardest to pull off. Every roadblock we run into—the awkwardness of pretending to sew with my hand in a cast, the clunky hug—is made worse, somehow, by Kiefer’s eye rolls and sighs. He knows enough not to say anything more, but he shakes my confidence all the same. Then Amanda suddenly snaps her fingers and says, “She needs an embroidery hoop!”
Stephen looks as blank as I feel. What the heck is an embroidery hoop?
“My mother has a couple with her knitting gear,” she says. “She said she used them as a teenager, to embroider patches for her jeans. They hold the cloth tight on a little frame, so you can work the stitches. You could easily hold it with your cast hand.” Amanda calls her mother, and by lunchtime I have a tight little circle of cloth to hold in my left hand while sewing with my right. It’s brilliant.
The hug’s a bit harder. “You have to just go for it,” says Stephen. “Throw your arms around him like there is no cast. But try not to deck him.”
He turns to Kiefer. “And you have to stop flinching! You’re hugging your long-lost sister!”
We try again, but it just feels wrong. Kiefer’s a fair bit taller than I am, so I have to really raise my arms to go around his neck. It’s hard not to knock his head with my clunky arm.
Stephen turns to Amanda. “Should we see if Brad is around?”
“Who’s Brad?” I ask.
“Fight coach. He could teach you how to do this safely.” He catches my look and shrugs. “Fighting, hugging—there’s not so much difference.”
Amanda’s thumbing her phone, but I have a thought of my own. “Do I have to hug him that way?” I’m not sure Stephen wants my opinion, but he seems to be taking me seriously.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we’ve been trying to do this big hug. But maybe instead I could kind of nestle up against him with my arms down around his waist, like he’s my protector?”
Amanda gives herself a head smack. “Oh good grief. Yes. Of course, yes!”
Stephen’s shaking his head. “Sorry, guys, we should have thought of that from the start. I have a habit of doing things the hard way.” Then he’s right back to business. “Okay, back at it. We’re on the clock here!”
Kiefer’s tall enough that it works fine. I wrap my arms around his waist and tuck my head in against his shoulder and kind of snuggle in. It feels like hugging a board though—he seems really awkward suddenly.
“Okay, that’s good,” says Stephen. “Kiefer, you’re looking pretty stiff, but that actually works with Walter’s character. You’ll loosen up as you settle in, but a hint of awkwardness—like he doesn’t know how tight he should hold her—is nice.”
Kiefer looks upset. “It’s just—it’s not what we practiced. It throws me off.”
“Adapting to last-minute changes is hard,” Stephen agrees. “But it’s part of the trade.” He claps Kiefer on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’re doing great. It will work. Now let’s move on.”
In the afternoon Beth appears and asks me to come try on my new costume. She’s put looser, longer sleeves on the dress. They have cuffs that won’t easily slide back if I raise my arm but are wide enough to fit around the cast. “You can undo the button and roll these back for the second half if they want to show the cast more,” she says. “And now—the pièce de résistance!”
With a flourish she pulls out what appears to be a limp strip of pantyhose. I want to show some enthusiasm, but I don’t really know what I’m looking at.
“Let’s see how it fits. Hold out your
arm.” Soon I have a perfectly fitted “skin” clinging to the cast. The effect is startling—she’s matched my skin color really well.
Beth is busy fiddling with the ends. “You have to tuck it in around the edges of the cast here at the hand end. You can do that part yourself—but I am the only person allowed to pull this over your cast! I don’t want some bozo giving it a bunch of runs.”
“It’s great, Beth! Thanks!”
She nods matter-of-factly. “I am the best.” She holds my cast at arm’s length and gives it a critical once-over. “Oh, yeah. You’ll do!”
Before I know it, it’s dress-rehearsal day. Which means we open tonight! My wrist hardly ever hurts now unless I bump it or shake it. Terry was right—the cast feels a lot more like it’s part of me. Which is good, because I have more to think about than a stupid cast. This is the biggest, most important play I’ve ever been in, and I can’t mess up!
On the shuttle to the farm, I’m suddenly missing Charlotte. I feel jittery and light, like I might float away. I need some of Char’s steadiness. I realize with a pang of guilt that I haven’t even texted her this week. Then I remember that she’s at a cottage on some lake with no cell service—which for some reason her mom thought was a good thing.
Terry starts with our run schedule. “This is your life for the next four weeks,” he announces. “Tuesday to Sunday. Shuttle leaves town at quarter to four. You get here at four and eat on-site. Or eat at home and show up by four thirty. Notes and news in the lounge at four thirty-five. Do not miss them! Questions?” He scans the cast and crew assembled in the barnyard. “Then let’s put on a show.”
Dress rehearsal goes pretty well, I think. There’s a bit of fumbling with costume changes backstage, and a prop mishap when Old Walter’s mug topples off the table. Treena, who’s only four, keeps running her fingers over the new cast covering when she’s on my lap.
Casting Lily Page 5
