Five, Six, Seven, Nate!

by Tim Federle

  “No,” Libby says, “I wouldn’t kid about something as treacherous as school. Like, we had a whole Bully-Free Zone assembly, and . . . I don’t know . . . I’m restless since you’re gone, Nate, so—”

  “It’s been less than a week, Libby-dibs. This is only the beginning.”

  “That’s my point. I think I’m going to start a theater club at school, or . . . I’m not sure. Something to fill the void while you’re away.”

  I hear a knock at Libby’s door, and she gives me the one-minute finger and scurries away.

  “You’re a liar,” I say when she’s back. “You were gone at least two.”

  “Ha. Well. Mom and all.”

  “Oh. God. How is Mom? And all.”

  “Hanging in. Struggling.” Libby takes one of her pigtails out (she’s got five, to begin with) and moves to her cushy desk chair. We never use her desk as a desk. It’s either a makeup counter or a great place to practice flips onto the spare mattress. This is how I almost broke my already-huge nose.

  “I’m sorry, Lib. I was hoping for some good news on your madre.” (I take Spanish.)

  “I have something horrible to admit,” Libby says.

  “Go ahead.” Finally, some controversy that doesn’t involve whether I can pick up a dance step.

  “You know the scariest thing?” She glances back at her bedroom door, decorated with posters from every show that’s toured through Pittsburgh. If we had any money, I’d’ve gone along with her. “If something happens to my mom . . . if she . . . you know—”

  “Yeah.” I know.

  “—I have to go live with my dad. I literally can’t even bear it.” Libby takes a genuine big breath and not a Tony Awards big breath. “I’m calling it now: His new wife would be found dead by the end of my first week living in their basement.”

  I don’t mean to laugh. “Sorry. Sorry, sorry, but that’s funny.”

  “If you’d ever met her, you wouldn’t think it’s funny,” Libby says, but she starts to giggle too. “Is it absolutely awful that I sometimes have a vision that my stepmother has disappeared?”

  “No. That’s not absolutely awful.”

  “And that her head is found in a nearby county?”

  “Okay. That’s pretty awful.”

  Heidi pops her own head in. “Natey, bud, let’s get you a little dinner.”

  “Gotta jet, Lib.”

  “But you didn’t even tell me about E.T., for God’s sake!”

  She wheels back and props her feet on the desk, revealing a teenier shirt than I’m used to seeing her in. There’s the chance it’s even a croppy top or whatever—the kind Olivia Newton-John wears at the end of Grease—but who can keep up with girls’ terms?

  “There wasn’t time to tell you about E.T.,” I say.

  In a flash, I realize I don’t even have anything I want to share. Not about receiving dead silence after saying, “Blurp.” Not about showing up at 9:29 this morning to literally sweat with the oldies. Not about Jordan refusing to make eye contact with me—even once—so far.

  “Who’d have time to brag about his flawless career, when his best friend is rattling on about her stepmother’s future beheading?”

  Libby grunts. “Pardon me,” she says, swinging her legs down, fast, and getting one eye so superclose to the camera monitor, I scream a little. Aunt Heidi’s cat swipes at my leg. “I was trying to get the image of my own mother’s slow degeneration out of my mind.”

  I gulp. You know when somebody farts in your strictest teacher’s class, and you can’t say anything? “Good word,” I say, feeling myself fidget. “Degeneration.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s a real word, right?”

  “Don’t be a Marilyn, Nate.” (Thirty-four previews on Broadway; seventeen performances; all-out flop about Marilyn Monroe—and frankly, a pretty aggressive name to be calling me.)

  “I wasn’t,” I start, and then just: “I’m really sorry. About your mom.”

  Music from Heidi’s living room suddenly fills the apartment. Really loudly. She’s making a subtle point. “Nate!” she yodels. A less subtle point. “Dinner.”

  “I’ve gotta go, Lib.”

  “Miss you, champ.”

  “Miss you, scamp.”

  “Hey—Natey Greaty, tell me one thing.”

  “Yup?”

  “You making us proud?”

  I think back to standing outside the theater with the other kids yesterday, forcing down that hot tea—the way everyone who drinks hot tea must have to pretend they like it. On their own quest to fit into their costumes.

  “Are you gonna come back a star, buddy boy?” Libby takes a big mouthful of Dazs.

  “A star,” I say. My God. What if I’m an outcast no matter where I’m cast? “I’ll do my best, Lib.”

  And then I get this high-definition memory of Keith, pointing up to the marquee’s giant gold lettering: “That is mad cool,” he said, gawking with the rest of us. “Man, to be him.” And introducing Jordan Rylance written in giant Nate-height letters across the front of the theater.

  Libby’s mom coughs so hard that it travels all the way from outside Libby’s room and through the Skype wires, and Libby turns around and squints at the door. “I’ve gotta go too, Natey. Gonna check on the Momster.”

  “You bet, Lib. And Lib?”

  “Yessir?”

  “I may be in the ensemble, but I’m trying to approach it like a star. Trying my hardest.”

  She gives me a cheesy thumbs-up, but it’s nice all the same. “Remember, Natey, there are no small parts.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Only small actors with medium stomachs. With large talent. Playing, like, smallish roles.”

  She shuts the clamshell of her monitor just as Heidi barrels through the door. “Your soup’s getting cold,” she says, finishing a graham cracker. “And I got the daily schedule e-mailed from your stage managers. Gotta get some sleep, Natey. You guys are staging the opening number tomorrow.”

  Ladykiller

  (Four and a half weeks till first preview)

  The studio is transformed. At every new rehearsal, the room is crammed even tighter with giant stand-in set pieces. “Let’s get the aliens down front and the townspeople in the back,” Monica says, holding a clipboard and a coffee that’s taller than I am.

  “Do you need me, too?” Mackey says. Mackey is playing E.T. He’s a pretty amazing character actor who has appeared in every Lord of the Rings movie and is approximately as jaded as Libby. Though he has the excuse to be.

  “You can take a ten, Mackey.”

  “Make it twenty,” Garret says, piping up from a chair, his mouth teeming with biscuits. “Take a long break, Mackey, because we’re working to establish some general movement vocabulary before we add you in.”

  The rest of the cast is gathered down front.

  “Where’s Asella?” Monica says.

  A stage manager looks up from a pile of paperwork. “She’s across the hall in vocal.”

  “Oh, right,” Monica says, consulting a schedule on the back of her clipboard. “It’s like air traffic control on a new musical, right?” Half the room breaks into applause, like all they do is new musicals. “So, let’s start on the opening sequence,” she continues. Every time Monica turns to anyone at all, it’s like a poem: her posture a yardstick, her legs two stilts. My mom would kill for Monica’s figure. Frankly, my mom would probably kill Monica, if given the chance.

  “Yes, yes,” Garret says, swallowing the last of his snack and jumping up. “It’s our opening sequence. This is very tricky. Stage management, could you ask the room to be quiet?”

  The entire room is, in fact, quiet. The only people making any noise at all are the stage managers.

  “Thank you,” Garret says. “What we need is fear, dread, a sense of a world being occupied by outsiders. Yes?”

  “Yes,” we all say like drones.

  “We’ve got Gertie and Elliott wandering the wood, the aliens hidin
g behind trees. And we’re looking to stage the entire sequence without dialogue. That’s the concept right now: movement instead of acting.”

  “Dance,” Monica says, as if helping.

  “Yes. Danced, like the opening in West Side Story. Which you children are too young to know about.”

  “It’s not called the opening in West Side Story, it’s called the prologue,” I’m desperate to say—but I just nod like every other beagle.

  Garret returns to his seat and folds an extravagant sweater around himself. You must get awfully cold when you’re the choreographer and don’t actually dance any steps.

  “So,” Monica says, addressing the pianist, “why don’t we just play some of the opening theme? We’ll loop it. Let’s all just improvise, and see if Mr. Charles sees any movement he’d like to build on.”

  “You’re afraid, you lot,” Garret says in a weird even tone, like he’s channeling somebody genuinely creative. “You’re cold and afraid and far away from your home planet. Now . . . dance.”

  The blonde girl—Hollie is her name, I’ve come to learn, because I’ve been to her Web site and joined her e-newsletter—immediately begins jumping all over, like she’s alone in her bedroom. She swirls and dips, and rather than the other kids being intimidated by it, they all appear inspired.

  “Work, Miss Hollie,” Keith says, beginning his improvisational movement by flipping backward and landing on his head. Literally.

  I dial back to the audition, the thing that got me this job. Relax, Nate. You deserve to be here. And without over-thinking it, I channel Jerome Robbins, who choreographed not only the prologue to West Side but also Fiddler on the Roof, a show whose famous knee crawls I demonstrated at the E.T. audition. If it worked then, I’ll try it again.

  “Let’s get this done,” I say.

  And I’m off, covering ground, pretending I’m a racecar and not a scared boy.

  “Watch it!” somebody yells.

  One thing about my famous knee crawls is that sometimes I don’t look up when I’m doing them.

  “Can we get ice?” I hear Monica shout.

  For a second I think she’s asking for a condiment, but then everyone’s gathered around me. And Genna. And only looking at Genna.

  “Are you okay, angel?” Monica says.

  (She’s staring at Genna. Not me.) (The devil.)

  “I’m not . . . sure,” Genna says, cradling her knee. I’m feeling this more than seeing it, because I’m right on top of Genna. Not sure how that happened. Also, wow: I’m not familiar with this position in relation to other people. Especially girls.

  “Give the kid room!” Mackey shouts from a towering stool in the corner.

  Everyone backs up as I roll off Genna, and then a stage manager smacks a blue ice pack down on her knee. Garret Charles walks the perimeter of the actor circle, hands on hips, eyeing me.

  “Should we send her to the hospital?” somebody yells.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Garret says, offering Genna his hand.

  “Thank you, Mr. Charles,” she says, and a few of the adults clap like we’re in a stadium. (I’ve seen this happen a lot, because Anthony has taken down quite a few football players, all of them instantly debilitated. They get actual applause when they finally walk off the field. If they walk off the field.)

  “We don’t need hospital,” Garret says, allowing Genna to stand on her own. “We’ll call upon an old technique I learned in England in the seventies. I want everyone in the room to place their hand on Genna’s knee.”

  Genna’s eyes go wide, and I watch as Monica beelines for the mirrors at the periphery of the room, gently biting her lip. Everyone else, though, takes Garret’s instruction—every adult, child, little person, and stage manager.

  “Get to it,” Garret says, “we haven’t got a millennium.”

  In moments, they’ve got their hands all over Genna, which is kind of weird. This would be illegal in Jankburg.

  “You too,” Garret says, flashing red eyes at me. Apparently I’m standing outside the human hand-mountain, but I feel like I’m watching the whole thing from above, like a ghost. God, do I wish I were dead right now. “This was your doing,” Garret continues. “Let it be your undoing, too.”

  I place my palms on Keith’s shoulders, which huff and puff and sweat as he smiles at Genna. “You got this, girl. You got this.” He feels warm. Bordering on . . . hot.

  “On the count of three,” Garret says, “we will all breathe in Genna’s injury.” If anyone so much as hiccups, we’ll all topple over and cause some genuine damage here. “And after we inhale the injury, on the downbeat of count four”—dancer folks are nothing if not complicated by numbering everything—“we shall then exhale a new energy into Genna’s knee.”

  People are looking wholesomely to Garret Charles like he’s the chief of surgery at Dad’s hospital back home. Like he isn’t a deranged quack.

  “One,” he says, his voice rising, “two”—and April, the hundred-foot ramp of a dancer, is actually weeping —“three.”

  The whole group breathes so hard, I swear a light flickers from above.

  “Hey, kid, how’s the knee?” I nearly say, but just then, I see Dewey and Calvin stride into the room from the hallway. We all sigh so loudly that Genna teeters on one foot—and then regains her balance.

  “I’m healed!”

  “I love this,” Dewey says, skipping over to Garret. “I don’t know what sequence you’re working on—”

  “They’re on the opening number,” Calvin says, spying Monica’s schedule over her shoulder.

  “Fantastic,” Dewey says. “Wow. Such an image. An entire glob of people—or are they aliens?—gathered around Gertie. Such power. Wowza, Garret.”

  Garret twiddles an imaginary moustache. Come to think of it, he doesn’t have eyebrows either. God, I wouldn’t be surprised if his own reflection didn’t even show up in the mirror.

  “I mean,” Dewey says, the room frozen around him, “I’m not convinced we need the whole cast for this—”

  “And some of these folks,” Calvin says, “will be offstage in a quick-change for the scene just after . . .” Monica cups his ear and begins whispering.

  “But regardless,” Dewey says, swatting at the air like it’s a giant iPad screen, “the important thing is that we just found our closing image.” Dewey hops up and down like a boy who has to pee. Oh my God, I have to pee. “Listen up, gang. Wow. Listen up.”

  The stage managers call for anyone hanging out in the hall to join the room.

  “The last image of the play,” Dewey says, suddenly confident, his blue eyes blazing like the two days a year when Jankburg is cloudless, “I’m calling it now—the closing image of E.T.: The Musical will be the entire cast embracing Gertie. This image, right here.”

  Genna bows. April is braiding her hair, still crying. (Sniffling, shoulders shaking, the works.)

  “Yes, well,” Garret says, clearing his throat. “I’m not—”

  “Don’t be modest,” Dewey says, slapping Garret so hard on the back, his jumpsuit zipper rattles. “You’re a genius, Garret.”

  Something swipes my butt, and for a second I flash back to the school locker room. On those horrifying days when I have to change my shirt for gym, one of the bigger kids usually grabs it from my hand and whips me until the coach breaks it up. (Seconds later, the coach is always fist-bumping the bully on his way out. True.)

  “Well, that was an unexpected turn of events, wasn’t it?” Monica whispers. She’s smiling, and then, before I can even stop it, I am too. “Congrats,” she says, just as stage management is sending us on another ten-minute break. “Looks like you just helped create the ‘closing image.’ ”

  She rolls her eyes but then winks at me.

  “You should ask your agent if you can get an assistant director credit.” This, in a whisper, from Hollie. “Seriously major, Nate.”

  “Yeah, big ups,” Keith says, heading with her to the door after attempting a co
ol handshake with me. Total fail, but still.

  “You’re on a ten, too, Mr. Assistant Director,” Monica says.

  Genna limps to a chair. I guess only on Broadway can you injure a child and get celebrated. Actually, that’s not true; after James Madison gave me a black eye last September, he was elected president of our class.

  But no matter: I’ve just done it. I’ve become . . . important here.

  “Nate!” a stage manager says, pulling me away from Monica (and back down to earth). “You okay? I saw that you took a pretty bad spill yourself.”

  I look down, just in case my leg fell off or something. It didn’t. “I’m fine.”

  “Great,” the stage manager says, looking at a list. “Listen. This afternoon, we’re going to send you across town with one of the guardians.”

  “Am I in trouble?” Oh my God, they’re going to fingerprint me for taking Genna down. Her dad is a lawyer—I heard her say that.

  “No, no. Nothing like that. You’ve got a mask fitting today. On the East Side. They have to take a mold of your face.”

  A mask of zits. “Awesome,” I manage.

  But when I grab my coat and head for the door, something catches me off-guard in the hallway. “What’s that sound?” I ask one of the adults. “It’s, like . . . unbelievable, in there.”

  It really is. E.T.’s big song blares out from the tiny music studio. And howling above the piano, a human voice buzzes and whirs like it’s being sent through a food processor. But in a good way. An otherworldly way.

  “Is Mackey rehearsing?” I stand on my tiptoes but lose balance, hitting my underbite on the metal door handle.

  “No,” one of the music assistants says. “That’s Asella.”

  “Asella?”

  “Yeah. They’re teaching her all of the E.T. music. Just so she’s ready to go on in the event of a Mackey emergency. You know Mackey.”

  I don’t really know Mackey, other than that he smokes a cigar on every break and is already not allowed near the adult female ensemble.

  “When are they teaching me the E.T. songs?” I say to the assistant.

  “Who knows,” she says, yawning, sorting through a stack of sheet music. “We’re only teaching the primary understudies now. I think the secondary understudies have to sort of get up to speed on their own time.”