by Tim Federle
“The plastic bags!” Roscoe says, pointing at Jordan’s feet. “Take them off!”
“There isn’t time!” The crew woman grabs Jordan by the waist and tosses him up onto the stage. He lands the way a kitten might fall from an end table, in one perfectly quiet poof. One perfectly adorable quiet poof.
The crowd roars its approval and Jordan turns to face them, bolted to the stage with plastic feet, the opening chords of music ringing out from a speaker mounted in the trees.
We all pile out the doorway of his trailer and stare up at him.
“My God,” I think we all say together.
I’d die in this situation. If I were him, I’d lose my voice or pee my pants. I’d panic or cry, singing too fast or not singing at all.
“Left in a place where I’ve nothing to hide,” he starts to sing, his voice even, perfect, “left with a dream that is pent up inside . . .”
Maybe the biggest surprise of my year isn’t that I’m on Broadway. Maybe it’s that some other kid, from the good part of town—outside of Jankburg’s dreary county lines, marked by a sad broken fence that nobody’s bothered to paint—might have something in common with me. At least in the family finance department.
“I’m all alone but I’ve also got you.”
The surprise of my century is that Jordan really was born to be a star. And I was born to be an understudy. And maybe the biggest surprise is that I’m starting to be cool with that.
“You’re supposed to be onstage, Nate,” Roscoe says, really quiet.
“Yeah,” I say through the mesh. “But let’s give Jordan the first verse. I’ll enter on the dance break.”
“He’s amazing,” Jordan’s mom says. But like a real one. A real mom who’s proud, wearing things she probably can’t pay for. She’s got jewels like Mom’s got orchids. But at least Mrs. Rylance is here.
“Yes, he is,” I say, relatching the E.T. mask and heading for the stage. “He’s amazing.”
But This Was Supposed to Be the Best Day Ever
(The. Morning. Of. The. Show.)
I didn’t think anyone would see the photo.
The excuse that I truly believe—the excuse I will take to my grave, which could come any day, because skin cancer runs in my family—is that Jordan did such a magnificent job up there yesterday, that I momentarily misplaced my common sense. And so, when I yanked my E.T. mask off after the number ended, and took a self-portrait in the trailer mirror (Mrs. Rylance wouldn’t take it for me), and sent the photo to Libby—
“I never would have thought she’d post it on Facebook,” I say. “I really didn’t! The crowd, the thin Central Park air . . . they did a trick on my brain, Dewey.”
Apparently there’s a company policy about not taking any pictures of E.T. with his head off. Something about not “giving away the magic.” Who knew?
“I don’t want to hear it—” Dewey says, pausing just after.
“Nate,” Calvin whispers into his ear.
“Nate,” Dewey says, louder than he needs to. We’re in stage management’s cold basement office, the cement bricks catching voices like a glove. Roscoe sulks in the corner of his own hangout.
“Please don’t scroll through my photos,” I say to Dewey, who’s poking at my Nokia like it’s a prehistoric relic. Even though it can’t do e-mail or Facebook or anything, it actually takes pretty nifty photos, if you’re good at squinting.
“You’ve given up any privacy rights by doing something so stupid, Nate,” Roscoe says, grabbing my phone and tossing it into his drawer. “Any rights at all.”
“Guys,” Calvin says, always the voice of reason, “aren’t we being a little harsh here?”
“No,” Dewey says, snapping. “Everything has led up to this moment. And this kid is Facebooking photos of himself as E.T. At an event he wasn’t even supposed to be at?”
Roscoe buries his face in his hands.
“Where’s the backstage wizardry there, huh?” Dewey says. “This kid’s making me look like a total idiot. This was my moment, Cal.” Dewey stands to look out the window. This is difficult, because we’re in a basement.
“It’s still your moment, Dew,” Calvin says.
I raise my hand.
“Yes?” Calvin says, his face a painful cramp, like he wants to be helping me but I’m making it . . . difficult. I remember this as the expression Anthony had the first time I got on our school bus wearing turquoise. And I don’t mean the color.
“I just wanted to say again that I didn’t upload the photo. I texted it to my best friend, whose mother is struggling with health issues, and my friend posted it on Facebook. To help promote us.”
The three guys burst into a merry laughter that is edged with knives.
“Unless your best friend is Riedel at the Post, we have a strict policy about not Tweeting or Facebooking sensitive backstage information.” I’m not even sure which one of these men is talking now. “There was an entire company meeting about this.”
“Yes,” I say, raising my hand again, “but that meeting was held, I’ve only now learned, on one of the days I was in cardio-aerobics with Monica. So I can’t really be blamed for not knowing.” Or can I? I don’t know much about New York laws. “Can I be arrested for this?”
They’ve got nothing, and Calvin looks to the other guys with a Well? sort of shrug, but that doesn’t stop Roscoe.
“I think,” he says, “I need to apologize to the company for bungling the event, myself—and obviously we’re going to need to sidebar with Asella, too—and then we’ll have to come up with some sort of reprimand for our Nate.”
I think he’s kind of teasing, but then Dewey cuts in with, “Absolutely. Nathan Flosser should . . . should sit out of rehearsal today.”
“Foster,” Calvin and I both go, but Dewey waves us off.
“Normally I’d agree, Dewey,” Roscoe says, “but we can’t afford to be down a cast member. First preview and everything. Gotta have all men on deck.”
The room gets superstill and superawkward. Still, it’s nice to be called a man. “I didn’t think it would go viral,” I offer. “I really didn’t.”
It’s true. Apparently not a single production photo had been released to the press before now, with hopes the public’s curiosity would lead to boffo box office (Asella’s phrase—and why isn’t Asella here?). And so this first-glimpse peek at my pimply grin popping out of the E.T. collar? It went viral. Libby’s photo was so reposted and shared, a news place in Pittsburgh picked up on it yesterday, and then this thing called the AP caught on, and then it went international.
And then Aunt Heidi sent me to bed with a couple of Children’s Tylenol last night because I was crying so hard. She offers me Children’s Tylenol for basically everything, like even when I don’t want to brush my teeth.
“You can’t count on anything going viral or not going viral,” Dewey says, this time to himself. “If you could, my first four video games would have been hits.”
Roscoe lifts the theater’s intercom microphone and announces, “Actors, welcome home.” He always calls the theater home. You’d think that’d be amazing and comforting, but these days it reminds me of my real home, where I’m also not so welcome. “We’re doing notes in the house with Dewey. After a short announcement. So . . . happy first preview!”
“Where are you going?” Dewey says, just as I’m picking up my bookbag.
“To . . . um . . . to my dressing room to get my notebook?”
I’m the only kid with a paper notebook. Everyone else types their notes into their phones, but (a) my Nokia would internally burn if I tried that, and (b) I think it’s rude. I don’t even like pencils, but I’ll use one for notes from a director because I saw Asella doing that and it just seems right.
“Fine,” Dewey says. “You can take notes, but then lay low the rest of the day.”
“Okay.”
“I really don’t want to see you in my sights.”
“He heard you, Dewey,” Calvin says.
“Sorry,” I say. “It wasn’t my idea.” He’s right, though. A ketchup bottle is tucked beneath my arm. Long story.
“Nothing seems to be,” Dewey says. “I keep waiting for you to have an idea, but you’re so busy running into other actors that we should have taken an insurance policy out on you.”
He’s talking about me almost breaking Genna’s leg (she’s fine) and also a time when I stepped directly onto Mackey’s head. This image, God knows why, propels me to say: “At least Mackey didn’t have to stand outside in the cold yesterday, right?”
Roscoe gives me a stern warning glance, the kind my dad gives me whenever I practice pirouettes near his signed Roberto Clemente baseball. It’s too late, though. Dewey sinks onto the piano bench and practically starts crying. “Stop. Talking. About. The. Event.”
So much for the deal we made yesterday—the Rylances and Roscoe and me. We agreed to keep the whole thing a secret: As long as I’d never tell anyone that the Rylances are up to their glass E.T. eyeballs in debt, they’d never tell anyone I subbed in for Asella.
Whoops!
“It was a gift,” I say, thrusting the ketchup bottle in the air and nearly squeezing a dollop onto Dewey’s shirt. “By the way.”
“Nice gift,” he says, snorting and getting meaner. He was probably a math geek in school. Math geeks are the most insecure geeks of all, so they can be the quietest and deadliest kind of bully.
“I know it’s weird,” I say, looking at my Heinz bottle, which I really have been lugging around since I was called into stage management’s office this morning. “But when your secret admirer leaves you ketchup, and a note saying, ‘My cheeks go as red as tomatoes around you,’ what are you gonna do? Toss it?”
This stops them dead. I didn’t mean it to. I thought I’d gain favor by hinting about my sort-of girlfriend. Most guys are more comfortable around other guys who’ve got girls on their tails. (Even if the girl on your tail is also after Jordan’s tail and maybe every boy’s tail.)
“Red as tomatoes,” Dewey goes, but then he trails off, grabbing his iced green tea (he’s the kind of guy who drinks iced green tea, which I think says a lot about his level of sanity to begin with, right?) and jetting out of the room.
And it’s only when Dewey is six seconds out the door that I realize stage management’s phone is jingling itself off the hook. And it’s another three seconds before I register Roscoe saying, “Dear God, are you serious?”
And finally, half a minute after Dewey bolted from my inquisition, Roscoe grabs the door frame and swings his head into the hallway.
“Dewey,” he hollers, almost like he’s calling a guy in for grits on a farm (I saw half of Gone with the Wind in fourth grade).
Roscoe shakes his head and says a ton of swearwords—really bad ones, like Biblically bad—and grabs the intercom again: “Dewey, to stage management’s office please. Now. Now, now.”
Very specific.
“What’s up, Rosc?” Calvin says, staring at the receiver in Roscoe’s hand. I wedge myself behind a garbage can.
“Houston, we’ve got a problem,” Roscoe says, opening up a big binder on his desk after making a Texas reference that’s probably only appropriate for grown-ups?
“What’s the latest, what’s the latest,” Dewey says, back in the basement in a video game dash. “Did the kid Tweet a photo of me yelling at him or something?”
“Worse,” Roscoe says, shoving me out the door, cowboy-booting it shut in my dust.
What did I do now? Were they offended about my girlfriend reference? Do they know it’s a total . . . embellishment?
“Gulp,” I actually say, after whispering a series of flops that probably gets the ghosts of our theater pretty riled up. A mouse runs along the hallway floorboard, and I’d jump away if there were anything to jump up on. So instead I squeal like a kettle. And it’s just after my vocal cords have stopped doing the tango that I hear Roscoe, muffled but true, shouting his head off in the stage manager’s office.
“You don’t have a star for the performance tonight, Dewey. We need to call in Nora Von Escrow and the rest of the producers.”
“What the” (extraordinarily bad word) “are you talking about?” Dewey says.
“We’re going to have to cancel the first preview.”
And that’s when Dewey screams so murderously loud, the mouse and I look at each other and run in opposite directions, him into a hole and me directly into Asella—who’s got her script, a bag of lozenges, and the smoke of fire in two saucer-wide eyes.
“We,” she says, “have to talk.”
Is Somebody Dead?
(The. Day. Of. The Show.)
With the cast called into the auditorium for an emergency company meeting, you’ll get why I’m surprised that Asella has me way in the back of the house, where first-time patrons will be filtering through in just a couple hours. Or not.
“What’s going on, Asella?” I say. Really, I grunt it, because she’s got me doing sit-ups. Is she punishing me for getting her in trouble because of the event? Is she in trouble? “Are you mad at me?” Did she lose custody of Doc in small-person-claims court?
But she places one shoe one inch above my one and only face. “Quiet.” She taps my nose with a Ked. “I’m asking the questions here.” Oh God.
The lights in the house flicker twice, signaling the beginning of a rehearsal. And you’d think, given the mounting drama around here, that all my castmates would be buzzing—like, at the level of honey making. But they’re not making a peep. They’re gathered near the orchestra pit, quiet as a funeral—though I can make out Genna, yammering on about how her mom wouldn’t let her get her ears pierced until she was five. The girl is oblivious.
“Okay,” I say, finishing my set of three sit-ups and taking a thirty-second cooldown. “If this is about my idiotic self-portrait on Facebook, and getting us caught, I can expl—”
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Roscoe’s voice is unsteady for the first time, and I leap to my feet to join Asella, who’s suddenly peering over the back-row railing. “Any stragglers, let’s all move to the front of the house. Nora will be here in a moment and I want to make sure everyone can hear her.”
The funeral comes alive. The very mention of our producer’s name sends the cast into, like, Ben Hur: The Sequel screams.
“Let’s talk later,” I say, heading to join the company when Asella (literally) grips me by the shirt.
“Remember the last time we were at the Koreaaaah Spaaaaaah?”
“When I finally allowed them to put clear nail polish on me?”
“Exactly,” she says. “But this isn’t about that.”
“What are we all doing here?” a voice from the audience cries out. “I have to get back to a client in MiMa by noon.”
“That’s Genna’s dad,” Asella whispers, sighing so hard I can smell tuna fish and fear on her breath. “They’ve called in all the parents to this meeting.”
Well, this can’t be good at all. This can’t be anything even orbiting Planet Good.
“Yoo-hoo!” Nora Von Escrow, British producer to end all, strides into the house. You can tell it’s her, even from back here, because the teenagers and dancers are clapping. Entrance applause is only reserved for TV stars and the British, according to Libby.
“Why are we hiding back here, Asella?” I say. And that’s when Roscoe catches sight of us, because that’s when my voice gets really loud.
“Jiminy Christmas, Nate,” he calls out. “Get down front. We’re having a meeting.”
He can’t even see Asella, who’ll probably sneak underneath all the seats and arrive just in time for the bagels that Nora always brings when she visits the cast.
“One second, sir!” Asella yells from a crouch, doing a remarkable impersonation of my voice. Frankly it’s transfixing. “Answer me one thing,” she says to me, now, her eyes the dots of two q
uestion marks. “How confident are you?”
I watch Roscoe thump his way up the aisle.
“In your ability to play E.T.?” I ask Asella.
It’s a remarkable amount of trust she’s putting in me. Until only recently, I didn’t know a legitimate actor from a mailman. In fact, I can remember only two summers ago, when Libby would grill me on where I was, “just before a scene.” I’d go, “What do you mean, where? I was looking through your old Playbills, wishing I was Stephanie Mills.” And Libby would go, “No, Nate, in the actual SCENE. Where were you in the SCENE prior to this SCENE, because acting is MAKE-BELIEVE.”
Libby’s the kind of girl who talks in all caps.
And my point, folks, is that I can hardly MAKE-BELIEVE that Asella’s asking for my opinion on her performance. I can hardly believe it either.
“You’re better than Mackey at the part, Asella,” I say, taking her hand.
And just as she un-bites her lip and draws a breath to confess something monumental—she’s squinting the way grown-ups always do when they have to tell you your guinea pig was killed in a dryer accident—I am ripped from her sweaty-palmed grip.
“We are,” Roscoe says, “waiting.”
He barrels me down the aisle, and I see Nora standing over everyone in front of the orchestra pit, with a glossy fur coat looped to the top of her throat.
“Sit,” she says to me. Roscoe plops me into an aisle seat near the front, my least favorite place in any classroom. “Listen up now, everyone.” Nora looks like an alien herself, because her hair’s in a million foil folds. Just like Mom’s when her friend Pat comes over and does Mom’s hair in our basement.
“So,” Nora and Roscoe and Dewey and Garret Charles all say, as if rehearsed. This ignites a light titter among the actor-folk.
“So what?” Keith’s mom calls out. Each child has a parent sitting next to him or her. Except yours untruly.
“Here’s the thing,” Dewey starts. “The very thing.”
But Garret is having none of this preamble, rising, taking off his first-preview overcoat and sailing it across the orchestra pit, where it lands onstage in front of the ghost light. Further murmuring ensues.
